The hideous, bright-orange brick on the exterior of my house has always vexed me: what to do about it? I mentioned this to my friend Erin, and she said oh, why don't you try a German Smear?
...See, to me "German Smear" sounds like a porn that I don't want to see. (Or maybe that I really, really do, depending on my mood and whether I've eaten recently.) Or maybe an extremely delicious sandwich. But probably not something I want to have happen to my house.
This is technically a photo of a woman painting, not of a woman doing drywall.
But strangely enough, when you google "woman doing home repair," what you get is mostly...porn.
So here is a photo of a woman painting. (I like her sneakers.)
Remember my little run-in with a full jar of gold leaf a few weeks ago? (Not one of my finest moments.)
But honestly? I wasn't all that upset about the fact that I'd just completely destroyed my floor with a permanent paint-splatter. Because I'd already decided that I was going to (finally) do something about the terrible, dark-grouted, 1970s-style tile in our master bathroom. And the solution that I'd come up with would mean that I'd be able to fix up the floor (which was tinted a lovely shade evoking a 1981 urinal) as well...at no additional cost.
Stay with me.
{ Living Room | Before }
Remember how I said I was super into my living room's kind of Aspen-y vibe, what with the dark wood and exposed beams and such?
I changed my mind.
{ Hover over photos to view captions }
I think we're done.
Check out that lush, vibrant landscape.
Oooooh was our front yard ever not good. My favorite part was the enormous potted (and dead) tree tethered to the roof to prevent it from dropping straight to the ground. In second place was the red mulch surrounding the enormous (also dead) bush next to my garage.
Enter: a xeriscaper I found on Thumbtack. What is xeriscaping, you ask? Excellent question; I didn't know, either. Basically, it means taking out plants that need bunches of water and replacing them with ones that are drought-resistant, thereby lowering or eliminating entirely the amount of supplemental watering that your yard requires. It's also (in my opinion) very pretty.
I have spent years - yearrrrs - whining about my closets. From New York City apartments to Colonial homes (which notoriously have zero closet space for some historical-but-unknown-to-me reason), I've just never even come close to having enough space for my stuff.
Finally, we have closets. But when we moved in we quickly realized that even though the space was technically there, the closets weren't organized in a way that let us take advantage of it.
So? Makeover.
I know, I already put up a video on this a couple of days ago, but I wanted to show you some photos, too...because I LOVE this room.
I honestly can't believe that it's the same space that I saw when we first moved in. I also can't believe how much we have going on in there, considering the entire space is about 8'x10' - and now it's a playroom, an office space, a music room and a guest bedroom (thanks to the addition of a pair of blackout curtains that I hung on the inside of the french doors, so that they aren't visible from the living room but can be used to darken the room in a pinch).
Alright, so here are a couple of "before" images:
Now THIS is the one I've been waiting to show you. When we first started looking for a new home, I knew that I wanted some kind of office space/playroom adjacent to the living area, so that the whole family can still hang out together when we're all doing different things. And the house we ended up in did have a (very) small bonus room, but it didn't open onto the living room, and felt stuffy and oddly proportioned, so it basically ended up becoming a receptacle room for all the stuff we didn't know what else to do with.
A trash dump, in other words.
Not ideal.
OK, so THIS was an exciting one.
See, the master bedroom in our new place was kind of weird. I mean, I loved most of it when I first saw it - the windows, the breeze, the proximity to the pool, et cetera - but what I did not love about it was the fact that the bathroom was kind of...in it.
You'll see what I mean in that video up there. Our sink was basically next to my head. It gave me the icks.
