Entry Way - Before & After

I know I said I’d be back with a master bathroom reveal but I’m hop, skip, and jumping over to the entry way today instead…because I’ve been procrastinating taking those after shots of the master bath I so desperately need to ring up a true reveal.  In my defense, we’re fairly certain one of the twins has the flu so I’ve been hunkered down with her.  We’ll get there, right?  You know it.  :D

Anywho, the entry way.  Entry ways are one of my favorite rooms in any house.  Just like I wrote about a back entrance awhile back, they can make or break first impressions of a house being the spot that's seen first.  They can also make or break your mood when you walk in from wherever it is you’ve been.

Here’s what ours looked like before we moved in:

I didn’t take this picture in the brightest part of the day in this room so it was feeling a little dark already and obviously, a pile of boxes doesn’t do much for aesthetics.  It was a real Debbie Downer for sure.

But, BUT, look at it now:

Small Cabinet Makeover

Something I've had on my to-do list for a good long while now is to paint a small cabinet that's main function is to hold our Berkey water filter*.  The Berkey is awkwardly large as far as water filters go and if it weren't the best at filtering all the things, we'd probably ditch it for something smaller.  But, here we are with this big, chrome, bullet-looking thing in our kitchen. 

There isn't really a good place for it on our kitchen counter because it's so tall and takes up too much space so we kept hoping to find a small cabinet at just the right height that we could set on this small expanse of wall right beside the kitchen counter and obviously, found one.  

It was for sale on Facebook Marketplace for $10 and not only was it not the prettiest cabinet in the wide world, but the lady who sold it to me used it to store makeup and so it smells...like makeup.  It's a weird smell to have a cabinet giving off.  I knew the smell would eventually go away but that faux wood finish had to be dealt with.  Fast forward months and months when only this #letsroomtogether challenge could provide the motivation I needed to get this thing looking a little more like it fits in with it's surroundings.

Kitchen & Living Room Progress

While we've been trying to focus all of our free-time and efforts outside, we have spent a few moments here and there trying to chip away at the kitchen.  It doesn't look like much since I last wrote about it, but we've actually made some good progress in here.

This is where we left off on the last progress report:

If you remember, we took out that wall and had a structural beam put into the ceiling (something we hired out) and then we put up new drywall and started mudding the joints.  After hours spent mudding ourselves, we realized that we just weren't that good at the whole process and it was taking us way longer than it would take a professional, so we decided to pay someone to finish that up.  Plus, we had an area between one of the beams in the den that was hastily repaired (we think there was water damage from the a/c unit in the attic that had to be fixed some time ago) and then covered with popcorn ceiling texture, which hid it's horrendous defects.  We had our guy mud the new joints and also do a skim coat over that repaired area.  It took him about five hours within the span of two days...something that definitely would have taken us hours over the span of weeks.  It was well worth spending the cash.

Anyway, enough talk about drywall mud, here's what the kitchen looks like today:

Damage Control

Is it just ours or do your kids have a daily goal of seriously destroying the house?  I feel like our girls are heck bent on undoing, unorganizing, unhanging, undecorating, un-younameit.  Especially Cecilia.  My sister witnessed her tactics first hand a few months ago and dubbed her the “Master of Disaster”.  So fitting.  Because of all this fun they create with their little hands, we’ve had some serious baby-proofing to do around here and it doesn’t bode well for this mom and her hobby of interior decorating.  Perfectly styled end tables?  Nope.  They’re barren save a couple of lamps and even those have had their fair share of near-death experiences.  Prettily decorated shelving less than four feet from the ground?  I wish.  Nicely framed masterpieces branching towards the floor in a perfectly unsymmetrical frame collage?  Forget it.  Needless to say, our house looks pretty good as long as you keep your gaze eye level and up.  But, I digress.  I thought I’d write a quick little post on how we do damage control around here so let’s get to it.

Cabinets.  Once the twins learned how to crawl, it was all over.  Everything at their level was game to be victimized.  That meant kitchen cabinets.  Pots, pans, glassware…we have it all in our lower cabinets and as it turns out, heavy breakables don’t make good toys (Cecilia can wield a gleaming pot like the best of ‘em).  We needed some fancy cabinet locks but when I went to a few stores to search for some, I had a really hard time finding some that didn’t cost an arm and a leg and that actually fit our cabinets.  At first I wanted to avoid drilling into our freshly painted cabinets at all cost.  Damage control shouldn’t have to cause more damage, right?  Unfortunately, all of the locks that didn’t require drilling either weren’t long enough to accommodate our cabinets or weren’t made for cabinet doors that swing in the same direction instead of away from each other.  Boo.  That meant we had to settle on the locks that had to be drilled in.  I had a hard time finding some of those that were relatively cheap though.  Enter amazon.  I love amazon.  We have a prime membership it’s one of the best things we’ve ever spent our money on.  Not only do you get to pick from a plethora of movies and shows digitally streamed to your own tube but you get free two-day shipping on most everything (and they’re not paying me or perking me to say that…we really just love prime!)  Anyway, I found these locks (affiliate link) there and we had them installed in a few days. 

We only had to buy one pack to baby-proof our kitchen, spending around $8.  Insert a happy wallet.

They come with two parts per lock – the part that attaches to the door and the part that attaches to the cabinet itself.  That means lots of drilling.  However we realized that if we attached the door lock just right, it would catch on the edge of cabinet, thus eliminating the need to drill anything onto the cabinet.  See?
 
We’ve had these locks on for a year now and with most of them being used multiple times a day, they’re still keeping the girls out of the cabinets just as effectively as they did the day they were installed.  :)  When we move, we’ll probably just keep them attached unless our purchaser wants them removed in which case all we’ll have to do is remove them, fill in the screw holes, and paint over them with some leftover cabinet paint.
(Side note:  After doing a little more research while writing this post, I stumbled on these locks from Target.  They’re similar to ours but attach to doors using magnetic force rather than being drilled in.  However, they’ll run you back $29.99 for four – for our small kitchen that’d be $60!  Yipe!  But, if you’re willing to spend a bit to avoid drilling, they might be a good option.)

Closet curtains.  The girls closet doesn’t have doors so before they were inhabiting their room, I whipped up these curtains to cover the space and we hung them with curtain rings threaded over a tension rod.


Cecilia (I think Seraphia has maybe done this once) has, multiple times, played Jane (that of Tarzan) on the curtains causing them and the rod to come crashing down, each time very narrowly missing her tiny head.  We finally had to quarantine them from their own room during the day until we remedied the situation with these pole sockets that we found in the hardware department at Walmart:


All we had to do was drill them into both sides of the closet opening and wa-la. 

No more boughs breaking and/or rods falling.  We don’t let the girls play in either of the bathrooms in our house because, you know, toilet water ain’t spring water, but if we were crazy enough to let them, we’d probably slap some of these up on each shower curtain as well.

Gates.  We do have one gate up prohibiting the kiddos from the laundry room where they like to press buttons and wash/dry imaginary loads of laundry but that’s it.  It’s an older gate that stays put using tension vs. drilling.  If we ever move into a house with stairs we’ll have to look into getting some sort of gate that swings open.  Any favorites just in case stairs are in our future or in case anyone reading is shopping for one or five?

Other than those few things, we try our darndest (we’ve resorted to locking the door) to keep the girls out of the guestroom because of the multiple bookshelves in there and my usual pile ‘o projects in process.  Sometimes I feel like a bad mom for restricting them from making messes and just being kids but then I let loose for one second and realize that cleaning up after twin toddlers while Anthony is at work and while carrying Sebastian around isn’t for the faint of heart – and that’s me, faint of heart.  I’ll take clean and crazy over messy and insane thankyouverymuch. 

So, what am I missing?  What types of baby-proofing do you use?  Anything you’d highly recommend?  Cages?  Handcuffs?  Or do you just go right for the straitjacket?  Juuuust kidding…  ;)  As I type, the floor-length curtains in our living room are looped up over the curtain rod where they’ve been hanging out for the past year or so because I can’t seem to convince the girls that they’re not part of a ropes course.  Any ideas on how to win that battle are more than welcome too!  Sigh.  Kids.

Storage Room Reveal!

Before we pop into the storage room to see how it all checked out, I'll just say quick that it definitely isn't one of our more glorious reveals (I think this one still takes the cake), but there is still a pretty big leap from before to after.  It's another one of those budget-friendly makeovers that we hold firm to, coming in at just under $180.  It really helped that the large cabinet was a free hand-me-down, the shelves were already here, and the upper wall cabinet we moved in from the kitchen.  It was on the wall we took down.

So, let's just start from the very beginning - the day we got the keys - the blank slate.  If I told you I pulled this photo from a 1980s archive, you'd have no reason to doubt me.

We moved in in 2019 and this is what this functioning corner looked like for many moons:

Kitchen Plans

While I am hustling in the kids' room (more on Insta), WE have been BUSY in the kitchen.  And when I say busy, I mean we took down a wall a couple of weekends ago and now we're just waiting on contractors.  So really, we were busy.  And now we're waiting to get busy again.  Which is why I can take this "down time" to tackle the kids' room...just wanted to clarify for anyone thinking we can do alllll the things at once.  Nope, not here.

Here's what this side of the kitchen looked like right after we closed:

And if you had walked into the den/living room and stared at that wall from the other side, this is what you'd have seen:

Or maybe it's what you wouldn't have seen.  That's what we're talking about.  From walking through this house on day one to now, we've dreamt about possibly taking this wall (halfway) down to open up the kitchen to the living room.

Kids' / Guest Bathroom Plans - A Mood Board

 One of the rooms in our house that's been majorly neglected is the kids' bathroom, which is also the guest room when family/friends come visit.  It was wallpaper laden when we moved in...

and that, coupled with a cheap plastic shower curtain, worn cream trim, and some horrible orangey light bulbs made it look like it was part of an 80's time capsule.

 

Not in mint condition though because the tile grout was (and still is) stained and the paint on the cabinets started peeling off long before we moved in.  But, those are exactly the kinds of rooms we like, right?  

Righty-o.

We got as far as getting the wallpaper off, hanging a much better shower curtain, and attempting to remove the popcorn ceilings (they're oil-based-painted on and going nowhere...womp womp) but that's about it.  

Then she sat and sat and sat.  Very much used by the kids but very much neglected.  We looked away when water got splashed on the drywall from showers but we can't push it off much longer.  We've got to get that drywall sealed and painted before worse things happen.  And while we're at that, might as well take it to the next level and touch up a few other things.  Snowball effect.   

So, now that the painting of the living room is behind us (tutorial on painting paneling coming soon!), I'm moving my energies into this room for a (hopefully) quick makeover.  This is only the start though - Phase Uno.  Also known as mostly using what we've got to squeeze in a makeover that costs less than $100.

Here's the plan:

DIY Shade Chandelier

(The fine print:  Some of the links to products below are affiliate links.  If you click on and/or buy from these links, I’ll get a small commission.  Your price doesn’t change a single bit but by buying through me, you help me/us to keep doing and doing and doing.)  :)

Let’s talk florescent lights…say, the one that once was in our kitchen.

It’s a pretty room to look at (although I’m biased) based on this semi-recent picture…until your eyes gravitate upward and notice the long, really outdated, really plain, and really ugly lighting (and you can’t see the end in the pic but the ends were a bisque color).  We HAD to do something about it.  Working with the existing light box, I gave us two options – some cool track lighting like this…

[image via Amazon]

…or a shade chandelier like this one that rings in at a wallet-biting $545:[image via Shades of Light] 

The problem was though, that I had very little cash to work with…but that’s always my problem, isn’t it? 

But you probably know, if you’ve been reading zee blog for any number of weeks, that that problem usually isn’t too tough for me to solve as long as I have a cup (or five) of coffee and a willing husband.  Since both of those things have a pretty good chance of being around…

We ended up with a new light fixture for $40.

You can read about how I made the shade here.  As for the chandelier underneath, I used this: An old wood and metal chandelier that someone donated to our church’s yard sale benefitting the Ecuador mission trip team.   I paid $8 for it.  I know you might see an old light fixture rehab and automatically click away because it sounds like a very intimating task involving lots of wires, possible welding, and lots of electrical mumbo jumbo.  But, I’m here to tell you it’s so easy!  If you can twist the lid off a Coke bottle and spray paint, you can refurbish a light fixture…pinky promise…or swear…or whatever.

Here is how I did it my friends.

First, I turned the chandelier upside down so that I could get at the bottom.  Then I unscrewed that little bronze filial right off.  It was screwed onto the end of a long threaded rod that went up into the middle of the fixture and so once the filial was off, the two pieces of wood you can see in the picture just slipped right off.

Under each light socket was the same type of filial that I just unscrewed to get those pieces of wood off.

I did the same thing for the other end, the top of the chandelier, except I unscrewed that ring that was connected to the hanging chain.

I made sure to take lots of pictures after every step so that I could remember how to put the chandelier back together.

With this particular chandelier, I didn’t mess with the metal bars holding the light sockets at all so I really didn’t have to mess with any wiring besides unwinding the existing wiring from the hanging chains before I pulled them off.

Initially, my plan was to paint all of the pieces – metal and wood – and put the chandelier back together the same way with the addition of a shade.  But then my friend Jesse and I were talking and she mentioned not even putting the wood back on, making for a much simpler chandelier.  I really liked that idea only I decided against it in the end because it would’ve required some shortening of the threaded rods and I didn’t know if that was possible without messing up the rods so instead I replaced the bulky wood pieces under each socket and the one under the middle of the chandelier with these wood ball knobs instead.

I had the greatest idea before this step though, to replace those bulky pieces with round acrylic balls instead but those balls alone would’ve cost me over $60 not to mention that I would’ve had to drill larger holes in them and I don’t know how feasible that would’ve been.  BUT, it would’ve been amazing, no?

Anyway, back to the wood knobs.  They were the exact height as the old bulky wood pieces so there was no cutting of threaded rods or wood cutting to do.  However, the pre-drilled holes in them only went in so far and they were too small to fit over the chandelier’s threaded rods.  To get them to fit, I first had to continue the pre-drilled hole through the whole ball.  To do that, I grabbed a drill bit the size of the hold and drilled through.

But the hole had to be even larger than that pre-drilled hole so then I grabbed a drill bit the size of the threaded rods on my chandelier and drilled an even bigger hole.

This part was a little tougher than I thought it would be.  Turns out, it’s a little difficult to drill into a small wood ball and hold the ball straight and steady all the while.  At first I held the ball with my bare hand and paid for that dumb mistake with a cut on the inside of my thumb when the drill slipped once.  After that I held the ball with my garden-gloved hand and it worked much, much better.

The bottom knob shows the size of the existing hole and the top shows the size I needed the holes to be. 
So once I had all those ball knobs drilled, I put them onto the chandelier.

Next, I had to figure out how I’d work the top of the chandelier so that I could fit my shade onto it.  I won’t go into much detail with this step because I know that every chandelier is different but in the end, I scrapped all the wood pieces that originally fit to the top.  Instead, I drilled another ball knob, threaded it on, placed the top lampshade ring over that, and cut a plastic tube (leftover from this lamp project) down to size and placed it on top of the lampshade ring.

[The plastic tube isn’t shown in the above picture but you’ll be able to see it below.]

It took me a day of brainstorming and messing with different placements to finally figure that out.  You see, I didn’t want the lamp shade to be super long and I wanted it to fall just past the bottom of the chandelier.  So, figuring out where exactly it had to sit on the top threaded rod so that it fell where I wanted it to at the bottom of the chandelier took a little trial and error; putting it together a hundred ways to see which way worked.  I took this picture after it was painted but you can see a part of that process.  With the chandelier on the ground, I would place the ring somewhere between the wood pieces on the top threaded rod and measure where it sat from the bottom of the chandelier with a tape measure.  Eventually, like shown in the above picture, I got it right.

Next up was the fun part – paint!  Except it took me awhile to figure out that too.  Which color?!
I loved the idea of a charcoal gray but then I thought it might look bad in the same room as stainless steel appliances.  Like the stainless steel might make it look really cheap.  I also thought maybe a gray-blue like the background of our valances or citron to add a punch of color.  In the end though, I went with white to keep things simple and neutral and added some colored elastic to punch up the volume.

To prep for paint, I had to cover those sockets and the wiring.  I cut strips of computer paper to place over the sockets; rolled them up, slipped them over, and taped off the tops.

To cover the wiring that came out of the top of the chandelier, I slipped it through a long piece of plastic tubing I had (the same I cut down to use on the top of the chandelier), not worrying if I got paint on it.

I hung the chandelier on the kids swing set to paint it, swings removed.  It was the perfect place.

First, I gave it a coat of Rust-Oleum Clean Metal primer.

And then I sprayed three thin coats of Rust-Oleum satin white, waiting a good half hour between each coat to do the next.

Once the paint was dry (I painted it in the morning and let it hang all day to dry), it was time to put the finished lamp shade on and get it ready to be hung.

The chandelier didn’t have a ceiling canopy with it (that top bowl-like thing) so I bought this white one.  It came with gold screws that are visible when hung so I’ll probably paint those white when I get a quick chance.

Anthony removed the old florescent light while I was putting the kids down for naps.

I don’t have a tutorial for you on how to do that (but Young House Love does!) but I was happy to see that it was easy to turn off the breaker in our refurbished laundry room cabinet.

Going…

going…
gone.


The only unfortunate thing about having to use the existing light box for us is that it’s not centered in the room.  It was placed down the middle as you’re looking down into our galley kitchen, but it’s farther towards the laundry room than it is towards the dining room.  I wish it were in line with the stove and microwave or the kitchen sink but it’s not and I’ll get over it.  Maybe someday we’ll move it but today isn’t that day.  Maybe someday we’ll also rid ourselves of the popcorn ceiling too because talk about dating a house.  Someday.

Installing the new light was quick for my handy man albeit with a little bit of bodily maneuvering around and under that big shade.  :)  (Need a tutorial on how to install a light fixture?  Check out this video!)

I still have to touch up the paint around the light box but I do love the view from below.     

Then there are the light bulbs.  I have a love/hate relationship with light bulbs.
My favorite light is a neutral, bright white light but the only light bulbs you can find that coming from are florescent bulbs and expensive LEDs (not plain incandescents which would’ve been great).  I didn’t want ugly fluorescents since they’d be visible and LEDs would’ve cost more than we spent to make the new light so those were out too.  I also didn’t want the orange light that ‘soft white’ brings or the blue light that daylight bulbs emit.  I have, however, read good things about the white light GE Reveal bulbs cast so I thought we’d give those a try.  Anthony grabbed a few packs while he was out and…
 
…the bulbs are blue.  Hmph.  But the light isn’t the usual orange of incandescents so we’re living with them for now.

Another thing I’m still trying to work with are the sockets.
 
You can see in the picture above that they’re yellowing.  The old socket covers were brittle and one was missing.  I can’t seem to find new socket covers short or wide enough so I’m still working on a fix.  At first I was just going to wrap those things up with some paper strips but then paper + hot sockets = a fire hazard???  Not sure but I don’t really want to burn the house down in the name of aesthetics.  Stay tuned for that and let me know if you have any ideas.

I know, this post is gettin’ real long.  Let me just save the best for last with a jump back into kitchen time.  Here’s what our cooking nook looked like when we were its house viewers.


Then we became the house owners and we painted the cabinets for free with leftover paint.

And then nesting/sense/darkness got the best of us and we went all light and bright painting the cabinets again, making a fun geometric runner, replacing the old laminate countertops, installing a subway tile backsplash, installing the microwave and shelf combo, and now the new chandelier.
 
Much, much better than day one, right?  What’s even better is that we’ve only spent about $3520 getting from what was to what is and that’s including all of the new appliances we put in a few years ago.

I’m not going to say our kitchen is ‘finished’ because just last week we were talking about blowing out the wall separating it from the living room but for now, we’re focusing on other rooms…like the living room.  More on that later.  I promise I won’t keep it all to my shelf.  ;)

Have a good rest of this (rainy here) Monday!  I’ll leave the lights on for ya. 

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Open for a Surprise

 Opening up a cabinet to grab a can of diced tomatoes is the most exciting thing ever, isn't it?

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I know.  Feel free to laugh or wonder what the heck is in my water.

It's one of the things you can chalk up to monotony.  Well, for me, it still is monotonous, but it at least brings little tiny spark of happy with it because...

I wallpapered the backs of our cabinets!