Tag Archives: Before & After

Baby Before & After Nursery

Nursery

January 25, 2011 –

We decided not to find out what we were having, so we needed to make a gender-neutral nursery.  While I would have loved an ultra-modern set up, there was no WAY I was about to spend $1200 on a crib and more on other modern furniture for small kiddos who could care less. So, we went the other way – a fun, bright and cherry mish-mash of re-purposed furniture, colors and textures inspired by sherbert colors (no doubt due to my pregnancy Pinkberry indulgences), and lots of art + etsy finds. We knew pink or more blue would make it’s way into the room the minute the kiddo arrived, so we focused on every other color to start.

The first baby gift we received was this amazing blanket knit by my sister-in-law’s mother, who I’ve only had the pleasure of meeting a couple times. So nice!! I love LOVE this blanket so much, and we pretty much designed the room around it.

The biggest struggle was choosing a color for the walls.  I’m a green gal, I love the color green, and I was well aware that my love for the shade of vert can get a bit redundant.  We really, really tried to go with another color, but in the end The Hus and I agreed that this lovely shade of Benjamin Moore’s Pear was absolutely perfect and totally us.

My theory on choosing a wall color: Pony up and buy any and all samples you're considering. Sit with the colors for at least 3 days before you make a decision. The expense and wait are worth it.

The problem was that we also fell in love with Behr’s Blue, but felt it would look too boy-themed on all the walls.  The Hus came up with the brilliant idea to paint the ceiling with the blue.  I love it. Love, love love it.

Pretty sky-blue ceiling!

We found this dresser at a garage sale for $25 while we were living in LA. It’s massive, and kind of brut-like, but a great canvas for any color paint. Of course I loved this funky color green, but we gave it a fresh coat of white paint for the baby’s room:

BEFORE: Dresser (oops I already started removing drawers before I remembered to snap a pic)

AFTER

The rest just sort of fell together really easily, thanks to some serious inspiration from OhDeeDoh and a lot of web surfing for fun finds.

Somehow we seemed to fall into a Giraffe/Monkey theme throughout the room.  But who doesn’t like Giraffes and Monkeys??  For a nod to the rest of the mid-century house, we added a big white tulip lamp for the ceiling and a Bertoia chair for extra seating.

Here’s the finished product and a list of where we purchased the stuff at the end.

Is this what she sees from her crib?

-  Crib: Just a classic Jenny Lind Davinci- totally affordable and completely adorable!
-  123 Pop Carpet + Mobile on Crib: Kaloo
-  Bicycle Print above crib (a gift!): Blanca Gomez, Poster Cabaret
-  Bird Prints above crib: sugarloop
-  Library Book Bin (another gift!): Land of Nod
-  Poms: Pom Love
-  Giraffe Painting (and another gift!): Lynne Rae Studio
-  White Lerberg Shelf: Ikea
-  Keep Calm Pillow: found on clearance at TJ Maxx

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Before & After

TV Room

January 15, 2011 –

This room is probably the smallest, but also unanimously the favorite room in the whole house…proof that people really do love tiny cozy spaces.

Because it is so small, and has weird offset features like the fireplace (LOVE the fireplace) and a small built-in bookshelf, we are limited to configurations and design.

In September we decided to open up the room a bit more and connect the basement to the rest of the house to offer more daily usable space since our family is growing. This was our biggest home reno project to date, and the one I was most excited about (except redoing the kitchen, of course).

To open the space we removed 3/4 of the south wall which enclosed the stairwell and created a pony wall with a ledge which now overlooks the stairwell.

Then we busted out an incredibly narrow pocket door which was the entrance into/from the hallway which doubled the size of the opening, and matched it to the other pass-through areas on the main floor.  This provided a bit more continuity to the interior architecture and greatly improved the flow. At the very least I’m not nailing elbows and toes on the doorways anymore trying to shimmy around sharp 90 degree corners.

The final touch was to give the space a fresh coat of paint – actual color y’all!  I know, I know, “beige” is so safe, and I am so not a beige gal, but we decided to match the TV room to the basement walls with my favorite True Khaki.  I just love this color. It’s got a nice hint of green (yay!) to it, and has enough warmth to envelope a small space without making it smaller.

So this is the room in its current state.  Words cannot express how much I hate the TV area.  The media console is our last remaining piece of IKEA furniture brought over from our apartment dwelling days in Los Angeles.  It looked fine there. It looks awful here.  Ideally I think we should put built-ins across that whole wall, and obviously throw up a flat-screen television which would not only save on much needed space, but de-clutter that whole rickety get-up.

The paneling has always been an issue in this room as it is part of the actual wall and to remove it would mean putting in all new wall. Ugh. So we glammed it up with a fresh coat of high-gloss white paint, and next to the khaki, I think it looks pretty spiffy.

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Before & After The Pink Ranch

Painting the house (or, OMG you’re painting the BRICK???)

January 14, 2011 –

Yes. We did paint the brick. We had terrible, cheap, ugly brick and it needed some serious makeup. And we had trim painted a viscous color of mint green. We love our little house, but the exterior was tragic.

After a neighborhood polling of many many shades of gray, we finally decided on Porpoise and went for it.  We used white only for under-hangs and a bit of trim (to save money our amazing painters managed to salvage the wood siding through 2 days of scraping and about 1000 coats of paint), and True Black for our shutters and very decrepit garage door (which looks a whole lot better after 3 coats of paint + primer.)

Also during the process we finally got rid of the mint green grape-vine posts and replaced them with nice square wood. Oh words cannot describe how happy I was to see the grape vines go.

Here’s the progression (Sept 2009 for chronicle’s sake):

BEFORE: Mint Green Awesomeness.

DURING: Our painting crew thought it would be ironic and funny to prime the house with virtually the same shade of heinous mint green we were trying to abolish. Har har.

back of the house

I have to send a lot of love to Chris Stanton of Colorfast Coatings. We couldn’t have had a more talented or hardworking or super fun crew if we tried.  Our house needed a lot of TLC to get it ready for painting and Chris and crew didn’t cut a single corner or prep work or final touches to get it right.  If you’re in the Denver area and need ANY painting done, Chris is your man.

AFTER:

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Before & After

De-Brassing: Master Bedroom

January 9, 2011 –

I understand ceiling fans are nice, but not the ones we inherited with the house, and NOT the fan in the master bedroom:

The pink in this house was a bit overwhelming, so we decided to paint the whole thing with a fresh coat of soft white and see where color choices take us later on.  The bedroom, however I kept as a white theme with accents of mossy green, silver and crystal.  Here is the very first lighting fixture we installed:


It’s feminine without terrifying The Hus, and I got it for a great price at Lamps Plus of all places.

And this was the start of my now full-blown lighting obsession.

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Before & After

Gravel Overdose Pt. 2: Back Yard

January 7, 2011 –

When we purchased The Pink Ranch we did so in the middle of one of the worst winters Colorado had seen in a while.  Actually, we went house hunting during most of it and I can recall on several occasions having to literally shovel our way up a walkway to see a house.  When we came to see this house we could barely drive down the street.

For the most part we didn’t think much of it (besides the perpetually cold feet) until we were moved in, the snow had melted and we realized we had no idea what the yard looked like.  The yard looked just fine covered in snow!

One of the big selling points for this place was the large yard, but what we didn’t know however is that for some reason this house was built on a weird slope (the only one in our neighborhood, as far as we can tell) which means the back yard slopes gradually downward towards the fence.  It isn’t flat at all.  The front does the same thing, but who cares about the front yard.

The biggest problem with this is that we see directly into our neighbors back yard which is *not* cute.  The fence, though normal height, doesn’t block our visuals because it’s so much lower down there and the house is so much higher.

Also, we have a concrete area just off the sliding doors in the TV room, which would be a lovely, sunny place to sit and stare at the neighbor’s yard, if the slab wasn’t nearly a foot lower than where it was originally laid and sliding away from the house.  Also, the slab is surrounded by a unexplained but very large dirt patch which contains in it a randomly planted rose garden which is kind of placed smack dab in the middle of the yard.

Also, the grass is terrible. Thin, neglected for lord knows how long, and probably the wrong kind to handle both sun and shade, and now two dogs.

On the plus side, we have two gorgeous old trees that blossom into bright pink flowers right around Mother’s Day every year:

Here’s the worst part, just off the house.  It’s mostly mud. Why? Because there were strawberries planted along the edge of the patio, Why? Why? Why????

Welcome into our home, Mud!

Our Summer 2009 plan? Cover it all with rocks!! We couldn’t afford to lay concrete (or so we thought) and a wood deck would look weird. Grass won’t grow there (clearly) so more more of our favorite tiny gray pebbles seemed the only option.

For the record I thought ordering two tons was a bit excessive.

So we skipped the professional part where you level out the space with sand and went right to doing a terrible job trimming the area, laying down Preen (did ok with that) and spreading out the gravel.
At least Lucy likes it.Oh, the gravel.  There was so very much and it just got everywhere. Plus the chairs and table sank into it as did your shoes. So while we succeeded in eliminating one mess with the mud, we created another, more destructive mess with the gravel.

Skip to the following summer (2010)…

Inspired by The Brick House’s scarily identical problem, we followed in her footsteps and added pavers INTO the gravel, rather that the other way around.  180 pavers to be exact. And a few weeks later I would discover I was preggers while doing the whole thing.

Note: pavers are not light.

Yes, we eyeballed the whole thing.

Et Voila!

The girls approve.

We’re still tweaking this area, but the pavers are sooo much better. We have a (semi) level place to sit and the gravel stays in the cracks where it belongs.  Best part is they were so inexpensive and totally in keeping with our hopes of transforming the back yard into a more modern, minimalist space.

To recap, BEFORE:

Before: gross, yucky, muddy mess.

And AFTER:

After: Cleaned up, leveled out and ready for parties.

Break out the margaritas!

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Before & After

Removing Tile

January 3, 2011 –

This lovely tile stretched all the way from the kitchen, around the corner in the TV room and down the entry way right up to the front door, carrying with it bright pink grout.

Not okay.

For obvious reasons that tile had to go. While we had to keep it in the kitchen the rest we hoped would come up easily and reveal more wood flooring. Ha.
First, we tried to hoist it out. And by we I mean my nearly 90 year old Grandfather who is AWESOME:

Go Papa!

As you can see that excersize revealed beneath it a layer of plywood followed by laminate flooring. Great.

So then we tried to get in there with a hand chisel:

Go Husband!

Ugh and double ugh.

So then we called in the Big Guns and our brother-in-law came over for some serious demo.

Almost there...

Hurrah!!

Oh wait. Why is the laminate still there? BECAUSE IT IS SHELLACKED TO THE WOOD BELOW IT AND IT AIN’T COMING OFF!

[Note future project is the above image: paint door or replace door; change out knobs on door and storm door; paint or replace storm door; do SOMETHING with that weird orange glass; paint brick.]

We ended up having to hire a wood flooring expert, who dug out the laminate and replaced just that area with brand new wood.  He was so amazing – you can’t tell the difference between the 1963 wood and the 2007 wood. He’s like the zen master of wood flooring. But more on him later. Behold the finished product:

Gorgeous.

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Before & After

Removing Carpet

January 2, 2011 –

I realize there isn’t really anything new to add to the world about the fact that we removed carpet and restored wood floors. I only add it here, because if you’ve done it, you know how instantly gratifying it is.

Just say no to Dusty Rose.

Say "YES!" to hardwood floors!

Yes, it is gratifying, especially since the entire main floor was covered in this nasty pink carpet.  It is fun to roll it back and haul it out.


Fun. Until you get to the tack strip.

Man, that tack strip was everywhere.  It took days to remove and we all were poked 10,000 times with those damn sharp tacks.  AND I had a fever in this picture…just to make sure we all were having super amounts of fun.

But the end result was worth it! Our hardwood flooring guy was a GENIUS. An artist really.  Look what he did!

ooooo

ahhhhhhh

oohhhhhh

So to recap:
BEFORE

Living Room: Before

And AFTER:

Living Room: AFTER

Lovely.

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Uncategorized

The Pink Ranch: A grand tour.

January 1, 2011 –

Here is our fair house, a modest 1963 Ranch in Denver.  We closed on Valentine’s Day in 2007. The Hus was horribly sick with the flu and we couldn’t even enjoy our bottle of champagne. Nor could we enjoy the insane two months of preliminary renovations waiting for us, which has to be finished before we could move in.  The flu of course passed on to me.  Ever ripped up tack strip with a fever? It’s super fun!

After nearly 6 months of looking for homes at entry level Denver prices, this was of course the very last house we looked at.  The minute we walked in, our Realtor exclaimed “It’s got good bones!” She was right. It’s got GREAT bones. The bones were sadly covered in every shade and form of pink you can imagine: pink carpet throughout (but gorgeous hardwood under there!!), pink wallpaper in stripes, flowers and metallics, pink toilets, pink sinks, pink laminate counter tops in the kitchen, PINK GROUT in the tile people!  Here’s a looksee:

Yes, the outside is a lovely mint green to compliment all the pink inside.

This is the front room, the living room which faces the street.

The dining room, which attaches to the kitches via a pony wall just behind The Hus.

The pink kitchen with bisque appliances and bisque laminate cabinets. A great size and layout though!

Another view of the kitchen looking back into the dining room.

This will become the TV room, just on the other side of the kitchen. A small, modest room but boy do we love that gorgeous working fireplace! The stone is gorgeous! (NOTE: one of the few rooms that is not pink.)

This is a bedroom which will eventually serve as an office. There are three bedrooms upstairs and 1 bed and bath in the "finished" (use that term loosely) basement.

The second bedroom. Why no pink? We'll never know. It's so great how clean the walls are, though. Har. Har. Nothing a whole lotta paint can't fix.

Ah, the master bedroom in all it's pink, mint green and brass fixture glory.

You're looking at a pocket door into the world's tiniest master bathroom.

See? So small and awful and clearly designed by insane people. We can't even shimmy in to fully photograph it.

This is the pink bathroom, and the main/guest bathroom for the whole house. Yep. That's a pink bathtub you're looking at. And two pink sinks, a pink toilet (with padded pink seat cover!) and a mirror on the OUTSIDE of the door, so when you're walking down the hallway you can check yourself out.

Now on to what I think was my favorite little nugget of decorating in this house: the downstairs bathroom.  In a total departure from pink the previous owners decided to embrace the seizure-inducing color combo of yellow and blue! They loved it so much they wallpapered the ENTIRE bathroom in it.  What do I mean by entire? I mean EHN-TY-ER. Like the cabinets, and of course, why not keep going across the back of the bathroom door?

Note masterful wallpapering skills which continue the pattern without regard to cabinet doors.

Oooh! A contrasting pattern! Perfect for a DOOR!

Just one more look at them wallpapered cabinets.

The basement. 1/4 of the space is randomly tiled and the washer/dryer were placed on the outside of the utility room.

Really cheap wood slabs were loosely nailed to the walls as a...border? And the walls were so dirty. So very, very dirty.

Lastly, the very weird, very hodgepodge utility room which makes no sense, and is generally scary. (Especially if you take a gander at the wiring up above you in the unfinished ceiling.)

On a positive note, this space does lead to a massive crawl space.

So there’s the nuts and bolts of the good bones of the house.  This was four years ago and we’re still working on the space, de-pinking it room and bringing out her hidden beauty.  Over the last four years The Pink Ranch has very much become our home, and even with all her bizarre quirks and unanswered questions we love this place very much.  At first it was just me and The Hus, and now the home is filled with two gorgeous dogs and a beautiful baby girl. We are blessed. And, we are tired.

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