Updated on October 14, 2013
Think Outside the Floor Plan
See more: Dining in the Living Room
Do you ever have those nights when your body somehow forgets it’s supposed to sleep? Ya? That’s exactly the kind of night I’m having right now.. It’s 4:22am and I’m sitting wide-eyed with about two hours of sleep under my belt. I finally gave in to the sleepless night and decided to be a little productive.. I’m doing my best to type quietly as not to wake up hubs aka sleeping beauty right now..
Anyway.. Josh and I moved into a house with an extremely standard floor plan. In fact, my nana and pa’s house is set up about the same as ours, and we know at least five more people with very similar layouts. We moved in having the house set up as originally intended with a family room, kitchen/nook, dining room, and living room on the main floor.
That’s our ‘before’ layout complete with ‘before’ flooring in each room (yes our house came with yellow floors in the kitchen). We had the house set up as-is for about six months when I got to thinking that we just don’t use our living room space. We had a couch in there, an awesome built in bookshelf with a bench, and our piano, but it served no real purpose for us. The thought somehow popped into my head that perhaps we could use the living room as a dining room since the room is much more spacious and then we could use the designated dining room space as that main floor office we were hoping to have. So I ran it by J and some other family members and everyone thought it sounded like a great idea! The only concern is that the dining room would no longer be right off the kitchen, but we finally decided what’s a few more steps going to hurt!? We made things official by buying a new dining room table and chairs and fell in love with our new dining room the day everything was delivered. Shortly after we even had family over for dinner to try out the new setup. It was family approved and those few extra steps seemed like nothing. So here’s how things are looking now (unfortunately we still have those yellow floors) :
I can’t wait to share more about the dining room and office transformation, but for now all you’re getting is the floor plan (hint: if you really want to see pictures of the dining room now you can click Our Nest here or in the header above)! And just for fun here’s an ‘after’ floor plan complete with the flooring we envision throughout the house and the new kitchen we are dreaming of:
Oh ya, and thank you to my main man for creating these awesome floor plans for me… xoxo
Updated on October 14, 2013
Sometimes Free Isn’t Always Fun
If you know me well, you know I’m a sucker for good deals and even more of a sucker for free things. Can anyone else relate!? I often hear about my frugal ways from Josh but I think I’ve rubbed off on him more than he realizes. Just recently he came home from Target but didn’t buy what he went for because, “It wasn’t on sale..” That secretly melted my heart.. That’s how crazy I am about good deals people. Needless to say, all of our house improvements have been done on the cheap, in fact, this specific project was FREE! But all we were left with after this FREE project was a pink front door… Yep.. a pink front door.
I’ve always dreamed of having a red front door for some reason. When I found out Glidden was giving away free quarts of paint, I signed up for what I thought was a deep red hue and had Josh do the same so that we would have two quarts of paint specifically for our front door. Shortly after moving in, Josh decided on a nice fall afternoon to sand our ghostly white door down and slap on the new paint color. I started getting worried after the first coat and kept telling myself it would dry darker and after the second coat it would for sure look like it did in my dreams. But we knew after just one coat that it wasn’t even worth it to keep going.. not only was the color awful but the paint did not take well to our door.
J & I couldn’t even stand to keep the door that color over night so we immediately went to Sherwin Williams and bought a new color.. I guess free wasn’t so free after all! Even from the first coat we could tell that this color was a MUCH better choice.
Alas my nightmare door turned into a dream come true and I had my deep red door. Just in time for fall…
