Friday, November 11, 2016

Flex Space with Some Color


One of the most frustrating spaces in our house has been the 'flex space' right as you enter the front door. It kind of feels like a entry space, but it's supposed to be another living space for the house.


There are a lot of houses with this floor plan in the area, and I've been in A LOT of them. The consensus? Nobody really knows what to do with this space. A lot of people either make it an office or a sitting room, both of which I'm told don't get used much. 

So after months of using this space as a holding spot for all of our renovation things, we finally decided to try to make this space functional for us. We often need a lot of work space for CKandNateCreate to assemble and organized all our pulls and knobs. So, we got two large tables from Ikea and put them on either side of the room so we would both have ample space to work on things.


Since the house is still very beige heavy, I decided to play around with some brighter art in this space. I found the bigger pieces on Etsy and the blue and green pieces are paper that Nate brought back from Switzerland for me years ago. The rest are just colorful family photos.


One of my favorite little extra additions is this ball clock from Regency Shop. It adds the perfect extra pop of color. We are often up late working nights and so a clock nearby is essential, and this one is fierce. It looks really delicate, but it is actually really heavy and well made. I love how the modern design plays so well off the chandelier. Which, by the way, can you believe I found on Amazon??


We also don't have a built in coat closet in this house, so we have this Ikea unit in the corner to hold our coats and shoe surplus. It isn't the most ideal of situations, but it works for our purposes.


So far, this setup has been working really well. It definitely isn't what I envisioned initially for this room, but this is definitely the most functional use of the space for what we need now. Having it finished also brightens my day since I'm not immediately walking into a disaster area. 

If you like the clock from Regency Shop, you should also check out some of their other products. They carry all different styles from this mid century Ibiza Chair, to the traditional Chesterfield Sofa, to the super modern Egg Chair. Everything is on a huge sale right now too. So you can definitely find the style you are looking for.

I was gifted the clock to provide a honest review. All opinions are mine.

Monday, September 12, 2016

Playroom Reveal

Can you believe we've been in Phoenix for well over a year now? Probably not since I haven't posted in FOREVER. Life has been crazy busy and fun things like taking pictures of our projects have not made the list recently. Hopefully that will change... Regardless, we still are working on the house, and we will eventually share all the work we've done. It definitely won't be in real time though. If you want more real time pics, or more pics of the kids, you can follow along on Instagram. I do manage to get shorter little snippets on there on a regular basis.

We do have some completely finished rooms now (yay!). I most recently finished off the final touches of the playroom.


This is the loft space that is at the top of the stairs. Initially, this space was huge. In my opinion, it was awkwardly big, with odd placements of lights and windows.



From the beginning, we knew we were going to take the back half of the room and make it into Maisie's room. For the playroom's side of things, this involved a lot of planning for the wall since we wanted to have built-ins for all the toys for the kids. Once we had a plan, Nate built the wall fairly quickly which immediately changed the feel of the space.



If you're wondering about the carpet, we did build the wall over the carpet. I think we checked with the inspectors at least twice to make sure this was legit... which it was. The reason we did this was because we wanted to leave the carpet in Maisie's rooms so that all the bedrooms would have the same carpet, but we were planning on taking out the carpet in the playroom. There was this really awful tile that was mostly loose in the hall and so the plan was to replace all the flooring in the playroom through the hall. By building the wall over the carpet, we didn't have to figure out how to cut the carpet ahead of time. We could just cut it away on the playroom side.


We went with a bamboo floor from Floor and Decor for the open space upstairs. My dad and Nate installed the whole thing in a weekend.


And then came the cabinets. We went with the Besta System from Ikea. We managed to get them on sale by chance so they were a little more affordable for us. We've had really good experiences with Ikea's cabinets, but this was the first time using the Besta system. We really thought the quality was really superior to some of the cheaper bookshelves, so the price difference was definitely worth it.


 After a lot of putting things together, we had all the doors and drawers installed. You'll notice that you can see wood all around the unit. This is for installing trim so that the unit would be completely integrated into the wall.

 We put the furniture back in, and it stayed like this for quite some time. If you've been around this blog for awhile, you know we like to get things functional, and then tend to make very slow progress on the finishing touches. At least we're consistent... right?



Fast forward a few months, and I've finally gotten around to installing trim, caulking, touching up paint, hanging curtains, decorating, and deciding that the layout wasn't great.


We actually ended up going back to how we originally had the furniture arranged. Now that the space is smaller, it feels right, and it allows for the kids to have a space totally theirs behind the couch and to have more of a den feel in front of the couch.

Side note: We got a killer deal on the bronze pulls. Lowe's had these bins of pulls and knobs without screws for 50 cents apiece! We spent a few bucks on new screws and so we were able to do this whole unit for less than $15. We can't even come close to making pulls for that little (which is saying a lot since we literally have a business making pulls)



I love hanging out up here. It's way cozier than our downstairs living room and I love that Will plays in here all the time. He knows which drawers has his toys in them and so he can play pretty independently.



So that's the playroom! Are you a fan of cozier living spaces or do you love the huge open floor plans?

Sources: 
Cabinets, play rug, kids table and chairs, bookshelf under TV, Large wall art: Ikea.com
Blue and White Rug: Rugsusa.com
Couch: Macy's Furniture Store
Window treatments:Wayfair.com
Floor poufs: Target

Tuesday, July 5, 2016

Maisie's Room - All Done Up!



There are some times when I finish a room and there are things I'm so-so on. Then there are times when, even after awhile, I can't get over how much I love the space. That's how I feel about Maisie's nursery. It took a lot to (literally) build the room, which you can read about here, and once we finished our new master enough to move out of her room, I could finally get around to finishing it for her.


I picked up a Jenny Lind crib and changing table for a steal off of Craigslist. We did have to retrofit the crib so that it doesn't have a moveable side, which was fairly easy... just required some L brackets and drilling. We then sprayed both of them a soft mint green, which I love against the dark walls. 


The art in Maisie's room is a smattering of handmade items, pieces that were given to us, and items I've picked up over the years that pulled the accent colors of the room. I used the moulding that I installed to frame each piece.


The dresser is a piece we picked up in a consignment shop in Florida and the rug is a transplant from Will's playroom in the FL house. The curtains are from Ikea.

The big splurge in this room was the glider. I didn't have one with Will and it was on the top of my list of things I wanted this go around. It was totally worth every penny and it's by far my favorite seat in the house (which it kinda has to be since I sat in a crazy number of them to find this one). We got it at BuyBuyBaby and it's the "Blake" glider from Little Castle. It's not too squishy and it has angled arms so it's pretty awesome when feeding Maisie. I even sometimes hang out in here after Maisie goes down or have her play on the floor while I work in this chair just to spend a little more time in it.


So this is where we chill with Maisie now. I know dark walls aren't super nursery-esq, but I wanted an untraditional nursery for her and it actually works really well since this girl needs a DARK room to sleep. It's also girly without being super pink. My favorite part is still the trim work that I spent way too many hours on. What's your favorite part?

Wall Paint: Valspar Seattle Haze in Satin
Crib Paint: Valspar Pillow Mint in Satin

Monday, June 20, 2016

Awkward Laundry Room to Full Bath

We officially closed out our permit last week. All inspections have been done and we have minimal finishing work left to do. Last week also marked 1 year in the house... crazy!!

We generally have a few things left to do in a lot of rooms, but one space that is completely done is the new kids bath that we put in in this weird storage space in the front section of the laundry room ( the washer and dryer are behind the half wall). This area was completely useless to us and it was the perfect amount of space for a full bath. Adding a full bathroom to the house is not only good for resale, but it freed us up to create a second master bedroom with attached bath on the second floor (the original master is on the first floor... away from kids... which is not awesome with a newborn)


Since this is the kids bathroom, I wanted something easy to keep clean but also a little fun. It took awhile but now it looks like this!


Nate started by ripping out the shelving and opening things up so that he could run all the new plumbing and electrical.




He also framed out the rest of the half wall to close off the laundry room and put in a new door so that we could access the laundry room from the top of the stairs (which is so much better since it keeps the noise away from the bedrooms). We also framed out a wall so that we could add storage at the base of the tub.




We've gutted and redone bathrooms before, but this was the first time we created a bathroom where there previously was none. This meant the first time installing a tub and plumbing everything from scratch. We've learned that tubs aren't the most fun thing in the world to install and that it's useful to have some one with small hands around. The annoyance of the tub was slightly offset by the fact that we got it on a major clearance.


We bought an Ikea cabinet (It's one of the pantry cabinets from the kitchen department) and inserted it in the space we left at the end of the tub.



We did Hardy board and installed a membrane on top for around the tub. We didn't love this in terms of ease of install, but it's supposed to keep the tub area nice and dry.




We've been using Floor and Decor extensively in this reno and picked up the floor tile for under $3 a sqft. We love the clean and classic look and we paired it with the subway tile in the shower.


Dark grout is a bit more fun and a little easier to keep clean with the little guys. HOWEVER, it is a pain in the butt to clean up. If we were to use it again, we would be really keep an eye on the grout lines to make sure we clean up any extra grout because cleaning it up is really annoying once it's dry and since it's dark, it shows any imperfection.


We added some finishing touches and we had a working bathroom! We spent ~5k on the whole bathroom including all the framing, plumbing, wiring and HVAC. In our area, adding a bathroom increases the value of a house by 6k so we're up $1,000 just on appraisal alone (which only counts it's existence, not the finishes)





Sources:
Paint- Valspar Signature : Sea Salt Blue in Eggshell
Lowes - Vanity (similar), Faucet, Toilet, Light, Tub, Towel Bar, Hooks, Fan 
Target - Mirror, Buckets (dollar area)


Wednesday, May 4, 2016

Maisie's First Month

Maisie just turned 4 months old so it is way past time to document some little tidbits on her. I initially thought I was falling into the rut of not taking pictures of the second baby like the first, but then I tried to put 4 months of pics into one post... even taking just the ones I loved are not going to fit into one post so we'll go month by month.

Maisie (Margo Elizabeth) was born on December 28th, 2015 at 7:06 pm. She was 8 lbs 1 oz and was 20.5 inches long. My water broke with her right around her due date and she made her debut about 12 hrs later. This labor was so much better than with Will. I did get an epidural again, but I waited until the last minute to get one. I still got every possible side effect from the epidural (and still have back pain) so I don't know if it's really worth it in the end, but holding off definitely worked better this time around. Maisie was born very quickly (two pushes), which was a pretty big shock compared to last time around. It took a few minutes for it to sink in that she was here, but we were completely in love!







We spent two days in the hospital and the majority of the time was spent trying to figure Maisie out. She was cuddly and sweet and a total mama's girl. But... she basically spit up everything that was fed to her. We got into a routine of her screaming (and boy can she scream!) because she was hungry, feeding her, and then her spitting everything back up. It was frustrating and exhausting and something we were not even close to accustomed to (and a little scary). Initially, the spitting up was attributed to her being born so quickly that she still had fluid in her stomach so we were hopeful that it would be a temporary issue.

Will got to visit a couple of times a day and seeing the two of them together was the sweetest thing you could imagine. He took to her right away and tried to help with her paci and gave her kisses.




Going home



For the first month, Nate and I were set up in Maisie's room (due to all the construction on our new master) so Maisie and I spent a lot of time in there. She really only liked to sleep for more than a few minutes on me or right next to me (touching) so I did a lot of work for my residency (or watching Nurse Jackie) with her on me. The rest of the time was spent getting used to being a family of 4, trying to get some sleep, and finish the house so we could get into our own room!












Over the month we found out that the spitting up wasn't going away and learned the art of avoiding complete wardrobe changes. Maisie taught us that she is very verbal (coos, grunts, screams) and very alert. She also taught us that not all babies sleep everywhere and some need all the S's to sleep. She has a crazy sensitive startle reflex and is very dependent so there were a lot of baby snuggles and baby wearing (Ergo saved our lives).

Maisie rounded out the month at 9 lbs 6 oz (52%), 22.5 in long (96%), and 36 cm head circumference (30%). She has dark hair (which has mostly fallen out) and blue eyes (for now).

One Month