Brick House: Living Room and Entry Before & After

One last Before & After to finish up the Brick House! I am so excited to have good people living here. They love the backyard and appreciate all the space. Though it is really weird not going over to work on the Brick House every morning. That has been the hardest to get use to....

Do you remember what the living/dining room looked like before? I didn't! Ha! Going back and looking at these Before pictures is a bit scary! Yikes! I don't remember it looking this bad..... I guess I really had a vision. And I am so glad the house has lived up to the vision!

 Oh those dark walls!

The front entry just looks filthy! At lest this is an after-carpet picture or it would have been worse...

 Let's get back to the pretty photos, shall we? 

It is hard to portray how large and bright this room is. Even on a cloudy day it is bright! Those big picture windows is my favorite feature! And the window seat looking things under each window? Those are radiator covers. They do make great window seats though! The warmest seat in the house during winter!

 From the kitchen doorway looking toward the living room.

The living/dining room needed the lest amount of work. All last summer it was the "store" room for tools and materials. We primed and painted the walls and ceiling; and washed and shellacked the floors. Other then washing the windows that was it!

 The entry needed a little bit more love. Besides needing to remove icky carpet, we also had to get two spots of cat pee to get out. (Our tried and true recipe is Time, Bleach and Nature's Miracle Stain remover. We had spray bottles of bleach and Nature's Miracle in the hall for weeks! Every time arrived and left we would spray the spots down with either bleach of Nature's Miracle. We tried to alternate. After four months there was only a faint whiff left when you got close! And the shellac took care of that.)  And then there was the stairs to deal with..... Read about the Stairs here.

 I know that light fixture isn't original, but it lends a nice touch of elegance to the hall!

Thanks for coming along on this journey with me! As with any journey there is mountains and valleys, but it has been fun! I hope you enjoyed it too! 

Summer Flowers, Painting and Porch updates

Ah! Summer is here in full swing! The porch is almost tree house like with all the leafy green trees surrounding it. I have been doing a little fluffing and sprucing to the porch. We changed the pillow covers to our usual summer covers and have added one or two other things.

I suddenly remembered I had a basic wooden stool in the basement and decided it would make a great plant stand behind the settee. Then Mandy found a (slightly squashed) fern on sale to perch on top. Perfect!

We have had pansies on the porch this spring. This one is lovely! 

 I forgot I wanted a new doormat to spruce up the porch, until I saw this one at Hobby Lobby! Mandy managed to get Kerri to "pose" for us. I love all the colors!

 Summer also means gardening around here. This year we have larger hanging baskets on our fence hooks. The tin buckets, while very cute, looked a little lost on the fence. We are loving the bright geraniums!

We also got our patio pots planted! (Say that seven times fast!) Can't wait to see what they will look like all filled out!

Summer is all about projects too, right? So last Friday I decided it was time to get re-painting the bathroom checked off the list!

 One of the perks of having a small bathroom is it is quick to paint! I managed to paint the bathroom and back hall (they were both the same color) in a little under three hours. Made a nice start to the weekend! (I don't often get a bird's-eye-view of the bathroom. The ladder was half in the bathtub for cutting in around the ceiling!)

I didn't get any spiffy "after" pictures. And it doesn't really look any different as I used the same color paint. It just feels a lot fresher and clean with a new coat of paint. Six years of wear and tear in a bathroom was starting to show on the walls! 

Saturday was filled with a bunch of projects outdoors! All of which I will share more details later. Mandy built a potting bench, which is super cute! I cleaned out the garage, which inspired Mandy as I found a bunch of lumber. The Great Radiator Project has also started. In the left corner of the picture above you can see a radiator I am scraping. There are two I need to scrap and re-paint. The others just need a touch up coat of paint. I am also working on patching the cold air returns in the cottage, which is why there are old floor boards there! I was cleaning and stripping the finish on the boards.

It took a bit for me to adjust to not having the Brick House to work on! Still in process, but I am getting into re-focusing on projects around the cottage. The biggest one this year is to get the whole house fitted with radiators. There are a lot of steps that project and hopefully we can get most of them done this summer!

I dug this embroidered cottage out of my closet and finally got it finished!