House Improvement: Lowe's Rocks my Socks

I would estimate that about 90% of everything we purchased for our house, was purchased at Lowe's. The paint and the wood floor are the biggest exception. Lowe's also didn't carry the front door we wanted, so that was a Home Depot purchase too. Oh, and our counter tops are Home Depot too. In pre-house days, both Curt and I just happened to prefer Lowe's. Mostly cause their employees were quicker to help than the Home Depot employees who most of the time never even offered to help. Now, we are super loyal shoppers. Only in cases where Lowe's doesn't have what we need do we shop elsewhere. Mostly we love the set up of the store, the help from the employees, the Lowe's card discounts and coupons we get in the mail...and now their hassle free returns.

Just this month while cleaning out the garage to pack it and move, we gathered up all the supplies we had that were from projects we never got to or didn't work and took them back to Lowe's. We didn't have receipt with us. (Yes, I have a huge pile of them, but it would take FOREVER to pair everything up with it's receipt.) In the past year, everything we've bought, we've bought with the Lowe's card to get the extra 5% off and then just paid it off as we went. At Lowe's they were able to look everything up and return EVERYTHING. Even things I know we bought as far back as last June and July! Everything! Even the tile that we bought in a boxed set and returned as individual pieces!! Even uncut wood that Curt bought to re-do the fence and never got around to it! We were so impressed and so so happy! Not only to have the money back, obviously, but to be rid of so many items that we would either have to leave with the house or pack and take with us! Seriously...so happy. Lowe's just made an even more loyal customer out of us! And they should be happy about that!! We've spent thousands of dollars there!!

House Improvement: Doors

When we bought our house...we were missing two doors, one very damaged and the remaining doors were super ugly and in one case painted peach. They had this faux wood finish that looks so so so cheap. I hated them! Since we were missing doors anyways and would have to replace the missing ones, we decided to replace all the doors. You can't walk into Lowe's and buy the ugly faux wood builder grade doors.

The first door we replaced was the garage door. I don't have a good before picture, but the door had been damaged. Our house was a foreclosure and we suspect it was through the garage door that someone broke in to repossess the house. The gold plate was covering the busted door...which we didn't know when we took it off. Anyways, it was quite the learning process as Curt had never replaced doors before. The door currently in our house, is not the first door we bought for the garage. The first one was ruined in the process of cutting it down to fit in the existing door way. To make a long story short, the first door was put into the scrap pile and a new door was purchased. It doesn't look like the rest because we would have had to custom order a door with the same design as all the interior doors and we weren't willing to pay that kind of money for the garage door. 

Replacing the interior doors is no easy task. Before buying our house we had next to no tools. While both of our parents live close and have lots of tools for us to borrow, especially Curt's dad, we still had to buy specific tools to do the doors. We needed a template for where to cut and a router to do all the cutting. The reason you need that is because the doors we bought didn't have any cut outs for the door knobs, latch or the hinges. We wanted the nice design on our doors and to buy the doors we picked with the cut outs meant spending a lot more money.

The actual process of installing these doors had a sharp learning curve. I think we actually had to re-buy three doors after ruining them. I actually don't even have a single picture of Curt cutting or installing the doors. It actually was such a long process that we had been in the house months before all of the doors were on with handles. I think the girls went without completed closet doors until after Christmas. The more Curt did it, the easier it got though. We got a system down and by the end, he was a pro. :)

When all is said and done...would we do the doors again? Yes, we would. 

Reasons why we are glad we replaced the doors:

1. We were missing a door on Emery and Ella's room and the coat closet, and since the existing doors were the faux wood, we couldn't just go buy a single door to match the rest. Plus that coat closet door is actually a very small door and had to be custom ordered anyways (yes, that small door is actually the most expensive interior door in the house!). 2. We HATED the existing pattern on the doors. 

3. The doors were very beaten up and Isabelle's closet doors were peach colored.

4. Our doors are seriously one of our top five favorite things about our house. 

Reasons why we wouldn't replace doors again:

1. It's a lot of work and not easy to get them all perfect or easy to get near perfect.

2. It's expensive. We have 12 interior doors (plus 2 or 3 that were ruined in the learning curve) and each of the doors is somewhere around $30 each. (Which is pretty close in cost to the 6 panel cross and bible doors most people have, but those come ready to be hung.)

3. Replacing doors means painting doors. Painting doors means painting door casings. Painting door casings means painting moulding. All of which, I hate painting. 

Overall, if the house was perfect enough in other ways, yes we would buy another house where the doors needed replacing. But the house would have to be pretty tempting to make it worth No. 3 on that cons list!

House Improvement: Painting

I love painting. There I said it. The actual process of it isn't the funnest, but I love the way it can totally transform a room. During the whole long closing process I/we picked out all our colors. I really wanted to hit up the Memorial Day sales since Home Depot always has their paint on sale that weekend. (Which is the ONLY reason I bought Behr paint.) The sale totally made it worth picking all our paint before we moved in. It's true...we did take a little risk in not looking at the samples in the lighting in our house, but personally I loved my colors and thought it would all be fine since I loved them so much. 

One thing that is great to know about, if you already don't, is that companies can do color matching or even specifically look up another brands color recipe and mix it for you. So my blue and grayish brown color are Sherwin Williams color samples. I can't remember what our blue is, but the brown is Realistic Beige. I love it. I love that you can do this since I really don't care for Behr's paint samples. 

As far a painting goes, I'm the cutter-inner person. I do all the trim work against all the seams and moulding. Curt rolled the paint on the ceilings and then my mom did almost all the rolling of the paint on the walls. For the most part (contrary to these pictures) I do the trim first and then it gets rolled afterwards. I don't tape anything. I don't like how the paint always bleeds under the paint. It annoys me. So, I just do it by hand. However, I found this cool tutorial that option 1 looks as if it would totally work. 

One thing that was really hard about painting the ceiling/wall seam was that since our ceilings are low and the ladder I had was tall, to sit on the top of the ladder meant my head had to be totally kinked at a weird angle...which was really hard on my neck after painting our entire house in just a few days.

I REALLY love my blue!
The dining room after the paint:

 A look at the kitchen:

 Isabelle's color was just a Behr sample paint. It totally escaped my mind to pick out the girls' rooms colors before going to buy them. Her's is Ballet pink, I believe. It's a light pink with a very fitting color since she loves ballerinas.

 Ella and Emery's room after the paint. This is not the original paint color. It was way too bright yellow before. This is the one color that didn't work out perfectly.

 Our room. I love our gray. I think it's a Lowe's color, but once again, I can't remember the name. We chose it by which of the samples closest matched our bedspread.

We also painted all the closets white.

Most of all the painting we did, was done before we ever moved in. All the ceilings, closets and rooms were completely done by the time we moved anything in at all. Near the end of our time here though we painted the doors, door casings and most of the floor boards. You'll learn this from a soon to come blog, but we replaced all the doors in our house (except the utility doors and the back door). The doors we bought were primed, but not painted. So to sell our house, we needed to paint all our doors. Painting our doors meant that all the door casings needed to be painted too. And painting the door casings meant we would need to paint the floor boards. It really spiraled out of control. Especially since between finding out we were moving and putting our house on the market we did a ton of work...and I had some pretty serious health issues mixed in there too. For those two reasons, we hired someone to paint the doors and the door casings. Other than paying someone to clean our air conditioner after clogging it with popcorn unknowingly, it was the one thing we hired out and didn't DIY.

I hate to say that it was worth it to hire someone to paint the doors and door casings...but unfortunately for our pocket book, it was. Physically and emotionally I was totally spent. We were out of time. I did paint the floor boards and casings in the babies room and it took me forever cause I had to do two coats on all the casings. They paint didn't take well. According to the painter, that's common. We actually bought a paint sprayer to spray the doors, but even then the task was totally overwhelming and we didn't even know how to go about it. The painters got it done in one day. They did come back a second day for about an hour to install everything since they had taken the doors all off their hinges to be sprayed in our garage and needed to dry over night. While I do hate the money I spent on them, I have really enjoyed them being all white and crisp and clean for two months.

(Scroll up to the pink room and you can see how cream these doors were before paint.)

 

I did paint the interior of our back door, although I don't have a before shot specifically of it. It was quite yellow cream-ish in color.

And finally...we painted our front door. And I love it.

Literally every surface in our house has been painted except for the floor boards in Isabelle's and our room, the inside of the front door and the utility doors & door casings. That's a lot of paint!

On one last note though. I mentioned that I used Behr paint. For years and years and years I've painted with Behr paints in my parent's and other homes. While I have no complaints about the way it goes on, I do have one HUGE complaint about the paint in the long term. In my parent's house, especially in the bathrooms, the paint develops streaks in it. When you touch the streaks, they are actually sticky and when they make it all the way down to the floor boards, it creates a yellow sticky pool on it.

So so so irritating! In my mom's house, we thought it was a fluke...or something. But we just noticed this week some streaks in the babies' room. NOT happy and I will NEVER be using Behr again. If you are curious as to what I will be using next time around...it will be Ace Hardward's Clark+Kensington. Consumer Reports just ranked in No. 1 and it's about half the price as Sherwin Williams.

House Improvement: Goodbye Popcorn

Before we had ever found and purchased our house, we had already decided that if we ever bought a house that had popcorn ceilings, we would for sure scrape them. We actually did doubt this decision during the time period between having our offer accepted and closing. It would just be so much work! And it was!! BUT, if we bought a home with popcorn ceilings again, we would for sure do it all over again. Yes, it was beyond frustrating at times, but so so so worth it. There is not a week that goes by that we both don't stop and admire our ceilings. Really, probably daily. It has made all the difference. ESPECIALLY since our ceilings our 8 foot ceilings, through the entire house. We would do it again, in a heart beat. That is IF it could be done before moving anything in! That is the catch. It was truly a mess, like everyone says, that I don't think I would want to do it if we had anything at all in our house.

Step No. 1: removing all the vents, the few light fixtures we had and laying down plastic over all the flooring.

Step No.2 : spraying water on to the ceiling and scraping the popcorn off. Really...a pretty easy step. Especially since our ceilings are low and don't have a single vault in them. We also had a friend generously come over and help. He pretty much did the scrapping and Curt did all the edges. Curt used a putty knife to go over every corner to make sure that where the ceiling and the wall met didn't have any popcorn. This was not a step we had read about on the internet, but a important one. It made painting the seam between the two so much easier as there wasn't any popcorn stuck to my walls.

Step No. 3: Repairs. The didn't have too many spots that needed touching up, but there was some damage from before we scrapped our ceilings that needed some putty work. We used the actual texture that we were about to blow on the ceiling and just used the putty knife to smooth it all on. It worked really well. In the end, months later, the cracking has continued slightly. Not from where we puttied, but from where we stopped. So, next time, we would go further in each direction...as in to "seal" the bad to the good. If that makes sense...

Step No. 4: Mix the texture. Ugh. Such a mess. To mix the texture, you just had to add water to it. However it was quite hard to use a really powerful drill and only let it turn slow. Inevitably, Curt couldn't hold the speed and it would start mixing too fast. It just wasn't possible with the drill we had. By the time we were done and all cleaned up, there was white texture sprayed into the concrete of the drive way and down the street. We were a little afraid we would have someone in the HOA or city say something cause it was definitely noticeable. However, I haven't noticed it in a long time, so I'm guessing the time and sun have bleached it away.

Step No. 4: Picking up all the plastic and mess and laying down new plastic. While Curt mixed, my mom and I did this. The pick up was fast, but oh how I (we) hate laying down plastic. This was a complete waste of time. We should have left the dirty plastic down. It never ever occurred to me that scrapping the ceiling was actually the cleanest part of this process! Boy were we surprised! I actually thought that the fresh plastic would not only be enough for the spraying of the texture on the ceilings, but to paint too! Once we got the new plastic down on the floor we were ready to texture. Or so we thought.

Picture of the scrapped, ready for new texture ceiling:

In true Curt-and-Natalie-form...nothing ever goes smoothly and nothing ever goes to plan. From this point on, it got really frustrating...

Step No. 5: Texture! Or so we thought... We borrowed a texture gun from friends but every time we loaded the texture into the hopper and put it on the gun, it would fall off and texture would splatter every where. While we appreciate the people letting us borrow their texture gun, after a good couple of hours of frustration, Curt gave up and determined to just buy our own. However, we couldn't find the cheapest, well rated one, in stock. So the whole process was put on hold for a couple of days. Which was more than just a little frustrating because almost every other project in the house was dependent on the ceilings getting done first.

Step No. 5, Part 2: Texture! Once we got the new texture gun, it went a lot smoother. Curt asked his brother, Luke, to take the day off and come help him. It definitely is a two person job! One person sprays the texture on to the ceiling, the other person comes behind and knocks down the mountains made by the texture so that the resulting and final texture is actually flat. While the process wasn't overly hard, it was so so so dirty! There was no keeping the texture from spraying every where. While my mom and I had put plastic on the floors, we had no clue that every surface needed to be covered in plastic. This hiccup added hours and even an extra day to the process since Curt and Luke had to put plastic up on every wall as they went from room to room. (I wasn't there to help them out to make it go faster.) In the end it probably took around 12-15 hours to texture our ceilings, BUT that also included the taping up of plastic...which probably took 2/3s of the time.

Step No. 6: Paint! After the texture dried, and as soon as it did, I got busy painting the seam of the ceiling and the wall with ceiling paint. I didn't care about getting it on the walls since every wall in the house was about to be painted. Curt was the rolling guy and I did all the trim. I actually can't even remember how long this took. But by the end, between texturing and painting, poor Curt's arms were like jelly. I have to say though...having crisp white ceilings has been amazing. I love them. They make my house seem so clean and crisp. TOTALLY love and TOTALLY recommend!!

Step No. 7: Admire your work. And we do. :)

Things we learned in this process:

1. Have a good texture gun.
2. Turn off your AC completely for the whole entire process!! When researching this process, no where online did we read this tip. We had to pay $400 to acid wash our AC out to get all the popcorn out of our AC after we were done.
3. It's a two person job.
4. It is WELL WORTH IT! We hadn't moved anything into the house yet, which made it all that much easier, and I'm not sure it would be worth it if you were already moved in. However, I don't think you would regret it if you did. Our ceilings look so much better. I don't know if the people buying our house noticed them not being popcorn or not, but I hope they appreciate them. I am not kidding when I say I admire them daily.

Before Pictures

One reason I haven't blogged all our house adventures is because I'm not sure how to tackle it, exactly.

I guess the beginning is the best place to start, right? I took these pictures right after we closed on the house. Honestly it's really weird to look at these pictures since we've come so very far from this! I can't believe all we have done in the past year. We are often told just how crazy people think we are. It's true...we are crazy. However, as frustrating as this adventure has been at times it has been well worth it. We have been so blessed with they money needed to fix this place up, the help from each of our parents and other family members, YouTube to teach us (Curt) how to do things and the ability to DIY pretty much the entire house. It's been an amazing and hard ride. 

Okay...here they are. The ugly truth. The beginning. Our beginning.

The Dining Room:

The Entryway:

The Living Room:

The Kitchen:

The Laundry Room:

The Hallway:

The Guest Bathroom:

Isabelle's Room:

 

Ella and Emery's Room:

Master Bath:

Master Bedroom: