I finally unpacked enough to at least find our cameras. So, I'm finally able to upload some photos I took before we moved in after painting more and after my parents' visit. Without further ado, here they are:
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| My mom worked painstakingly to rid the kitchen of wallpaper - two layers! |
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| More wallpaper removal |
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| Our sweet new fridge - with sexy ramp up lighting! |
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| What a blessing - it's a Frigidaire Professional - we got the last floor model that was on clearance for about 60% of the price that this year's model will list for. |
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| We all (Mom mostly) worked to clear the brick patio of weeds and dirt that had accumulated. It's a totally different space now! |
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| We moved the picnic table over to the patio area instead of having it out in the grass in the back of the yard. |
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| Carlyle's Birthday surprise - a gas grill! We love it! |
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| We cleared out the brush and scrappy shrubs and weeds growing in this front corner of the yard. |
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| We cleared out some bamboo. Our neighbors next door have done more on their side now too. |
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| The patio cleared off |
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| We cleaned up the back right corner of the yard - between 1/4 and 1/3 of the span of the back fence. |
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| ...and started a compost pile for yard trash. |
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| My parents brought us two tomato plants, and Daddy was so sweet to plant them for us. I've since dug in to that ground myself to transplant a shrub, so I know how hard that ground can be! I appreciate it! |
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| The treadmill our awesome apartment manager gave us! :) That wallpaper is gone baby gone now. |
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| We got the entire upstairs carpeted (not the stairs - we're going to rip off the carpet on the stairs and repaint them at some point when we can stand to live on the lower floor for a little while - like after we get a guest bed). |
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| We LOVE the carpet. We got a super great deal on it too. Go see Ali at Carpet Plus in Bowie on Rt. 3! We got 20-year warranty SHAW anso-nylon carpet with high quality backing and the best padding installed all right under $3/sq.ft. We knew we wanted to replace the carpet upstairs ASAP, and we just happened to stop by that place just for fun on Memorial Day weekend and they had a sale going on. They were an absolute pleasure to do business with. And, Rosie & Daisy love their free carpet sample squares that we have scattered on the wood floors downstairs. |
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| I love it! This is the upstairs left bedroom - Carlyle is using it as his office. |
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| The color of the carpet is called "Dunes." The trim I painted a crisp semi-gloss white before they installed the carpet. The wall paint is Behr Chocolate Froth. |
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| The color on the door is the original room color. Not sure if I'm going to change it to white or keep it. It's kind of a neat extra detail. |
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| Looking in to the master bedroom. |
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| I LOVE LOVE LOVE the color I picked out for the bedroom. Ask my parents - I spent probably 20 minutes staring at colors in Home Depot trying to find the ideal shade of blue. I didn't want baby blue, but I wanted a light gray blue that wasn't purply. I found it - it's Behr Sparkling Spring. It looks very beachy and relaxing with the crisp white trim and it coordinates with the carpet perfectly. |
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| I can't wait to hang some black and white photos here between the windows in black frames. I have since bought curtains from IKEA - hoping to hang those this weekend. |
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| The blue looks very different depending on how the light hits it, but I love every bit of it. This is the little nook in the bedroom that we'll make a sitting area. We're planning to get a chaise and a little chair and table and lamp for this space. |
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| I think I was trying to get the contrast with the white here. |
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| We solved a mystery while my parents were here. We were attempting to patch a bad section of drywall in the master bedroom and uncovered a the inside of a weird built in shelf / box that we could see from inside the closet. It had an electrical outlet in it, too - so we think maybe it was a shelf someone made for a TV. I decided I wanted to keep it, but instead open it to the bathroom and make a little shelf / cubby for my hair dryer, straightener, curling iron. This is the view of it from inside the bathroom. Since the bathroom is in the slanted part of the ceiling, the only place to put a mirror is on this wall, so it'll be helpful to have everything close together. We took down the medicine cabinet that was here, and my plan is to make a hinged door to cover this with a picture frame. I bought the frame this weekend. I'll do frames for the mirror and other things as well, maybe framed cork to hang my jewelry on. |
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| Daddy the electrician also moved the outlet to the bathroom, installed a GFCI. He did such a great job! Now I have an outlet next to my electrical tool cubby. |
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| ahhhhh new carpet... now we need to do the downstairs to get rid of the stale this-house-has-been-empty-for-a-year smell |
I'll take photos this weekend of what everything looks like now that we've moved in.
