My living room is yellow

As someone that typically goes a Bit Mild on colour, I surprised myself by picking a deep mustard colour for our living room. It's on the walls, I'm feeling a bit overwhelmed by the choice. Deep breaths, right? Art deco inspired spaces are SUPPOSED to be colour saturated. Right?

!!!!!

Our bathroom reno - the demo begins

Okay, so you saw what it most recently looked like - and what it started out looking like...so what's happened?

Well, we started with a massive demo - we had decided to absorb the closet in our master bedroom (you can see it in the floor plan here) in an attempt to get enough space to have a separate tub and shower (can you imagine?! I know!). That and the fact that our plumbing was in exterior walls meant it all had to come out.

Bye bye ugly vanity with your broken drawers and god awful tiles!


Bye bye toilet that never ever seemed to flush properly!




After taking out the toilet and sink, the hub went to town ripping down the drywall and quickly discovered that it had been put up over the original bathroom walls (plaster and gypsum, of course!). CHECK IT OUT, at one point my house had a classic vintage pink bathroom!

Coming in from the hallway, love the chaos! Check out the pink walls...with the east facing window, I added tinfoil and a window a/c unit thinking it would help keep the Boiling Heat out (it didn't).


As I mentioned before, we had decided to absorb the master bedroom closet - so you can see the demo activities from our new (and temporary) second point of access to the bathroom. You can see that obviously the walls were at one pointed tile lined - though not with ceramic tiles, with plastic ones (?!)


Peeking around the wall from inside the tub (oh la!), you can see that the original sink had faced the toilet (vs the door, where the pre-demo one had been). And that it had a built-in medicine cabinet.


BUT WAIT, it gets better! Check out this shot, you can see the shape of the original light fixtures AND a cubby. A cubby lined with the original, red red red swirly plastic tiles. This discovery made my day, I saved one of course.


I had to include a close-up shot. Check it out, they were a deep red with pink swirls? Must have been an epic bathroom.


And, of course, the door heading back into the hallway.

Second Floor - Tour of Our Before

When we started this whole reno process, I was so keen. I even posted a tour of our first floor before we started. Wow, I impress myself. Now that we've been working hard on the second, I realize I never posted a tour of the before - better late than never, right?. Or really, a follow-up tour of the after or "current state" of the first floor. BAH!

;)

Anyway - so here it is, a mock-up floor plan of our second floor space.


Somewhere out in e-lala land, I have a ton of before photos that are vastly superior to these. Sadly, this is what I currently have on our hard drive..follow me up the powder blue stairs (carpet, walls, everything!)


At the top of the stairs sits our master bedroom, great view of the ugly ceiling fan and the attic/dormer storage.


The hall to the second bedroom and the bathroom:


Our second bedroom, complete with mirror tile, ceiling fan and dirty dirty blue shag carpet (oh the memories!)


Here's where the hall turns towards the bathroom...this is actually an intermediate shot - you can see that the walls are no longer blue and a light has been added.


This, of course, led into this epic space:


Which included great details like a floating ceiling and a custom made carpet (grosssss!)




Of course, you can see these and the intermediate steps for our bathroom in this post.

Changing out the cold air intakes

When we moved into the house, we noticed that all of the cold air intakes for our furnace were large and irregular in size. They were the original wood grates and when you looked inside, the vents had become gross gross gross. Right away, I wanted to change them...

Upon inspecting the situation in the basement, I quickly realized that the ducting for the cold air intakes was actually non-existant - basically, there's just a closed-in section between two joists (does that make sense?) that also lines our foundation wall (?!?!?!). This means that the air that being pulled in for reheating also passes all along our cold foundation wall before returning to the furnace. Blah! How is that efficient? With that in mind, I realized that eventually I would want to put in proper insulated ductwork and pull the cold air intakes away (at least a little bit!) from the cold exterior walls of the house.

So what does this have to do with right now? Well, with the plans to refinish the floors underway, I knew it would be important to resize and change out the vent covers now so we went out and bought some pretty art deco inspired vent covers from Home Depot. We chose 4x10 aluminum floor register in a nickel finish by Decor Grates from Elite.


Luckily, through all of our other reno projects I worked hard to salvage original floorings and molding. So the hub pillaged our supply, framed in a smaller hole and pieced matching hardwood into place. The difference is a little noticable but when the floors are done, that should disappear.


And with the new cover, voila!

Dick and Jane's Spot - Art Outside the Home

Art Home - gotta check it out!

Dick and Jane's Spot

I love it, from Curbed National.

How to Cut Crown Molding | Video | Crown Molding | This Old House

How to Cut Crown Molding | Video | Crown Molding | This Old House

With our planned living room reno and master bedroom overhaul, I dream of adding crown molding for that finishing touch...

Oh, I forgot to mention

I'll admit, this is a text-only post. So here I am, just jumping into the story of our bathroom remodel and our fireplace restoration (can I really call it that?). What's the relationship? I started talking a bit about all of our planned projects here but never really described our "logic". Are we just going at this all ass-backwards? Back around Christmas, when we finished up the small Rec Room Project we decided to take a break and quit renovating for a while. Of course, that didn't stop us from doing our entry (which now needs to be entirely redone and WHAT? I never posted that? Okay, I will) but hey. We vowed, at that time, to approach it all with a bit more rationality. A bit more, you know, control.

Things happened, life moved on, and we became motivated to get the bathroom overhauled this summer. And well, as with any major reno project there is always the opportunity to just add a bit more on. I mean, why not? Who doesn't want to do a massive reno project all at once (/sarcasm)? With our bathroom reno, we decided to absorb a closet from our master bedroom. With that, we realized we would have to remove allll the furniture from the bedroom so then we got thinking - why not take out all the furniture on the second floor? It's only one other bedroom. And with all the furniture gone, we can get the floors refinished! You know, I just realized that I never posted a tour of the second floor. So add that to the list (entry project, second floor tour, oi).

BUT WAIT, why finish there?! My God, the hardwoods are the same EVERYWHERE. We wouldn't want the floors to be a little off, would we? So with that, we decided to take all of the furniture out of every room (leaving us with just the rec room and kitchen) with hardwood and have them all refinished at the same time. And rip off the last bit of remaining carpet on the stairs - get it all done, oh!! Exciting, right?

Well, you know how we got the house releveled? and rewired (oh wait, it appears I never wrote about that. My list is getting long!)? All of this led to some serious wall repair - walls were cracked throughout the office, master bedroom, stairs, entry, living room AND kitchen. Only a few - and all after we painted everything (oh and wow, I never posted that either). So we patched and decided to wait for the electrical - which punched little holes everywhere and moved numerous boxes and blah blah blah. End result? Patches, patches everywhere. We just hung art, placed furniture strategically, etc. No big deal, right?

Wrong.

Apparently, you want to prime that shit up as it keeps throwing dust. And you wouldn't want that dust in your newly finished floors, right? Right. So what does that mean? Time to finish up all the patch repair! And paint!

Yeah, fall.

Our fireplace - Status Update

I almost forgot! Check out how we went from this


to this


to this



here.

My ugly bathroom

So a few months ago, I posted inspiration for our pending bathroom reno...in July, we booked it up and got started. Here are some classy shots of the most recent before (in case you don't remember, our bathroom on move-in is here).

After cruising down the dark hallway, note the blue carpet. This was illuminated with lights and the bathroom door open to get some natural light.


There was an awkward turn into a tiny door - I added mirrors to reflect light.


Opening the door, you immediately saw the large (almond?) vanity. All the drawers were broken...


And another turn led you to the toilet/shower. The above toilet storage was an awesome vintage find and I was just lucky my shower curtain matched. Hard to believe this was already Post one level of reno...

Drapes from Redrawn

I recently went on a road trip to Toronto - where I oggled Elte (my dream source for rugs), Barrymore Furniture (the perfect place for fabric remnants, according to Chris @ StyleNorth), and Ginger's (first time, I loved the hardware the most) and eventually found my way to Redrawn where I spotted these beautiful drapes.


A detail shot:



They are for my living room, now I have to hunt down a seamstress that can fix em up for me and pick a paint colour/coordinating fabrics. Ahh! I love chinoiserie, this is my first venture in the area. Wish me luck?