It was a fairly minor remodel, so I hope you’re not seriously underwhelmed (though if you had said minor to either of us while we were tiling bathrooms or backsplashes or pouring/polishing those concrete countertops, you probably would have been smacked upside your head.)

First things first. Before you scroll any further, you need to go check out the original home tour so you can see all of the before images. There’s a link at the end of that page to bring you back to here.

Here we go! Let’s start things off with the blurriest image of the bunch.

The front of the house was boring and honestly the after is too because we didn’t want to invest too much time or money. Had I cared to go the extra mile, I would have re-shingled the roof and painted the trim a contrasting color. And if I’d cared to go even further, I would have installed a bigger dining window and a window in our master bath. I also would have made the porch more interesting by installing double glass doors and added onto the roof to give it more dimension.

Instead, we painted the front door black and added black shutters. Nothing we could do about the landscaping. The neighborhood subdivision had its own HOA fee in addition to the plantation POA fee that covered landscaping and maintenance. The over hacked pruned bushes are what we got for our money.

Let’s move on to the interior.

Oh my gosh. These images are so blurry, they’re down right embarrassing.

The house previously had a different color of paint in every room: very dark tan (pretty much brown) in the living / dining area, hall, spare room and boys’ room, yellow in the kitchen and dining, and a fairly dark blue in the master bedroom, office, and bath. Overall, the house felt like a cave. I normally love white and bright, but we opted to paint everything a very pale grey to keep it light, but still contrast the moulding and kitchen cabinets.

Doesn’t that fireplace look so much better? We ripped out all of the tile on the surround and the floor, painted the inside black, and re-tiled with a white carrara marble.  We also replaced most of the lighting throughout the house (except for that booby light which I never got around to.)

The kitchen cabinets were previously a cream color. I would have loved to replace all the cabinets. Even though they looked outdated, they were actually in pretty good shape, so we decided to keep them. We gave the uppers a fresh coat of white paint and painted the bottom black. It was between black and navy. That was a current trend at the time, but I think if I were to do it again, I would choose a different color on the bottom, perhaps a warm medium grey or even a fun green color like this or this.

We kept all of the original hardware. We also kept the sink, but replaced the faucet, and replaced the lights and appliances. My favorite part of the kitchen was the new stove and range hood. We installed carrara marble on the black splash and took it all the way up the the ceiling behind the hood. I love the look.

We were originally planning to raise the three cabinets above the window, replaced the doors with glass doors and install an open shelf in the newly created space below, but we backed out last minute after debating time, cost and effort plus what we would get back out of it. It would have looked so great though.

Check out these counters, y’all! Concrete!! SO MUCH WORK! And so much mess!! But man, was it worth it. They were awesome and I’d totally install concrete counters in a future house. Loved them.

I never got around to redoing the upholstery in the nook. A heavyweight linen would have looked nice.

But forget about that, look at the pantry door!!! We made it out of pallet wood and installed it on a sleek and modern track. You can read more about it here.

Also sad I didn’t replace the tile in the entry, but that would have been so much work and we agreed that it wasn’t worth the effort.

We ripped up the old, stinky carpet throughout the house and installed a hand-scraped engineered hardwood. It looked great in the house, but I hated it for a few reasons. First of all, I just hate dark wood. I prefer light and bright for everything, including flooring.

One weird thing that I didn’t realize would be an issue until it was: dark floors mess with your peripheral vision. Sounds dumb, but I couldn’t tell you how many times I stubbed my toes on things in the evenings when it started to get the least bit dark outside. We did a dark charcoal finish on the concrete floors in the basement of our current house and I do the same thing down there too. Brad does as well, but won’t admit it’s the dark floors that contribute to it.

The other super annoying thing about this flooring was how easily it scratched. You could look at it and it would scratch. Sneeze too hard and it would scratch. Run down the hall? Scratch, scratch, scratch. Basically if you’re an older, lightweight retired couple with no grandchildren or pets, that walks softly, always wears socks or slippers and never rearrange your furniture then this is the flooring for you.

Poor Kenzie would scratch the floor simply walking around. We tried all sorts of things and ended up using gel tips on nails which meant she could never go on walks with us after that. I felt so bad.

We don’t have good after shots of the bathrooms, but we installed white penny round tile in the boys’ bathroom and painted the cabinets the same black as the kitchen.

Overall, the remodel wasn’t exactly my style, but really neither was the house. It was still a fun project and I loved living there. So many happy memories were made in that house. We put the house on the market because we planned to sell both this house and the Beaufort house and use the money towards building a home on our lot. The plan was to move back into the Beaufort house which we had kept as a rental, remodel and list it. Then once it sold, move our stuff into storage and stay with my mom while construction on our beach house wrapped up. But shortly after we listed this house we found out we were expecting another baby and decided to stay put for a while. We told our agent we wanted to pull the house off the market, but as it turned out, the people who saw the house the day we found out we were pregnant put in an offer and even though we hadn’t accepted anything yet, our agent told us it was illegal to back out. It wasn’t. He was full of crap and a terrible realtor.

Anyway, we were forced into moving and proceeded with our plan to move into the Beaufort house. Since it had been a rental, it was rather beat up, so we remodeled it again – installing the same hand-scraped flooring and painting the walls the same light grey as the HHI house. Meanwhile, after much prayer and dozens of pro/con lists, we ended up making the tough decision to move out west. We felt it would be best for my businesses for a variety of reasons and it has been. We sold our lot, the Beaufort house and the HHI house and moved to Utah. We miss the island terribly and can’t wait to move back, but we know we’re in the right place for now.

Let’s leave off with our golf course view. I think this might be what Brad misses the most.

I’m guessing that most bloggers that stopped blogging didn’t necessarily do it on purpose. I know some did and made an official announcement. Others went quietly into the night without so much as a goodbye. The rest just got busy and blogging wasn’t a priority.

You can count me in with that last group.

Sorry, I guess?

I know I’ve never been great with consistency when it comes to blogging, but I didn’t intend to take so much time off. I was pretty sure I’d get back into it with my posts last year (after a two year hiatus). We saw how well that went.

Now that I’ve been away so long, I find the biggest challenge to jumping back in is not knowing where to pick up. We’ve had a lot of changes as a family. Do I start with those? They were big! A pregnancy. A loss. A move. A baby. Each deserves its own post. Do I start in order? And what about fun house projects we’ve done? Sprinkle them in?

I figure I lost most followers anyway during my hiatus so now is as good time as any to change things up a bit and include some other random girly things I’m interested in. I’d love to document my attempts at a capsule wardrobe. Or my fitness journey after having a baby. We’ll see. If I can carve out the time, I think it will be fun!

Anyway, the house turned out beautifully and we had a few projects in the remodel that really put the finishing touches on it. My favorite was the new pantry door. The old door was a wide, single bi-fold that was old, squeaky and falling apart. It didn’t close properly and squeaked so loud that you didn’t dare open or shut it after putting the kids to bed.

We have a couple of businesses that we get a lot of pallet deliveries for and we were starting to accumulate quite the stash, so I had the idea of making a sliding pantry door out of it. It was one of those ideas where you aren’t sure if it’s going to turn out great or be a total flop. But we had already trashed the old door, so we didn’t have much to lose. As you can see from the finished photo it. was. awesome! It looked so great! By the way, I’m sorry the photos look kinda crappy. They were taken a couple of years ago on an old iphone. It’s crazy how far camera phones have come in such a short time!

We started out by washing off the pallets. We didn’t want dirty, gross wood hanging on the wall. After they dried out really well, we cut the top pieces of wood off using a sawzall we rented from Home Depot. We had to buy a new blade for it (required if you rent from Home Depot), but it cut like butter. If you’re planning to try a project like this or are looking to do any pallet projects that require taking apart pallets, don’t waste your time trying to pry them apart. Cut them with a sawzall! Speaking from experience, it will save time, energy, and sanity. Be sure to use a blade that cuts both metal (for the nails) and wood.

After we had our pile of wood, we began to assemble to frame. We built the outer frame and brace using 2x2s. Apparently I didn’t take any photos of the completed frame, but it had a single brace across the center for support. Since it was a sliding door, we needed to keep it as lightweight as possible.

We then added our pallet wood to the top. The pallets were made from a few different types of wood (one of which was cedar so it smelled pretty great) and they had all weathered to varying degrees. We were able to have a variety of colors and textures on the door and that gave it a really rustic modern look. Some of the wood was too warped, broken or short to use, so we eliminated those. Then we arranged the wood so that the coolest pieces were at eye level and each style of wood was separated from others like it (hope that makes sense). It gave it a varied look. Once we were done arranging the pallet wood we fastened them to the frame with our nail gun. Easy peasy. We chose to leave the existing nails in. The nail gun nails weren’t visible and the existing nails were bigger and looked old and rusted. It added to the aesthetic we were going for.

The next step was attaching the handle. We used the 43″ version of the Lansa handle from Ikea. It looked sharp (and expensive!) and worked beautifully. The last step was installing and mounting the slide rail. I honestly can’t remember where we bought it from, so if I can find it I’ll add the link. I do remember it wasn’t that expensive. The whole project turned out amazing. It was by far my favorite feature of the house and everyone who came over commented on it. It was often mentioned in the feedback when we went to sell the house. Everyone loved it.

There has been so much that has changed since I last posted. The two biggest being that we added a new baby to our family (!!!) and we made a cross country move (which I still have incredibly mixed feelings about). I’ll be sharing more about these and other updates soon. In the meantime, I’ve redesigned the blog. It’s now more simple and clean – all of which speak to the minimalist in me. I have a different direction in mind for this space. Above all, I want it to be personal. My own thoughts and experiences. My own stories. Hope you’ll join me.

This is our couch:

But not our house. Remember this post?

The sofa is a huge 10′ long so plenty of room for pillows. Still, I don’t want to go overboard. Too many people make this mistake:

(Image via)

Where do you sit? So awkward when you visit people who decorate like this. Do you put the pillows on the floor? Is that rude? Do you perch on the edge? Jump backwards and try to land on top? Hmm…

Anyway, I think I could fit easily fit 5-6 on our couch without it looking crazy. So let’s talk options.

Last year I discovered this pillow from Ikea and became obsessed.

Apparently everyone else was too, because it was sold out for months at almost every Ikea location I checked with. I finally scored it in Atlanta on our way home from Christmas.

I loved it, but it looked terrible sitting there with my gray standard pillows. I thought for a minute that I shouldn’t be pairing black and white with a gray couch, but after I took the gray pillows away it looked awesome. Now all I had to do was figure out what would work with this pillow and still work with my style.

One pillow that would look great with my couch and the LAPPLJUNG pillow is this one from CB2. I’ve had my eye on it since they released it forever ago. I love it. It’s hotness embodied in a pillow. It’s like a little black dress. Only not a dress and not black. But otherwise…

You get it, right? It’s $59, but I have a $25 gift card to ease my tightwad conscience. Anyway, I think it would look pretty sweet with this pillow from Target.

Never mind the crappy picture. Apparently Target did the photo shoot in the dark. The colors are burnt orange and bright white. My hesitation with this pillow is:

1. It’s chevron (albeit a cool variation) and chevron is so OVER DONE.

and

2.  It’s $50. That’s like 3 – 5x what I normally am willing to spend on a pillow. BUT my mom always says it’s worth splurging on something if you know your going to love it. I’m just not 100% sure it’s a sing it from the rooftops kind of love.

I was in Target the other day on a mommy/son date with Ezra and after perusing the toy section for an hour, I told him it was time to look at my toys. We headed over to the decor section and eventually made our way over to the pillows. You have to check everything when you’re at Target, because you never know if something cool is on sale. Turns out they were having a [measly] 10% off sale on pillows. But I gladly took whatever I could get $1.69 off this pillow:

Cute, right? Ezra gave it two thumbs up and put it  in my cart right away (and like 5 others which I had to sneak back on the rack). It’s happily lounging on the womb chair as we speak.

Now if I have the Ikea pillow, the gray checkered pillow and the [potential] CB2 pillow as a starting point, all I need to do is bring in color. The chevron pillow is one option, but like I said, I’m just not sure it’s for me. After digging around a little I found several pillows that I’m totally crushing on. Behold:

I’m not getting all of these. They’re just options. Numbers 4, 5 and 6 I have/will have. Number 7 is a definite and I think #1 is as well, but really, I like them all. Numbers 9 and 12 are normally $170, but are on a crazy clearance sale right now for $35. The problem is it’s just a cover so I have to pay extra for an insert. Also, shipping is like $8 for small piece of fabric. Same story with #8. It’s a Dwell Studio cover so I would have to pay extra for the insert. It’s on “sale” for $110, but you know there is no way I could every pay that much for a pillow. I’m thinking I could easily DIY them both. Numbers 10 and 11 are from Target. I think I need some solid colors. Do you agree? Maybe I should get the Target chevron now and bring the color in at the new year. Thoughts? Feelings? Emotions? Feel free to share your opinions and give me some pillow advice.

I don’t really have much to show in the way of progress pictures. The house is in shambles: everything in boxes, furniture piled in corners, plastic sheeting everywhere. We really tried to be organized with this remodel and finish one project at a time, but I can only take so much painting before I want to tear my hair out. I hate painting. Okay, hate is a strong word, but I really really really don’t like it. Brad makes me do all the edging. He uses this lame excuse of how he would do a terrible job and I’m so precise yada yada. Cop-out. Anyway, there is an insane amount of trim in this house so it takes FOR.EV.ER. We’ve painted for weeks now and still have so much left to do! I tell you what, though, it is SO NICE to be rid of all the horribly dark paint colors in this house! The picture above more accurately shows the old blue color in our bedroom. Awful. The pictures of the master bedroom in the before tour make the wall color look much lighter really was.

So am I alone when I say I loathe painting or do any of you feel the same? Chime in.

We didn’t want to move into an apartment and we dreaded the thought of having to show the house all the time, so on a crazy whim we put in an offer. We haven’t decided yet if we’ll sell it right away or keep it as a rental like we did with the Beaufort house.

I know I gave somewhat of a tour when we first moved in, but here it is slightly cleaner and without boxes and pantyliners all over the place:

It’s your typical older home on the island. It was built in the late 70’s. With the exception of those bushes, the property is beautiful. The house, on the other hand, needs a serious makeover.

This is the dining room. Technically it’s more of a breakfast nook area, but we don’t use the dining room as a dining room. Kenzie is the worst photo bomber.

Here’s another view of the dining room. I can’t figure out why they didn’t install a third window. It’s always annoyed me. It looks off centered from the inside and the outside. The dining table was left by the landlord. It’s ugly, but fits perfectly in the space. We’ll give it a little makeover, too.

This is the view from the entry to the dining room and on to the kitchen. That door on the left is a walk in pantry. The door beside the stove leads in to the laundry room.

The appliances will all have to go. The racks in the dishwasher are broken and rusted. I consider getting a tetanus booster every time I wash dishes.

WHY is there a fan in the kitchen? Seriously? That’s so gross. Fans get dusty and even if you use a swiffer you’re still going to have bits of dust flying about. And the countertops? I can’t even talk about them without seeing red.

The kitchen is kind of a wide galley style. It’s spacious, but useless. There’s no room for anything. Is that an oxymoron? Spacious with no room?

Here’s a view from the other direction.

The kitchen exits into what should be the dining room. As you can see my beast of a treadmill takes up all that space. I have no idea what to replace that boobie light with so if you have any suggestions feel free to share.

The fireplace is terrible. Rather than removing the existing tile, the owner added another piece of backer board to the floor and tiled on top. It’s warped and cracked and ugly. And the tiles on the surround were just glued on. They’re loose and wiggle. (Also, I know the picture is off center, but didn’t want to put any nails in the walls so I just used the one that was there.)

Here. Enjoy this cuteness while your eyeballs rest from all the ugly this house tour is throwing at you.

Living room complete with a tiny TV. I can’t justify getting a new one, because we don’t really use this one.

On the left is a view from the living room to the entry. That door is an eyesore. On the right is the hall towards the entry/closet. That shelf is a junk/catchall area.

This is the boys’ bathroom. So much to do. The medicine cabinet is awful and rusty and that caulking will NOT come clean, so we’ll need to cut that out. We’ve got lots to do ya’ll.

This is the boys’ room.

This is the office nook. I’m not really sure what it’s intended purpose is, but that’s what we use it for. These pictures are being far too kind to this wall color. It’s really ugly in person.

I call this stack in the corner the leaning tower of Eames. We’ve had the red LCW out in the living room forever, but the other two have lived in their boxes the past 5 years. Those doors are for the beach house and they are incredibly heavy. Brad and I can hardly lift them together which is why I didn’t bother to move them out of the picture. I think Kenzie makes the shot. She makes any room look better.  

This is the master bath and the end of the tour. Thank you for coming. Enjoy the rest of your stay.

UPDATE: We finished the remodel ages ago, but unfortunately we lost the after photos we took. I happened to stumble across the old MLS listing for the house and took screen shots. You can see the after photos here. If I ever find the after photos I took myself, I’ll be sure to update the post.

It starts with an r and rhymes with schmemodeling.

Oh boy…

P.S. House tour tomorrow.

P.P.S. Sorry our announcement wasn’t baby related. We got a few texts asking what’s up. Still not pregnant.

This was our first year to dye Easter Eggs. Memphis crushed most of them within a few minutes reminding us why we’ve never bothered to try it before. Oh well, it was still fun and no cups of dye were spilled in the process so it was a success in my book. By the way, brown eggs dye the prettiest. The colors (while they lasted) were gorgeous.

“Can we hunt Easter eggs today?” was the question asked at least 10x a day during the three weeks prior to Easter. I just love how much excitement the boys have been for holidays and birthdays. Ezra’s already asking how many days until his next birthday! (It was two months ago. Two posts ago in blog time… shameful I know.)

Remember the fun little project a alluded to last week? I’m putting together the announcement now. Stay tuned!

Am I ever going to miss a birthday post? Probably not.

Am I ever going to give up my lame cake decorating attempts? Probably  not.

We managed to keep the bike a surprise despite all the close calls. Ezra even saw the bike box in the car, but Brad told him it was just garbage we needed to drop off for recycling. After the party when Brad was putting his helmet on the lightbulb went off: “Hey that box wasn’t garbage. That was from my bike!”

Love that boy.

Check out his reaction. He’s so cute.