Decisions Decisions

Now that the end tables were done we were set on leaving them el natural.

Then right before we are about to put on the protective glaze we decided to paint them the same color as the headboard which is Early American by Miniwax. And we kinda like it but it was a bit light, and I am sorry I didn’t take pictures.
After staring at it, we thought it might be too much to have a honey stained headboard and dresser and end tables. So off to Home Depot we went and picked up some Jatoba bean also by Miniwax. We stained over the Early English.

I love how dark the Jatoba bean was but when we started to wipe it off streaks of the Early English came through and we loved it even more. It gave the wood an old color look, if that makes sense?

And that is where I am going to leave you hanging. I hope you come back Friday to see the finish product.

Goodbye Gray

Nope I am not talking about my hair! I am still in my twenty’s too young for that I hope! And even though James is in his thirty’s I’m pretty sure his blonde hair will only darken instead of turning gray. The gray I am saying goodbye to is the gray wall in our office.

What spark this change you may ask? Besides the fact that we are crazy and love change we just felt like it was too dark. I know the guest room was next but we are still waiting because we thought it would require more work to paint that room since we are planning on replacing the baseboards. We were wrong! James ended up having to recaulk where the wood beams meet the wall. I will be posting a tutorial on that later this week.

Anyways back to why we painted. This room does not get a lot of natural light and James kept finding himself working in the dining area because it was so much brighter. So we are hoping a few coats of paint and some reorganization he can move back into the office. Leaving our dining area clutter free and finally having somewhere to sit and eat again. Oh joy!

Gisele The Rug

I don’t speak swedish so I keep calling the IKEA gislve rug ‘Gisele’ because the word looks similar and like the model it is beautiful. anyway here it is in all its beauty in our guest room.

It’s a bit small and maybe we should have gotten two but we are really happy with it especially since it was only $20! We bought a rug gripper to go under it because the backing is a bit rough and we don’t want it to scratch the hardwood floors we laid down.

I know you may be thinking, ‘ugh why would you lay that rug there with that wall color?!’ No worries the room will be painted soon. Like as soon as we feel like ripping out and buying new baseboard. When we get to that point we will paint because the baseboard is horrible! It needs to be done. The old ones are chewed up from the previous owners dogs and we want something larger and already painted white like the ones in our office.

So do you love our new rug? Do you like the name I made up for it-really creative right? Any guesses on what the new wall color will be? I’d love to hear what yall think.

We Are Expecting. . .

Guests!

No babies for awhile. Just a teaser there.

This spring/summer we are hoping to have some friends visiting us as well our neice Rachel.  Although these visits are months away, the guest room has been our main focus the past few weeks. Below are some things we are hoping to accomplish before company arrives.

• Paint the room
• Find the perfect side table/nightstand
• Purchase a T.V. for guest to watch because Jamie and I sleep really late and I don’t want guest to feel like they have to stare at the ceiling until we wake up. Now they will have entertainment in their room.
• Lighting-we are in a debate over this one. I want overhead lighting and James thinks we should add a wall  mount light and table lights
• Clear out the closet It is currently filled with James’s collection of clothes.
• Hang New Art

And that is everything! Thankfully we have time to spare and will hopefully accomplish all on this list if not more. Oh and our goal for this project: $500. I guess that is resonable. We don’t need much and the T.V is our only big ticket item. So wish us luck! And in case you forgot here is the current state of the room.

And The Winner Is. . .

James!

Yup I gave in to him. Once we got to Home Depot and looked at the spray paint the brightness of the yellow made me nervous because the lime green was a bit too bright for us so I could only imagine taking it to yellow but as James says “It’s just paint we can repaint it later.” Soooo you all those sitting on the edge of your seat here is the after. . .

Wait for it. . .

Wait for it. . .

Spray Painting. . . Again!

Maybe I was a graffiti artist in another life because I LOVE TO SPRAY PAINT. And whenever we buy a new color I go on a HUNT for things around the house we can paint.

Anyways our bronze color fish got it this time. We really never liked the color, it was way too traditional but we had bought the piece years ago at Kirkland’s because we found it so humorous. See the bronze fish here: \’here fishy fishy\’ See it is a fish with a bowl sitting on his back. So a fish+bowl =fishbowl! Haha! We are dorks. So to make it more modern we used some left over lime green paint and gave him a few coats. We liked it for a while but grew tired of it. It is too bad I am just now posting a picture of it.

Consider this before and check back Monday to see the after because we have painted him again. I voted yellow because our walls are gray and gray+yellow=WOW! However James voted a dark blue so come back Monday to see who won that battle.

Anyone else painting this weekend? Or maybe also addicted to spray painting? We could start a club! =)

Two Minutes

That is basically how long it took to do this update. See James had this in his shower:

Yeah an old plastic shower rack. Nothing wrong with it, it functions great but I wanted my boo to be so fresh & clean so I got him this:

A new shower rack! Along with other bath items. And yes I did call James my boo and say ‘so fresh & so clean’. I am nerd.

Regardless it was a nice gift he liked it and I think it would be the great gift for anyone is a huge bath person or maybe a gift for people moving out for the first time. . . hmmm.

So what do yall think? Love it? Hate it? Don’t really care? Does anyone else still have the plastic white ones? I know we have one in our master bathroom and needs to be replaced one day. . .

No Mudroom? No Problem!

When we bought our first house we didnt think of the important things like, ‘Does it have a mudroom?, Does each room have overhead lighthing?. ‘Are the vents on the floor or the ceiling?’, and how big is the attic?’. We have fixed some of these problems. We organized our attic a few weeks back to make it more spacious  and have it on our list to add overhead lighting in the office and guest room. Until then I guess we will just stumble into the dark rooms blindly as we search for the floor lamp on the other side of the room. Yeah it does not make sense logical but decor wise it looks better to have the floor lamps on the other side of the room and no we do not have any working switches. All great things to remember when looking for a house.

And as for the vents on our floor, it just makes it a pain when we arrange furniture because we don’t want to cover a vent over. You may never notice it in pictures but in the master bedroom  we have the dresser moved inches away from the wall so they don’t come up the floor vents.  So with some of those items out of the way I am finally share what we have done to make up for the lack of a mud room.

As you can see when you walk into our house you literally walk into our house. Our driveway leads up to the front door so its the all purpose door for guest and us. So alot of traffic can mean alot of dirty feet. To cut down on tracking dirty shoes all over our house and especially the white rug we have in the living room we invested in a basket.

Yup it was that simple. We picked up this cute basket at Target and are now using it as a  catch all for our shoes. Now the area looks so much cleaner. It is also convient because I use it to carry the shoes back to their home in our bedroom closet.

So if you are like us and don’t have a mudroom maybe you can just invest in a basket. And if do have a mudroom please note we are jealous!

First Major Project

Sooo you saw on Wednesday we finally have fire in the Brice house but it took awhile together.  In this post I will take you back to our first major project on the house, it was with the fireplace. This picture is a bad shoot of before.

Sorry about the mess, we were currently painting and this was before I really ever took any before and after photos. So you also can’t see why had to make a change to our fireplace. The problem was the fireplace had a hearth that stuck out three feet into our living room. We needed all the floor space we could get to enhance the living space. So James used his manly skills to rip out the old hearth and build a new fireplace. Before I go into that here is another bad before shot:

That was my last effort to show you a before of how it jutted out into the room taking up valuable space. This photo was actually used on a craigslist Ad to sell the coffee table-ohh how my photography is so so! Onto the rest of the story. Again I don’t have any pictures of the actual removal of the old and in with the new fireplace this was before I took before and after photos but here is a quick run down of the process.  And one more pause: before I launch into it I am a very visual person so I rather use pictures than words to explain myself or learn about things but I will do my best to explain in detail in case in of you awesome readers out there are thinking of doing the same thing to your house. Okay here I go. . .

So where the hearth jutted out three feet, he use a sledge-hammer to break up the tile on top of the hearth. Underneath we found the framing that stuck out into the room it was 2x4s and plywood, it was all a foundation for the tile, he used a saw to cut it all back until it was flush against the wall. After that we had a big open spot in the pergo flooring-luckly the owner left behind extra pieces so we were able to add those in. 

Next he used 2x4s and hardy backer to build out the frame around the fireplace. Afterwards he added the title followed by grout and lastly sealed it. We made sure we had extra tile just in case we dropped a piece or made a bad cut.

Lastly he spray painted it which was a really bad idea! James had to actually stop and run to depot to purchase paint to brush on instead. What happen was it kinda sprayed backed and got all over the rug and surround areas so SPRAY PAINTING THE INSIDE OF YOUR FIREPLACE IS A MESSY AND BAD IDEA. As you can see it was looking kinda rough from all the previous fires so regular heat-resistant paint was the way to go. So that is how our fireplace sat for two years until we finally found that fireplace screen and here it is today, well almost everyday we like to burn alot of fires.

And in case you are wondering we use dureflame logs instead of real wood. We chose these because they burn cleaner and they still give off plenty of heat.

Mission Accomplished

After planning for our new dining room table for some time and making arrangements for it to fit which you can see in this post , we finally have it assembled and ready to use.

In phase one it looked like this:

I say phases because things are constantly going from one form to another in this house. Like In Phase 2 we replaced the ikea kryssbo light with the CB2 eden light. . .

and then after living with the table for years and having multiple hosting events where we left guests or ourself standing we decided to upsize our table. So we posted ours on craiglist and finally we sold it.  For a few days our dining room area looked  like this

The buyer was a intresting guy.  He asked if we would throw in our ikea dragor rug in to seal the deal. . .  yeah you read that right and as you can see we refused his grand offer. And today it now looks like this

The white chairs were clearance at Target and actually started the inspiration for our new dining set.

Anyways because this table was longer than our previous one we decided it would fit best turned and we are really loving it. I feel like now it truly divides itself from the living room since it is no longer facing it and makes the dining area its own entity and I like how it faces the kitchen so communication can continue to flow between the two areas. It is like an eat in kitchen/ its own dining room so the best of both worlds.

Hope everyone has a great weekend and check back Monday because we have something EXCITING we will be celebrating at the Brice house over  this weekend.