They Painted the Front Door Blue....

When we moved from our first house to our new house we literally moved 10 houses down the street which means we literally drive by our 1st house at least twice a day. It's a stalkers paradise really....without even having to go out of our way we have been able to kind of keep an eye on the ol' house. Over the past 11 months we have noted small changes here and there to the yard, but nothing too drastic. That is until a few weeks ago when we drove by and the front door, our beautiful red front door had been painted blue. A light, airy pretty shade of blue. I wanted to hate it, I did. I mean, that was OUR front door that got so many compliments for it's red pop, but the blue, the blue looked good too. It's weird to think of someone making decisions for that house that actually enhance it's beauty but I guess that's how it goes, each owner adds their own touches over the years which only adds to the charm and history of the home.

With that being said I thought it might be fun to take one last walk down memory lane and look at the changes we made over the 2 years and 10 months that we owned that house.

*Disclaimer - Almost all of the Before photos are from the real estate website, so the quality is not very good.*

Dining Room Before:

Dining Room After:

Full story here. 

Kitchen Before:

Kitchen After:

Photographed by Galina Coada. 

Living Room Before:

Living Room After:

Full story here.

Master Bedroom Before:

Master Bedroom After:

Full story here. 

Sunroom Before:

Sunroom After:

Full story here. 

Deck Before:

Deck After:

Full story  here. 

Full story here. 

Bath Before:

Bath After:

Full story here. 

The blue front door feels like the end of an era. The house is different now, not different bad, just different. We don't naturally identify with the house as much now that it looks different than it did when we left it. And I think that's good, it's not our house any more and it's clear from the good decisions being made by the current owners the house is still loved and considered. 

Unless otherwise noted all photos are my own. 

100 + Year Old Mantle

My grandparents, who live in Atlanta have a 2nd home in Carnesville, GA a little town north east of Atlanta. They both grew up in Carnesville and each July my family spends a weekend there.  In 1985 they purchased their home, a beautiful house built in 1910. It is everything a country home should be...warm, inviting and just oozing with southern charm. This past July, my PapaJack was showing us some items in his garage when we came upon a mantle. It was hard to get a full glimpse of the mantle as it was partially covered with other furniture, but we could tell it was cool and it became even cooler when he told us it belonged to his mother. 

He said we could have it if we had a place for it. Brent and I talked it over and decided we thought it could be a really cool feature in our dining room. We have two fireplaces in our house, one in the living room and one in the dining room. 

Here is a shot of our dining fireplace situation:

While this fireplace is fine, it's no 100+ year old family heirloom so after confirming the dimensions would work we knew we wanted it! 

We headed up to Carnesville to pick her up and brought reinforcements with us in the form of Brent's mom Cindy and his brother Scott because PapaJack let us know this piece was REALLY heavy. He wasn't lying! At 85 1/2" tall,  57"wide and solid through and through, this mantle was a challenge to load, unload and maneuver into the house. 

Within the hour of getting the mantle into the dining room, Brent got out his tools and began removing the existing fireplace surround. 

We knew going into it there would be some modifications needed before the mantle could officially be set into place. But seeing the surround totally stripped down really got our wheels turing at the possibilities like the black marble....do we keep or change? We haven't decided...

As for the mantle itself we haven't quite nailed down what we are going to do with it finishing wise. 

If you look closely you will notice there are a lot of intricate details in the mantle, some of which have been damaged over the years, so we are definitely going to have to refinish and repair (where needed). Obviously we are not professionals in this arena, so we are going to do our research and plan to talk to professionals before attempting to do anything that would alter the integrity of the piece. 

We are so excited and honored to be entrusted with this family heirloom and we can not wait to watch this piece play an intricate part in bringing our entire dining room to life. 

All photos are my own. 

DIY TV Niche'

Sometimes you do big projects that take a lot of time, money and brain power. Other times you do simple things here and there that help bring a space to life. And then there are times you do something relatively small, that isn't the easiest, but is by no means the hardest and then you or in this case me, forget to ever even mention it to you guys. And with that, today I want to tell you about the niche Brent created on the side of our fireplace.

This little project was actually our very first DIY at the new house. In fact I believe it started the day we moved in. It may seem simple and hardly blog worthy, but take a look at what we had going on the day we got all moved in....

It was cord city over here! 

In our last house we put all of the TV "stuff" behind the fireplace which happened to be at the top of the stairs going down into our basement. However, as you can see we didn't have that option here. We had a fireplace on an exterior wall with flanking built-in cabinets that had GLASS DOORS. We knew something had to be done so Brent decided he was going to see if it was possible to create a niche on the side of the fireplace to store our goods. I'm not really sure how this project jumped to numero uno in the big scheme of our life at that time, but it did. 

Because it was literally moving day, family was in town helping us and before I knew it my brother-in-law Jimmy was hammering out a hole in my wall. 

Once they had a small hole Brent used his saw to cut out a bigger hole so they could take a look at what was going on behind the sheetrock. The hope was that there would be enough space behind the wall before the fireplace flew to insert a cabinet to hold all of our gear. Lucky for us...there was! 

Brent wasted no time pulling out the necessary tools and whipped us up a box to slide right into the space. 

Once he had the box in the hole he pulled all of the wires through and installed a new outlet to plug everything in to. 

Next we installed some shelves, painted everything the same color as the walls and loaded our little niche 's with all of the TV, video game and Internet gear. 

It's not glamorous or groundbreaking but it made a HUGE difference in this room. You literally would never even know this niche was there unless you were entering from the back patio. Having a TV over a fireplace is not always ideal, but having a TV over your fireplace with cords dangling every which way is just...........terrible, visually speaking. Lucky for us, this little issue was an easy DIY fix that really got this room off to a good start! 

All photos are my own.