Crafty Lain: July 2010

Front Door

So as many people know I STRESS a lot about making decisions. But it is always the small decisions that I stress over. Give me a major life changing decision and I can make it in 2 seconds flat..but deciding on what color to paint the front door was a STRESS! :)

The front door...like a lot of the house was brown! Brown door, brown roof, greenish-brown shutters...yuck...where is the color? I guess in the flowers b/c we do have lots of them coming up. But non the less...it needed to be changed. So my 1st plan was to do a green door. B/c most front door are either white (mostly all) or black and sometimes red. Which is why I wanted to do green..something different from everyone else. And we did...we got it painted green but after the 1st coat was on it just didn't pop like I had hoped it would. So, alas...we did red. But I'm glad we did b/c I think it really makes the house pop.

Here are the BEFORE pictures...

Here are the shutters on the right side of the house - BEFORE

Red Front Door - AFTER
We decided to paint the entire door and side panels red...again...another stressing decision...and painted the storm door black and added a new silver kick plate.

Shutters AFTER
We went with black since it pretty much goes with anything and it will match the storm door.

Our walkway to the front door. When we moved in there was snow on the ground so we didn't know what was going to up come in the Spring. Thankfully the previous owners loved flowers b/c we have LOTS of them now!

Our Kitchen BEFORE & AFTER

Kitchen Island Before - A lot of the kitchen was brown...brown cabinets, brown floor, brown table, etc. It needed some color.

Breakfast Area Before - There was a floral border along the entire kitchen. Ick! And the walls were all yellow with the chair rail.

More of the Kitchen Before....

Here is the Island while I was painting. You can see I also painted the upper part of the chair rail green. Already the color is improving things...

The Kitchen AFTER
Painted the island red and the strip over the cabinets. Painted the upper chair rail green and painted where the border was the same as the yellow below. Added a new light fixture over the island and bought some new fabric and covered the curtains that were there.

The updated breakfast area...new curtains, new wall hangings.

And new floor. We had the parkay floors in the kitchen too. Again, I was stressing over putting down the duracermic we had in our old house or going vinyl. They make some really nice tile looking vinyl now so we went that route. I like it so that's all that matters, right. :)

Next to do is the back splash...glass tiles from kopperwood. :)

Foyer & Hallway BEFORE & AFTER

So we moved into our 2nd house on Valentine's weekend and have had lots of house projects going on. We are finally done with the biggest ones so I thought I'd share our accomplishments.

The Hallway and Foyer - new laminate flooring that we put down with the help of Daddy. Picking the pattern was such a STRESS!!! But I think we made the right decision on the color/design. It's called Honey Spalted Maple.

Here are some BEFORE pictures of the Foyer and Hallway. The foyer was the original parkay wood floor from the 80's. At first I felt like I shouldn't be covering real wood with fake wood but the floors just weren't doing it for me...they had to go. However I will say my original plan was to only do the hallway. I hated that carpet! But Daddy and Lance both said no, if you're gonna do the hallway you gotta do the foyer too. So we did and I'm so glad we did!

Oh and I can't forget about the walls. The foyer and hallway were all painted white. We painted them a creamy coffee color before we did the floors. I didn't want to get any paint on my new floors.
This is the foyer looking down the hallway.