Dining Room

Before and after pictures of the dining room

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Old Homes are Not for Wimps

After  a few weeks without heat, I realized that this isn’t for everyone. Talk about having appreciation for modern amenities!

It is hard enough to get up with the baby in the middle of the night, let alone when it is 58 degrees in the house. Try adding cold pee to the mix when our 4 year old has a rare accident.

We are lucky that we have multiple bathrooms in this house, so that when we do have something torn apart, we will only be moderately inconvenienced.

The kitchen will be another story I’m sure- but well worth it .

If you wonder whether an old house or fixer upper is a good idea for you, consider this- If you don’t like to camp- don’t do it.

Replacement Kitchen Faucet

We replaced the very old competitor kitchen faucet which had an annoying whistling sound if you turned it on full force- with Moen’s Lindley Eco-performance faucet yesterday. Our Lindley faucet features our newest finish- Spot Resist Finish which is great for me as a busy mom. The less often I have to clean things, the better. And, check out how much better the sink area looks with just this change!

 

Less noticeable improvement- the plumbing was so old, that we didn’t have shut off valves under the sink which meant the water supply for the entire house had to be shut off to work on this project. See the new shut offs installed along with new plumbing.

 

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Sample Wallpapers for Girls Bath

Thinking about going bold in the girls bath. First- wallpaper-which I have never attempted. And second, a bold design.  I figure a small space is a good room to take a design risk…    I thought I was sold on the beach toile wallpaper, but there are so many really cool wallpapers out there, the more I look, the harder it is to decide. I am a very visual person, so printing out samples and taping to the wall really helped me see what will go well with the vintage black and white tile.  Now, I have narrowed down to 3 samples that I am ordering online to verify colors and scale of the designs.

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The Grass is Always Greener

In our case, the grass was greener at about every other house on our street. During the course of the summer, grubs took over and killed our entire front yard.

We had recently watched a This Old House episode where they talked about seeding grass in the fall. We had just enough time to follow their recommendation to get the new seed down by early October.

So, we decided to go for it.

Despite the small size of our yard, the entire process took a full week of 1 person’s time.

This was using tools we had on hand- nothing specific for the project, except a seed spreading tool borrowed from a neighbor.

One tip- at first, we didn’t flag the perimeter of the yard to prevent walking on or driving over the new seed. We ended up with tire marks- the guilty party? Me….

I highly recommend inserting flags or roping off the area to call attention as people pull in and out of driveways!

Here is a related article with some good tips. http://www.thisoldhouse.com/toh/asktoh/question/0,,486816,00.html

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Home Halloweenification

Halloweencollage

I’ve never been big on holiday decorations outside of Christmas- it seems impractical. So much work for only a few weeks of display time…

 

But, now that we have a 4 year old and a rather spooky house to work with, I was inspired to go the extra mile and add some Halloween touches. Macy jumped right in too, claiming that we didn’t have nearly enough decorations to go around. We quickly converted our dining room table into a construction paper Jack-O-Lantern factory. The output of which ended up exclusively in Macy’s bedroom of course.

 

Retrofitting Old Sink to New Faucet

We are on a roll in the master bath room….

 

So happy to report that we successfully replaced our very old faucet with a brand new Moen Kingsley Widespread. It is so shiny!

This project was more than just a faucet replacement, but didn’t turn into a vanity replacement as I had feared. When you try to combine old and new, there are no guarantees that things will work out. I wasn’t 100% sure we could convert the internal spout to external until we took the old faucet off and saw what we had to work with. 

 

Once the old faucet was out, we took the entire sink out for a good cleaning, replaced the plumbing to the wall and snaked the plumbing in the wall. The result is amazing! Our water drains and we now have an external spout with more water pressure than before- despite the water-saving faucet. Yippee! What are the chances that the same update to the girls bathroom faucet will go so smoothly?

 

Added bonus- Widespread Moen faucets are M-PACT compatible, which means if we want to change the trim part in a few years to a different style, all we need to do is twist off the handles and spout and twist on new trim.

 

 

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