Nursery Closet Redo

After we painted the nursery aqua, my dad went to work on the closet. As you can see in the before photo, this closet is very narrow and having the hanging bar (or bars) at the back waste a lot of space.

My dad has put in a lot of closet shelving before (like some storage shelves he and Eric did at our last home - this has more detail about the shelving) and I really like the way the shelves don't use brackets which also get in the way and waste space. The shelves were already painted wood from Lowes and the wood pieces that brace the shelves were painted white by my dad to match. The shelves are about 15 inches apart.

The four shelves allow for so much storage and easy access. Plus there is space below the shelves to store things too. The rods on the very narrow wall on the right are able to accommodate baby and kids hangers with enough room but it would be a little too narrow for adult size hangers. They are 1 1/2 inch wood left natural and about 38 inches high (bottom rod) and 67 inches high (top rod). We could have painted these white too but that would have been more work and I think they look fine natural.

This layout definitely makes the best use of the narrow closet space when needed for hanging clothes and storing items. Definitely an awesome upgrade from wire shelves and rod! Thanks dad!

Shades of Gray Paint: Medium Gray

I'm back with another dining room update! You can see the chandelier we installed and the old sideboard we purchased. I decided I wanted to keep with the gray palette of the family room/kitchen and foyer which are all very open and close to the dining room but I wanted a medium shade of gray instead of a light gray. Since the dining room is so open, has lots of white molding and we don't spend time in there every day, I knew it could handle a darker color.

Here is the before with builder beige and the after with Sherwin Williams Gray Matters.

Now, here is how we arrived at the lovely Gray Matters paint color. As I explained in Shades of Gray Paint for light gray, before painting any room we get a ton of paint chips and tape them up on the wall. We look at them in various lights/times of day etc. You don't want your paint color to only look great in natural light.

You also want your paint color to go well with other paint colors nearby so I included that paint chip among the ones I was deciding on (it is the X in the photo below). Of course paint on the wall will look different (sometimes slightly different and sometimes very different) from paint chips. So we select several we that we like (usually 3-5) and get paint samples and paint those on the wall and look at them in different lights/times of day again. We chose Gray Matters, Classic French Gray (which was my favorite on the chip), Cityscape (one shade darker than Gray Matters) and Gray Shingle. They are all numbered below and you can click on the photo to make it larger.

After seeing a few photos on Pinterest, I wanted to also paint the inside rectangles of the coffered ceiling so we tested the colors out there too. Eric w as hesitant about this look so we agreed during painting we would just paint 1 out of the 4 rectangles to ensure we liked it before painting the rest.

We pretty quickly ruled out 2 and 3 for being too dark so then it was down to 1 and 4. Gray Shingle (4) seemed to have a purple or brown undertones depending on the lighting. Since Front Porch, our light gray, was a true gray we liked the idea of more of a true medium gray too so Gray Matters seemed to fit that perfectly and looked great with Front Porch in the adjoining areas as far as we could tell.

So we spent a Saturday painting! We used Gray Matters in flat no-VOC paint. We left the bottom part of the wall under the chair-rail with the picture frame trim all white. We liked the way the painted coffered ceiling looked so we did all 4 rectangles.

There are still a few places to touch-up but other than that we really love the newly painted dining room. Gray Matters was the perfect medium gray paint color for this room.

Here where you see Sherwin Williams Gray Matters in the Dining Room you can also see Sherwin Williams Front Porch in the foyer and how well they flow.

Hooray another builder beige room bites the dust! Anyone else been working on painting projects?

Linking up with: Power of Paint, Tip Junkie, Inspire Me Monday

Dining Room Progress: Wine bottle chandelier

I have big plans for this dining room.... a rustic chic style. The first step towards that was a new light fixture. I had my sights set on a glass bottle chandelier after seeing one on HGTV's The High Low Project but let me tell you it was not easy finding one that was affordable but after much searching I spotted one on Amazon for what I considered a reasonable price for a statement piece. You can see it is about a third of the price of the Anthropologie soda bottle chandelier. It has silver colored metal instead of oil rubbed bronze/copper metal like its more expensive counterparts and doesn't have the glass ball at the bottom but that was okay with me. I just can't justify spending thousands of dollars on a light fixture.

Below is the before/after photo from The High Low Project starting my quest for a glass bottle chandelier.

 Once the chandelier arrived from Amazon in a very beaten up box we discovered that 3 of the wine bottles were broken. Thank you UPS. So we submitted the issue and were sent a replacement and they paid for us to ship the broken one back of course. We then took down our current chandelier and put together the new chandelier minus putting the glass bottles on it. Once we had it hung how we wanted it (we didn't need all the chain it came with) and confirmed the fixture box was secured to a stud (thank goodness for all the construction photos we took), we added the 40 wine bottles feeling confident it wouldn't come crashing down. Note that these wine bottles are a tad smaller than a normal wine bottle although if you had a way to make your own frame and use regular wine bottles that would be a great DIY option.

It has been up for about two months now and we love it. We did have a bit of trial and error with the lightbulbs as the online description said one type of bulb (which did not work) and then a sticker on the metal where the lightbulb is screwed in said a different type of bulb (which ended up working). At the beginning of this year Eric and my dad installed a dimmer switch in the dining room and in our kitchen for the recessed lights. I wish I had dimmer switches in almost every room, they are fabulous! Our dining room gets a lot of natural light during the day so if we were using it then I would want the light to be on low.

I plan to sell our practically new chandelier that came in the dining room when the house was built which retails at over $400. If anyone local is interested in getting a great deal on a really nice brushed nickel 9 light fixture, let me know.

Next up for this room is a sideboard (recently purchased - post coming soon), new paint... thinking a medium gray, and eventually a farmhouse table and different chairs. Oh and maybe some curtains and/or a rug... not sure about that yet though. I really can't wait to get rid of the builder beige in there though!

Shades of Gray Paint

Gray paint is all the rage so of course I wanted it to be the neutral in our new home. Plus we did beige in our last home so it was time for something different even though this new house was builder beige everywhere. I like to go with a neutral in big open areas like family room/kitchen so I can do bold pops of color for accents but then later I can always change up the accent colors.

We had 3 days to decide the paint color we were going to use since we hired someone to paint the entryway, family room, kitchen and stairwell. Why didn't we DIY it like we usually do? Well we wanted to get it done before the movers moved our stuff in (we just didn't have that kind of time) since these were going to be the most lived in areas and it would be a pain to move furniture later AND we would have had to hire someone to do the stairwell anyway since it was too tall to adequately reach on a ladder (sounds like an accident waiting to happen). So hence the 3 days...

We started off with 41 shades of gray on paint chips. YES 41 shades. That probably sounds like overkill but there are a ton of gray paint shades out there... and we were just using mainly Sherwin Williams and also some Benjamin Moore. And these were just the light gray shades. I had already weeded through the paint chips and didn't even number anything on the too white side or the too dark side to bring us to a big whopping 41.

We taped them all up on a main wall in our family room on a Friday afternoon. Ones that we didn't like came down and the rest were then taped up on a wall in the stairwell to repeat the process looking at them on a different wall.

See gray is a hard color. Much harder than beige in my opinion. It can have undertones of blue, purple, green, or beige. I really wanted a true light gray so no undertones. And Eric wanted whatever I wanted :)  Of course paint will also look completely different under different light or during different times of day.

So we left and came back that night because you want to like your wall color at night too when there is no natural light right? Again we looked at colors on different wall and narrowed it down some more. 

We did the same thing the next morning and had it narrowed down to about 10 shades. Then we picked our favorite 5 and bought the samples. I really loved two of the shades, SW Passive and SW Gray Screen and I was sure one of those was going to be the winner. All 5 were Sherwin Williams colors. We mostly had SW since our painter said that is the brand he highly recommended and they can do it in the No VOC option. We had used SW paint in our first house for a few things and really liked it.

At the house we painted the 5 samples on 3 different walls - family room, stairwell and kitchen and let it fully dry before judging. Of course paint on the walls will look different than paint on the paint chips but gray proved to be even trickier than colors we worked with before. The two colors I was so sure of I didn't really love. Passive had a greenish bluish undertone and Gray Screen definitely had a blue undertone. Knitting Needles and Light French Gray were too dark for what I was hoping for. On The Rocks seemed to be the best of the 5 choices.

But I wasn't loving the way On The Rocks looked on the kitchen wall. It seemed too white there and I didn't want it to just blend in with the cabinets. We came back different time of day that Saturday to look at them too.

I told Eric I really wanted a gray that I just loved and that I saw on the wall and I knew that it was it and I just wasn't feeling that. He thought I was a little nuts for needing to fall in love with a shade of gray. So Sunday morning after more staring and discussing, I convinced begged Eric to allow us to pick two more samples. We chose Tinsmith and Front Porch, both SW.

And low and behold I loved Front Porch! It was the one! On all the walls and during different times of day. Super glad went for two more and didn't just settle. Eric was super glad he wasn't going to have to put up any more samples.

The painters came a couple days later and did in a few hours what would have taken us an entire weekend plus extra time for hiring someone for the stairwell. Well worth it in our situation, although not to worry I'm sure we will be DIY painting most of the rest of the house.

These gray paint shades could look completely different in your home but we were really happy with Sherwin Williams Front Porch and highly recommend it for a great light gray shade with no undertones. They recommended a flat sheen as it is the least glossy and hides wall imperfections the best and cleanable (for dirt marks or fingerprints, just not scrubbable for bigger messes) contrary to what I thought. With flat paint most of the time you only need one good coat instead of two with other sheens. The painters also said it is what they use in over 75% of houses they paint, which I found surprising.I think in our first house we used eggshell or satin because we didn't know any better. Now we will continue using flat paint in almost all our rooms.

Good luck in picking out your perfect shade of gray, I'm glad I found mine!

Would love for you to follow along!

House Tour

The house tour I promised is here! The post you have been up all day and night waiting for! I took these pictures right after we closed but before we moved anything in. Well to be honest we had already moved a few things into some of the closets and storage space. I wanted to share the new house with you and have a set of "before" pictures to compare to as we decorate, paint, etc.

It might be helpful to first read The House List and the Floor Plan if you haven't already. The floor plan post will definitely help you orient yourself for this post. Fair warning that there are going to be a lot of pictures :)

The front - grass is doing alright so far thanks to tons of rain and a mild summer. I actually took this picture recently since it showed the blinds Eric put up a couple weeks after we closed.

One thing I'm pumped about is all the big rocks. These were found on our lot when they did the foundation and there are still some in the woods out back and around in the pine straw areas. I had them make me us a nice grouping of rocks near one of the front trees. I call these my picture rocks since I think they will be great for future family pictures.

Entrance hallway - first one was from one of the walk-throughs hence all the blue tape (there are a few pics throughout that I guess I forgot to take again after we closed so they also have blue tape in them whoops) and the second one is from after closing but looking back at the front door

Dining room (to the left of the front door)

Downstairs bedroom (to the right of the front door)

Downstairs hallway bathroom

Family Room

Kitchen

Family Room and Kitchen together since really it's one big open area. This is what sold me on this house and floor plan. I love the big open space and all the counter top space and luckily this is really where we spend a ton of time!

Breakfast Area and a peak at the back porch

Master Bedroom

Master Bathroom

"Mudroom" area

Laundry Room

Stairs

Loft

Eric's office. It's gonna get code crazy up in here.

Bedroom

Hall Bathroom

Guest Bedroom

Guest Bathroom - tub/shower is to the left of the toilet but not in the photo

Game Room

 

Back down the stairs

Back Porch

So there ya have it... that's the basic tour. I know I didn't include the yard so I'll have to save that for another post perhaps whenever we decide to do something new to the yard. Right now it's just grass, pine straw and builder grade small bushes. Oh and the lovely trees that were already there! Love love love looking out at lots of trees in our yard.

The next house post will be about how we picked a paint color for the main living area (lemme tell ya it was no simple task) and updated pictures with the new paint on the walls.