Tag: home depot

Home Improvement

Family Room Bathroom Renovation Reveal

Jessica Smith

Our bathroom is finally finished! I say “finally” like it took ages, but it really only took us about a week to do — not too bad!

I decided to tear down our bathroom about a month ago when I just couldn’t take it anymore. The rest of our house looks pretty nice, but the bathroom was just yucky. Not to mention it was especially gross compared to our beautiful new family room. So I tore down the ugly brass fixtures and the old mirror.

Then my step dad came over to help us remove the vanity and the toilet since we had no experience with plumbing at all.

Afterwards, the hubby and I went shopping for a new vanity, toilet and light fixture. After shopping around, we found what we wanted for a decent price and scooped them up. Then I got to painting.

I stayed up until 1 a.m. painting our bathroom a light purple, Behr’s Silent Ripple to be exact.

Then the boys got to installing our new stuff! So exciting.

Doesn’t he look so hot with his headlamp on?

It felt so great to have our new stuff installed, but the bathroom still wasn’t complete. I needed a vanity mirror, but the hubby didn’t want to buy one. We also needed a new towel bar and shower curtain. I got those at Wal-Mart.

For the mirror, I had two options: First, I could redo a mirror my best friend gave me for Christmas. It was big and bulky and kinda ugly, but it could work. Or, I could use the builder-grade mirror that we took out of our master bathroom when we installed our medicine cabinet.

I figured to give the bulky mirror a try before resorting to an ugly, frameless mirror. So I taped it and took it out back to spray paint it with primer. I broke the top part off so it would actually fit in between the vanity and the light fixture. Then I taped off the mirror and sprayed with Krylon Primer. I barely beat the thunder storm before pulling the mirror inside to paint it white.

Three coats of white paint later…

I loved it! Bye-bye, builder-grade mirror!

All of the pieces were ready to go, so I installed the towel bars, hung up my new shower curtain, popped some curtains into the window, hung some artwork and placed our new mirror. I’m in love.

And for the final reveal… **drum roll, please**

Now if that’s not a cute bathroom, I don’t know what is! I love the dark espresso of the vanity against the light purple walls. I love that the curve of the white mirror meets up perfectly with the faucet. I love the bright white accents and the subtle bird theme in the bathroom. Love. I love love love it. It is SO much better than before!

Home Improvement, Life

Weekend recap

Jessica Smith

This weekend has been pretty awesome. It started on Friday when my stepdad came over to remove the toilet and vanity from our family room bathroom. Then the hubby and I got to pick out a new toilet, vanity and light fixture — oh, and paint! We went with Behr’s Silent Ripple.

It is a light purple, but in certain lights looks a little blue. When we got home from buying our paint, I immediately got to work on the bathroom — even though it was 10 p.m. Three hours later, I was almost finished. I just had to cut in around the edges. Fun fact: I didn’t use any tape in the bathroom and it doesn’t look terrible! Yay!

Saturday morning started with loud thunderstorms and a swim meet. After the thunder calmed down, I rushed out of the house to see Elliott swim two races at his swim meet.

I got there just in time to catch his first race — it was a relay and he did the butterfly. Man is he fast! He also did a medley race, but was pretty tired from the earlier race because not much time was in between.

My dad, who has always been very involved in our sports, is an official for Elliott’s meets sometimes. Check him out — so serious!

When I was younger, he coached my soccer teams and he refereed soccer games. Now it’s swimming. He’s awesome.

Once we watched his first two races, the hubby and I headed off to Lowe’s. We had found a toilet at Home Depot the night before, but wanted to see what Lowe’s had as far as vanities went before making our purchase. We left empty-handed, planning ordering a light fixture and vanity online when we got home. But when we perused the interwebs, we decided that the cabinet to go with was the cabinet we almost bought at Lowe’s to begin with. So we got back in the car and headed to Lowe’s again.

Amidst all of the Lowe’s trips, I got to go out to lunch with my momma and BOTH of my sisters — that never happens! Allie is in town from Colorado just for the weekend 🙂 What a nice treat.

We ended out Saturday having dinner with Brian’s momma, then attending a block party in my dad’s neighborhood. I used to go to block parties each summer in our neighborhood, but they died down for a while. The neighborhood is trying to bring them back, which is a fantastic idea because they are so much fun!

Today, the hubby and I are cleaning up the house, grocery shopping and just taking it easy. Allie is going to come see our house for the first time! And John is going to come back over tonight the help us install our new bathroom purchases! Hooray.

On top of this fabulous weekend, Hobby Lobby gave me a sweet shout out on their Facebook page that pretty much made my entire life!

 

I hope you all had a great weekend — Bathroom reveal sometime this week 🙂

Home Improvement

OMG OMG OMG Craft room!

Jessica Smith

Best blog post title ever, huh? It perfectly relays my excitement for my craft room. This weekend the hubster, my dad and I fixed up my craft room so it is epic-ly awesome.

I bought two cabinets for my  room when I went garage sale hopping last month. I paid a whole $5 for each cabinet. Brand new they would have cost $130 a piece! Sweet savings. The best part about them is that the woman who sold them to me used them in her craft room. She was so excited that I would be using the for the same purpose.

I also picked up a third cabinet from Lowe’s. Unfortunately, it was too tall so I had to return it. So the hubby and I visited a local hardware thrift store that sells home improvement items from people’s home renovations. They had lots of cabinets, window and doors that otherwise might have been thrown away. We were able to find a white cabinet that was the same height as my yard sale goodies for $35!

Before we picked up the third cabinet I planned on painting the other two white. I thought the white would pop against the teal walls. So I primed my yard sale cabinets, leaving “X” marks on the sides that I didn’t want people to see. Since my third cabinet was already white, I didn’t have to paint it!

Once the cabinets were primed, I painted then with two coats of semi-gloss white paint.

While I waited for the cabinets to dry, I hopped in my car and drove back to Lowe’s (this past week I was at either Home Depot or Lowe’s four different times!). I originally bought knobs for my cabinet drawers, but since the other cabinet had handles I swapped out the knobs for 11 matching handles.

I easily switched the cabinet hardware on the one with pre-existing handles. Then the hubster and I installed the handles on the two cabinets without any hardware. We were using my small electric drill until we got fed up with its lack of power. I asked my dad to borrow his bigger, better drill. He said, “Of course,” then surprised us with our very own corded, super powerful drill. He’s awesome.

With the new drill, Brian finished installing the hardware on the cabinets and all systems were go for putting the laminate on top. If you need a slab of pre-cut laminate, Lowe’s is the place to go. Home Depot no longer carries the pre-cut pieces, so you have to pay big bucks ($14 a square foot and higher) for their laminate. I was able to buy a 8 foot long piece of laminate at Lowe’s for $108 — and I had a 10% off coupon. Not too bad!

After we had the laminate on top of the cabinets we maneuvered things around so two cabinets were on one side, and the bigger cabinet was on the other. This left a perfect amount of space for a chair in the middle! It’s also the perfect place for Remmy to cuddle up and take a nap while I do crafts. We decided not to glue, screw, install, etc. the laminate quite yet, just in case I want to rearrange the cabinets. We’ll probably do that in a couple of weeks after I take the room for a test drive.

My dad had a great idea to buy a power strip and mount it to the side of one cabinet so I have a lot of outlets I can use. It was also great because it saved us from drilling out a hole for electrical cords in the laminate and it’s hidden from sight.

Aren’t they so cute working together!?! Love it. And how about those banana boxers! Get a belt, hubbs.

Check out my beautiful workspace! All in all, it only cost about $150.

I’m so impressed with how well the cabinets match. The white looks fantastic and the hardware is great.

We also installed shelves for even more storage. The hubby and I bought super long shelves for our office right after we moved into our house. We had them cut down so they’d fit perfectly in our nook, and we saved the remnants just in case we needed them later on. These pieces were a great length for my craft room, so I grabbed some shelving mounts this weekend and I had me some fancy new shelves. (Don’t mind all of the crap below the shelves… I’m working on it haha).

With all of my new storage, I’ll finally be able to clean up my craft room so it is a working space! *HUGE sigh of relief*

What do you think? Want to come craft with me in my sweet new space!?!?!