Man's Cave?

I'm not so sure that "ManCave" is really the word we should continue to use for our basement movie lounge, because nearly everything in it was my contribution!! =D Don't get me wrong, my muscle man definitely loves how everything is turning out, but from the design to the decorating, it's very much been my project!

 We're not finished with it yet, but at least for the moment we have a very useable, very enjoyable cave that I just can't wait to show off! So even though we still have some work to do (a few more wall decorations, a new TV and stand, and hopefully some furniture that's more 'have friends over to watch movies'-friendly), I figured it's close enough to done to at least show a few pics, including this amazing before-and-"after"!

The room is really turning into a movie-cave, complete with red velvet curtains that act as "doors" for the archway entry, bookshelves quickly filling with star wars collectibles, and a practical shrine to the amazing art of Matt Busch! I simply love the anniversary movie posters he did for the trilogy, I'm so honored to finally have a place to hang them!

 The back wall is still lacking a little bit(and cluttered, so I didn't show off the full 360 degree view), but we just got this amazing black glass corner desk for my muscle man. Now that it's been installed and his computer is up and running, he has a proper space for gaming! (until now he'd just been playing WoW from the couch, using the TV as a monitor =P)

 With all this talk of a man-cave, I can't help but realize that this is quickly becoming my favorite room in the house! I mean nearly all the furnishings on the walls and bookshelves are things I've collected over the years, and I love being able to watch movies against that gorgeous light absorbing black wall/ceiling! So why should the men get to have all the fun? I'm still going to call it the man-cave, but that's mostly because lady-cave just sounds wrong..very very wrong...and I just don't see that title catching on anytime soon...

House Work: Underfoot

I'm so excited we're finally getting started on our first 'big project' for the house! Sure, my muscle man has changed a leaky faucet in the downstairs bathroom, and we've done a pretty significant amount of the painting already, but those were super easy compared to this one!

New FLOOORS!!!

When we first put in the offer on our house (way back in April, yay short sales!) I wasn't totally sold on the house but agreed to put in the offer my muscle man wanted because a) it was way under what they were asking, and b)because if we actually got the house for that, I could replace the nasty carpets with hardwoods! So to my total surprise, our offer was accepted and now we finally have the house, so now it's time for me to get my hardwoods!

 (just a little sneak peak for now, I'll show off my final choice of color/stain next time around!!) 

And now that we've got the wood acclimating to the house, the real work can start...

The carpet came up easily enough, but for some reason the builder's decided it would be hilarious to staple the carpet pad into the subfloor every inch or so... Which meant someone (the muscle man decided that would be me =P) had to pull up all these stupid little staples before we could start working on leveling the subfloor...

We're thinking (hoping... and it appears we are correct...) that 15 years of spills in the same area of a carpet are not good for the subfloor underneath... It doesn't appear that the boards are warped or unsound, they do not creak or bow (which is why we're pretty sure it's just a pattern of accident prone former owners, I'm sure there's a similar spot in our old house under the edge of the sofa, where we kicked over quite a few glasses when we didn't have a coffee table to set them on)... But there are some areas where the moisture has caused some swelling, so we went and got a sander to smooth it down to prepare for our wood floors, my muscle man took over most of that duty, I don't have the biceps for it haha! =)

So far so good, we still have the dining room to do, but at least the living room is staple free, carpet tack free, and on its way to being fully sanded down!

House Work: In the Works

So unfortunately we haven't gotten much accomplished in the house in the past couple of weeks... My wonderful husband had to work overtime, which meant 14 days straight for him, cutting out our weekend entirely.. and I just wasn't motivated to do much other than cleaning up some trash and tidying things up, mostly because all the immediate things on the to-do list were slightly too risky for me to do by myself. ie painting, when the only way we have to cut-in at the ceiling is to stand on a wobbly kitchen stool... or there was hanging blinds, same problem there though... I thought about making some curtains, but forgot that my huge plastic tubs of fabric were still at our old house...

So instead I just enjoyed the weekend, and started plotting some fun and awesome things to do once we get the time for it!!

(None of these photos are mine, I just found them pretty designs and am kindly borrowing the images from their proper owners to show off the gorgeous work!)

 










 First up are a couple of lovely master bedroom designs! I'd say our bed has a similar shape to both of these, but I love the little details like the lamps (we don't even have 2 nightstands at the moment, we very much need to find another one to complement the one I already have! Then we can tackle lamps haha) and then there are those great focal points in each of them! I'm not one for mirrors in the bedroom, but I love the circle paired up with the straight lines of the bed on the left, and those shutters are just so quaint and cute on the second! Both are very straight-forward, uncomplicated designs!

 

Another fabulous bedroom idea, the overall decor is way too stuffy and fancy for our tastes, but I just LOVE that oversized print above the bed... And with me being a photographer, it would be so easy to create a wonderful artistic shot that I could get printed of the two of us. 

I gotta show off at least one inspiration photo for our man-cave, right now it's just a big empty cavern, but soon we'll get some carpet put down and then hopefully we can find some bookshelves that will look good along the back wall, which has a low ceiling due to wiring/pipes and stuff... This photo caught my eye because the bookshelves don't actually go to the ceiling, but the photos draw the eye upward and there's no awkward empty space up there... So if we put in prefab bookshelves that don't reach, this is a great idea to utilize that space without looking odd!

 This last one is actually from an AL blogger (theletteredcottage)...If I could, I would just waltz right over to her house and hire her to do my decorating, her and her husband have such great eyes for design.. I adore her house, but she has the advantage of having in an older home that looks great with her cottage charm.. I don't =P But I still want so badly to have an exposed wall like this in my home, and I'm thinking the laundry room is the perfect place for it! And I think I've convinced the muscle man to help me do it! So hopefully that'll be soon on the to-do list, because we need the laundry room finished so I can move the washing machine and dryer over!

...And I'll be back to my own photos next time, but it's been a busy time for me at work too, so there just hasn't been enough time to go around! But soon! =D

House Work: Clean Carpets

One of the first things on my agenda when we moved in was to clean up as much as we could! Aside from a pile outside, there wasn't much clutter left by the guy who moved out! He did, however, leave quite a bit of filth! Every space is dirty, from the ceiling fans to the floors... So since we're not replacing the carpets right away (aside from the living/dining room, more on that later) I thought it would be the perfect time to rent a cleaner and shampoo all the carpets, before we moved any furniture in... Made for an empty house for a little while, but it was worth it to have clean carpets without having to move anything heavy! So after a little internet searching, I decided on Lowe's version of the rental carpet cleaner, the Bissell Big Green machine. (link) I figured it would probably be less used than the big brand competitor, plus Lowe's is where we go for most our house stuff anyway... 

You can see here how dirty the master bedroom was, you can practically make out the outlines of the bed and dresser drawers! 24 hours later and we had a whole new space! (yes, the fresh coat of paint didn't hurt either!) It took forever, I spent the whole day doing our place, I put 5 hours on the machine! Every room had to be vacuumed before I could shampoo it, and in some rooms I guess I didn't do that great a job vacuuming first because the machine kept spitting out these clumps of wet fuzz, but that wasn't such a problem because the results were fantastic!

I really didn't have much hope, I mean the carpets are worn, and still are after the cleaning, but they look SO much better! I was so impressed after cleaning the master that I ran in and made a random pass on a dirty patch in the living room to show the muscle man how cool it was (I did the master first so it would dry quickly and we could finally move the bed over!) The photo(top) really doesn't do it justice, I mean it was amazing the difference!

I was so relieved the living room cleaned up so nicely, we are replacing the carpets with hardwood, but we were hoping to be able to re-use the carpet in the basement 'man cave' since it's currently has a concrete slab floor. So it looks like that plan is going to work, yay saving money! =D

Still lots of stuff to do to help the house situated the way we want it, but it's certainly a start! =) I think the bedroom is nearly 'complete', once we find a couple of pieces of furniture I'll post some after photos! 

House Work: Worth it?

While buying our short sale was definitely the best financial decision for us, I'm certainly feeling the negative side effects of such a purchase about now. Don't get me wrong, we got an amazing deal! Even based on the square footage listed on the realtor's site (which we thought was just the square footage of the main floor of our split level, we've since confirmed this) we got the house for less than $100/sq ft., which is pretty average around here for a 3 bedroom, but our house has 4! And if you consider the actual square footage, which includes the 'basement', we wound up paying around $80/sq ft. So the short sale hassles, waiting, and confusion definitely paid off when it came to the bottom line.

But with that said, the downsides are pretty obvious... The former home owners had fallen behind on their mortgage, so home renovations probably weren't too high on the priority list =P In fact, aside from a couple of wallpaper borders that are totally not our style, and a coat of bright-bubblegum-pink paint in one of the spare bedrooms, there isn't a whole lot that isn't original to the 15 year old house... I mean nothing is falling apart, it's just that nothing has been changed since the builders left it, not a fixture, not a door, not even a wall-plate haha! (seriously there are several plug covers that are broken off, no doubt they were behind furniture, so when they busted, they were out-of-sight-out-of-mind)  We did get lucky and the house had been lived in while it was listed, at least until we put our bid in. But not by the owner, she was renting it out to some guy... We think we've determined it was him who installed wiring for surround sound in my muscle man's basement mancave(very well, I must say, it's professionally done), too bad he also ripped out the original carpet and didn't get around to replacing it with new...We've also determined he was probably single, middle aged, and didn't own a working vacuum or dusting wand... Anyway, point being:

EVERY single surface in the house is in need of TLC.

The floors need a good cleaning (check! eh, sorta)

We rented a steam cleaner from Lowe's for about $50 including the soap, and after a long and hard day of work, the carpets don't exactly look new, but they certainly look clean! As much as the steam cleaner tried, it's just impossible to vacuum up 15 years of wear on a carpet.. the fibers are all smushed down in all the paths around where furniture was.

The living room carpet is actually going to be re-purposed  downstairs for the muscle-mancave, I'm getting hardwood floors upstairs in the living room/dining room! Hopefully those will come soon, we're budgeting carefully!

All the rooms need a fresh coat of paint (working on it!)

The kitchen painting project I already wrote about here: link, and the master bedroom was next on the list to get rid of this awful whitish-blue color that covers nearly every remaining wall in the house. After that we gave up and bought a 5 gallon bucket of paint for the rest of the house, we can customize the colors later if we decide that's what we want to do, but we just want the blue gone as soon as possible! It's kinda depressing, because it's such a cold color, and here's the kicker, my dad was over helping paint the other day, and came to the conclusion that it's not even paint! He thinks it's a blue-ish tinted primer! Which explains why it's on literally every wall, and was applied before the popcorn ceiling... 

Several light fixtures need some help

Some of them are just not our style, some just need new bulbs... and then there's the ones outside that seem to have a short, we're gonna have to get the electrician out for those if new bulbs don't work..

For some reason, the faucets don't match the accessories

In all the bathrooms, there are these pretty (silver colored, I don't know what actual finish they are, nickel or chrome) faucets on the sinks... Too bad the showers and towel racks are all brass!! We've solved this problem in the downstairs bathroom by replacing the leaky original (silver) one with a brass faucet, and it's super pretty! I think in the master we're going to eventually work on making the shower and lights match the (silver) faucets, but that's going to be a while coming because we want to do a fairly major bathroom reno.

And on top of all of that, there's still the normal moving hassles to deal with lol! The decisions about what decor to chose (I only have furniture for a one bedroom apartment, and no dining room furniture! Luckily my god-mother is on top of that one and offered us her dining set woo hoo!! =D ) Where to hang pictures/what kind of art to buy (again, one bedroom apartment, I don't own much wall art because I've never had many walls!) Plus all those windows to curtain!! In short, it's going to be quite the journey to turn this place into a palace, but I think that between my muscle man and myself, we're pretty ready for the challenge!! More updates to come!!

House Work: Kitchen Duty

First up on our to-do list for the new house was to fix the kitchen before they delivered the new appliances, we're trying to move into the house that way (ie, don't move furniture into a room until we've got it to an acceptable readiness, or at the very least the walls painted and floors done). So we were in a bit of a crunch since we had a refrigerator being delivered soon, and a kitchen that was the unfortunate victim of builder's basic paint and an even more unfortunate border...

 Now don't get me wrong, I love cows, they're cute and just remind me of the country and rolling pastures... But I really don't want them in my kitchen! So they had to go, and fast!


 Like most other things in our house, neither me or the muscle man had any experience taking wallpaper down, but I took my chances and skipped buying any expensive glue stripper or tools, I figured I'd try with just good old fashioned hot water first...

 And lucky for me, it (mostly) came right off! It took the paint with it in some places, but since we were painting anyway it didn't matter, I only had to sand everything down after...

 Of course, the sanding wasn't difficult, it was just incredibly messy and because of the location (and our lack of a ladder lol!) I wound up standing crouched on top of the counters... all day long... while stripping wallpaper... and sanding...

 ...and then guess who had to 'cut-in' all the ceiling?? Let's just say I now really hate that those builder's basic cabinets don't go to the ceiling!

Still a lot of work to do, so I wouldn't exactly call these before and 'after' shots, but hey, at least we've got a fancy new fridge and range, and a pretty new coat of paint! (before pics came from the listing, that's not our furniture/stuff hehe)

House and Home

So after starting searching for houses this spring, the muscle man and I have finally bought our first house!!

It was a short sale, which if you know anything about real estate, means that it was anything but a short process! We submitted our initial offer in early April! And from there, it actually went kinda quickly, because another buyer had already tried to get the house, so the bank had already done a lot of their whatever they do, but it was still quite an annoying process... They told us they were going to try to close at the end of May... which then turned into the first of June, then the middle, and then finally for the last week of June until we closed it was literally a day-to-day thing, if the bank finished the paperwork we had a standing appointment with the closing attorney each afternoon and would need to leave work and head that way... I'm quite the planner, so that was SO not my comfort zone!!  Especially when it comes to having to leave my work short changed, and especially when it comes to big important decisions like signing papers for a house! (and all the other things that come with that, utilities and packing and such!)

So finally the day after my birthday (what a birthday bummer to NOT have a house lol!) we got the call that we needed to come on to the attorney and off we went. I wasn't able to get the lights or water turned on in time, which meant we'd have to wait 2 days since the next day was 4th of July... Great, so now we have a house and can't even enjoy it!

Somehow we decided that rather than packing it would be a better idea to just spend the day at the lake instead of sulking about our power/water-less house, but then it was back to work (I don't have vacation time yet, blah!) but back to our house!

We're slowly moving in now, and we finally have power, water, and the all important internet! I'm a bit ashamed to say that we had internet and the computer over here (mine at least, the muscle man's needed a couple of new parts) before we had any furniture besides an air mattress. =P And since the house was a short sale, it was in a bit of disrepair and just needs a lot of little work.. Mostly it's just a 15 year old house that has never had any upgrades (save a couple of ugly wallpaper borders). Seriously, this house has builder's grade written all over every fixture, wall, ceiling and floor... Every wall is this awful basic blue/white, and every surface needs a good washing to take care of the dirt and filth of 15 years of living in... But that's another blog, for another day!

Yay new house!!

And yes, I made the muscle man carry me over the threshold, he was not happy about the fact that I made it a photo-op (or the fact that after one shot, I had it in the can, and then promptly deleted the perfect shot I had in a fit of over-heated/exhausted chaos... whoops...I had to re-set the camera and everything since I had taken it down from the precarious ledge I rigged it on to check the shot) But he was a good sport and did it again!