As new homeowners, we have come to realize that there ARE a few advantages to apartment life.  When something breaks, you just call the office and a nice man comes out with a bunch of tools and takes care of it.  You don’t really have to own things like ladders, drill guns and lawnmowers cause the “nice man from the apartment complex” does.  Since we closed on our house last month, we’ve become quite the regulars at the Home Depot near our house . . . to the point where people are starting to recognize us actually.  And our poor dads!  They’ve gotten more than a few desperate phone calls like, “Is is supposed to be this hard to get a cabinet hinge off?” or “What do I use to patch up the hole I just put in our bathroom wall?”  Needless to say, It’s been an adventure of epic proportions!

 

The top two home improvement lessons we’ve learned so far:  1) Nothing is as easy as you think it will be . . . EVER!  No matter how easy it looks on HGTV (which we now LOVE by the way), it’s not.  And 2) keep your receipts.  You WILL buy the wrong thing at Home Depot.  There’s no point in getting mad, just accept it because it WILL happen . . . over and over again.

A small selection of our many, many new purchases. Our very first purchase was the 8 foot green ladder. Getting that into my little blue Rav4 was entertaining!

We’ve created a little graveyard of the ugliness we’ve been pulling out of the house.  Mid 90’s light fixtures anyone?

This little baby was about the ONLY thing that survived the big lighting switch out.  It was originally hung in the studio, which has kinda low ceilings to begin with, so rather than put a 6 foot and under height restriction on our clients, we decided to move it into the family room.

I know you already saw the new dinning room light, but it’s just too pretty not to post it again :-)

It’s funny that something as small as changing out light fixtures can do so much to modernize a space. This front room will be our living room with the TV on the left side wall and our couches on the right.  To add a some mood lighting, we added dimmer switches for the front pendant light as well as the one in the dinning room.  Ryan’s becoming quite the little electrician, despite his deathly fear of electrocution.  I’m not kidding people, he gets upset when I accidently shock him in the grocery store. If  it does happen, I’m not allowed to touch him until we leave the store.

We’ve had so much help from our amazing families!  Here’s a shot of Ryan’s dad Greg working on hanging one of the new lights.

Rather than do vertical blinds for the back door, we opted for curtains.  Perfect example of a project that sounds easy and turns out to be a big pain!  We had to hang the dang rod 3 times to get it at the correct height.  On top of that, it required 3 trips to Pottery barn, the second time for more curtain rings and the third time to exchange one of the panels which was not the same length as the first one even though it said it was supposed to be on the package.  A two inch difference doesn’t lie!

My favorite part of the curtain project?  The squared finials on the end of the rod.  (And learning that these were called “finials”! LOL!)

So the biggest project we’ve completed so far has been repainting our cabinets.  There was quite a bit involved in the process for what seemed like a simple change:  1) Take down cabinets doors & remove the hinges, 2) Clean all surfaces, 3) Prime all surfaces, 4) Paint all surfaces, 5) Put hardware back on and rehang everything, 6) Touch up all the nicks we made by not letting them dry long enough, etc.  Not only did we do the kitchen, we did the cabinets in both bathrooms as well.  It took about 3 weekends to get the whole thing done, but it provided lots of photo opportunities :-)

And the whole thing would have been impossible without A LOT of help!  Here’s Ryan & Greg putting the last of the hinges back on.

Here’s Ryan’s mom Lanie doing touch ups .  Lucky for us, she’s a fab artist who paints for a living.  Experience with a paint brush = a hot commodity during a painting project!  Although we were able to remove the doors and use a paint sprayer to do those, all the cabinetry that was attached to the wall had to be hand painted.

Here’s what our previously ugly kitchen cabinets looked like BEFORE.  And then DURING – the purple looking color is primer.

And now – the AFTER!  We’re certainly not pros, but it turned out pretty well.  Much better than living with a kitchen from the early 90’s at least!  (You may have noticed that all three photos were shot with completely different light, some with flash and some without.  We started out using our little point and shoot camera for the before stuff, but wanted the finished product to be better quality.  What? You don’t think that the “before & after” ads on TV do that too?  Come on now, you know it’s true. LOL!)

Putting in a dog door was especially fun since it required cutting a BIG hole in our house!  Check out the burly man wielding the saw!

Awwwww look – It’s our first HUGE hole. (tear)

A man with a saw sure draws a crowd!

And of course, my Dad (Dan) and I just had to do the old inside-outside trick.  Yep.  We’re a bunch of dorks.

Our introduction to the home improvement process has had it’s up and downs . . .

But it’s also been a lot of fun and we’ve already built a ton of great memories in our new house with people that we love.  Thanks so much to our awesome family that have been such a huge help!  Where would we be without your love, support and advice?  I think it’s safe to say that we’d be living in a much uglier house. LOL!

Lots of Love from both of us :-)