Old House Tour!

Here we go folks, I am back from the break. We moved, ourselves, as greenly as we could. We borrowed crates & dumpster-dived boxes, and used free baskets & paper bags & packed it all up and moved it across town and then promptly left town to visit Tex’s family & came back and we are now, a month later, kind of unpacked. But I missed writing so I am taking a break to post photos I took before I packed everything in the base house; to give you the full tour. If I had stayed in the house, it would have transformed even more over time. But, we have our nice little craftsman cottage to charm up, and the mid-90s base house is someone else’s problem.

      It had potential… If we had stayed, my plants (hidden here in this hasty photo) would have grown, flowering behind the massive shrub and I would have hung a wreath.

Starting the tour inside on the second level (first was all garage and mancave/closet), we will begin in the living room/dining room combo. Using this horrid photograph of both the family room and dining room from our first night in the house, you can see the large rectangular space I was working with:

This was taken from the balcony doorway.

Here’s how the living room ended up, though I was plotting another loveseat, or an armchair or another side table, and a rug and curtains, if only time had allowed.

Without a before picture for reference, here is the family room.

I also wanted to create some large art to hang behind the sofa, and pinned several good inspiration pieces. The dining room also needed many certain somethings, though it sufficed for the time.
The balcony was the first post on this blog, full of thrifted and salvaged things that I rehabbed into shape, but now I am scrapping it and including the it here on this ‘tour’ post instead! First was the after photo once I first started improving the balcony, and following are two photos showing the balcony a day before I packed it up.

Left half.

Right half.

Then of course there was the kitchen, another spot that needed DIY imagination, time, and dedication.

I was happy about the light from the window, but the dark and plain cabinets left a lot to compensate for.

This piece I found and could not leave behind in an antique store in King George, VA and it served me well in the kitchen.

The art came from my mother-in-law; it is made of photos taken of signage in the Austin, TX area! How sweet!

Third Level:

     The guest room upstairs never really got much thought in our 6 month stay, except when I tried to make it as nice as possible for our few house guests.

The photo above shows the simple original space. I had very little proper furniture leftover, only really a bed, and that’s pretty much all that we stuck in there, besides all Tex’s uniforms and all my craft stuff. Also an awesome antique schoolroom map that my cousin O gave me that I hung on the wall opposite the gold frames.

The master bathroom never got too much improved either, although there was not much that could have been done since we were ‘renters’.

Before

After.

Master bedroom before our household goods arrived.

Taken from the corner the bed is in the first photo.

We went with the clean and simple IKEA dresser, which can be customized soooo many different ways.

Partially stained, partially assembled

Two coats of honey maple on the pine, and cream colored drawer pulls finish the piece off. On the dresser sit two wedding gifts, and my grandmother’s jewelry box, along with some random effects.

I came across the curtain panels at a low Goodwill price, (& at the same time they were on shelves at Target!!) so I scooped them up and saved a few pennies there. The mirror came from a consignment furniture shop, and the rest of the room I “wallpapered” with my collection. Several pieces of which are my own works.

I made the jewelry board leaning on the shelf, and may make another in order to do a post on it.

On one side of the bed sits my nightstand, which underwent some serious modification. It began its life at Target looking like this:
I took one look at it, grabbed my gold Krylon, and bought a nice piece of solid cherry from a specialty wood store. I tossed out the teal fiberboard top and gave the wire spindles two coats of gold spraypaint. As for the wood, my dad and I cut it, planed it, measured it, sanded it, and glued together an octagonal top. We sealed it with tung oil and it has a nice warm finish.

This is a close-up of the new look, but the nightstand is now on my side of the bed. The tie-backs were once part of lace curtains, cut up in the name of crafts. These pieces were the doubled up tube where the curtain rod would have gone through.

This is the serendipitous nightstand which I stumbled upon in a Target catalog, which I went to four different Targets to find, and which miraculously was 50% OFF when I finally found it!!! Amsterdam & Vienna art above.

Close up!

I spy with my little eye, a calico cat, seen here just leaving the scene after terrorizing Murray the plant.

My side of the bed

Past correspondence (old postcards)

On the wall opposite the bed- where one day I envision a chair and standing lamp- I have temporarily ‘installed’ a makeshift shelf from crates I stained & stacked, to keep Murray the plant company. Also, to hold my recent & rapidly growing globe collection. (Tex was away at a week-long school…when he came home I had two new toys)!

The canvas print was a sale find, and the other two are mine. A church I saw in Bratislava, and a collection of coins from pre-Eurozone Europe in a shadow box.