Spring 2010: Outdoor Improvements

As you can see, it was a busy spring! Nesting much? Along with the inside improvements, we also did a couple outdoor ones. First, the brick pillars at the foot of our driveway needed some serious help. They were originally built with brick tops, which allowed water to get into the grout and over time, the tops began to crumble. Then, on windy days, the lanterns on top of them started to blow over, due to the crumbling brick!

After the brick tops had been ripped off. Our landscaper, Carl Cincotta, did the project.

Finished product below! 3" slabs of bluestone, with rough, rather than finished, edges. New lanterns (more about those to come) and a nice wooden house number plaque made by Carved Home Signs on the Cape.

Additionally, at some point before the pillars (I forget exactly when), Cincotta also re-did our front steps. They too had been all brick, which just doesn't fair well in all types of weather. At some point we'll also need to re-do the front walkway. The steps are now bluestone as well.

Spring 2010: Basement Bathroom

We have a great finished basement- it has main room, a bedroom, and a workout room that we have turned into another guest bedroom. Off this room, there is a full bath. We hadn't touched it in years- hadn't even opened the door! But we decided to fix it up since we know it will get future use as a guest bath, or even if one of our kids wanted to have their bedroom down there. I don't think I have "before" pics, but the bathroom was painted cream of course, with cream wood cabinets and a beige tub and toilet. The countertop on the vanity was this awful dark green formica. We wanted to keep the project low budget, so I found a granite countertop with built-in white sink at Home Depot- just $199!

The workout room turned bedroom.

We also got a new white toilet and Larry from Winchester Mechanical was able to install both the sink/countertop and toilet for us. I painted all the cabinets white, and bought a new shower curtain and towels. We also replaced all of the brass hardware on the cabinets, as well as the towel ring, TP holder, and towel holder. The mirror and the new vanity lights are from Home Depot. All we need to do in the future is replace the tile floor!

Moms: Sometimes they can be right!

As I am finally learning now, at age 30, and a Mom myself:) Back when we were re-doing the kitchen floor, I was thinking how I would like a new kitchen chandelier.

This was the "old" one.

Of course, chandeliers are expensive and Shane wasn't completely sold on spending the money on a new one at the time. I really love the look of the types with little lamp shades on each bulb. During one of my mother's visits, she mentioned the idea of removing the glass around each bulb on the existing one, and buying little lampshades from Restoration Hardware, as I had for the new sconces in both bathrooms we renovated, and also the new hallway sconces. What a great idea on her part! And I knew they would fit, because the shades attach directly to the bulb, and the bulbs in the chandelier are the same type as in the sconces. Even better? I went onto the RH website and the shades were on sale for $9.99, from $20! Score! A "new" chandelier, for $50 total!

Here it is with the shades:

They are the same color as the ones in both bathrooms, a color which happens to match the kitchen perfectly as well! And of course I love that the chandelier itself already had a Satin Nickel finish. Thanks Mom!

Winter-Spring 2010: Baby Hamel's Room

Okay, enough about doorknobs, now a fun post! As I mentioned, we found out that we were expecting a baby in late September 2009, and knew that our smallest bedroom would be the nursery. We opted to leave the baby's sex a delivery surprise, so I had to come up with a gender neutral theme for the room. I learned pretty quickly that when you take away pink and purple, everything else looks pretty masculine. Which worked out for us, seeing as we had a boy! My first thoughts for the nursery were that I wanted it to be light and whimsical, kind of dreamy with no bold colors.

Then, I spotted the sheep rug. It was in a Pottery Barn Kids catalogue, but when I looked into it, it was sold out and discontinued! Well, I HAD to have this rug. And as we know, pregnant women usually get what they want. After calling every store and outlet out there, I found the rug on eBay. Score! It was shades of cream and beige, so my next job was to find a paint color to match. After testing about 8 billion shades of beige on the walls, I settled on a color called Carrington Beige. It's very light, and somewhat creamy looking.

We hired our amazing carpenter, Brian, to install crown molding and a chair rail in the room, as well as shelves in the closet. I love the finished look of crown, and wanted a chair rail to add detail to the room, as well as to be able to paint the top half of the wall the beige, and the bottom, white. These are pics of the room in progress, after the crown and chair rail went in.

I am proud to say I did all of the painting in this room myself. (Don't worry, I cracked the window and made sure I was using safe paint first.) The molding, chair rail, and closet shelves all were installed as raw wood and needed to be painted. Shane helped do the closet! Here are the awesome shelves, post paint, that Brian built.

Finished paint and the sheep rug!

Next, I needed some wall art. After doing a little searching online, I found adorable animal outline prints on a site called Dinky Cow. I contacted the artist and asked if she could do some custom prints for me. I wanted three sheep, in different positions, outlined in beige. She was more than happy to do them for me, and several weeks later, the prints arrived, adorable as ever. They were painted on flat canvas board, so I went to Michael's and found pre-cut mat boards, and white frames. Perfect!

The finished room:

All furniture is from Pottery Barn Kids. I ended up not liking the color of the slipcover for the glider pictured above, so I ordered another, it's a more natural-cream color, and I like it so much better than the stone. Crib bedding and the lamp, as well as the changing pad cover, are Restoration Hardware Kids. Faux wood blinds I got at Home Depot, and the sheer window panel is from Bed Bath and Beyond. I ended up getting a heavier curtain when Cooper was 6 months old, to block out light when he started taking 2 hour crib naps!

It's the Little Things.

Throughout our renovations, we've done small things (but as we learned, some things only SEEM small) along with the big things. Remember when I said that we were doing our best to rid the house of yellow brass? One of the first things to go was the pulls on our built-in drawers in the master bedroom. These were the pulls before:

And these are the pulls now. I love this style and hope to have them on the kitchen drawers someday. (We need new cabinets first, eek.)

Then, in the midst of the foyer renovation, we decided to buy new hanging pendant lights, of which we had two: one hangs in the front hallway, and one hangs at the very top of the staircase on the second floor. I don't have an actual pic of the old ones, but they looked like this.

And these are the new ones, Hudson Valley Oxford pendants. Along with the rug in our bedroom, they are one of my most favorite home purchases, they are really beautiful lights.

And THEN...I decided I really wanted new doorknobs. The old ones weren't bad, but yes, they had a brass base, and a glass handle. I really wanted satin nickel lever-type knobs. Then we realized that if we replaced all the knobs, then we would have to replace all the brass HINGES on all the doors as well. Let me just say that you never realize how many doors there are in your house until you go to replace the knobs and hinges. And since we were doing lever knobs, we had to make sure they all faced the correct direction, and for those we wanted locks on....oh boy. Thankfully the painters helped us change a lot of them.

Old knobs:

New knobs:

After we replaced them all, my cousin, who now has an 18-month-old, pointed out that I had just made it a lot easier for a toddler to open doors. Oops.

Lastly, we had these interesting brass sconces on the hallway walls on the second floor. They reminded me of something you would see in a haunted house. Again I don't have an actual pic, but they looked like this.

Some were double like this one, some were single. We removed them all, and replaced them in only two locations- one outside of the two guest bedrooms, and one outside Cooper's nursery. The others weren't all that necessary, so we just patched the walls where they had been. These are the new ones, they are the Riley sconce from Restoration Hardware.

Front Hallway and Kitchen Floor: Fall 2009

I haven't blogged since May 20, 2010! Haha as we all know, that's because Cooper Matthew Hamel was born 2 days later, and I've been busy since! He is a great baby and takes great naps though, so I am back again!

There was brief hiatus in renovations in the summer of 2009, as we got married on July 18th, and then spent an amazing two weeks in France and Italy! Then we found out we were expecting a baby in late September, and I left Fidelity in mid-October. This left me a LOT of time to manage a new project at the house, and I got right to it! :)

We knew we wanted a new floor in both the front hallway and kitchen, and we wanted it to all be the same tile for continuity purposes. Previously, it was 3 different floors! Dark green marble in the foyer, a short stretch of parquet in the hall leading from the foyer to the kitchen, and then 6" square peach tiles in the kitchen. I used to call the kitchen floor the McDonald's floor, it really looked like it! "Before" pics are below.

The McDonald's kitchen floor!

Dark green marble in the foyer. You can also see the old wall color in these pictures.

We also decided, while we were at it, that we might as well repaint the hallway and the kitchen at the same time. Repainting the front hallway meant also repainting the entire upstairs hallway, as all the walls are connected to one another. Previously, the foyer and kitchen were a deep cream color, and the wainscoting was 2 separate shades of cream, a darker and a lighter version. We chose Benjamin Moore Stonington Gray for the hallways, though I added a bit of white to it to lighten it up a bit, and then the paint store matched it for me. All of the trim and ceilings, as well as the wainscoting, in both the hallways and the kitchen, became Decorator's White. We chose White Sand for the kitchen walls, which is very light taupey-beige color.

After pictures of the floors:

After pictures of the paint:

In the picture above, you can see that the right wall is White Sand, like the kitchen, and the left wall (not pictured) is Stonington Gray, like the hallway. We had to do the two different colors on each wall as the right wall is shared with the kitchen, and the left, with the foyer. It actually flows really well!

White Sand in the kitchen.