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!