I have a story for y’all. It’s a story about regret, catastrophe, and despair. A story about second chances, a story about hope, and redemption.
It’s a story about beams. Glorious Glorious beams.
So a couple of months ago our area was hit by a series of massive hailstorms. The kind of hailstorms that hit hard and fast at 3am, bringing baseball sized hail to pelt your house and terrify your children. The kind that slams into your roof, breaks your windows, turns your car into a golf ball, …
Read More
Quick and Easy Office Makeover
So last month for my Better Homes and Gardens sponsored post we gave my brother and his wife’s living room a makeover...
This month I am still between houses and have zero rooms that are ready for decor or organization...running water and locks on the doors trumps decor, every time. So I batted my eyelashes at Eric and Kelsey and asked them if they would let me use their house again. And they said yes, since they are under the impression that I’m doing them a favor, when really it’s the …
Read More
My Painted Kitchen Cabinets – Five Years Later
Since we have been on the subject of kitchen cabinets lately, I thought perhaps y’all would appreciate an update on the ones I painted five years ago. Truth be told they aren’t holding up that well, so if I can keep someone from making the same mistakes I did that would be great.
So five years ago Adam and I took this dated, boring, builder grade kitchen...
and turned it into this...
The total price on the kitchen renovation was about $3,800 ($2,200 on new appliances + …
Read More
Installed Cabinets
Happy Fourth of July everyone! I was scrolling through Facebook today and looking at all the festive pictures and memes, and interspersed between and the red white and blue was this gem...
It made me laugh out loud...so I had to share, of course.
Anyway, in the last post I left you with a trailer full of cabinets...
and an empty kitchen.
Then one day this happened...
And now we have the beginning of a kitchen!
So, would you like a quick tour?
First up we …
Read More
Cabinet Beginnings
One of the main ways we are saving huge amounts of money on the kitchen is by building our own cabinets. Way back when Adam and I were dating (as teenagers about 14 years ago) his family ran a custom cabinet shop. They built the cabinets themselves, which means that my handy husband isn’t new to this whole cabinet building thing. We got a quote for cabinets anyway (just to make sure building our own was worth the time and effort) and it came back around 10K. So far Adam has built and installed …
Read More
Designing a Kitchen
Alright, it’s time to start talking about the kitchen in the new house. We’re moving in just over a month, (because we sold our old house! In a day! More on that later) and in order to move in we need a functioning kitchen. As a reminder, here is what the kitchen looks like in the blueprints....
Actually, here is the complete floorplan so you can see how the kitchen relates to the rest of the house.
As you can see, it is really really open. Which means not only does the …
Read More
Eric and Kelsey’s Budget Living Room Makeover
Most of you know that Better Homes and Gardens is one of the main sponsors of Domestic Imperfection. Every other month they send me a Walmart gift card, then I incorporate some their products into a project I’m working on and write a post about it.
So for my June post they e-mailed to say that they were going to send me a bigger gift card than usual and wanted me to makeover my living room. That sounded pretty darn great...except for one little problem. Even though I technically own two …
Read More
Painted Interior
A couple of months ago (how has it been that long already?) I wrote a post about choosing interior paint colors for our new home.
All those vertical paint samples above were the contenders, and we ended up choosing Shoji White, a very light neutral (the same color we chose for the exterior).
So Adam and his trusty paint sprayer got to painting, and....it’s white. Like, really white.
I knew it was going to look white, but still...it caught me off guard a little. My reaction …
Read More
Interior Limestone
When designing and planning this house Adam and I knew we wanted a lot of rustic features inside our home. Metal ceilings, antique beams, shiplap siding, brick flooring, rock walls, and rustic wood ceilings and floors were all things we wanted to incorporate in one way or another. We particularity wanted an entire rock wall on one of the walls in the main living space. After finalizing our blueprints we were like “We’re going to put the rock wall HERE. Okay, no... here? Well, that won’t …
Read More
Grout mistakes and installed bathroom tile
*Thank you to Floor & Decor for sponsoring this post.
Last month I shared with y’all the process of picking tile for our kids bathroom, and I’m happy to say that it's all installed, and we are that much closer to having a livable house! As a reminder, here is the tile we picked - a brushed marble tile for the floor, a tumbled marble subway tile for the shower walls, and a linear blue glass for the backside of the niches (all from Floor & Decor).
Originally Adam and I had planned …
Read More
Choosing interior paint colors
I don’t think anyone here would disagree with me if I said choosing paint colors is hard. There are just so many options, and they usually look very different on the wall than they do on a little paint chip. Saying you're “just going to paint it a neutral color” doesn’t make things any easier either...even though it may sound like giving up. Neutrals are hard to choose because their undertones are all over the place and they change so much from house to house, room to room, and even depending on …
Read More
Texture and Primer
For a long time I was doing really great at keeping up with blogging about progress on the house, but I’ve since fallen a bit behind. I’m going to do my best to catch up though, and today we have a thrilling post about texture and primer (which actually happened about two months ago).
So the last time I updated y’all on the inside of the house it had just been drywalled.
The next step was texture. I know that texture is very different based on where you live, and around here walls …
Read More
Prepping to Sell – Curb Appeal and Porch Updates
When it comes to selling a house, I feel like curb appeal is the most important thing. Buyers make snap judgements on houses just like they do on people (even if we don’t want to admit it, we do.) If you pull up to a house and it looks overgrown and uncared for, you're going to decide (probably subconsciously) that the owners aren’t excited about owning it and you're not excited about buying it. Once you get inside, any features you don’t like about the house are going to stand out even more, …
Read More
Boys Bathroom Tile
*Thank you to Floor & Decor for sponsoring this post.
Alright, so it’s time to start diving into all the finish selections for the inside of the house. Up until now we have concentrated on exterior stuff, but the exterior is almost finished and so is the builder... which means that Adam and I have a whoooole lot of work to do in a relatively short amount of time. (We’re only having the builder build the “shell” of the home and are doing most the interior work ourselves). We have a lot to …
Read More
Exterior Limestone
Okaaay....that was awkward. Totally did not mean to take nearly a month-long blogging break. I assure you I got lots of important things done and didn’t just sit around binging on New Girl and Fuller House and going to bed at a completely reasonable time each night. (That’s sarcasm, I did and it was awesome.)
So, where were we? I believe I owe y’all a long overdue post about the exterior rock on our house.
Before we talk about the rock though, lets talk about these …
Read More
Prepping to Sell – Bathroom Updates
Originally Adam and I had planned not to sell this house until after we move into the new one. Our current house is paid off, and we figured that one of the advantages of not having to carry two mortgages is that we can move at our leisure. We were planning to finish the new house as much as possible, move our stuff over (slowly, because I’m going to purge the crud out of it as we go), fix up all the lingering details on this house, then sell it while it’s nice, empty, and clean. Because really, …
Read More
Drywall Changes Everything
If you’ve ever built a home, you know how big of a deal drywall is. It takes your home from feeling like a cold, empty skeleton to something you may actually be able to live in (and decorate!) one day. Last time I wrote about the house we had just filled our skeleton with spray foam insulation, and it looked like this...
And then a crew of miracle workers showed up and changed everything. There were about ten men and they had the whole house drywalled, taped and floated in about two …
Read More
Spray Foam Insulation
I’ve come to learn that people in the construction industry have very strong opinions about insulation. There are basically two categories, people that love spray foam insulation and people that hate it. Adam is firmly in category A, while our builder is firmly in category B. It seems that builders either exclusively use it or won’t touch the stuff.
Reasons people hate spray foam -
It has been known to have issues with rot and mold
Price (it’s about twice the cost of regular batt …
Read More
Things I’m Lusting After
Before we jump into this post, I just have to say thank you for all the comments on my latest post about the book "If You Give a Mouse a Cookie". First of all, y'all are hilarious, and second of all, you proved me right beyond the shadow of a doubt. It's funny because Adam loves to read (as an adult and a kid), reads to the boys all the time, AND my boys are familiar with the book....but somehow Adam has made it nearly 32 years without ever hearing of this book. Don't worry, it is on its way …
Read More
Choosing a Rock (is making me crazy)
There are so many decisions you have to make when building a house. Lots of them are small, quick decisions...and some of them are big 'ol monster decisions.
Choosing rock is a big 'ol monster decision. Rock is a big investment, and you can't change it. I feel like exterior paint was a big decision, but the fact it is, it's just paint. If I had decided to paint my house purple and a year later I was like "wow, that purple paint is really obnoxious", then you just paint it again. Rock though, …
Read More
Beams, beams, and more beams
I've always loved beams. Big, chunky, rustic beams ... the more the better. So when I started thinking about what I wanted in our new house, a boatload of beams were pretty high on the list.
Farmhouse Kitchen by Austin Home Builders Dalgleish Construction Company
Farmhouse Entry by Washington Architects & Building Designers Donald Lococo Architects
Rustic Porch by Waynesville Building Supplies Appalachian Antique Hardwoods
Rustic Porch by Comfort Architects & …
Read More
- « Previous Page
- 1
- 2
- 3
- 4
- 5
- …
- 11
- Next Page »
