Wednesday, April 24, 2019

One Room Challenge Week 4 | Spring 2019

Week 4 and yet another week where not too much looks visibly different! We are painting the fence up black and will have some photos of that shortly. In the meantime I finally caught a sale on this Mayne Window box and purchased it this past weekend. I'm so excited to see it installed against the crusty looking brick like the inspiration photo above!

This is the spot where it will be installed, we purchased a 5ft long box that will span the width of this window. My only wish is that I had more windows!!


:And finally, just to keep it real, here was a nice little surprise we found today after meticulously manicuring the boxwoods & their soil bed:


It seems we had a little critter visitor! Ugh. A good reminder that we can only control so much, and we usually can't control nature! :)

Fingers crossed for more pretty to show you next week ... stay tuned & be sure to visit all the other amazing makeovers by the guest participants here.




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Wednesday, April 17, 2019

One Room Challenge Week 3 | Spring 2019



This week was super slow with progress. Sadly our masonry worker is behind schedule and virtually nothing has been fixed regarding the sagging bricks. But we managed to finish one small but important detail, let me start off by showing you a problem we never realized we had until a year after the purchase of our house:


Sorry for the fuzzy photo but you can clearly see what's happening with the arrows. Our exterior lights are literally not in line with the roof line of the house and the brick arch of the garage!! Can you imagine? The electricians who did the original job seem to have measured from the ground up, going with the sloped gradation of the land and leaving the lights crooked!!! Geesh. So we took a couple of bricks out to balance things before the install of our new lights will happen in the coming weeks:



It took removing 2 bricks, chiselling out one and replacing the one below. We got a new pancake box for the new fixture (thank you to my dad in law for putting that in!), and now we are all ready to go.

These are the new beauties, can't wait to see them flanking the garage:


Some inspiration from the Lake Forest Show House:


And we have the light by our front door already installed (thank you our electrician Chapmann Cheung!), as it's installed onto the shingles and we didn't have to wait for the brick repair to happen. SO at least it's giving us a little taste of pretty to tide us over until the brick work is done:


In case you are curious, we purchased these Acclaim lights via Lowes. I love the Asian lantern shape and the brass finish again the shingles and the bricks. Can't wait to show you more! Have fun perusing some of the other ORC guest participant spaces here.



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Wednesday, April 10, 2019

One Room Challenge Week 2 | Spring 2019



Here we are in week 2! Lots of stuff on the go, but for this week I'm still going to catch you up on some of the work that was already done prior to the 6 week challenge. I think you'll quickly see there would have been no way for us to get ALL of this done in 6 weeks! But please watch my instastories this week for some-real time action on the brick work!

Let's look back at the garage before, we selected a black (Benjamin Moore Black Magic) for the paint:


Much better! And then we started to test out white for the trim which was originally blue as seen here:

I hinted last week on the fact that we removed all the yucky stucco, and we actually also removed the arched windows for a bit of an updated look:



You can see the windows and how they now look in the Master bedroom (more on that front soon, stay tuned!):


Once the windows were replaced, we got to the fun part of replacing the stucco with cedar shakes, nothing beats the smell of fresh cedar saw-dust on the job site :)


Getting better ....


Good bye blue trim! Hubby took it upon himself to paint the trim Benjamin Moore Oxford white, everything looked 10x better!


Now it was on to removing that mess of a landscape job, we replaced the ruble with fresh soil and boxwoods to create a hedge. We chose Green Mountain boxwood species and I am SO glad we did. In our Pacific Northwest climate these boxwoods grow FAST. This was planted in spring 2017:


 So remember what this front window looked like:


And now:

Look at how those boxwoods grew in only 2 seasons!!!! Hubby removed every plant in front:


Here you can see me standing amongst the original landscape with our little dog Yoki, everything was just a tad bit overgrown and it took up space in the walkway, especially with that funny little cutout in the concrete:


And now, much wider!!



What do you think so far? Thank you for following along, and hop to the ORC webpage for so many more makeover journeys!



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Wednesday, April 3, 2019

One Room Challenge Week 1 | Spring 2019



I'm nearly laughing at myself for being brave enough to put this project on to the internet as a Guest Participant for this round of the One Room Challenge. I'm still in new-baby exhaustion with a 6 month old whose proven to be a bit of a terrible sleeper, however we really do have this project underway already and our contractor is promising to have this done for us to enjoy for the summer. What "room" am I speaking of, you ask? Well, not a room per se. Apparently I like a challenge, we are finally completing the renovation of the front exterior of our home.


In all honestly several projects have begun and some have been completed on the outside of this wee house. But I promise if you follow along with me in real-time for the next 5 weeks, you'll see it all come together for the completed look. And maybe putting it onto the internet is the pressure we need to make sure it really happens!

The 'BEFORE' photos I'm posting here date back to Spring 2015 when we first purchased this home. We changed the front door right away, and the landscaping in Spring 2017. I'll have all the progress and the inspiration photos for you next week so be sure to come back for more!


You know what's funny? We never noticed upon purchase that the exterior lights flanking the garage are actually not aligned height wise! Apparently they line-up with the slope of the land ... does that seem weird to you? We had an electrician remove the lights just last week (yes it took us that long):

(Luckily our fantastic electrician makes night calls - thank you Chapmann Cheung!)

They were old and horribly falling apart. The home was built in 1989 and everything left original! We also had the old California-style stucco removed, next week I'll share what we replaced it with. Any guesses?


Now, one of the MAJOR portions we are completing in this 5 weeks which has NOT begun (eek), we are going to repair and repoint our bricks, it turned out that we had a significant and dangerous sagging spot above the garage. Now that we have kiddos we worry about the risk of these awful things tumbling down (sneak peek, the garage door has been painted!):


So, we are going to experiment a bit for fun here. We toyed with painting the old bricks but we aren't sure it's the look we want to go for. We are going to try a heavy mortar repair that will give the exterior a bit of an old crusty 'Charleston-charming' look. Here is one inspiration shot (taken by Marianne Simon):


We are going to install bronzed exterior lights, paint the fence black, add a black planter box for extra old-world charm, and complete the paint and landscaping. Fingers crossed we can do it on this time-line, with two little boys in tow! Hope you'll be back for more next Thursday. Make sure to head to the One Room Challenge official page for the links to all the other Guest Participants and the 20 featured designers.



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