Inside Our Home: The Master Suite

The master suite is just off of the living room.

 The french doors open onto the covered porch.

Through the door on the left of the photo is the master bath.  The space where the master bath is now was originally a bedroom.

I must admit, the master bath is my favorite room in the house.  The vanity is a vintage piece we picked up at an antique store in Portland.  We had Dad convert the drawers to fit the sink plumbing so they could still be usable.  The vanity and the caprese light I bought from West Elm, might be my favorite elements in our bathroom.  I did most of the tile work around the bathtub myself and Josh did the tile work in the shower.  I still need to grout the tile around the tub.  But I love how everything turned out.

We closed off another portion of the covered back porch to create a spacious walk-in closet.  I love having so much space.  Sadly, I only left one third of the closet to Josh, but I don't think he minds too much.  We would like to build more shelving in the future, but for now it can wait.

Inside Our Home: Kitchen + Dining

Moving from the living room to the dining room:

From the photos below, you will see that swapped the kitchen/dining room locations.  Our new kitchen is now where the dining room used to be and our dining room is where the kitchen had been.

What we did in the kitchen:

-Completely tore out the original cabinets and flooring.

-Moved the arched opening to the other side of the room.

-New tile flooring the dining room.

-Added all new cabinets (which we assembled ourselves)

-Added solid walnut counter tops and painstakingly applied coats of epoxy and polyurethane to the surface.  

-Refinished the original hardwood floors.

-Tiled and grouted the backsplash with penny tiles.

-Added a pantry.

-And, let not forget to mention that Josh made a special trip to Seattle to get me the apron front sink from IKEA.

I love that sink and IKEA Portland no longer had it in stock as they were discontinuing the current version.

During the remodel.

Here's a cute video of Paxton showing you "How to" remove wall tile.  

Again, we used the old wood from the living room wall to build the open shelving in the kitchen and in my pantry.

I love my open shelves and the penny round tiles. Although, the tiles are a little tricky to hang.  I did most of the tiling and grout in the kitchen myself.

 The original cabinets were in really bad shape.

We pushed the dining room area out and closed-in part of the original covered porch.

Inside Our Home: Main Entry + Living Room

As you will see, we made a lot of changes inside.  We took everything down to the studs and sub-flooring, as well as moved and/or added doors, windows and walls.

Here is our main entry and living room:

Here's what we did in the living room:
-Shifted the front door location and replaced the door.
-Moved and replaced the main window.
-Stripped and refinished the original hardwood floors.
-Added new hardwood flooring in the entry to match.
-Removed the wall in between the original front door and the upper staircase
-New Sheetrock, paint, trim and lighting.

Below is a video clip of Josh demolishing the wall.

Removing the old flooring from the entry was a lot of work, as there were 5 different layers of flooring.  And the wall Josh took down was almost entirely made of wood.  We believe the wood wall was original to the home built in 1910.  It provided us with several long 1" think beautiful old boards.

With the old wood, we decided to build a bookcase for this wall.  Our inspiration was a bookcase we had seen at Crate & Barrel (pictured below), their cost: $1499.00  

Our bookcase: $300.00 for pipes and fittings.  

I love having such a handy husband who can build things for me and I love how it turned out!  ...Now I want to use some of the old ship-lap wood to build some storage crates for the bottom shelves.  

The Crate & Barrel bookcase and close-ups of our shelves.

Our Home - The Complete Remodel!

As many of you are well aware, my lack of blogging has been due to an extensive home remodel that we started a year ago February.  The mass amount of work our home needed has basically consumed our lives up until now.  And while we still have hours of touch-up paint and small finish work details to complete, I am happy to say that we are finally finished and have moved in!      

Above: Our home as it looked the day we bought it, back in February 2014.  The tan and peach color and the ugly front porch made it a real eye-sore.

...And now that it is finished, it looks a million times better!  We removed most of the stucco and replaced it with Hardiplank siding, replaced the front door, added windows and doors, added new gutters and completely removed the front porch/railing and built it new. 

We didn't make any huge changes to the shop.  However, we did put on a new roof, replaced the plywood door with a real door, replaced the windows, added trim and gave it new paint.  It's amazing what a fresh coat of paint can do!

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Below are the rest of the Before/After pictures of the outside.  I did my best to capture the same angles as I took in the before pictures so you can have a better idea of exactly how it looked before.

The old front porch was just plywood and underneath the stucco posts, the wood was rotting and in bad shape.  We used this beautiful ipe wood for the decking, with metal posts and cable railing.  I love how it turned out!

The front of the basement previously did not have any windows.

If I hadn't experienced it for myself, simply looking at the before and after pictures, it's sometimes hard to imagine just how many hours of work each project took.  Below are just a few of the "During" pictures to give you an idea.

On the front porch they removed the window from the end, started removing the stucco and opened up the wall to add in the french doors off the master.

 Demolition on the porch, created a huge mess of debri that had to be manually hauled down to the dropbox located at the street. 

On the east side, they removed the stucco three stories up, patched in plywood where windows were being relocated or changed, added a covering of Tyvec before siding and then had to install the new siding, often working several feet off the ground.  The new siding alone, took 2 days full days work.

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I will post pictures of the inside of our home soon!