I keep forgetting to formally introduce you to our new house.
She's warm, inviting and even has a sense of humour ... by way of wallpaper. But I'll get to that.
Our main level is exactly what we wanted: three bedrooms, a spacious bathroom, linen closet, broom closet, coat closet, open-concept living and dining areas, and an eat in kitchen with a pantry. Believe it or not, for a girl with a whole lot of cookbooks and gadgets, I actually have empty cabinets in my kitchen. Once things are just the way I want them, I'll give you a full-meal-deal tour. Until then, on to the renos.
So, when we moved in on December 9, we decided to only live on the main level in order to tackle some of the aspects we weren't so in love with in the finished basement.
The lower level of our back-split home featured floral wallpaper, country-scene border, dark, forest green trim and dark brown carpet. It's split into the following areas: play room, living room, laundry room, foyer and half bath. The remaining side of the basement, which is closed off by a door, houses our workshop, and the furnace and wood room.
There's nothing inviting about that (except for the amazing wood stove and brick surround, which you can't see in this picture anyway, so you are getting an accurate depiction of why I had. to. change. it. yesterday.)
Step 1: Peel the wallpaper. After living only 12 hours in our house, I decided to take the plunge and just grabbed a corner of the paper and start ripping. To my surprise, it came off with relative ease.
Hidden behind the smaller floral design was a layer of whoa-70s-inspired poppies. And honestly, if a wall of this paper had remained intact, I probably would've kept it. Sadly though, it all was ripped in the process, so was inevitably removed.
If you've ever peeled wallpaper before, you know that it isn't an easy feat that the best of times. The second layer was less than a picnic, but with generous assistance from friends and family, and a whole lot of elbow grease, we de-wallpapered, crack-filled, sanded, crack-filled some more, sanded some more, and finally* got to a place where we could re-paint.
Oh, and you may have noticed, we ripped up that terrible-awful-no-good-very-bad carpet, too.
A rare photo of Husband and his twin bro in matching T-shirts.
Picking colours was tough, but now that the walls are completed, I couldn't be happier with our choices. The walls in the play room, family room and foyer area are CIL's light taupe.
I wanted to do something different in the laundry area, and with inspiration from
John and Sherry's grellow (green + yellow), I chose CIL's spring thaw.
It's a work in progress -- more after photos to come!
*Take the word finally with a grain of salt, of course, because we painted less than two weeks after moving day.
