Bathroom renovation begins

So this is what our upstairs bathroom looked like a few months ago...

And this is what it looks like now.

This renovation has seriously gotten the slowest start. The leaky pipes were repaired in December (hurrah!), but it hasn't been touched since then.

We still have a bit of demo to do before the rebuilding can begin. The rest of the floor needs to come up, and there's a weird buildout on the ceiling that mimicked the neo-angle shape of the old shower.

Last week, I finally made my first purchase when I found some wall tile for the shower. I scooped up a deal on some oversize 6x8 inch white subway tile. Just $2.16/square foot! I was toying with the idea of light gray or mossy green tile, but after paying $2500 to replace our plumbing stack (yeah, for real), I am trying to save money where I can. And the price was too good to pass up. White tile it is!

I think I found a floor tile too, but I have one more store to check before committing.

Stay tuned, although I'm thinking this one is going to take a while...

Quickie bathroom refresh: New shower curtain and repainted register

Our main bathroom was calling out for some attention. We did a gut renovation in early 2010, but a quickie refresh was in order. First, a new shower curtain.

The old one was water-stained and snagged, and I was growing tired of it anyway. Changing out a shower curtain is so cheap and easy, there's no sense in living with something you don't like anymore.

I found this one at Target for $20. They have so many pretty options right now in their Threshold line, but I loved this all-over floral design the best. We definitely need a white curtain in this bathroom. The window is in the shower and when pulled closed, a white curtain still lets much of the light through. Getting rid of that swath of dark black at the top definitely brightened things up.

Quick change #2 was repainting the register. I feel like this is something I post about all the time. I think I've done like three other posts about painting registers (!) so I won't bore you to death again, but I just love our house's vintage cast iron registers. Especially in this room, it's an important period detail that's very noticeable.

I stripped and repainted it in 2010, but since then a bit of rust had started to peek through the paint. I had even used a rusty metal primer, but I guess the humidity in this room is just too much for even specialty rust products. We have an exhaust fan and use it all the time, and the rust probably would be worse if we didn't.

I did two thin -- almost drybrushed -- coats of black latex enamel and called it done. It took three years to start rusting, so I didn't even bother using another coat of primer. I may come to regret that decision in the future, but I really didn't want to buy any more paint. (Have you seen my stash??)

I went all black this time instead of two-tone. Looks pretty slick! Definitely an eye catcher. Plus, the black should mask any rust that starts popping through again.

p.s. if anyone in the STL spots a vintage cast iron register like the one above at an antique mall, e-mail me at erin (at) lansdownelife (dot) com or shoot me a message through Facebook. I'm trying to scoop one up for my kitchen, and I've seen them from time to time, but of course, now that I'm on the hunt for one, I never ever see them.

The Jenny Lind nightmare and the make-do headboard

So you might have noticed in the shared kids bedroom reveal that something was missing. Something I told you I started working on way back in February.

Remember Jenny? Jenny Lind?

I got this headboard and footboard out of my parents' basement, but once upon a time, it was in my great grandmother's house. The finish was not good, so I decided to paint it and make it a fun big girl bed for Elise.

I briefly wondered if I should try and put the bed together to make sure everything was OK before I got started, as older beds can be slightly different dimensions than modern mattresses. But I was pregnant and that sounded like a lot of extra hassle. So instead, I got to work and figured whatever happened, we'd be able to make it work. This, my friends, is called foreshadowing.

It took me about 4-5 hours to sand both the headboard and the footboard. Thanks to some unseasonably warm and sunny February days, I was able to do 90 percent of the sanding outside. I used one of those foam sanding blocks; they are so much easier to use than regular sandpaper, especially when sanding something with a lot of curves and details like this. I'm a fan.

I was excited to get a custom-mixed enamel paint, but after a quick trip to Sherwin Williams, I learned that they couldn't mix enamel in a deep pinky red because they don't have a base for it. My options? Go with regular latex paint or pick a different color of enamel. I left the store with their advice so I could think about it.

I didn't want to use semi-gloss in this situation, so I decided just to get some flat paint mixed and then follow up with polyurethane. More coats, more work, but I could get the color I wanted AND that hard glossy finish. I ended up buying the paint at Lowes, though, because I didn't really want to make a special trip back to Sherwin Williams.

Then it was time to paint! I started out with my favorite stainblocking primer (Kilz Premium Latex) and followed up with a coat of flat gray paint in hopes that would cut the number of coats of pink I needed. Painting deep saturated colors on top of pure white primer is a lot of work.

It was around the second coat of pink paint (in total, my fourth coat) that I began hating this project. Why did I have to choose such a saturated pink? Why couldn't I have just used white enamel and have been done in two coats? Because my girl wanted a pink bed. And although I'm sure I could have talked her out of it, I wanted her to have a pink bed too. After the fourth coat of pink, I decided it was good enough to stop. The middle of a project can suck the soul out of you sometimes.

(Spray paint would have been a good option here, but being pregnant and winter, it wasn't going to happen that way.)

And then I went and had a baby and the bed sat in the basement for over a month. But near the end of April, I picked the brush back up and gave it two coats of polyurethane to finish it off. The shine! So pretty.

Then it was time to put the bed together. Sorry, no photos of this process. You'll soon find out why. My dad brought over the metal rails and the box spring just wasn't fitting. He thought maybe he had more longer rails still in his basement and maybe he picked up the wrong ones. Fast forward a couple of weeks, he brings a collection of six rails over. Dan and I struggled to get everything assembled and we discovered the first pair was way too long. Like six inches too long. We try a second pair, they were again too short. Like an inch too short. We try a third pair that seemed just about right and we put the box spring in and the whole thing was crazy wobbly, not to mention crazy high.

I don't think this old bed was intended for use with a box spring. It probably had some sort of platform missing. Anyhow, it wasn't working with the box spring. And it wouldn't work with just an unsupported mattress either. So we took it all apart again.

I talked to my dad and we decided that maybe we could just attach the headboard and footboard to a modern metal bed frame. Wait, make that just the headboard. The metal bedframe wouldn't be long enough to be able to attach the footboard as that end is usually open. OK, I thought, I'll sacrifice the footboard.

When he went to attach the headboard to the metal frame, the heights didn't line up well. The legs were all spindly where the metal frame would attach. There wasn't a flat surface where the two should meet. Not only that, but the headboard is slightly warped. (I noticed that before, but didn't realize it was going to be an issue.)

So now I have a beautiful but useless pink Jenny Lind headboard and footboard taking up space in my basement. All that time wasted! Eight coats of primer, paint and poly! Kills me.

I put so many hours into this project, I'm not ready to quit them just yet. I'm hanging onto them until I figure out if there's anything else that can be done with them. I've seen benches, etc. made from beds and cribs, so maybe they still have a future.

But what's the new plan for Elise's bed? We ended up using a plain metal bed frame to get everything up off the floor. At this time, I'm not ready to spend a lot of money on another headboard. The cheapest new ones I liked were still over $100. And after this debacle, I'm more than a little scared to go the vintage route.

For now, Elise's make-do "headboard" is two giant throw pillows from Home Goods. It is what it is, but I think it kind of works? It is a kid's bed after all.

I also think that it might be wise to wait until Etta's eventually out of the crib and then just buy two matching beds. The long-term plan is to move them upstairs in a few years and matching beds would look so good. Plus it gives me a few years to casually shop for a deal. And maybe my new-found fear of vintage beds will wear off a little.

Any ideas of what I could do with my useless headboard and footboard?

Decorating a shared bedroom for two little girls

This post is long overdue. In fact, I think my last post about this room's transformation was before Etta was born in March. The room's been sort of done for a while. There were a few hangups, and I kept thinking I was going to make a couple of more things for it. Reality says, probably not, so here it is!

I had to do some major decluttering in here. Not only with the practical stuff like clothes, but also a lot of accessories and decor. I removed everything we weren't using and anything that didn't feel especially special. This room has always had a few too many things in it, so I was glad to get it under control. There's still a lot of "stuff" in here, but there's more breathing room now.

This room is small, like maybe 12' x 12' including the closets, and there are three windows and FOUR doors to contend with. The furniture placement took a bit of finessing. The architecture of the room is such that the twin bed is too long to fit on ANY of the walls and leave enough clearance for the doors to open. I know it looks like it would fit lengthwise in that inset with the windows between the closets, but it's literally two inches too narrow. Ugh.

If you're wondering how things are going with the two kids sleeping in the same room, we really haven't tested those waters yet. Etta is a fabulous sleeper. (I am so thankful, and seriously marveling at how this girl can be so easy when the other one was the complete opposite.) We may try her in the crib pretty soon.

I feel like this room has really come together this time around. I liked it before, but there was a transition period after we took the crib out where the layout didn't seem to work as well. A larger rug under most of the furniture seemed to solve that. the touches of pink don't hurt either. It's so happy!

See the first incarnation of Elise's bedroom here >>

Painted wood molding kitchen backsplash

This is the story of how I took a weird problem and turned it into a design feature.

I ordered our new laminate counters without that four inch integrated backsplash so they would look a bit more high-end. But our old counters had that backsplash, and we didn't know what was behind it.

It was a risky move. I expected I would have to do some wall repair (sanding and repainting), but I didn't expect to find this:

Weird holes in the paneling where the electric had been run. Under every outlet. These two walls are masonry, so the wiring isn't really inside the wall. And that left me with these unpatchable holes.

But I also didn't expect to find this.

Big gaps between where the countertops and the walls were supposed to meet. Nearly three quarters of an inch in a few places! Our countertops are square, but we discovered the room is not. Ah, old house. You got us again. So even if I had been able to patch the holes in the paneling, I would still have been left with the gaps.

I gave it a lot of thought, looked at a lot of photos for inspiration, and adding molding was the most elegant solution I could think of to solve both issues. Maybe not ideal, but making the best of the situation I got myself into.

I didn't want it to look like we were just slapping some lumber up on the wall to hide the ugly. Too obvious. So we added the decorative lip to make it look more intentional and to blend with the rest of the trim in the room.

My dad made all of this from some scrap barn wood he planed and smoothed out. (It's the same wood he used to make our cottage style shutters too!) I think he bought the decorative trim for under the lip, but all the other wood was from his stash. After he installed it all, I filled the screw holes and painted the trim and the lower half of the walls the same shade of white (Valspar's off-the-shelf Ultra White).

Throughout this entire process, I had my doubts. Would it look strange? Would it stick out? Truthfully, it wasn't until I got it all painted that I was completely sold. Now it blends right in with the rest of the trim in the room. Like it's always been there!

DIY Kitchen makeover reveal

The kitchen makeover we started way back in January (when I was seven months pregnant, no less) is finally done! (Or more like "done," because nothing around here is every really done.)

This wasn't a gut job to reach unattainable "dream kitchen" status -- more like a very practical and realistic update. We kept what worked (the layout, the cabinets, the tile floor) and replaced what didn't (the aging appliances, the pinkish counters). A new paint job did wonders for brightening the space. I ended up re-painting the white portion of the wall and all the trim as well just to freshen it.

I didn't add up every last penny, but I think were all-in at around $4000, and about $3000 of that was for the appliances alone. Not bare bones, but totally affordable for such a dramatic change that better fits our style.

I still want to figure out a solution to make our countertop microwave look more built-in and I might hang a few more pieces of art, but when things are 95 percent complete, you might as well call them done and show everyone the before and afters.

And more photos...

I have a number of posts coming up on some of the details, but if there's anything you really want to know about, give a shout in the comments!

p.s. I'm kind of dying that I didn't get a photo with my schoolhouse light in it. It's one of my all time favorite things, and it really caps off the room. Maybe next time.

See all the kitchen related posts >>

Sources
Appliances: Whirlpool
Microwave: Frigidaire
Range hood: Broan
Counters: Wilsonart 'Oiled Soapstone'
Faucet: Kohler
Paint: Cliveden Gray Morning (Valspar)