We are lucky to have a large kitchen. It is big enough that we don’t need to use all the cabinets for kitchen related stuff.  We actually use the whole set of cabinets on the right side to house tools, paint, wire and every other conceivable item needed during a house renovation. Plates and cups out.  Putty and caulk in.

On the day we moved in, the kitchen was clean and tidy – completely free of renovation mess…

Not so much after a year of renovation.

Both the island and countertops are cluttered with power tools, paint and plugs…

Although the countertop is not a pretty sight, there’s worse to be found in the cabinets and drawers.  This is the result of trying to quickly tidy away the countertops to make things seem tidy when we have guests around.  Out of sight, out of mind. You’ll notice that the bottom shelf of the cabinets is more densely packed with renovation goodies than the upper shelves – that’s because at 5 ft 1″, I cannot reach beyond the second shelf.  Cue sound effect – wop wop.

It was high time that we did something about this mess.  Apart from the visual clutter, the tools lacked organization.  I’d lost count of the numerous times we’d tried to find a tape measure, a flat head screwdriver or the box of sheetrock screws – tools we *knew* we had. Somewhere. Frust-rat-ing.

So we had to make mess to tidy mess. Everything came out of the cabinets and drawers and were organized into related piles. 

Who knew we had three tubes of liquid nails, 10 rolls of electrical tape and 15 replacement blades for the box knife?   Not only did we find the elusive tape measure, we found four.  Flat head screwdriver?  No problem, we have multiple in various sizes. Sand paper in every conceivable grit size. It was like going shopping, but for free!

 Each drawer or cabinet was designated a theme, so we now know where to go to find stuff.  We have a caulk drawer…

and a drawer that houses painting and tile related accessories…

The paint now lives in the cabinet below – it is great to know exactly where all our sprays and paints samples are, along with the roller brushes and trays.

We even have a drawer for screws. That tupperware container on the left has all the odd assortments of screws, nuts, bolts and washers we came across.  Now if we need one or two specific size screws, we can look here first without having to go buy a pack of 1000 at the DIY store.

The upper cabinets look so much better. A place for everything – everything in its place.  I’m hoping that this will make the renovation madness around here much more efficient.

So, our kitchen is back to its clean and tidy state.  For now.

We’ve put together a tool bag of the items which are used most frequently – tape measure, screw drivers, level, extension cord, hammer, chisels, box knife, stud finder, and so on.  This portable tool chest can be carried around the house and be used for whatever project we’re working on that day. 

Hopefully, that’ll mean that we’ll be less likely to leave tools lying around the house, so we won’t be in the situation of not being able to find four tape measures.  Yeah. A girl can hope, right?  What tips or tricks do you use in your house to keep your tools organized?  Do you store your tools in the house like we do, or are they relegated to the garage?  Ughh, the garage – now there’s another organization project on our to-do list…

The storm that blew in over North Carolina dumped about 8-10 inches of snow on us this weekend. With temperatures below freezing since Friday, we haven’t ventured much outside.  I opened the doors long enough to snap a few photos.

Here’s the view from our back deck – check out the 9 inches of snow on the table:

Here’s the view from our front porch:

Our landscape lights should look something like this:

They look pretty cool lighting up the snow!

Did you get hit by the snowstorm this weekend? Anyone brave enough to go outside and build a snowman or make a snow angel?

This past weekend, we had a paint party at our house. Paint.  Partay.  Can I get a woop-woop? 

Meet Pawel and Alyssa:

These are our two very good friends who have helped us many times during our house renovations (like building a fence, and moving large furniture).  This weekend, they came over to help us transform our two front living rooms from brown trimmed, bland white walled-ness, to crisp white trim and yummy mocha-ness. 

On the right of the entry way, the living room started out looking like this:

To the left of the entryway, the newly-dubbed “TV room” looked like this:

The mismatched front door looked like this (thanks to our puppy, Arriba):

and the stairway looked like this – check out that funky striped wall paper!

Between the four of us, we prepped, primed and painted.  The wallpaper was scraped off.  Five window frames, two door trims, a fireplace, a closet door  and the front door transoms were primed twice. The walls and stairways received a coat of paint.  And although there is more painting to do – glossing the primed surfaces and a second coat for the walls – it really is amazing to see the transformation.

The living room now looks like this:

You’ll notice we didn’t paint all the way to the ceiling and floor - these points will eventually be covered by white crown moulding / base boards. We also didn’t paint the brown window frames seeing as the windows will *hopefully* be replaced soon (to avoid more water leaks).

I love how the mocha color makes the fireplace pop – before it just faded into the background.

In order to prep for our office makeover (details coming soon), we’ve moved our living room furniture into the  “TV room”. Although it is in a state of transition, the creamy cappuccino walls really make this space feel so much more inviting:

One of the best transformations was painting the brown-trimmed fireplace white to match the fireplace in the living room.  Once all the electronics are moved, and the newly-mudded cracks are sanded and painted, this will be a great focal point in the room.

Removing the wallpaper from the entryway and stairs also made such a big difference (all your hard work was worth it, Alyssa!)

But perhaps my favorite transformation of the day was painting the front door transom windows white to match the door.  Well, it’s been primed twice, in need of a coat of gloss paint and the painter’s tape removing, but who cares?  Just like with the fireplace, changing the brown trim to white makes the space look so much more inviting.

So, there you have it.  It’s amazing what four friends, a gallon of primer and a couple gallons of paint can do in just a day.  What amazing transformations have you done in your house?  Maybe it was some new paint, some new curtains or a great light fixture that radically rejuvenated your home?  Do tell.

… it pours. Literally.  Inside our house.

In the middle of the night last night, I woke up to the storm raging outside. But beyond the howling wind and the rain lashing against the windows, there was an odd noise.  It sounded like someone peeing in the toilet, but from a great height.  You know, instead of a great flood, it was more of a continuous tinkling.  This might not have been odd had it been for the fact that Rick was sleeping soundly beside me.  That left two options.  1 – we had an intruder who had to stop midway through burglarizing the house to use the facilities.  Or 2, we had a leak.   In case it was option 1, I prodded Rick awake to see if he could hear the noise.  The trickle of water had turned to a continuous drip.  When there was no flush of the toilet, we ruled out the intruder option.  So Rick went on a scavenger hunt to find the source of our early morning disruption.  He didn’t have to go far. 

On the walkway that connects the master bedroom to the library we found this….

Water was dripping down from the attic above. My immediate thought was that we had another issue with the air handler – a water leak that caused damage to three floors in our house.  However, the air handler was on the other side of the house, not to mention hadn’t been on recently and so could not feasibly be the cause of the leak here.  Rick investigated in the attic and found that water was coming through the window sills, running down the wall and into the ceiling below.  To soak up the water we laid down a bunch of towels whilst we diagnosed the problem further and formulated a solution.

The culprit appears to be the rotten window sills on the attic windows.   The previous owner had puttied over rotten areas of the window sills and now the putty has begun to crack, allowing water to seep through.  The permanent solution to this problem would be to replace the windows. We’ve looked into getting our windows professionally replaced, but at the moment upgrading 37 windows is not really in our budget. So, we needed to come up with a temporary solution to keep the water at bay…

A quick trip to the DIY store yielded these repair tools: a 50ft roll of 10″ aluminum flashing, a pair of tin snips, some clear caulking and some self-pierceing sheeter tan screws with rubber washers.  The caulking gun and drill were tools we already had on-hand.

Rick measured the width of the window sill and cut the aluminum flashing to that length.  Using the tin snips, he also trimmed the flashing to fit all the angles of the window sill. He used the self-piercing sheeter tan screws to secure the flashing in place.  Self-piercing screws are handy because they create the holes, so you don’t have to use a drill bit first. Rubber washers are necessary for sealing the holes in order to keep water from penetrating the flashing under the screw head.

Once the flashing was securely attached to the top pane of the window sill, Rick bent the flashing over the edge of the sill and attached with the same sheeter screws.

Once the flashing was all in place, clear caulk was applied all around the edges.  This will keep water from running in under the edge of the flashing and seeping into the wood. 

So, here’s our temporary solution to sealing and preventing further water damage on the window sills.

This fix should hold up during the Spring time showers that are coming our way in the next few months.  Well, and the snow that is forecast for this weekend.  So that’s two water leaks in the house that have been fixed.  Hopefully, these things don’t come in threes…

As part of our vanity makeover in the downstairs bathroom, we installed this fountain faucet over the glass vessel sink:

However, over the months of use, we’ve ran into one problem.  Water stains.  After we turn the tap off, the few remaining drips have left an indelible stain on the glass. We’ve tried a bunch of things to remove the offending marks, but to little avail (glass cleaner, lime-away, magic eraser). So recently, I’ve been looking into alternatives. I really like the waterfall effect of the existing faucet, so I wanted to find one that mimicked that effect  Just minus the glass.

I’m lovin’ this trough faucet by Pfister.

The open faucet creates this cool waterfall effect.  At 8.25 inches, the spout is high enough to sit above the raised vessel sink.  Plus, it is a single-hole configuration which matches the existing faucet, so swapping them out would be a breeze.  The faucet comes in a range of finishes – chrome and brushed nickel being the most popular. So, unless I can find a way to get rid of the water stains on the existing faucet, this baby might be coming home with me. 

Have you guys got any fab tips for getting rid of water stains?

I’m not a big fan of New Year’s resolutions.  Don’t get me wrong – the ideas and motivations behind resolutions are good. After all, no-one plans to gain more weight, smoke more cigarettes or be a crappy friend in the upcoming year.  I dislike resolutions simply because if I don’t follow through with them, I feel like a failure the rest of the year.  Usually, that’s about 11 months. I guess I am not alone in this – research shows that anywhere between 78% to 97% of New Year’s resolutions are broken. 

According to this psychological study, you will be more successful at keeping your New Year’s resolutions if you do these three things:

1) tell someone about your goals
2) focus on the benefits of success
3) keep a diary of your progress. 

So, my blog friends, I want to share with you our goals for completing renovation projects around the house in 2010.  Sharing of goals - check.  Outlining our resolutions is a good way to help plan projects for the upcoming year.  And come the end of twenty-ten, we will be able to look back and evaluate how well we’ve done in tackling the projects.  Optimism – check. And of course my dear blog readers (all three of you), I will keep you updated of  every step of the way. Progress documented – check. 

So here’s how our DIY resolutions for 2010 stack up.

The majority of our projects will be done on the first floor; namely in the foyer, the bathroom, the dining room, the office, the garage and finally, the yard. We only have one main project in the works to be tackled upstairs, and that’s in the bedroom-turned-library.

Let’s break it down in more detail.

1. Foyer

When we moved into the house last year, one of the first projects we tackled is taking down the walls between the two front rooms and the foyer.  The walls came down, the headers went up …. but we never really finished putting the drywall back.

One of our goals this year is to finish off the drywall and get those studs covered up and painted. After all, the stud look is sooooo 2009.

2. Downstairs Bathroom

It’s taken a while but we’ve almost finished the downstairs bathroom renovation.  Almost.  The bathroom started off looking like this:

Since then, we’ve tiled, grouted, painted and made-over the vanity.  What’s left?  We have just a tiny amount of grouting to do and the crown moulding to finish.  Then we can make the big reveal!

3. Dining room

We swapped the inherited deep-red paint for a more sophisticated, modern color palette:

To finish things off in the dining room, we are planning on installing chair rail and trim boxes on the lower part of the wall. Flooring would be a nice touch, but I’m not sure we’ll be able to get to that this year – let’s keep our fingers crossed.

4. Office

The office / living room is where we have spent most of our time in 2009.  On the first day we moved in, we set up all the essentials in this room – you know, the TV, the computer and some comfy chairs. And that is pretty much where they have stayed as we renovate the rest of the house.  We’ve accumulated more and more junk necessary items over the year, piling them on top of each other, so that the office now looks something like this:

Don’t judge. Something drastic needs to be done in this space for 2010.  Notice the half painted wall?  Another “let’s try and see what this paint color looks like” moment, waiting to be finished.  So, the plans for this space is to finish painting the walls and ceiling, and make this space more functional as an office.  That will mean moving our living room furniture into one of the front rooms.

5. Garage

The immediate plan for this space is quite straightforward: get the garage doors working!

Rick has already spent sometime taking down one of the dilapidated garage doors and replacing the rails and opener.  One down, two more to go.

6. Yard

The very first project we tackled in the first week of moving in was to fence in a small portion of the back yard so that the dogs had a safe, contained space to play in and do …well, what it is dogs do in yards.  At some point this year, we’d like to get the rest of the yard fenced in:

We also plan on clearing out that dense brush between the trees before summertime kicks in.

7. Bedroom-turned-library

The last thing on our 2010 to-do list is to finish off the headers and railing in our bedroom-turned-library project upstairs.

Most of the studs have come down, the header is in place – we just need to remove the remaining studs.  Then we plan on installing a new rail along that wall to meet up with the handrail going to the bedroom.  Eventually, all the wooden spindles will be replaced with wrought iron ones, and the wood will be stained a darker brown. Oh, and finishing painting the walls might also be a good idea

So, that’s our renovation goals for 2010.  I’m not sure how many of these projects will get done, but here’s hoping it will be a productive year. At the very least, at the end of the year, we can look back at this post and laugh at how optimistically ambitious we were at the start of 2010.

I was super excited to get a F1.8 50mm lens for Christmas this year (so excited that I broke it out a little early to try it out).  However, much to my disapointment, I haven’t had much time to try the sucker out.  What can I say, I’m a busy girl. 

Rick did manage to snap a couple of adorable photos of my niece, Grace, when we were in the UK.  My favorite pic is this candid shot of her pulling a funny face:

Rick also took a pretty cool picture of my brother’s fiber optic Christmas tree.

I could really see this sparkly and abstract photo being printed out and hung as art in our home.  One of these days, anyway. You know, when we actually have walls to hang art on.

Wow.  Where did the time go?  The two weeks we were in England absolutely flew by.  And now we are back in the US and back to work already.  Boo. Although I didn’t get a a chance to post on the blog when I was across the pond, I wanted to share some of the amazing photos I took of the English countryside in all its Winter glory.  Although technically it didn’t snow on Christmas day, it did snow in the days running up to Christmas.  And on Christmas morn, the part of the world we were currently inhabiting looked like this…

and this…

and this…

and this…

Gorgeous, huh? Of course, all the snow and ice played havoc with the traffic.  At one point, it was touch-and-go whether my grandparents would be able to make the 2 hour journey to Wales to celebrate with the family (on the account of them living on a 45 degree angle death-hill). But Christmas eve, we braved the slushy death trap and brought my grandparents safely to Chepstow where we all spent a lovely Christmas in each other’s company.

Happy New Year everyone!

Just like the ones I used to know. This weekend, Rick and I are heading over to the UK to spend Christmas with my family. Rick’s niece, Ashley, is flying in today from Oklahoma – she has graciously agreed to look after our house and babies while we are gone.

As I’ve mentioned before, Christmas is one of my favorite times of the year.  There are a few English Christmas traditions that I miss when we celebrate in the USA, so it will be a treat to experience them again. 

Christmas crackers.  We put these on the dining table, along with party poppers and little chocolate treats (and the usual table setting fare).  After dinner, you pull the crackers with your neighbor – they go off with a large pop!  Whomever gets the larger end gets to keep the contents.  This usually includes a party hat, a really terrible joke or riddle, and some kind of small gift.  The quality (and usefulness) of the gift is directly proportionate to the cost of the crackers.  Read: more expensive crackers = better toys. One year, I tried to bring crackers in my carry-on luggage from the UK to the USA, but they were almost confiscated because they contain gunpowder.  Mmmmm yeah, not the best idea to bring explosives onto a plane, Amy.

Christmas Cake.  Ahh sweet, moist fruit cake covered in marzipan and icing, I adore thee.  There is nothing better than having a slice of Christmas cake on a cold Winter’s morn with a steaming cup of tea.

Christmas Pudding. Another version of the Christmas cake, except rather than being baked in the oven, it is steamed.  It comes without the icing, and is usually served with cream.  It is also heavily laden with brandy.

The pudding is traditionally served after Christmas dinner (not that anyone has left enough room for this dense dessert after all the turkey). To serve, you are meant to pour a *small* amount of brandy over the top and light it.  A little dinner table fireworks show, you see – the piece de resistance of the holiday meal. 

I always remember one year my mum got a little heavy handed with the brandy.  The resultant fire managed to sear the dining room ceiling.  Fun times.  I wonder what shenanigans we’ll get up to this year?  Stay tuned for my next blog post winging its way from England…