Making this House a Home

WARNING: this is a very long post.. my apologies.

Ok, so once again it has been ages since I have blogged and not much has happened besides changing things up at the home. We lucked out with a lovely little two bedroom apartment apartment in Westminster, Ca. and we have been working for the past nine months to make it ours. Here are some of the things we have been working on..

First, we worked on a little organization of our 'stuff' and got a bunch of shelving units from everybody's favourite cheap furniture store.. that's right, Ikea.

  bookshelfs, DVD holders, media stand
We originally wanted to have the DVD stands surround the media stand, but due to the size of the sofas and the size of the room, there was really only one way to set everything up and since the lovely wall heater is on the wall we need to use for the TV, for now they are on another wall. Don't worry though, we will have them encase the media stand once we have another place to call home. ;)

Next, we got a fabulous little kitchen table from Living Spaces(very reasonably priced I might add, if anyone is looking for kitchen tables..). We decided we wanted to get a bar height table and this is what we got:

I had some bi-fold doors as a backdrop in our wedding and decided to turn them into a headboard. I have a few kinks to work out with keeping them connected together, but I'm pretty happy with the result. I also added curtains to the closet and took down the huge dark brown double doors.


Remember the last picture.. it will come in handy near the end of the post. Yes, that is a cardboard box, and yes, that is what I used as a nightstand for the past nine months.

In the meantime we celebrated our one month anniversary and decided that we would cut out top layer of cake with that date instead of a year later.. can you even fathom eating cake a year later, I mean, come on now. That's gross. We, on the other hand, enjoyed our cake thoroughly. it was so good! :)

I decided to make a little personal statement for our door and worked on figuring out some sort of 'wreath'. This is what I came up with:

 

Once again, Thanks go to Ikea for the 'clearanced' frame.. that they still sell(to this day I can't find anything wrong with it..). got the rest of the materials at Hobby Lobby and threw it all together with a glue gun. I love it!  :)

We had a lovely little mishap in the bathroom (not our fault, btw) which led to a brand new bathroom for us. We were without a bathroom for 12 days, but I'm glad that we caught the problem early on or it may have been a lot messier.. We noticed that the bathroom was extremely flooded after a shower one night, and figured we had just leaked water through the old glass doors of the shower; but after attempting to mop up the water with towels it just kept coming and coming.. We told the building managers and this was the result:

This was the really old decayed pipe under our tub.. yes, that is a huge chunk missing.. and the source of all the water. 

So long story short, they brought in some.. interesting, workers who liked to rummage through our closet, use up our toilet paper, steal the rest of the roll of said toilet paper, and continue to be creeptastic. However, in the end, the results were pretty good. We thought the walls were a little yellowed from previous paint and did not do the new remodel justice so we gave the walls a nice clean coat of white and that was that. So here are the before and afters.. sorry the pics are so small, it's hard to get any sort of angle into the bathroom.. but I guess that's a good thing..? haha 

Part of the remodel included a new vanity since the old one was damaged from the water, and we also were given a tub without the annoying sliding glass doors, so we were able to put in a cute shower curtain. :) We also added one of those storage things above the toilet for extra storage, and put in some new towel rods.

After the bathroom ordeal we decided to give the kitchen a little lovin'. We started with the faucet since it was so short that I couldn't possibly clean a pot in our sink. once again, here are the before and afters:

 

Luckily for us the first faucet ended up being faulty and the problem for the leak under the sink so the faucet price got waived. Hooray for free upgrades! :) (Even if it hadn't, though, we got a very reasonably priced one from Costco)

During this time we had to travel up to Utah for my, duh duh duh... GRADUATION! Hooray for finally being an alumni with a bachelors degree.. took me long enough.

We took on another kitchen project, a very large project mind you, in resurfacing our kitchen cabinets.. they had that orange-y, yellowed seventies wood colour and we thought they would look much better in black. we started first with a wood stain and began sanding everything down to remove the varnish that was left.. if any. The stain route didn't really work so we got a gallon of black semi-gloss paint from Home Depot(Behr brand). That really did the trick and we were once again pleased with the outcome.

 

Before, during, almost there..... and Done. We chose to paint them blue on the inside to add a little brightness since black would add darkness to the already small and dark kitchen. Ironically we found that the kitchen was brighter with the black cabinets.. I think that was just because the black makes the yellowed walls look more white instead of dingy. It also helps that we added the bright-light light bulbs throughout the house, making our home much more happy and bright.

 The next little project I decided to mostly take on my own was to plant a small garden. I went to Home Depot again and grabbed a large galvanized tub and used a nail to make holes in the bottom for irrigation, which worked out really well. my little garden started out great and grew very quickly!

I had a lot of fun with this little guy and I felt very productive. it's empowering to grow your own veggies! 

We had to get me a new car for various reasons, but we were pleased with the outcome, We ended up with an '06 Toyota Matrix, I love it! Yes, I put a U of U alumni license plate cover on it. ;) 

Around now, the little garden had overspent it's welcome in the tiny tub and wanted a larger home.. so we decided to make a bigger garden using cinder blocks. 

Here is the overflowing tub... definitely needed a change. 

 Now that I no longer have a truck we truly tested the strength of my little hatchback.. it was filled to the brim!

I think we added up the weight of all the bricks, stones and blocks to around 800 pounds.. we had to drive home VERY slowly. haha, but it turned out a success! My little garden definitely needed the extra space. 

Alright, so up to this point(about 8 months after we moved in..) we still hadn't put anything up on the walls and decided we could find places for the pictures, as well as some shelves. Here's what we came up with: 

 

The trio of pics is in the living room, the double shelf is above the stove (we usually have our four most used pots and pans hanging from the bottom but they were in the sink when I took the pic..hooray for dirty dishes..), The temple pics and Cucina sign is in with the kitchen table, as is the long shelf with baskets. I use the baskets to separate the mail and a few other little things that I don't know where to put.

Ok, so I told you to remember the cardboard box for a nightstand picture right? well, you can scroll up to the beginning if you don't. (I already have too many pictures to refresh your memory.. ) We looked all over for a few months and found nothing for a nightstand that was reasonably priced. Everything we came across was more than $90 and were super small and horribly made! Anyway, on the graduation trip to Utah I went to my grandpa's house to help clean up a bit. (He passed away last October and the family has been finalizing the estate) there were many things up there that were up for grabs since the siblings didn't want any more. Among these belongings was a little dresser that I thought would be absolutely perfect for a nightstand! All I had to do was peel off all the little kid stickers, strip the gross teal paint, and put a fresh coat of paint on it. Or so I thought... This project went on for about 5 months or so.. which  means that it was going on during most of these little projects that I just posted about. That's right.. 5 months. For a little dresser. It was the black hole of projects. Here are the before, during and after pics: 

Lovely colour... right? I say no. 

One of the many attempts to strip the paint.. we went from sanding(the sandpaper just got gummed up with thick paint), to one kind of paint stripper(which didn't work..), to another kind of stripper(which actually worked) before we got just about all the paint off this little guy. 

Gave it a quick spray down of white to give it a base coat to work with.. I still hadn't chosen the final colour after this many months. 

I decided to transform the upper drawer into a shelf with a pull down door, and drill a hole in the back to allow for a cord to make it a charging station. (that is the Hub's new toy from his birthday.. a fun little drill to do all the projects I request.. haha, little did he know ;) )

 

Dun Dun Dun!!!! the final result happened this afternoon and I couldn't be happier with how it turned out. I chose to go with a light grey to give it a nice dignified, neutral colour to go with just about anything we change in the bedroom.. because trust me, it is never getting touched again.. haha.

Well, I think that is about all the changes that I can document for one day.. sorry for the long post, it has been a busy past couple of months trying to juggle all these projects, jobs, a small social life, and applying to PTA schools. Life is always moving forward! I'm proud of my little family and the projects we can turn out with a little ingenuity. I have loved turning this shell of a house into Our Home. Best of luck on all your prokects that you might be going through!