Oh Look at that Kitty.... on the Piano???

Yesterday I started taking down the Christmas decorations. (It takes a while in our house, since I have to sneak the ornaments into boxes with the toddler is in another room.) Partway through I took a break to eat dinner, and when I came back, I saw the lovely scene above.

Notice anything strange?

How about now?

Oh, she looks soooooo pleased with herself!

But she did make me realize something. I do want to get this room finally all the way done, rather than just got the furniture in place done. It's the first room you see when you come into my house, and it's also the room that stays the cleanest because it doesn't get abused used as much each day. So it's a perfect choice to have a pretty room that is always ready for a picture.

Which I need.

Because, people, I may be ambitious, but I can't deep clean a room before I take a photo around here.

Enter the "Picture Perfect" challenge that Donna from Funky Junk Interiors is throwing. What perfect timing!

At any rate, I want to get this room to that picture perfect state. I probably won't get it all done this month because I am also working on other rooms, too (I like to jump around), but I'll make a dent in it and that's what counts. (So I tell myself, anyway.)

So -- I have a plan. So far my plan has two steps:

Step 1: Evict cat from piano.

Step 2: Finish taking down decorations.

Once I get that far, I'll take some more whole room shots so you can see what I'm up to!

Woo hoo!

Dining Room Mini-Reveal

I hope you all had lovely Thanksgiving weekend! Ours was supremely relaxing, and for that I am additionally thankful.

As you may recall, I had been trying to make over my entire dining room before Thanksgiving, calling it the "Countdown to Thanksgiving" project.

I didn't make it.

BUT, I did make quite a bit of progress, and I had just a few moments to snap a couple of pictures of the table set for our family Thanksgiving dinner. It was a dark, rainy day, so the light isn't great, but hopefully you can get the basic idea.

I don't know if you remember, but this corner was really dominated by the big, monolithic, grey faux stone wall. It was cool, but it was So. Very. Dark. We live in the Pacific Northwest, so though we're not as far north as, say, Scandinavia, because of the cloud cover we might as well be. I need every scrap of light I can get.

Here's the before, in all it's glory.

Wow. I can't believe we actually lived with that for so long.

And now, drumroll.... here's the after-for-now:

Big grey wall? Gone! I covered it up! Not with paint, with plaster! I love how it looks like some old wall in a loft or something. I had thought it would be quick and easy, but it ended up taking several days and over 50 pounds of plaster (and some help from friends, family, children... seriously, I was conscripting people over here). But I love the way it turned out and I'm planning to do the front, too.

We also painted (yes, painted) one of those pink chairs to try that (it worked!), threw some stuff on the wall so it didn't look barren, and brought my old reclaimed door inside and threw some aqua paint on it to try that out. And of course, you already know about how I tore out the stone planter. No more laundry basket safety feature needed! :-)

I'm still working on it, but already it's so much brighter that I feel like I might actually make it through the winter with all of my sanity intact!

Yep, even with all the imperfections and things I still want to change, this little corner makes me happy.

Now, I don't know about you, but I'm really feeling the holiday spirit this year, I have to say. I have lots of ideas for things I'd like to do. But I also want to keep going until this room is really done. That and I really need to put my stuff back in the china hutch / cabinet / thingy! :-) So I'll be juggling both of those things for the next weeks.

I'll keep you posted! :-)

You Can't Do Just One (Demo, That Is)

You know how it is, right? You mean to do just one little demo project. You intend to do just one little home improvement. But you can't help it. Once you start, you can't stop. Pretty soon you're tearing the whole place down.

Or, up, as the case may be. Heh.

We've been living with this really sad kitchen floor. Really sad. The edges were peeling up, the finish was worn off, and it was up on a layer of chipboard so we were constantly tripping on it and/or stubbing toes. Plus, gah, the color! I like beige, but this wasn't a lovely, cozy beige, this was a soul-sucking beige that literally vacuumed the joy from your body.

Or something like that.

So, against all reason, and despite my newly avowed commitment to The Lipstick Way as I proceed with my "Countdown to Thanksgiving" dining room makeover ... we tore it up.

Added bonus, now all the flooring is at the same level, which means (a) no tripping hazards, and (b) I can do trim work and other projects and know that the future floor will be at the same height as what's there now.

The vintage sunshine yellow Moroccan-style 70's vinyl is just a temporary added bonus. Hee hee.

So, it took a couple of days, but we went from this:

To this:

With a whole lotta this in between:

Oh yes, and plenty of this:

Can you imagine the thought bubbles?

"Gee, that vacuum sure is loud."

"Oooh look, a broom!"

"Man, that's really loud!"

So, now the question is -- do any of you want to know how we did it? Because I'm gonna tell you all about it in the next post! :-)

Don't worry, the ugly part will be over soon, and then we'll finally get to the pretty stuff! I'd say that's my favorite, but I really like them both.

Which is your favorite? The demo or the decorating?

A Little Color for the Master Bedroom

As work progresses on the dining room makeover I sometimes sneak off to my room to read. nap. read. okay, fine, nap. The point is that I like to hide out in there.

It hasn't been fixed up yet, so it's not, you know, my "vision" for the room (oak doors! oak trim! gross carpet! gah!). But it's cozy and stays relatively tidy. I don't know why it stays tidy. I try not to ask too many questions. I just enjoy it.

Except lately it had been feeling blah. Last time I was musing over this room I put all white pillows on as a temporary measure, and they were feeling dreary. I just figured I'd live with it for now and focus on the fun I'm having in the dining room.

Then the other day I was feeling like I needed another pillow to prop myself up with, so I got a pillow, grabbed the first pillowcase I found, one I made with pretty pink fabric a while back, put it on and stuck it on the bed.

All of a sudden the whole room looked more inviting. Weird, huh?

And then I started noticing all of the other things in the room. There really are some pretty bits and pieces in there.

Just because of this one little pillow. Isn't that funny?

Has that ever happened to you?

How to Tear Out a Stone Indoor Planter (Part 3 of 3)

At last, we're wrapping up this project -- tearing out the indoor stone planter that has plagued me since I bought my house! I tore the planter out as a part of my dining room makeover for Thanksgiving, and I thought some people might like to know exactly how I did it.

I have shared how I got ready for the project, and how I did the actual demo. Today I'll share how we finished up the demo and cleaned and finalized the project.

Though it seems daunting (which is why we put it off for so long), it turned out to be a fast and easy project. But a big portion of that was sheer luck. This planter really was built in a way that made it easy to get rid of it. I have no idea if that's common or not, so it's something to look at if you want to rip out one of your own.

I'm sure there's lots of ways to do it. This is the way that worked for me. It's a long story, so I've broken it into three parts:

Part 1: Prep Work
Part 2: Demo
Part 3: Finishing Details (this post)

That Last Row

Once we got all the main walls out, we ended up with one last row at the bottom that we couldn't chisel out because the level of the mortar was under the level of the wood floor. Once we got there, we had to pound on the inside of the stone with the sledgehammer until they came loose.

Uhhh.... you're not really supposed to work on projects like this in sock feet. So, you can pretend you didn't see mine. Ooops.

Once we got that last row out, we had to work on the front of the fireplace, where the hearth is. I didn't want to have a really sharp corner there, so we used the chisel to chip away some sections and make a "clipped" corner. (By "we" I mean "Mr. Magpie" as you can see.)

As we worked, we tried to knock all the mortar off the stones and then stack them up to be taken out to the garden and (hopefully) used for something out there.

Clean Up

Once all the stones are out, there's nothing to do but start cleaning up the mess! With all the big hunks of debris, the easiest thing to do is use a flat shovel and literally shovel out your house!

We put it all in bags and then loaded it into the car and took it to the dump. Our local landfill takes "clean" debris such as rocks, bricks and mortar for free. Sadly, it can't really be reused for anything. We salvaged all the stones, though, to be reused.

When we did finally get to the bottom, we found, to our extreme relief, a smooth, level, concrete area. It was leveled off exactly at the level of the sub-flooring. Again, I have to wonder if someone along the way knew this planter box was going to go away eventually. It's set up perfectly for us to patch the floor and have a seamless end result.

There was some old splats (that's a technical term (not really)) of mortar on it, but Mr. Magpie hit them with the chisel and they popped right up.

(That's right, folks, I start the projects, he finishes them. Heh. I should probably be nicer to him, huh?)

After that and a quick vacuum, we had ourselves a nice, wide new place to walk through the middle of our house.

I think that says it all. :-)

The funny part is that once we decided to actually start the demo, the whole project took about two hours, start to finish, including clean up. That's it! After we were done, Mr. Magpie said, "I can't believe we waited so long to do that, it was easy!"

You'd think he'd listen to me more. Hee hee.

'Till Tomorrow...

P.S. If you missed it, make sure to go back and read Part 1: Prep Work and Part 2: Demo