One year later: The playroom

Cash's playroom in the second bedroom in our house, you can access it through the hallway or through the master bedroom. The previous owner used it as a office. It makes for a great playroom, as Cash grows it will change with him to suit his needs. I imagine at some point in will become a den where he can watch movies or play games with friends.

Before

This is looking in from the doorway in the master bedroom. The door you see is the closet.

After

Before

This is standing in the corner near the windows. The doorway you see goes out into the hallway. You can see into the living room also. To the right of the doorway is the closet pictured in the previous before picture.

After

Before

This is taken from the doorway into the hallway. Windows on the left and the doorway into the master bedroom is on the right (you can see a sliver of the door casing).

After

What we've done

• Not much aside from decorating!
• Replaced the light fixture. The fixture was in the dining room when we moved in, I recovered it and installed it in the playroom.
• Repainted the outside of the door to the hallway

What we'd like to do

• Install shelving in the closet. Right now there is just a hanging rod which serves no purpose in a playroom. Shelving would make a ton more storage space.
• Remove the popcorn ceiling. Its the only room in our house with a popcorn ceiling and I'm not a fan!
• Replace the blinds with cellular shades.
• Repaint all trim and doors

One year later: The front of our bungalow

We are nearing the one year anniversary of moving into our house! We closed on our house June 3, 2011 and then rented back to seller for a month. We moved in on July 3, 2011. I wanted to make a big post of before and after pictures and list the things we've done so far and what we'd still like to do. I figured it'd be much to big for one post so I'm going to break it up into a few over the next month.

Before

Our house the day we looked at it for the first time, I don't have one from the day we moved in but it looked basically the same minus the flag, boat, porch furniture, and wreath.

After

Here's our house today, a little over a year after closing and almost one year after moving in. Not a HUGE change, but we've done a lot of little things.

What we've done

• Added stairs the the side of the porch
• Painted the porch and stairs
• Replaced the ceiling fan/light and carport light
• Added a porch swing

What we'd like to do

• Rip up the driveway and replace with pavers. Right now we have a paver walk way and the driveway under the carport is pavers, so we'd like to continue the pavers through out the entire driveway.
• Install gutters along the side of the carport to help with the flooding in the carport during a heavy rain. We'd hook the gutter up to our rain barrel to make it more efficient in collecting rain water.

Front porch progress!

The stairs on the front of our porch were beginning to look a little rough, and the side stairs that my Dad built for us needing a coat of paint. So we decided it was time to take on the project of painting the front porch! We got a TON of paint color samples from Lowe's and Home Depot and lined them along the side of our house and slowly narrowed it down to two different shades of grey.

Here are the new stairs, I wish I would have saved the before picture on my phone, but I'm at the library and I left my camera at home! The stairs that were there before we only in the very middle, so if you stepped off the side of the porch you'd fall right off. They just floated in the middle and looked a little out of place. The new ones are awesome, we love them so much.

Here's after we had painted the porch, you can see the old color on the stairs. The color is very similar to what was already there, which was a complete coincidence! We decided we wanted to do some sort of pattern on the porch, something that wouldn't be super noticeable until you walked up to the house. We went with a sunburst pattern. The night before I was going to paint I taped off the pattern so I could get right to painting the following morning.

The finished product, before the furniture was back on the porch!

      

The side stairs are my favorite part :) The stained glasses window hanging above the swing we got during Shrimp Boat in Fernandina this year.

 My parents bought us the porch swing for Christmas, and my Dad hung it up a few weeks ago. We spend so much more time on the porch now! Cash loves swinging on the swing and playing with his cars on the new stairs.

Chevron love!

We painted the fireplace a few weeks ago. I definitely realize some people might think its a little out there, but we love it so much more then before! Plus its paint, so when/if we get sick of it it'll be easy to change.

It was HARD to do! I made a stencil, traced it on, and then painted each stripe. It took forever! And its not even finished yet, I'm still working on the sides.

 We have some very excited things happening at our house in the next two weeks! I am SO excited about it! We are having colonnade bookcases built in between the dining room and living room. At some point there was a wall of some sort separating the two rooms and someone removed it. We want to try and  keep things as original as possible structurally so we wanted to put it back. Rather then just doing a wall, we decided to go for the more traditional look of the bookcases and columns. I will for sure post a ton of pictures when its finished! Its being built this week and hopefully installed next week!

New couch!

We bought a new couch! We found a really good deal and couldn't pass it up.

 It was brown when we bought it, so we went out a bought a light grey slip cover. I love it, it is so so comfortable!

Then we got the back cushions tufted and I love it so much more! We still want to switch out the legs for a more tapered style though.

(The chihuahuas approve!)

We also painted the living room, dining room, and hallway. Its a light grey and we love it so much more! It was a blue grey before, which we liked, but I wanted a more true grey color. I need to take some better pictures, but I sorta forgot we had painted!

Cash's Playroom

Here is Cash's playroom! I made that picture using the Photosynth app on my iPhone. It pieces pictures together to make one big picture, which is why it looks a little funny. Its a fun way to get everything in the picture though. The new rug came today and we really love it! Its a Flor rug, Metadoodle in the color Blingy Bronze.

 I would like to add some floating shelves above the bookcase to put the Ugly Dolls on. I would also like to put floor to ceiling shelving in the closet to add more storage. Right now we have a dresser in there, but we would have way more usable storage if we put in shelves. To the right of the bookcase is a door that goes into our bedroom, and to the left is the windows.

 This is the wall across from the windows, and in between the doors that leave the playroom.

To the right of the dresser is the closet, and to the left is the door to the hallway.
(You can click any picture to make them bigger)

Playroom

I hung up some shelves in the playroom yesterday, and made some curtains that Im going to hang today. We also ordered a new rug from Flor that should be here tomorrow, and then I'm going to finally post pictures of the whole room! There are still a few things I would like to do, but for the most part it is finished!