Basement Renovation - Stage Two

So, when I left off with my last post about our basement renovation, Chad and I had gotten all the paneling and wallpaper off the walls, repaired them and got them ready for paint, and moved the door to one of our basement closets!  (If you missed it, you read the details and see the pictures HERE).

The next part of the project is really where I came in.  Painting!

Oh Boy!  Taping, priming, painting... more taping, more priming, more painting... Wow, can I just say, I was SO done with paint by the time I finished the basement!  It felt great to get it entirely done and know that I (little ole me) had done it all by myself, but it was very time-consuming, very messy, and very tiring!  I had painted before, but not to this degree and not on my own! So this was a learning experience for sure. (On the positive side, I will say that during this time, I was in the process of trying to lose weight, and painting turned out to be a great fat-burning exercise regime!) 

Taping completed, time to start priming! 

 Look at these gorgeous primed white walls:

What an improvement just plain white walls can make! These walls were a blank canvas ready for the color of my choosing! :)

Along with the walls, the large bulkhead on the ceiling got a coat of primer.  This was by far the hardest and most difficult thing I had to paint.  It was made out of the same stained paneling that we pulled off the walls, and because of the stain and the treebark texture, I had to use kilz oil-based primer to cover it.  I don't know if you've used oil-based paint or primer before, but it's nothing like latex.  NOTHING.  It sticks. to. everything. EVERYTHING!  It was the biggest pain in my neck (literally, since I had to look straight up at the ceiling the whole time) of everything in this project.  When I finished it, it was all down hill from there!

Yes, this is me completely covered in oil-based primer.  No, I was not exaggerating.  Yes, I did find primer stuck in my hair up to 5 days after this despite ridiculous amounts of soap and scrubbing.

Anyway, you may have noticed that in some of the pictures above many of the ceiling tiles are missing.  This is because while I worked on painting, Chad was in the process of getting the florescent lights ready to be removed and replaced with the warmer and softer light of recessed potlights on a dimmer switch.  Chad did a lot of the work getting ready to put the potlights in himself, but we hired an electrician to run all the wiring, which turned out to be good because the homeowner before us had made a mess of the electrical and our electrician had to completely rerun everything to make it right.  Plus we wanted to add several extra outlets throughout the basement because, even in the little amount of time we spent in the basement, we always were running out of them.  And we also had him add a few light switches.  Again, we were so glad we made this investment.  He did all the work we had for him in just a few hours and we had peace of mind knowing that it was done properly.  Here are the new potlights after Chad got them all connected:

(And yes, that blue rectangle of painter's tape you see on the wall is marking the spot for a nice new big TV. Teehee :D New basement calls for new entertainment system!)

My next step was to narrow down paint color.  I collected about million paint chips from every store we went in that sold paint.  Chad always laughed when I couldn't walk past the paint displays without grabbing a few more paint chips that caught my eye.  I wanted something soft and calming, without being too neutral since the rest of our house is beige (which I like, but I wanted to throw a little color into this area).  I finally narrowed it down between 2 colors from Benjamin Moore.  Palladian Blue and Wedgewood Gray:

So we bought samples of both of these colors and I painted them on poster board and hung them up on the wall to try to figure out which one we liked best because we all know that colors can look really different from the paint chip to the wall. Here they are in 2 different areas of the basement:

Wedgewood Gray on the left, Palladian Blue on the right.

 

Wedgewood Gray above, Palladian Blue below, shown next to the stone in our basement.

We were fairly sure we liked the Palladian Blue better when we looked at the paint chips and when we saw other examples of it in pictures online, but when we actually got the two colors up in our basement with our lighting, the winner hands down was Wedgewood Gray.  Palladian Blue felt a little too bright and a little too green and a little too beachside.  It said to us "bathroom".  But we loved the dusty blue of the Wedgewood Gray and it looked pretty great with the stone and tile Chad had picked out! (We still love and plan to use Palladian Blue in the future... maybe in our next home!)


Okay, enough progress for one post! :) See how the wall color turned out in my next post (which you can now view by clicking HERE!!) and what we did with the trim! 

Basement Renovation - Stage One

Last March, after contemplating long and hard about whether we really wanted to do all the work or not, Chad & I decided to redo our basement.  We had been thinking about it and talking about it - trying to decide if it was worth it or not.  We'd spent basically the entire last year and a half working on our outdoor spaces (which I promise I will get around to writing about one day) and that had taken so much time and effort, we weren't sure we wanted to jump into something else right away.  But finally one evening, we just spontaneously started pulling off paneling.  And from then it, it was an official project.

It was dark, dingy, and outdated down there - horrible yellow stained wood paneling and textured fabric-like wallpaper! When Chad re-did the rest of the house, he went ahead and removed the thin carpeting that was glued right onto the concrete and traded it for tile so that it would be easier to wash it up when it got dirty from coming in from outside.  He also painted the doors a shade of white, and put up the stone that is behind the pellet stove and at the bottom of the stairs.  Other than those changes, though, it was the same basement the previous owner left behind. 

We never used that space for anything more than storage and a place to do laundry.  It's a good portion of the square footage of our house, and it was wasted.  Plus I was so excited to get to finally put my own touch in a major way on our house.  (Chad bought and remodeled the house before we were engaged, so I didn't get to be very involved in the process).

Here's how it looked when we started (though, since my camera corrects for poor lighting these pictures don't accurately show just how dark and dingy it really was):

So, after dealing with it for some time, the spontaneous removal of the paneling started one random evening after work (as is evident by the fact that we were already in our PJs!):

While Chad ripped off the baseboard and paneling, I pulled off the wallpaper.  (I should mention that both the paneling and the wallpaper came off, for the most part, extremely easily... much more easily that it should have.  The previous homeowner had not done a great job of putting either of them up, but that was great for us since it meant less effort to get it down.)

I finished the "demo" part of this project the next day, while Chad was a work, and then I worked on scraping the rest of the wallpaper off in the couple of places that it did want to stick to the wall.  Here's all that paneling and most of the wallpaper, finally off the walls (YAY!):

You can see where the paneling was removed, that the dry wall joints were never taped under it.  So Chad and I started to do this ourselves so that we could paint the walls.  We ended up getting some help with this from a professional because the walls were not smooth at all and there were so many places that needed patching. We were really glad we did! The contractor told us that most of the joints the homeowner had done before us hadn't been done properly and it took a lot of effort to get it finished smoothly.  We were really impressed with how nice and professional it looked when he was done.  And we felt that it was a good investment since we knew that due to our lack of experience, we could have never made it look even remotely as nice as he did because of the shape it had been in!

We also really wanted to move the door to the closet below to the other side of the wall because we knew that it would make the space much more usable that way.  So with some help from Chad's dad, we got it removed very carefully, so we could reuse the door jam and the door again in the new doorway.

And Chad worked on cutting out a spot for it on the other side of the wall.

Then Chad started framing for the door to go back up in its new place, and also framing in the wall where they took the door out so they could drywall it again, (again some help from his dad was so great!)

Here is the new and improved closet, with the door in the new place and the old doorway ready for drywall:

And then once the drywall got put up:

WOO! I was so excited to see these changes. It was already looking so much better!  And we accomplished all this in about 2 weeks!! But it was about to get a lot more intensive for me since I was the one who was going to do all the painting! For the sake of keeping this from being a massively long post, I'll do another one soon to show how painting transformed our basement (Which is now posted!! You can view it by clicking HERE)! :) Hope this encourages you to take on whatever project you've been eyeing up in your house! ;)

My 20 Favorite Free Winter & Christmas Fonts

During Christmastime there are always a lot of reasons to need some pretty Winterish fonts!  ...Christmas Cards, Gift Tags, Holiday Newsletters, etc... So, I thought I'd make a collection of some of my favorite fonts to use for Holiday projects.  Some of these are really versatile and I use them all year round and some of them are pretty unique to wintertime!

Here's where you can download these cool (pun!!) fonts:

1. KG Hard Candy Striped
2. Maratre
3. Mountains Of Christmas
4. Sandwich Paper
5. Unnamed Melody
6. Return To Sender
7. Janda Snickerdoodle Serif
8. Janda Stylish Script 
9. Herr Von Muellerhoff
10. Hultog Snowdrift
11. Shipped Goods
12. Xiomara
13. Foglighten No. 01
14. Janda Sparkle and Shine
15. Antrokas
16. Magnolia Light
17. DK Father Frost
18. Can't Write Quickly In Winter
19. AlwaysHere
20. Cursif

The fonts in this printout are Herr Von Muellerhoff & Sandwich Paper.

Also, check out my collections of handwriting fonts HERE and some script style fonts HERE! I really like to use these styles of fonts for holiday projects, too! :) Enjoy!

Apothecary Jar Winter Snow Scenes

Christmas decorating is now in full swing at the Frey home! Chad & I put up our tree on Thursday, a week BEFORE Thanksgiving, and I hung my garlands on the stair banister, along with some Christmas lights!  (not quite done with that, though, because I discovered that one of my light strands isn't working, and I need to go buy some more!).  And my wreaths are up.  I finally threw away the very dead mums on my front porch... There are still some pumpkins out there though, because Chad said, "Well, it still isn't Thanksgiving yet for another week...", so I had mercy on those and they can stay a little longer.  But for the most part, Fall decorations are coming down, and Winter is taking over.
 
And last night, we had the first snow flurries of the season, so everything, indoors & out, is really starting to feel like winter now!  I get very excited about all this, if you can't tell! :)

Yesterday, I also took a few minutes to change out the Apothecary jars I have sitting on my bathtub in our master bathroom.  I normally have these filled with bath bombs, sponges & other bath tools, soap flowers, and yes, Epsom salt!  I saw several months ago, on pinterest, some really cool projects that used Epsom salt to look like snow!  I thought this was such a cool idea, because it really is so sparkly and white, just like freshly fallen snow.  And I've definitely seen some apothecary "snow globe" decor ideas this year.  So I thought, I've already got Epson salt in this apothecary jar, why not add some trees and make it a pretty winter scene?? 

 

 

This was the simplest project ever.  I love the simplicity and calmness of the look.  Now there's just a little added feeling of serene winter in our bathroom!

All I needed for this project was Epsom salt, which was already in one of these Apothecary jars.  I just emptied the other two and spread the Epson salt out between all of them.  And I grabbed a few more of the bottle brush trees that I recently purchased at Lowe's, and to finish the project, I just arranged them in the "snow".  You can see my other Christmas in a Bottle Project that I made with them HERE.  And that is it!  Done. Simplest way to "winterize" a bathroom ever! ;)  They definitely bring a smile to my face every time I walk in there!

DIY Christmas in a Bottle Project

I had a very realistic dream last night that I woke up and noticed this soft sort of glow outside our bedroom window, and I knew right away what it meant.  I jumped out of bed and rushed over to push the blinds back and saw a thin layer of crisp white snow over everything.  It had just started to fall, only just covering the grass and laying so sparkly on all the trees... *Cue a nostalgic sigh.*

When my dreams become entirely about snow, I know that I'm in full blown Winter Mode.  I love winter.  I love snow and ice and being stuck inside.  I guess that's the introvert in me.  Christmas is my absolute favorite holiday.  Being in warm, cozy, soft sweaters is my Happy Place.  Especially if there is cuddling-with-my-husband, a good book, and/or a fire involved.  I love going to stores during winter and looking through all the new Christmas decor.  I'm as pale as a vampire and practically burst into flame when I go outside in the summer... I just wasn't built for it.  But during winter, I get a glow, and it has nothing to do with the sun.  And I'm excited that now the time has come again, and I finally get to start my Christmas/winter decorating for the season.  

I have yet to go all out and really decorate like I would love to because it would take quite a large budget to buy all the decor I've had my eyes on over the years.  This will be Chad & my 3rd Christmas together as husband and wife, and we've been slowly accumulating things each year!  I've also been trying to do some DIY projects for decorating to make this year the most decorative ever!  Which brings me to the reason for this post!  I wanted to share a cute little project that only took maybe an hour to make and I think turned out super cute!

The inspiration behind this project is snow globes, which I'm not so much into anymore, but I loved as a kid.  I still love those winter village scene collections, though, where you can buy all the individual houses and people and add to your scene each year! My mom used to do that with my sister and me each Christmas... Maybe one day I'll start a collection of my own.  I've seen similar things to this on Pinterest, especially with mason jars, but I couldn't find much of anything at all with wine bottles.

This was so easy to make and there aren't a ton of supplies involved.  Here's what you need:
-Clear glass wine bottle (emptied, "delabeled", and cleaned)
-The cork from the wine bottle
-White thread & needle
-Small pushpin
-Small bottle brush trees assortment of your choice
-Epsom salt
-Thin cardboard or card stock of your choice
-Sissors
-Some kind of long thin stick that you can use to stick down into the wine bottle for maneuvering the trees

I pull the labels off my wine bottles and clean them out usually as soon we're done with them, so this one was all ready for me to use.  Fill the bottle with as much Epsom salt as you'd like.  One suggestion I have with this is to go ahead and use a funnel or be sure to pour in the salt as carefully as possible.  If the salt touches the edges a lot, it can leave salt dust on the walls of the bottle that make it look cloudy and are next impossible to get off without emptying the bottle and cleaning it out with water again.

Next I selected my trees.  I recently got a big pack of these bottle brush trees from Lowes and I used 2 of the smallest size and 1 of the next size up (which was still pretty small).  Remember it has to fit through the mouth of your bottle.  The bigger one that I used was a tight fit.  The first thing that I had to do to make these trees work, was take them out of their bases.  This was a piece of cake because mine are just threaded in there like a screw and secured only with a small amount of glue.  It was easy to unscrew them and pull them out with just a small amount of force.  And I think once I'm done with these, I could always screw them back into the base again and they'd work just fine!

I inserted the large one first.  I sort of scrunched up the fat part of the tree to make it a little narrower and then I just pushed it down into the bottle.  It doesn't matter that much how it lands, as it's not too difficult, with some patience and maneuvering, to get the tree into the position you want it to stay.  After all the trees you want to use are inserted, take a stick, or something long and thin, and use it to push the trees into place.  I just used a stick I picked up outside and also a wooden BBQ skewer. Again, it actually wasn't as hard for me to place the trees as I thought it was going to be, but it did take some patience and some time.  Once your trees are how you want them, the hardest part is over.  Really, you could just leave it like this if you wanted.

I wanted to add a star, though.  For this, I simply cut a star out of a thin piece of scrap cardboard I had laying around.  You could also use cardstock if you prefer.  To hang it, I threaded a needle with some white thread and pulled it through the tip of the star.  I tied one end off so it would stay attached to the star.  Meanwhile, I pushed a short pushpin up into the bottom of the cork.  Then I simply hung the star to the length I wanted it to be hanging down into the bottle and tied the other end of the thread around the pushpin in the cork.  All that's left then is to insert the cork back into the bottle, and there you go.  A gorgeous Christmas scene!

This could be a really fun project to do with older kids (it may be a little to difficult for younger ones).  Or you could be like me, and just make it to enjoy a pretty scene on your kitchen counter!  I think this could be a super fun decoration to have at a Christmas party.  It would be especially cute sitting with the other wines you might be serving!

I'm sure there will be many more Christmas projects for me in the next few weeks to come! :)

See how I dressed up the other wine bottles in this picture above HERE.

Happy Winter!! :)