New Home & New Beginnings

 Bonjour!

Hope you are all enjoying your summer.

Here in Maryland it has been terribly hot and humid.

We have not been able to enjoy the outdoors, I can't stand the humidity.

Plus, we've been so busy remodeling our home, busy with painting, sanding, gutting, replacing, shopping and having

meltdowns.

But it's been three months since we purchased our home and we've done so much to it, I can hardly believe it.

We still have some painting to do, but we're on the home stretch.

I've tried to be quite particular with purchases and making sure everything matches. 

I want to do it right the first time, which I know everyone wants to do, but when you have a budget then it's a little harder.

We pretty much used every penny we had on this place so we have to just wait and use what we have, make it work.

This is where creativity comes in and thank goodness for internet, so many ideas out there.

We have two rooms done, yes DONE! Woo Hoo!

Our Living and Dining room. 

I'll give you a tour of our living room, it's not big but it is cozy and we love it.

The picture on the left, obviously is the Before, with lovely red high gloss paint, and an off white high gloss ceiling paint that showed off every imperfection. The windows were broken and if they opened you were afraid you might lose your hand since they would slam shut, very scary. 

So after priming every inch of this house and repainting the result is below.

The After is what we worked so hard to get. Oh what a nightmare it was. 

But we sanded all the floors and used a clear lacquer, we like the natural look of oak.

Here on the floor is the ceiling, yes the ceiling! When we primed everything some areas bubbled, so we'd scrape the areas and prime again.

Well, the ceiling, when we scraped we scraped chunks of paint. It was like peeling a sunburn.

At first it was fun, then aggravating, since we primed all that and it was for nothing.

Oh well, it's done and we got to put on a nice fresh coat of white.

Looks so much nicer without the ceiling on the floor, heh?

This is the right side of the fireplace, again that lovely high gloss red with a high gloss dark pukey color. This house doesn't have too much natural light and the previous homeowners went crazy with dark paints every where, it was so gloomy and depressing.

The paint colors we used were a Martha Stewart paint called Sisal, I really love this color with the white trim, oh, don't look too closely at the stair rails, they're only primed there.

Need to get that done.

So this is part one of our renovation series. 

I'll next post our dining room pictures as well, contractor just finished up fixing the new sliding doors in there.

Bonsoir!

New Home for New Sofa

OK, honestly, this blog is not about my sofa although it seems to be.

Right now, this is a slow going blog.

We're in the middle of trying to find our next home, so we're in transition.

We're renting a small apartment, it's been four weeks now, and waiting to hear back if we have the house we put an offer on.

Short Sales are a nightmare, so if you're considering

going that route, you better not be in a hurry

for a home because you'll be waiting

a long time!

So, while we wait we are still house hunting and seeing if

maybe, just maybe, there's another house out there

that suits us just fine.

So, right now, we're trying to make our temporary

living arrangements

comfortable.

So, as you know, we sold our sofa and purchased a new one,

and it arrived after two weeks of living here

(I have a cover on the seats, we have cats so need to protect the furniture)

I love it!

It's from the Broyhill collection called "Cora", a little more than

what we wanted to spend but we made money off the sell

of our other sofa so that was a great help.

The pictures above the sofa

I found them at Marshall's (I love that store, a little too much) and the colors match our sofa perfectly.

So, when we finally move into our house, we'll need to purchase

a chair or chairs to go with our sofa.

I look forward to decorating our next house, all in

French Country,

hence, this blog!

Comfort

Finally, we received our sofa and this is the exact finished product. I haven't had a chance to take a picture of it in its setting

but I had it saved on my desktop when I was playing with the companies website, and TaDa here it is.

It is the exact look of it.

I LOVE IT!

It's over eight feet long and we love the bun espresso color feet.

We were suppose to get an accent pillow of a dark pumpkin color but it's on back order so they sent us an extra striped pillow.

It is so comfortable and pretty.

We have moved from our home of 11 years, we closed on our old home last Monday, a week ago today, and now we're

living in MD in a small one bedroom apartment in a beautiful area, for now, until we find a permanent home, which we hope will be soon.

Then I can post lots of pictures of our new home in my favorite

French Country Style.