Texas House : Dining Room

I mentioned in my last past that I'm confused about the "boob light area" because I have a dining room.

Here's what it looked like with their stuff :

And here's what it looks like with ours :

I still need to 'finish' some things in there, but I'm not exactly sure what I want.  I'd like something to flank that pottery barn mirror on either side (It was our house warming present to ourselves.  I am all about DIY, but we had a coupon and free shipping and working with mirrors on a DIY project with Kalia just kind of seemed like a nightmare!).

You can barely see a glimpse of Kalia's bench through the hallway there.  You walk into the house, see Kalia's playroom (that's coming up soon!), then the dining room, then you walk into the kitchen.

The buffet needs to have something up on the walls above it too, but what I have leaning against it works for now.  At the old house we had a mirror above it, but that seemed like overkill on mirrors here.

I leave the dining room table set because it makes me happy.  I got these napkins and placemats from Serena and Lily a little while back on clearance (pretty sure they're still there!) and they tie in with the pillows on our two chairs in our living room, so I feel like it helps the house 'flow' a little bit better.

So that's it, our dining room.  See why I'm confused about the boob light area off of the kitchen?

Happy Friday guys!  I'm training for a half marathon right now, so my only plans for this weekend are to not die of heat exhaustion while running 9 miles in the morning!  This Texas heat thing is no joke!  I have some projects in mind that I'd like to get started on, but I'm generally pretty wiped from my long runs.  And Kalia.  Kalia wears me out too!  So we shall see!

Hope yall have a great weekend!

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House Tour : Out With The Old, In With The New

I have promised you guys a full house tour for awhile, and I'm finally going to deliver on it.

Even though this house is no longer mine.  We closed on it at the end of April.

To make a long story short, Chris accepted a job out in Dallas, TX, so for the first time in our whole lives we are no longer Floridians.  We were actually officially homeless for the first time since college!  We lived in corporate housing for a little over a month, and closed on a beautiful new home in McKinney, TX at the end of May.

Our house wasn't even on the market for a week before we were under contract for 99% of our asking price after receiving multiple offers.  We closed in less than 6 weeks.  Happy happy joy joy dance plus lots of mayhem and tears and hugs and yay's all around.  It's been a whirlwind of a few months to say the least!

Onto the Tour!

The Back Yard.  We didn't sod all the way down to the back, so it looks a little barren in this picture.  The new sod that we laid a year ago has started spreading and filling in the dead areas though.  Hopefully that'll continue on for the new owners!

The in-law suite bathroom.  We didn't really do much in here...

Kalia's bathroom.  We painted the walls, took out the old shower door, painted the cabinets, and faux painted the countertop.

The in-law suite bedroom.  I wish I had before pictures to go along with this, but I was in panic mode to get it done.  This room used to be Barney purple...blah!  I painted it Moonshine by Benjamin Moore and painted all of the trim white.

Kalia's room.  Ah, this was such a labor of love...I'm not gonna lie,  I cried the last time I walked through here.  We completely gutted this room and pretty much built everything that went into it.  I replicated this as closely as possible in the new home.  I really loved everything about it!

The daybed room.  This room used to have two daybeds in it, but I moved one into Kalia's room, and then into her playroom.  Chris installed the floors one weekend before we listed it.  It's the same floors we installed in Kalia's room.

The front door and the dining room. 

We hung up mirrors that went to the dresser in the in-law suite, and I painted little shelves and put fresh flowers in there for showings.

The exterior of the front door with the hanging pendant that we installed.

Our living room.  I painted the back of those book shelves along the wall and really loved how it turned out.  All of this trim was an off-white too, so I painted that all shiny white as well.

I also did that key art and those pallet shelves...

and made the Hart sign, and hung the ski's in an x with pictures of Chris and I from our snowboarding adventures.  I'm glad that my 'stuff' gets to stay with us!  I am happy to report that almost all of it fits in perfectly at the new home.

Here's a few of the front of the house, which we re-painted once Kalia got here.

We had to leave the Gator flag.  It was actually a part of the negotiations!

Moving back to the inside...the kitchen.  Oh, how I loved that kitchen.  I pretty much did nada here.  It was the huge huge selling point when we bought the house.

Kalia's playroom.  This room evolved quite a bit since she arrived.  The pictures over the daybed are just black fabric with a picture of her from every week for her first year.  It's amazing how quickly she changed!!  I painted the chalk wall, built and painted the ledges, and then added a family picture wall above the ledges.  Both Kalia and I miss the chalk wall.  If I'm being 100% honest, I don't miss the dust though!

The entry to the Master Bathroom from our bedroom, or the vanity area.  I painted this area twice, did all of the trim white, and we took off the closet doors and spray painted them to get rid of the yucky gold color.

Last time you saw our Master Bath, it was the light blue color.  I painted it gray (moonshine by benjamin moore, my favorite light gray color to go to) because I felt it was more calm and would appeal to a larger audience.

Next up, our Master Bedroom.  I re-did that trunk that my parents gave me and added my sewing machine cabinet that I also re-did to finish out the space.  We've upgraded furniture at the new house, so I can't wait to share what our room looks like now.

Here's a picture of the office.  This room also got painted, and we took out the built-ins, sanded them down, and re-stained them.  They were a blonde honey color before.  I also painted the back of them to make our things pop.

This is the office bath that Chris and I completely gutted and re-did just days before listing the house.  There was striped wall paper and an old toilet, laminate vanity, and builder grade mirror in here.  For such a little room, it required a ton of work, but the difference was amazing.  As you can imagine, we were in a rush, so just use your imagination for the before pictures!

And last, but most certainly not least, the pool deck.  Oh pool, how I miss you.  Our new home does not have one.  I think we'll wind up putting one in, but that yard and that pool were irreplaceable!  

This house and our old neighborhood and our old state, ha, were so hard to leave, but we had to do what was right for our family.  As soon as I quit my job, Chris put out his resume, which is why things got so scattered here on the blog.  Balancing a baby plus Chris interviewing and making up his time with his old job and trying to get house projects done during naptimes and bedtimes because I knew the move was coming was quite a bit challenging.

I'm hoping that I can come back here and share projects and our lives with the four of you that still read this blog (hey 'rents!!).  I'm still working on finishing up getting the last of the things unpacked...like my sewing machine...yuck!!

In personal news, my little girl turned two last month.  Crazy how time flies.  Here's a picture of Kalia jumping on her big gift on her second birthday.  We're still a little hair challenged!!

Hope everyone is doing well!

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Dining Room Updates

I don't think I've shown you guys our dining room.  On my list of things to do is to add a page for our house tour with this blog, so hopefully you'll see our entire home at some point.

Here's what our formal dining room looked like with the previous owners stuff :

We hosted Thanksgiving at our home the very first year we moved in, so we painted the walls (pretty much the same color, but it brightened it up), painted the baseboards white, added furniture (dining room table, buffet, chairs), added a rug and curtains.  (And by we, I mean mainly me...this was during Chris's first Fall semester, and he was in full fledged work full time, get his MSEE full time, and go to Gator Football games full time mode!)  We moved in in April of 2009, and by November of 2009, this is what the dining room, with the table set, looked like :

This was prior to my blogging days, so please forgive the lack of full room shots.  Here's what the room looked like with our very first Thanksgiving guests :

Notice the empty walls?  Yeah...we ran out of steam / energy / money / care to do anything else in this room after that year.  I had a ton of ideas for what I wanted in there, but other projects became more important.

Well, the weekend before last, while we were out closing out Kalia's registry items, we came across a mirror from Pier 1 for $20.  A nice, mirror, cool shaped mirror...for $20.  Yes, please, I'll take it!  The reason it was $20 (instead of the initial $199)?!  It was a vanity/dresser mirror that no longer had said dresser / vanity to go with it.

Easy solution.  We just measured and attached our own hardware on the back.

Oh, and it had some scratches / dings on it, which were all fixable.  Just a little stain later, and the mirror was good as new.  My preggo brain forgot to take any good before shots of this...sorry!!

I told Chris I wanted to white wash or yellow wash it so the wood itself didn't just blend in...to give it more pop, but Chris put his foot down.  He said we're hanging the mirror, and if after Kalia gets here, you want to tackle another project, fine...but this looks good enough the way it is.

It actually amazingly matches our dining room furniture really well.  And those two picture frame ladders on either side we've had for forever.  They've been in a closet since we moved here, just waiting to find the perfect spot.

Do you see those two little books on top of the buffet?

I got the red one for our first Thanksgiving and had everyone write down what they're thankful for that year.  Not only is it a good way to reflect back on the year, and for us to look back at who celebrated what holidays with us, it's a great keepsake memorabilia that I know we'll keep for forever and read through.  The very first entry in there is my Papaw, who passed away the day before we left for Hawaii.  He wrote in our book " God has blessed me with so very much. The thing I'm most thankful for is a loving family.  Pop Paw Hannan".  I'd write more on how great of a man my Pop Paw was, but my pregnancy hormones are kicking in, and I need to move on or I'm not going to finish this post!

Whew...anyways, the brown book my Dad and T. Mom got me for Christmas, so once the red book gets filled, we'll move onto the cool brown one.  Such a fun way to preserve family get togethers!

Here's a shot of the entire dining room, which is what we see when we walk in from the garage :

For those of you that are super observant, yes, there is a dining room chair missing.  It's in the daybed room parked in front of my sewing machine, so that when I get motivated to sew, everything's all ready.  I think the chair is collecting dust in there these days.

Notice that cool little box on the right of the picture?  It's a R&Y Augousti desk box that I won in a giveaway from Elizabeth Sullivan's Blog.  She's the interior designer whose idea I stole copied to make my nursery room bookshelves.  It was such a cool, fun thing to win because it's definitely not anything I'd normally feel justified spending the $$ on, but to win a unique piece?  Sign.me.up!

And yes, the expansive wall on the other side of the dining room is like the elephant in the room.  It's huge and empty still, but hey, one wall at a time, right?!  I actually know pretty much exactly what I want to do on the other side...you know, one day!

So what do you guys think of our dining room?  I know a lot of people have given up on the idea of formal dining rooms to have more 'fun' rooms, but a formal dining room was important for us.  We have so much family and love the idea of being able to host family dinners on our own!  To give you perspective, this room sits caddy corner to my horrible Palm-Tree-room-that-will-someday-become-a-game-room.

Hope everyone's having a great week so far!  Happy Wednesday!

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