If you’re just getting caught up, here’s Part I and Part II.
In Part II, I mentioned our old house acoustic ceiling tiles and how in our living room, their uneven tracks were especially unappealing.
The fall before this past one, we had mice that took 6 or 7 tries from a surly extermination company before we were rid of them. At night, we could hear them under those ceiling tiles as we sat on the sofa below. If you’ve seen the 1997 movie Mouse Hunt or have had mice, you may understand the depth of desperation that might have caused me to rip down some of the tiles, looking for the mouse highway. We eventually got rid of the mice, no thanks to my rummaging in the ceiling.
I did find the mouse highway. I also came across sagging plaster with gaping holes and lots of dust. We left it. There was no mental energy for it over the winter and spring.
Then, one of the kids broke a pane of glass in our front door, which is in the living room. When we had the handyman to come replace it, I asked him about the cost of dry walling the ceiling, if we took care of demo. He gave me a price that was about 75% of the cost the last person I’d asked had quoted me. It was a number we could live with. We made the arrangements.
If you missed it, here’s Part I.
Around the same time that I made the coffee table, I started tackling the fireplace. It was dark and ugly. The brick and tile were dingy. There are differences of opinion about whether or not brick should be painted. I am not in one camp or another. But I knew the brick in my living room needed a facelift, and washing it didn’t help. So I matched our home’s cream-colored trim in masonry paint and had at it.
When our house got featured on Design Mom, I was excited. It was before I had my own blog, so it was a chance to flex my new photography muscles, and get in some writing.
When I found out which photos she’d selected for the post, I discovered she’d chosen not to feature our living room. Besides the kitchen, the living room is the core of a home. We spend a lot of time in ours. We do most of our schoolwork there, and it’s where I typically hang out during quiet time. Not featuring it seemed like it was leaving out an essential part of our home.
But when I looked at the photos I’d submitted, I realized why she’d skipped it.
This is Two in the upstairs bathroom, early in its journey. And the seat is up! But, embracing imperfection, I’m keeping this feature photo. The internet needs a little Real Life Living once in a while.
One of the first rooms I wanted to tackle when we moved into our house was the upstairs bathroom. It’s tucked in at the end of a hallway away at the opposite end of the upstairs bedrooms, and we primarily use it only at night. It wasn’t super important that it be functional at the beginning because there were only four of us.
Here’s what it looked like when we did our first walk-through:
If you missed them, here are Parts I and II of the saga. To recap, we moved into our house in 2008, and were inspired from the get-go by our tiny but lovely kitchen from our first apartment as a married couple when we lived briefly on Long Island.
Little by little, I pulled the kitchen apart and put it back together again, with help from my family. And I painted. Again. And again. And again.
At this point, the kitchen wasn’t getting a lot better without tearing everything out and starting over, but I kept pushing. I trimmed my open shelving out with 1x pieces of wood I had lying around to prevent dishes from being pulled out accidentally, and to make the edges look beefier. I made matching curtains for all the windows using fabric from Joel Dewberry’s Heirloom line called Opal in Dandelion. It’s no longer in stock, but I mention it because the fabric matches the kitchen perfectly, and I like all the words: Heirloom, Opal, Dandelion. 
Our house got featured on Design Mom in March of 2014, which was fun, and helped me up my photography game. But I have trouble leaving well enough alone.
