Tuesday, October 22, 2019

Transformation Tuesday: Furniture Edition

So we've been "moved in" for a few weeks now, and things are going really well! We're got probably about 70% of our stuff moved in and piles and piles of stuff to donate/throw away (we're filling our trash can every week lol).
The horses are fine. Bored, but fine 😅
Something new for us in this process has been restoring some antique (and some modern but beat up) furniture. Quite a few aspects of the house were designed around some antique furniture I inherited (although we won't talk about my despair over the still ruined buffet, that I still haven't found some one to restore it yet). Thankfully, most of our other projects have gone much better! I didn't really take adequate "before" photos but DAMN did they get much better in the afters!

This was a dining room table that came from my great-great aunt. The top was pretty beat up, although the legs just needed some polish and old English. 

Plz ignore the train wreck that is my tack shed - all the construction moving of supplies has me ITCHING to do a reorg this winter with all my new space and leftover construction materials lol. But the photo was intended to show the desk/vanity. 

We picked this up off the side of a local gravel road a few years ago - DH saw some potential. It had free spray painted on it 🤦

This was actually a pew DH refinished a few years ago, rescued from the old church on our property. I used it as a ladder to reach my upper rack of bridles (bad me) and it needed some TLC to be glued back together.

Looks great in the guest bedroom though!

Detail on the dining room table leg.

We winged it on the stain color from Walmart (not a ton of selection lol) and it ended up being basically a PERFECT match!


Top is the new stain, side is original finish.

Sanding down the desk


First coat of stain on the top, and then we just stained over the original finish (which apparently you can do with this product 🤷‍♀️ #winning)

I really love the inlay detail on the drawers

The handles at one point were brass, but were SUPER tarnished

I had a can of gold Rust-Oleum, so I went ahead and gave 'em the old razzle dazzle 😂

These chairs were also in my tack shed being stored -- thankfully they ended up still being in pretty decent shape (we originally thought we might need to reupholster them) so some polish and old English and they were good to go!



Plz ignore the diaster behind it 🤦



After it's second and final coat of stain


Those handles really pop!

Made that to show a friend the progress!



I have zero before pictures of this, but it was a spectacularly beat up boring old end table that I planned to put out on the curb. 

Instead, DH spray painted (I know, I was horrified) the bottom half black (we already had the spray paint), sanded down the top and stained it with leftover trim/door stain from the house, and naturally I had to make the handle gold too lol.

It actually turned out... Not terrible? I needed a nightstand anyway and we used what we already had, so the investment is like...30 minutes of work haha.

We ended up rearranging the bedroom to feature this between the windows. I'm so tickled with it!

Had to do some decorating and also buy stuff to protect the freshly refinished top 😁

We also hung some artwork this weekend - I'll need a chair or something for it, and probably a mirror, but I'm pretty happy with the results of our roadside trash and a $13 can of stain, lol.
Still some more stuff to move over but it really is looking like a home now 🤗

And hopefully that means soon I can get back to... Ya know.... Riding 😂 thanks for putting up with all my non-horsey posts for the last 6 months!

Wednesday, October 9, 2019

WW: Moved In!

Let's see -- where did I leave off? I think we were finishing up plumbing, waiting for the septic to get hooked up, and trying to figure out a temp fence for the dogs.

DH ended up taking a Fri-Mon-Tues off work at the end of September to knock out most of the plumbing and help supervise the septic hookup

We also made a trip to Menards in his car (ill-advised lol) and crammed it full of closet stuff.

Teeny dog was "helping"


I put together a bedframe from Amazon and was pleasantly surprised at the quality - we furnished our entire guest room from Amazon for under $500 😂



Functional water!

This doesn't look like much but it was the LAST TWO pieces of trim I had to stain.

Water heater and softener


Those little trim pieces worked SO well and make the backsplash look so finished, I love them.

The last door to stain - I actively avoided it so long that DH took pity on me and stained it himself. I had done the previous 8 and my back was MAJORLY ANGRY at me.

This divided laundry hamper has been life changing #adultingsohard
Closet day




So even though I measured the closet like 61518472 times, spacially what I wanted just wasn't working. So we rearranged about 6 times and came up with a far better use of the functional space!



coat closet shelf and hanging bar

Yay giant hole in my back yard!


More closet stuff

Bathroom looking slightly more finished

Tragedy - we built a climate controlled shed to house several antique pieces of furniture I planned to have in the house.....annnnnnd apparently at some point in the last year or two it started leaking. Still looking into whether or not this is worth repairing 😭😭

The water also necessitated opening this china and washing it all - this box hadn't been unpacked since 1970 when it was packed at the factory


He got a FB shout-out for this one but he deserves another - marry a man who will uncomplainingly sit for hours with you hand washing close to 200 pieces of china

At least the hutch survived mostly intact!

Last week one of our "splurge" items arrived - a brand new really high quality bedroom set and split king temper pedic mattresses 😍😍😍



Replacement appliances arrived intact!
(Fun fact, they were delivered by the guy who had picked up the broken ones, and he caught me on a super bad day trying to deal with things alone and everything had gone wrong, so when he showed up I was sobbing my eyes out in the back of the truck wrestling with the gooseneck hitch. He didn't bat an eyelash at my incoherent babbling and had the appliances loaded up lickety split. When DH was on the phone with him making arrangements for the second delivery, the guy was like "oh, you're the one with the wife" 😂😂 so apparently I made quite an impression, poor guy. Bless him. 



My back was super out basically all of last week so luckily the neighbor was able to help DH with the appliance install so I moved shoes

Boots and boat shoes are pretty much all the shoes I need, right? 



It still needs to be leveled, badly 🙈


I went with a memory foam mattress in a box for the spare and the card that came with it was hysterical

It didn't look like much to start but it did puff up substantially overnight and I'm gonna have to agree with the 29k good reviews - I was super impressed with it and although I'm not sleeping on it, it does seem comfy. I need a blogger to come visit for the weekend to test it 😉

Hanging the guest room closet system


Last Friday all the sheets and comforters and whatnot came in (I didn't have any king size stuff)

Guest room bed out together 

Friday DH hustled his ass off and built a dog yard while I moved enough stuff in to officially start living there!

The dogs were a little weirded out at first but they adapted well
Sunrise the first morning in our house 🥰
 (well technically we slept there the night the septic was first operational but the dogs were so wound up they didn't let us sleep so I said we weren't trying that again on a work night 😴😂)


We had to buy all new living room furniture too and before we had it, they were pretty peeved about the lack of a couch to sleep on!

While we were furniture shopping last weekend my mom came over and finished the grout


DH also bought an absurdly large TV 



Some fun closet features include a sliding tie rack (for him) and a sliding belt rack (one for each of us)


We hung the guest bedroom doors last weekend, so now aside from curtains it's pretty much done!

We also hung the master bathroom mirrors last weekend (hard to get ready for work if you can't see yourself!)



Curtains!




Adventure unicorn Francois moved in this week too! (The dogs were really too interested in him so I put him somewhere safe 😂)


We still have a few more odds and ends to finish up (towel bar in the master bathroom, mirror on the guest bathroom, curtains, gutters, etc), but for the most part we're DONE. Now we begin the even less fun process of moving the rest of our stuff over and getting rid of what doesn't make the cut (basically all our old furniture, half my clothes, etc, lol). 

170 days from breaking ground to moving in...... Can I go ride my horse now? 😁😁😁