The Lounge...

...formerly known as our porch... being that everyone keeps asking "is it heated out there" I figure we should just call it something other than the porch from now on.

It's new purpose is a bar/lounge, so I'm going to test the waters calling it "The Lounge".

A quick photo journey of it's many stages:

Gross Brown and Cream when we first moved in

I painted the walls Purple first

with plans to change the ceiling and trim to bright White

Just priming the ceiling changed the entire feel of the room

White ceiling

Trim finally white

Then we decided to rip apart the ceiling; see those photos in this post.  All my hard work painting that ceiling... just ripped apart.

We have a couple different lighting options out there now:

Center light with a soft white temperature 

4 corner lights with Amber temperature (more of a mood lighting)

nicely lit room with all lights on

The finished product!

What's really cool is that all of the fixture 'globes' have matching patterns.  About 90% of the globes in our home have this same matching pattern.  I think that's pretty neat.
Here's a close up:

That's all folks!

~Cheers~
Ang

Porch Project 2017-2018

Yo Loyal Fans... how I've missed you all!

Remember back in 2016 when I posted about a Patio Project Steve and I had started?  and then in early 2017, I shared a finished photo of that same patio?

Well... if you notice in those photos, there is no light on the front of our house (off the 4 season porch), which means on these dark fall nights I sit in the dark... not really all that cool.  So the next order of business after the completion was to put a light out there.  Well, as it turns out our home was built in 1923 and the wiring isn't as straight forward as any other house.  I won't pretend to know anything about electrical work, but something about needing a ground wire from somewhere.. so the electrician says we might be able to pull one from the center light in the porch... the ceiling of the porch looks like this:

so... both Steve and I being willing to get rid of that ceiling and upper wall, decided to rip it out and see if we can run the ground wire from there.

Here's the process of that... (PSA: demo day on Fixer Upper looks way more fun than it is):

Cool.. that only took a few weeks - turns out a full time job takes up a lot of free time for such projects.  Steve has this idea to add some lights out there but then wait... and even better idea...  let's build a coffered ceiling, so he has to figure out where these new lights need to go and get boxes hung... cool. 

He gets that done and we call the electrician out to wire it all up, next thing I know, we have a damn light on the front of our house, just in time for Halloween 2017:

Next things next... insulation; the people we hire are a few weeks out.. so we wait.  This is complete the end of November 2017:

spray foam insulation

Next step: hang Sheetrock

Cool beans, right?

Now comes the hard part; our 1923 home is not square nor is it level... so we lay out a grid for the boxes:

Then Steve has to get to thinking... and I'll just leave you with the building of the boxes in photo form - from base blocks to complete with antique ceiling tiles and crown molding:

There is so much detail that you can't even imaging, including but not limited to filling nail holes and sanding them and caulking all the gaps...

So this past weekend we got everything primed to be painted (we'll be painting everything white to match the window trim):

We're working our asses off this week so we can have this room open for the weekend and for Halloween 2018 next week... but I tell ya what... I'm sore.  My neck, my back, my shoulders, my arms.  Holy Hannah.  It's been a long process, and I'd never go out of my way to build a fancy ceiling again, but I gotta say... it looks amazing and I'm so proud of my husband for building this!

I'll post some final photos once it's done, hopefully after the weekend!

~Cheers~
Ang

Paint

I feel the need to paint.  Sometimes I get this itch...

Oh, I don't mean paint a portrait... I'm no good at that, I just mean paint color on a wall; I'm a pro in that area.

So... here are my thoughts and if you have any feedback, I'd love your input or even thoughts.
In December we painted our kitchen a shade of Green that wasn't exactly what we wanted, but we've lived with it and while we still don't love it, we no longer hate it as much as we did.  We've also picked up a backsplash that we're hoping will help us like the kitchen more.

Seem like I'm off topic?  I'm not.

Turns out buying a gallon of paint for the little bit of wall we have in our kitchen was WAY TOO MUCH.  So we have almost a full gallon to use yet!  Oy vey.
I'm thinking it might make sense to somehow use it in our spare bedroom.  Right now that bedroom has had very little attention from me/us; the walls are pink and have been for the year and half we've lived there.  Here is a pic from when we first moved in:

So.. I'd really like to avoid painting the entire room that green (click through the link above to see the green) and leaving it all just ... green.  Being that we weren't crazy about it taking over our kitchen, I really don't want it taking over this room either - regardless of how much time we don't spend in that room.  So I'm thinking either some neat technique or maybe an accent wall in the green... the question then becomes what other colors(s) to use with it?  Keeping in mind it's a guest room, I want it to be welcoming yet colorful is okay in my book.
I'd like to avoid using gray or blue as those colors are already in rooms upstiars.

Any thoughts or input on what colors to match with that green ... or what/how to pain the room to use up some of that green and not make the room look exactly like our kitchen?

Update via pictures

I figured since I really have nothing to write about I should go through my phone camera and post some of the stuff we've been up to, in NO particular order!

First and foremost, in case you don't make it all the way through this post, I'll post the most important thing first.

A couple weeks ago we took a bottle of Stoli vodka and a pineapple.  Cut up the pineapple placed it in a big drink dispenser poured the vodka in and let it sit for just over a week.  Now some just drink this on ice (called a Stoli Doli), but we had other plans for it.  There is a restaurant in Duluth that makes a drink (which name escapes me) - it's a muddled cucumber, a shot of pineapple infused vodka, sprite and a splash of soda.  Sounds odd, but it's seriously amazing, especially for summer - extremely refreshing!  My brother made a variation of it by putting soda with a splash of sprite (less sugar, great idea!).  He said it was probably the best drink he's ever had... and coming from my brother, that is saying a lot!

You should probably get off your ass and give it a shot.  You don't even know you're drinking, it's gold.

What else?  Have I told you that Steve and I celebrated 3 years together?  I think I mentioned it was coming, we'll it's come and gone.  On our anniversary (it was a Friday), I went downtown Minneapolis and we had food truck lunch, yum!  We went to Solera that night for dinner, a first for both of us, and delicious.  We also stopped by a little restaurant for a rhubarb dessert sampling - I'm a sucker for rhubarb anything.

We also tried a new burger at home - Steve is in love with Pizza Luce pizza's... so he wanted to see if we could make a burger to taste the same.  This burger has garlic mashed potatoes, tomatoes, scallions, and feta on it.  It was good, but the pizza is WAY better.  Yes, garlic mashed potato pizza.  I need a Pizza Luce fix!

This past weekend we spend a fortune on a number of things - we got the items pictured below - 2 floor lamps that look like the top pic, and 2 boxes of tiles (second pic) to make a backsplash in our kitchen.  Both items were normally very expensive - we got the lamps for $50/each (Tiffany lamps) and the tiles were normally $28/sheet, we got them for $5.00/sheet - SCORE.

We also purchased (not pictured) 7 sheets of Oak veneer - which will hopefully be enough to fix the oak table we have along with the newest item we've added to our collection of antique family pieces (the picture is when it was still at my aunts house with stuff all over it, but you get the point of what it is) - it's an Oak buffet, which may or may not go with out oak table, no one knows if they are a set - BUT these pieces were in the house my dad and aunts grew up in for their entire lives... and now I have them both.  The best part is hopefully we purchased enough veneer to restore them both to their original beauty!

The veneer is like 60 years old (both pieces are older than that), so we're hoping it will look right on theses pieces.  This stuff retails for upwards of $30/sheet... we got it for $10/sheet!

So we spent a lot this weekend, but saved a ton too!

Pam's shower and bachelorette party were a success - obviously, if I'm involved in planning, it's bound to be a success!  Here is the bride and her ladies:

Lastly, I'll leave you with a photo of my adorable kitty snoozing on the couch (yes, I'm aware he is overweight):

That's all for now people!