The Pink Sink Project

I think of all the rooms we have renovated so far, I am most excited about this one.  Not because it came out better than any of the other rooms, but because I'm excited to have the kids start to enjoy it.  This is also the first room for which we had someone else do the work.  In this case it was carpeting.  After much discussion, we decided to go with carpeting for the playroom.  I was worried about stains and spills, but at the end of the day we wanted to create a warm, inviting space for the kids where they can get down on the floor and really play.  While we love the laminate wood floor in the office and Man Cave, it just didn't seem a good choice for the playroom.  I'm so glad we went with carpet - today was freezing cold, and now that the carpets are in place the room feels physically warmer.  I won't worry about the kids' comfort when they're down here playing.  To recap, here's what we started with: It wasn't the worst room ever, but we

It's been quite some time since I last posted, but we've actually had a flurry of activity over the past month.  I'll play catch-up later, but right now I'm excited to share our latest nearly-completed project.  It was almost two months ago when I introduced the playroom as our next project.   It was supposed to be an "easy" job.  Famous last words... Actually, it wasn't particularly difficult, but it took us forever to get it together.  The only reason it's now mostly done now is because we gave ourselves an external deadline.  Carpet is being installed TOMORROW (!!).  After the painting languished for weeks, we finally called to have the carpet installed, thereby giving ourselves a deadline.  It was either that or stress about getting paint on the brand new carpet. So, for the past two weeks we have been pushing ourselves to get this done.  This was made even more difficult with M out of town for four days last week. One of the

Do you know what this is?  That's right.  It's the first batch of pumpkin muffins made in our new oven.  They were extra delicious because of all we had to go through to get them.  When we were waiting for our oven to be installed, I was craving  these bad boys every day.  They were so worth the wait. Those lumps in the muffins are chocolate chips.  I don't mess around with my muffins.  Pumpkin spice + chocolate = the best fall flavor combination ever. 

Today is Little Lady's 6th Birthday.  We let her open her gifts before she headed off to school today, and our sun room is still littered with gift bags and tissue paper. That's not why it feels like Christmas today, though. A full month after we purchased our new oven, it was finally installed this morning!  Isn't she beautiful?!  M and I keep squealing when we walk by it, like two kids on Christmas morning.  A big "thank you" to M's Uncle R for coming up to install the junction box for us. Of course, it's now 80 degrees outside and I have no interest in turning on the oven!  I also don't have the for my pumpkin muffins.  Go figure, right? The other exciting news is that our new sofa arrived today!  This past weekend M and I went shopping for furniture for the newly renovated Man Cave and instead came upon this beauty for our living room.  Not at all what we went shopping for, but we fell in love! I wasn't looking for anythin

With only the finishing touches left on the Man Cave (woo-hoo!), we're already thinking about what our next project will be.  The list of projects to choose from is never-ending, but we've decided to focus on the kids' playroom next.  We've still got nice weather for at least another month, but I want the playroom ready for the winter, to have somewhere to keep the kids entertained (more accurately, to keep them from driving their parents crazy!). Is it any surprise that the single largest room in the house belongs to the kids?!  When the house was on the market, this room, which is on the lower level, was advertised as the "second master bedroom."  M and I both had the same first thought when touring the house for the first time:  When Little Lady is a teenager, it would be great to have her move her bedroom down here.  She would have her own space, and there is a full bathroom downstairs that could be all hers, too.  I had the luxury of having an entire at

You know how they same that some things are worth the wait?  Well, the Man Cave is definitely one of those things!  I had wanted to have the room done by September, and here it is the 28th of September, and we finally have the flooring completed. More accurately, I should say that my husband, M, completed the flooring.  Except for a few rows that I did earlier this week, M used every spare minute he had this week to get it done!  Each night, after the kids were in bed, he would head down to the garage to cut some boards and lay down a few rows.  I have to be honest and say that I thought we might have a tough time with this floor, being the first one that we did ourselves.  The first few rows were tough, especially making sure that everything was lined-up and level.  M really pulled it together for us, though.  Here are some pics of the first few steps (the red stuff on floor is the vapor/moisture/sound barrier that we laid underneath the laminate). Hard at work!

So, first, the bad news.  Our oven died.  Actually, that's not even the bad news.  The oven decided to conk out on us quite a while ago, longer than I care to admit.  It was summer, we had a new grill, and we try not to turn on the oven a lot when it's that hot out, anyways.   We were honestly just lazy about finding a new one, but we finally settled on a new model a couple of weeks ago.  We're upgrading from the 1980's era black model that came with the house, here: I was looking forward to the install finally happening today, just as the weather is starting to turn colder around these parts.  I have been craving some homemade pumpkin muffins, and had planned to take the new oven for a new spin this afternoon. The bad news comes during the install, when the dude discovers that the previous owners had hard-wired the oven into the wall!  There is a single hole in the Sheetrock, where this giant, original, 1965 wire comes out of the wall.  It had been stri

Football is a pretty big deal at our house.  Little Lady knows that Sunday afternoons are dedicated to watching the game.  After the end of last season she was confused as to why the TV wasn't on for the game - she had gotten so used to watching football on Sundays! Alas, the Man Cave isn't quite ready for today's season opener.  All we need is the flooring.  Oh, and a couch.  Oh, yeah, a new TV would help, too.  M has been scouting out a new TV and we both have a pretty good idea of what we want for furniture, but we don't want to pull the trigger on either until we get the flooring done. We finally finished up the painting, which took a lot longer than it really should have.  We had aimed to have the entire room done by the end of August, but life has kind of gotten in the way.   I wanted to wait and show pictures of the room when it was completely done, flooring and all, but that might be a while... To recap, here's what we started with: And he

As I write this I'm waiting for another coat of paint to dry in the Man Cave.  Despite no posts in the past week, we have actually been making progress on the room.  The walls have actual paint on them now!  I'm hoping that by this weekend all of the painting will be done and all that will be left is the flooring. I have to admit that I went through a week without any motivation to work on the room because I didn't think it was coming out how I wanted it to.  It's been so much prep time that I was getting frustrated that it wasn't coming out as I envisioned it would.  Specifically, I wasn't happy that after hours of prep works, I could still see paneling peeking out from behind the walls. When I last posted about the Man Cave I feared that I would never be able to cover up the paneling.  Here's a picture from the last time I posted: Despite spending hours filling in the crevices with joint compound, the walls still didn't look flat.  Particular