An update on Peter - He’s doing wonderfully! His stay in the hospital was 29 days - VERY long and hard on the family. BUT, he is now home and doing really well! He’s running around like a normal little kid and starting to talk MUCH more than before, and in more fluid sentences! Here is a family photograph I took of the family the week or so after they got home from the hospital:

Also, I wanted to share with you guys a few before and after images from our house and the link to my flickr album that shows a LOT more pictures. We have been working really hard over the last month or so to get our house more pulled together. We have been doing LOTS of hanging of art and photos, painting of some furniture pieces, and cleaning and organizing!

LIVING ROOM BEFORE:

LIVING ROOM AFTER: (The living room was set up for a meeting of a prayer shawl ministry - why there are books and yarn and shawls all over the place :) )

DINING ROOM BEFORE:

DINING ROOM AFTER:

KITCHEN BEFORE:

KITCHEN AFTER:

DEN BEFORE:

DEN AFTER:

HALL BATHROOM BEFORE:

HALL BATHROOM AFTER:

And here is a link to the Flickr Gallery where you can view a slideshow of larger images!:

OUR FLICKR BEFORE AND AFTER GALLERY OF OUR HOUSE

Here is a picture of him and his adorable self:

First and foremost we use the Kilz one coat coverage paint and the Colorplace paint from Walmart and had them color match all of the paint sample cards we brought them. Why the two different kinds of paint? We decided to use the kilz for colors that we knew would take two or more coats to cover what was underneath them - specifically the white we used on the red cabinets, etc. I really like the Kilz best and in the future will probably just be using it for all of our painting needs. It goes on nice and thick, wthout looking thick. It dries quickly and 90% of the time covered in one coat if we were neat painters. :)

In our bathroom the color is Shakespeare from the Relaxed & Cozy line by Glidden:

For our den (room with the tv), my office, and the master bathroom we used the color Celery from the Vintage Masters line by Ralph Lauren:

Our kitchen/dining room color is called Moacha Accent by Behr. I would add an online color swatch of it here except all of them look brown - and this paint while having a brown undertone - is way more gray than the online sample swatches make you think. The color card code is 720d if that helps you find it on their website or in stores.

And last but not lease our front living room. This color was a really hard one. I wanted a yellow - but quickly found out that yellows are hard paint colors to get right. The second time we had to go much more “tan” on the paint chip to get a color that wasn’t overwhelming on the wall yet still was golden. The color we ended up with was Kilz Soft Pebble. I love it!

If there any other questions about the bathroom or anything I’ve posted please let me know! I love talking about the things we are doing - however sometimes I forget little details like that! :)

I’ve neglected to post yet about our bathroom coutnertop redo….so here goes!

First and foremost - at some point in the future we plan on doing a much more major redo where we will replace the base cabinets, get rid of the wall cabinet, new countertops, etc. Until then we wanted a refresh that we could live with that wouldn’t cost a fortune. I didn’t want to spend money on a new counter top just to have to rip it out in the future! This lead to some major brainstorming. I just happen to watch way too many shows on HGTV and thought - they do cool things all the time to counter tops - why can’t I? So on the search I went. I googled and searched for ways to rehab countertops. The one that always came up and seemed the most reasonably priced was of course paint. I figured what did I have to lose? If it sucked, I could just rip it out and get the ikea butcher block we had been considering becuase of it’s low cost. But paint was MUCH cheaper so going that route first seemed logical.

First things first - I don’t promise that this is the “right” way to do this or even the best way, it is however the way *I* did it. :) Try this at your own risk. :)

Since I was kind of winging this entire process there was some trial and error.

The first thing I did was take bondo and fill in some holes in the countertop that I obviously didn’t want to be there. They were ugly and made the countertop look extremely sad.After the damage to the countertop was filled in I got a fine grit sanding block and got rid of the smooth surface of the countertop and made sure the bondo was smooth with the countertop. Then I wiped it down and dried it off to get rid of all of the dust that this created.

The next step is the most important - Taping off the area! You have to be sure to tape off the area completely as spray paint over sprays. Also, you want to be REALLY careful around areas like a sink that you aren’t removing and faucets and such. Take your time and make sure to press down hard so that the tape adheres completely and the paint won’t seep underneath. I used plastic shopping bags cut to lay flat as my major masking medium for the area. Tip: you may want to also cover your floor and toilet and other areas. Our floors ended up having fine mists of paint on it that I had to scrub up later. Would have been much easier to just have put down some trash bags to begin with.

Now, this is where my major trail and error came into play. I started with this high adhesion for plastic spray paint that was supposed to give a hammered metal finish. Well, just to let you know it’s the most caustic paint I’ve ever used. I don’t recommend it in a small interior bathroom with no window to open. I put on two coats of that and was extremely unhappy with the finish (nothing like hammered metal and very uneven) and the smell permeated the entire house. This stuff was definitely not “green”. *laugh* I probably killed a few braincells that day.

After that dried - I realized it looked a little better than I thought when it was wet and decided to spray on a clear protective coat to see how it would look. BIG MISTAKE. Test your paints together before you put them on the final piece. Once I started spraying the clear coat on top, it was landing in puddles on the countertop and making DOTS in the paint below - so much so that I could see the white of the countertop underneath. BIG ISSUE! I thought at that point that Ok - I’ve ruined this countertop we will just have to go buy one. Then I decided, heck at this point I REALLY didn’t have anything to lose. I waited till that was all dry and sanded it down some more to get rid of the drips and the raised areas that the horrible clear coat caused. It was ugly…REALLY ugly…at this point. I was glad my husband was at work and had no clue I had done this to our bathroom yet!

I ran to walmart and prayed I could find something in the paint department to help me fix this mess. I found this great Rustoleum outdoor spray paint for plastics and metal. It has a texture and I believe is supposed to resemble stone of some sort. I don’t think it really looks like stone, but it does resemble a finish for a countertop! :) So I bought two cans of that stuff. Another thing I purchased while at the store was a spray handle for the spray paint canister. I had a sneaking suspician that the reasons for the uneven finish before was becuase i wasn’t able to easily spray and not get my finger in the spray, which would make drips and stuff. I was hoping that this little tool would help. So, at that point I headed home and prayed the entire time that I could fix this.

Oh yeah, did I mention that we were having a Christmas Party at our house that weekend - the first time all of our friends would have seen our house since we bought it and had been working on it?! No stress there! *laugh*

So back at home I stuck the spray nozzel onto the spray paint container - shook it all up (follow the directions for your spray paint) and went after the countertop! AMAZING. It was amazing. The spray nozzel made all the difference in the world! I was able to do sweeping strokes, get no drips, and even coverage! Also, this new paint was much more forgiving. If I stopped in one area and started back up, you couldn’t see the line of the previous stroke!

I decided at that point that I didn’t want to put on a top coat layer. I figured that this finish was made for the outdoors, so it should hold up pretty well. Now after living with it for a few months I think I probably will go back and add a to protective finish. Not becuase it’s not holding up, but becuase the paint has a tooth to it - a rough texture. This makes it hard to wipe down and keep clean as towels and such like to stick to it and don’t glide easily over the surface. I think by adding a top clear coat to it that would alleviated that problem. I will be sure to make a test board with the paint and the top coat before I do it on the countertop though - I don’t want to mess up a good thing!

After I was sure the paint was dry I carefully pealed back the tape and the masked areas and ta da! A Brand new countertop! Our Realtor stopped by later that week and was floored. She thought it was a brand new countertop. In fact everyone that has seen it in person has thought so! I’m thrilled that we were able to do something so cost effective and relatively simple.

So go ahead - try some paint if you hate your countertop! It’s better than the alternative of living with something you hate. :)

And this is what the bathroom looks like today:

Here is a list of the things we have done and the approximate cost. We had to do things on a budget as we spent most of our money putting down new floors in the rest of the house.

So this bathroom was redone for a total of…..(DRUMROLL PLEASE!)…..approximately $399!!! :) And honestly the actual DECORATING cost substantially less. By shopping thrift stores and watching out for high quality looks for good prices at big box stores it’s possible to really change a rooms look without making it look matchy matchy! :)

Here are a few things that have piqued my interest recently:

I specifically would love the Le Creuset® White Oval French Oven. Of course at that price I could have like 6 other knock offs. However, I adore it in white. Find me a white knock off at 1/4 the price and that’s perfect for me. :)

I also want a portable GPS unit:

I honestly don’t care what brand. It just needs to be portable, have up-datable maps, and speak to me while I drive. :) I’m tried of going to out of town weddings and having to print out tons of maps to and from different locations and the hotel. We have GPS on our laptop, but honestly that’s a pain in the butt to bring with us and deal with. We only pull it out if we are truly lost. LOL

Thats it for today. :) Tune in next week for more! :)

The Christmas season was so wonderful! It snowed for the first time in our town in years! We live in southern Louisiana and snow is not common! Here are some photographs of our house and neighborhood before all the snow had fallen! A few hours later we had almost 4 inches at our house! :)

It was magical and so special for it to happen for the first Christmas in our house! We will always remember it! :D

:)

BUT, today we made big progress!!!!! We have started painting the kitchen cabinets! They look SOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO much better! It’s really amazing!

We also have the floors all ready and prepped for us to start installing our new floors tomorrow! WOOHOO :)

Tomorrow hopefully we will have some majorly drastically better pictures of rooms with FLOORS! :D

Here is a BEFORE of the kitchen:

AND NOW!

- still have to find the matching molding to finish off this corner of the room. If not we have to get all new molding. BLAH! LOL

- mom painting the cabinets. :) I was doing doors in the other room! LOL

More to come tomorrow! :D

So at about 4:30 we called the local tool rental place and ended up rushing over there to rent the floor remover thingy for $62 until Monday morning at 9. OMG so worth it! Here are some pictures from after we got the machine. We left the house at 7:30 to come home and watch the LSU football game and rest our muscles. LOL

This machine is totally our friend!: