Life at the Moment

I had that last post saved in my drafts for a few weeks before I posted. I thought just typing the words that Mia was sleeping through the night was enough to tempt fate, but no, apparently you actually have to hit " post" before you upset the God of Getting a Good Night of Sleep, because now my daughter has decided that the hours of 10:30pm and 1:30am are a wonderful time to scream her fool head off. And I want to die. The end.

I got inspired by Pinterest again to do a little art project for the entryway (the wall over the table used to look like the last photo on this post and I never really loved it).

I was first inspired by this photo:

(originally from Me Oh My)

And then I liked the one contrasting stripe from this photo:

(originally from from Ohdeedoh)

And so I came up with this:

I quite like it.

Is it bedtime yet?

(Second &) Third Time's the Charm?

Now that Mia and I are into somewhat of a routine I've been getting a major itch to do some projects around the house. But it seems I have lost a bit of my DIY mojo somewhere along the way.

The first project I've been thinking about for about a year now: painting the front door. I even went so far as so try out a dark gray color I already had about a year ago, but I didn't like it. So since then our front door has been light blue with a little swatch of gray paint. Lovely.

I always hated the color scheme of the outside of our house (as seen here). The light gray siding with light blue shutters, and until last year the trim around the windows was two-tone blue and gray (which looked really dingy). Jeff painted the trim white last year and removed the shutters from around the kitchen window (because one was broken), so the only light blue we're left with is the shutters around the bedroom window and the front door.

Oh hey, look how fugly our front door was when we first moved in!

and this is after trying a few different paint colors I already had on hand
(the storm door was replaced a few years ago via Craigslist)

I turned to Pinterest for inspiration for the front door color. I wanted to do something bold and splashy. I thought about yellow (but I considered that when the door is open into the entryway it might clash with the yellowish paint in the walls there), eggplant (worried about resale), charcoal (not enough of a splash), poppy red (too much of a splash?), and finally settled on green after seeing this picture:

obviously from Blueprint magazine

I thought the color scheme seemed preppy and cute.

Not so on my house...

It was just okay from the outside, but truly hideous when the door was open, which it is a lot of the time as we get evening sunlight through the storm door.


So I had wasted $10 on a quart of paint, and I went back to my gut feeling which was to paint the door a rich, dark, charcoal gray. I like it. Is it splashy? Not really. Was it a risk? No. But it no longer looks like an elementary school. So that's something!

next up, I need to replace the ugly blue mailbox

Onto my second project which actually took 3 tries to get just right: hanging curtains in Mia's room.

I had some curtains that I loved from our old apartment, but they did not look good in our existing living room, and since the afternoon sunlight has been creeping into Mia's room through the side of the blinds and right onto her sleeping face, I decided they would work in her room.

On my first attempt I bought curtain rods and spray painted the finials aqua, but as Jeff was hanging them I realized the rods were too short. Ugh. If only I hadn't painted them, they could have been returned. Measure twice, hang once, right? Right. So another $10 wasted.

I ran out and bought longer rods. I learned my lesson and didn't paint them first. Jeff hung (hanged?) them. At first we only did one curtain panel on each window because they are small windows. It worked fine on the window in the corner, but the other window just looked lopsided.


So, on my 3rd try I finally got it right and moved the curtain rod out a few inches on either side and added another curtain panel.

Success!

I think it actually warms the room up considerably.

And since I have no other way to wrap up this post; Look! It's Mia as a penguin!

First Impression

Speaking of the entryway, right after we finished the floors Jeff had an idea to swap out the coat closet door for something more aesthetically pleasing.

Currently this is the first thing you see when you enter the house. (I'm revealing the "after" photo first because no "before" photos exist)


The door used to look like all of the other doors in the house, like this one from Lowe's, which was an awfully unappealing first impression.

So we bought a solid wood door with glass panes, like this one from Lowe's. We painted it white and applied privacy film to the glass to hide the contents of our closet. This also gave me the opportunity to change out all the door knobs in the house to match this new one. The old ones were faux brass or something, flaking paint.

Again, I have to credit Jeff completely with this idea. I think it came out great. After the floors and door were complete a friend came over and exclaimed over the new door and didn't even notice the floors!

Learn From Us

Last spring we took on our second major flooring project: tile.

I am not going to pretend like we are experts or that all of our projects come out smelling like roses, because this one didn't. Our kitchen floor looks leaps and bounds better than it did when we moved in, but it is often still the bane of my existence.

The entryway tile before

Threshold between entryway and kitchen

The kitchen vinyl before

The entryway had an 8x8 industrial-looking gold tile that was loose and breaking, and the kitchen had white vinyl that was badly stained. I wanted a simple, inexpensive 12x12 neutral tile.

Jeff tore up the tile and 2 layers of vinyl. (I wish I had a picture of the vinyl that was under the white in the kitchen. It was meant to look like river rocks or over sized pebbles. Awful.)

The next step would normally be to lay cement board to ensure that we had an 1 1/2" subfloor sturdy enough to carry the tile. For multiple reasons (we don't own a truck to carry multiple pieces of cement board home from the store, we couldn't accurately measure our existing subfloor to know how thick we needed the cement board, we were worried about the thickness affecting the transition between the tile and our hardwood floors, etc.), we chose instead to go with a different product called Ditra mat. It is a lightweight roll of plastic-like membrane that acts as an uncoupling layer between the sub-floor and the tile, so that any movement that occurs in the sub-floor does not affect the tile. It eliminates the need for a 1 1/2" sub-floor and is very easy to cut and work with. It's installed with a layer of thinset directly onto the existing sub-floor.
That was the easy part. The rest is physically taxing. Jeff was on his hands and knees for several hours laying the tile, then grouting while I followed behind him on my hands and knees wiping up the grout.

The entryway went smoothly enough. It might not look like a professional job, but it's a vast improvement.

Around the time I took the above photo is when things went awry. You can tell by the window that it is dark, as in, it was around 11pm or midnight. Jeff started to run out of thinset, and I watched as he slighted each tile with too little. I knew I should have spoken up, but I just wanted the project to be complete and I didn't want to be the harpy, nagging wife. (Secret: I am easily overwhelmed by mess and clutter. It makes me anxious.)

We grouted anyway (we used Tec XT grout which is stain resistant and doesn't have to be sealed. More expensive, but worth the money, in my opinion), and celebrated the finished project.

It was about a week later that those tiles were obviously loose and the grout between them started to crack. Jeff decided to try to pull up the loose tiles and reset them while I was at work one day. The one problem with the Ditra mat is that the thinset settles into the grooves of the membrane, which is its purpose, but makes it hard to reset tiles because you can't get all that dry thinset out of the grooves, and thus, you are laying wet thinset on dry thinset and building up a thicker layer than the tiles around it. Which is how we ended up with this:


And we continue to deal with cracking grout in the surrounding areas.

I spent the next several months searching for a rug that I could live with that would cover the offending un-level areas. I finally found one at Crate and Barrel.

Again, I think it's a vast improvement, but to someone who appreciates perfection I feel like these issues are glaring.

I guess we will just have to remodel the whole kitchen to alleviate this minor disaster.