Laundry room...

While looking at my kitchen this week I realized we don't have a lot of storage space and the grocery bags and Tupperware were very quickly taking over all of the cupboards. So after a quick trip to Home Depot and Walmart, I decided that today was the day we were going to re-do our laundry room for extra storage and a place to store kitchen appliances that really didn't need to be in the kitchen 24/7, such as the crock pot,  juicer, and espresso machine. While at Walmart I picked up hooks to hang my cleaning supplies and Home Depot we picked up the shelves. 

Please note my beautiful drawing of what I wanted the room to look like when we were done:

My mother always told me to be an artist, but I suppose I will write until my art career takes off (sarcasm noted).

I picked a burn your eyes blue because I hate doing laundry with the deepest passion of my heart and I figured if it was bright and cheery, I might want to go in there more often. 

As always here are some very important things to keep in mind:

1.) A laundry room has a lot of pipes and wires and other such surprises running behind the drywall so understand that you may not be able hang shelves where you had planned so just go with the flow and do the best you can.

2.) Learning from the flooring disaster we just went ahead and pulled everything out of the laundry room (expect the washer that requires four men to move it) to paint and hang shelves to make the job much easier.

3.) Do not buy the first "L" bracket you find. We traveled into the deepest darkest pits of Home Depot and found much more efficient brackets and saved ourselves five dollars a bracket. Overall, that is $45 we saved.

4.) Don't use a stud finder. Because of the pipes and wires running behind the drywall the stud finder will go insane and you could send a screw through a water line. Not good. I have attached a video if you have never found a stud without a stud finder. It is always a great skill to have, especially for DIY projects.

 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XALXlx5cc1s

Yay! Now the almost finished product! It needs some more organizing and more efficiency, but the end is near...

The Juniper Bushes...

Right outside the kitchen window we had wonderful juniper bushes that I could have easily let take over our front yard if they weren't the ugliest plant ever known to man. They are wonderful for spider nests, catching random bits of trash floating in the wind and gosh they are god's gift horrific yard covering.They provide a built in security system because they are nature's razor wire. 

This is a juniper bush, or should I say, OUR multiple juniper bushes that have had time to breed in the twenty years the house has been around. They are ugly and really serve no purpose what so ever except to cover bald patches. 

When I get an idea for a DIY project I think my boyfriend goes into a secluded room, curls up into a ball on our beautiful floors, and cries because he knows that I cannot even complete half of the project alone (as for this project I only made it thirty minutes) and he knows that the weekend will be spent on that project and he will miss the beloved Falcon's game, be sore for a week and by the time he recovers from the previous project, a new idea has surfaced, but I digress.

So looking out of the kitchen window one morning, drinking my morning tea, I decided the junipers needed to come out. I have removed bushes before, it really wasn't that difficult. Strap a chain to the root and then to a truck, drive forward and you are done. Not with these guys. The root system wound through the entire front yard and it took us two whole days of non-stop work. No worries though we had two extra crew members to help...

This has been by far the most difficult project by far in the entire house and will probably remain the hardest throughout the entire time we are in the house. 

Here are some VERY helpful pointers if you have been cursed with juniper bushes. 

1.) Trim from the top down. It is important to know where they have entangled themselves and just start hacking away at the top. 
2.) DO NOT strap a truck to the roots. The root system is so intricate that the chain will slip off the root and the truck will go through the neighbor's house.
3.) You need a man. Now this is not relationship advice it is just the truth. It doesn't matter if he is a brother, a father, a neighbor, a husband, or your friend's husband. The reality is that even pulling with every ounce of my being those bushes did not budge. 
4.)  Understand what you are getting into before hand. The neighbor children will see you cry, you will look like you just lost a bar fight with a porcupine, you will need the help of random people if you are alone, and it takes hours upon hours upon hours of non-stop physically demanding, back breaking labor. I apologized to my boyfriend for weeks just because he looked liked hell and the project was my idea that I couldn't complete. 
5.) You will need a lot of tools. Make sure they are sharp, in good condition and no one is emotionally attached to it like the shovel that has been passed down through eight generations because nothing can break it. It will most likely break.
6.) I don't say this in my posts but you will need it, good luck and happy hacking.

Painting...

The best way to make a house home is with paint. Paint can change the mood of a room within a day and can completely change how visitors view your home. That's why it is important that paints for home are chosen very carefully. Since browns and greens are my go to colors, a lot of our house is painted shades of brown and green except for the living room which was suppose to come out tan and really came out yellow, but I love it anyway.

Now I am not the person to tell someone how to pick paint colors, I believe that is a god given gift, personally I inherited a little from my father but it is far from perfect. On the other hand I can tell you how to make painting much easier with a few tricks of the trade. 

First, I would strongly suggest not using painters tape. Every worker at Home Depot will tell you it makes it easier, these are LIES! Unless you are doing a design such as stripes or chevron lines the tape just gets in the way. If you are "cutting in" it takes some practice but just use an angled paint brush and a steady hand to get all of the edges.

Second, aluminum foil is your best friend for doors knobs. I know personally if I take door knobs off doors I lose screws and pieces and it is just not good. unscrew the knobs a little and using aluminum foil you can cover them completely without getting paint on them. 

One of the biggest mistakes made was that I took the light switch and outlet covers off and didn't want to keep track of screws so I threw them away because hey they are only 80 cents at Walmart. In reality they are about $1.50 a piece and when there are 30 that your threw away, that is 45 dollars you could have saved.

Also, no matter how great your friends are, don't let them paint. I love my friends dearly but when you let them paint you get this:

So after much trial and error and proper supplies and help, painting can be a breeze and can have your house looking more like a home in a few weekends. 

The Floors...

The first thing to check off on the list of our new home were the floors. As I stated in a previous post, there was beautiful Berber carpet. We had to take it out because first I don't enjoy the wonderful classiness of this amazing carpet (I suppose it is just too much for me) and I also don't enjoy that when my furry children get a toe nail stuck in one fiber the entire floor covering unravels, but that's just me.

About two weeks after we moved in, Home Depot was having a wonderful sale on dark bamboo floors for $1.50 a square foot (I LOVE sales!) So we picked up every box they had and headed home excited to rid our lives of our wonderfully horrible carpet.

As we were figuring out how much it would cost to have someone install the floors, I realized we could save a lot of money by putting it in our ourselves. Me and my crazy money saving ways.

Needless to say, after many tears, broken boards, yelling, many weekends, and a few boards that still just don't make the cut, the floors are in. One of our "oops" below, but the molding will cover it once we get them installed.

If you are attempting to put in your own floors let me give a few tips that will really save you a lot of time and heartache.

1.) When you start, have the correct tools. No matter if you are putting in tongue and groove flooring or traditional flooring, spend the money and buy or rent the right tools because in my experience, a hand saw just won't cut it (no pun intended).
2.) Put in one full row of boards all the way across horizontally and work off of that. I thought we could fill in one side, move the furniture, and then install the other side. NOPE! This was our biggest mistake. Just bite the bullet and move all of the furniture into another room.
3.) Just go ahead and take all the molding off the bottom. I have seen some people that can do it without taking off the molding and just installing quarter round after, but in our experience just take them off, make your life much easier.
4.) Last but the most important part, If you are planning to paint, paint before the old stuff comes out. I can be quite a messy painter and I am dreading painting the rest of the walls for fear of dripping on the new floors.

Before and after pictures of the floor to follow :)

And So It Begins...

Buying my first home before the age of 22 and before I was able to graduate with my bachelors degree, I was completely delusional about how the entire process would go down. Not only the actual process of buying the home but also working on the things in and around the home to make it presentable. 

My first piece of advice: When loving, caring, and helpful family members and friends start to give advice, WALK AWAY, or if attempting to be polite, smile and nod. I mean the previous statement in the nicest way possible because personally I love my family very much but when it comes to home buying, as Dorothy would say, "Toto, we are not in the 1980s anymore". Just over thirty short years ago, Sally Sue and Bobby Jo could walk into a bank with money for a down payment and were pretty much approved. When my boyfriend and I began the process, in a few short minutes our eventual first born was signed over, DNA swabs were taken and every single paper in our filing cabinets was copied for further study. A few months later after every pay stub, tax return, utility bill, and living arrangement from the past ten years were checked and we overcame the bump of the twenty dollars that was won off a certain Atlanta Falcon's scratch-off that was not claimed as income; we were ready to start looking for our dream home. 

Throughout eight months of spending every waking moment in empty houses, we finally found a house in a neighborhood that we loved. Our dream house had gray Berber carpet and the overwhelming smell of curry but after another month of double checking paperwork it was all ours, plus the flooring would be "our first little project together" in our new home. 

Since we have bought the house in March, I have learned so many things that people WILL NOT tell you about buying and renovating a house. Everything from painting and flooring to even appliances and gardening, has secrets that your wonderful, helpful family members won't tell you until after the fact. I am here to help now, so there is not a hair-pulling-screaming-emotional-breakdown-fest every time a project starts. Trust me, it will make your entire world spin a little easier.