Adventures in Design

On last week's blog post, I mentioned that I needed to share pictures of the inside of the house, but I was waiting to clean it first, so I could take nice shots. That finally happened (it has been raining on and off for the past few days, so the muddy dog prints finally got to me), so behold: before and after shots of the new digs!

I know I shared the before shots in this post, but I wanted to put them in here again, just for the sake of comparison.

First up, the kitchen. While the majority of the kitchen remained the same (we want to replace the cabinets one day - we like the style, but they're starting to show normal wear and tear - that's in the far off future), we did paint the large wall that the sink shares with the front door.

The before - the kitchen upon our move in

The after - we added some personality,

mainly in the form of fridge magnets

You can see how, in the shot above, we painted this large wall a turquoise kind of color with a sort of underlying electric "pop" to it. I had all sorts of color ideas for this house before we moved in, but Chris convinced me to stick to just one color family - blue - and reinvent my ideas from there. This ended up working pretty well; the blue theme continues throughout the house, it blends with the gray that previously existed (we did accent walls in this house, both to minimize visual clutter and to spend less time painting), and it still allowed me to use my general ideas about how I wanted the accent walls to appear.

While the rest of the kitchen is pretty much backsplash or cabinets (thank the good lord for cabinets that go all the way to the ceiling. Less dusting and less painting plus more storage!), we did have one small section of white next to the fridge. We ended up painting this the one non-blue color in the house to echo the red of the front door, as it stands directly across the room from said door. The previous owners left us all the old paint, so we didn't even have to buy another can (although they inexplicably left the old foam rollers in the paint can, which were rapidly decomposing. Interesting, that).

The metal shelving units in the house
were already there, so we just took them down,

painted behind them,

then put them back up.
And then put a bunch of crap on them.

As you may recall from the move-in blog a few months back, as you walk into the house, the kitchen is on the left, and the dining room is on the right. A quick reminder of what the dining room initially looked like:

OMG - I hated these curtains so much.

I know it's a style to let the ends

puddle on the floor, but it makes me insane.

Hem your goddamn curtains.

These particular curtains were also a safe haven

for all sorts of interesting bugs

and had weird holes/burns.

Yes, that's what happens when your curtains

drag on the damn floor.

Rant over.

Dining room on the right,
leading into the living room on the left.

The room as it looks currently:

In this shot, you can see the continuation
of the blue wall from the front door/kitchen.

We kept the same chandelier, as we really like it.

THIS IS A PROPER CURTAIN LENGTH.

AHEM.

Since we were just playing with accent walls in this house, we wanted to pick unique colors (of blue) but still ensure they meshed together, if they were in the same room. To achieve this, we grabbed a ton of swatches from Home Depot, picking one bolder color and one less intense color off the same swatch. By doing this, the paint colors would end up being within the same tone family and would hopefully play well off each other. So, if the lighter turquoise of the kitchen/entry wall was the lighter color on this swatch, here's the more intense one:

The living room!

The wall with the tv ended up being one of the smaller walls in the house, so we figured we could get away with a bold color, albeit one that wasn't too crazy, as we'd spend a lot of time looking at it. A few more shots of the same space:

Helping to lay down the rug.

As you can see, we put curtains on the long window here.

This is a west facing window,

and the afternoon sun gets really brutal.

The previous owner's solution to this

was an external shade that rolled down the outside of the window.

So, every day around 2pm,

you'd walk outside and hand crank down a shade.

Does that sound annoying? It was.

These particular curtains are made to block sun,

and this seems to work well.

You can probably see from the second photo above that we kept the glass "bubble" hanging decoration that came with the house. I'm ambivalent about it, but Chris digs it, so it stayed. It's his responsibility to dust it - every single bubble - before Dad and Risa come for Thanksgiving, so we'll see how long it remains inside.

Another before shot of this area for comparison:

As we got ready to paint this area, we were able to take some of the cabinets off the wall (they came with the place), but others wouldn't budge. Thus, we improvised:

I fit!

Before we head down the hall, we have the guest bathroom:

These shots remind me of those

"Guess the Differences" pictures that

came in Highlights magazines.

We obviously didn't do too much here,

other than hanging some art
(a tube map of London),

putting up a shower curtain,

and opening a box of Kleenex.

Bathrooms are a PITA to paint, ya'll.

Next to the guest bathroom is where I spend the majority of my weekdays, my office. This room was clearly going to be my office, as it is much, much smaller than the other option for the guest bedroom; I don't actually think a bed would fit in here, even a small one. The previous owner used this room for an office as well, and it's a good fit. In reading about what colors to use to make small spaces seem bigger, I often ran across the idea to paint the room a dark, rich color, which seems somewhat contrary to what you might expect. I figured I'd try it out, and I really like the results.

Before:

As I mentioned, it's a small space.

After:

Still a small space, but much nicer now.

I enjoy spending my days here.

Time to head down the hallway! First, shots of the hallway itself:

Another "Guess the Difference" shot.

Hung pictures and added a runner.

Old dogs on slippery floors equals

the need for a runner.

The washer and dryer are hidden on the right side of the shot behind the larger set of doors, but that first doorway is to the spare bedroom. Before, in all its glory: