It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas!

My favorite part of having a home is making it mine.  For years I've been collecting ideas and subscribing to design magazines building my collection of inspiration for a home.  One of the reasons I fell in love with my house was all the character.  I knew I wanted to put my own spin on the house while preserving the integrity and enhancing the beauty that the house already possesses.  The pictures below are only of the ground level because as the laws of physics dictates only one level of my house can be appropriate for pictures at a time.  Also there are Christmas presents upstairs that I know prying eyes (emilygrahamandjennagraham) that would love to get a peek!  

The first bunch of pictures are my "before" pics- enjoy! 

This is the view from the kitchen to the front door. 



Downstairs bathroom- there really is a shower and toilet in here but nobody wants to see that.



Dining room

Dining room looking into the living room (stairwell in between)

Living Room

Living room and jazzy little desk the previous owners left behind- not exactly "If These Walls Could Talk" material.



This is looking into my kitchen today- please disregard all the wine bottles and glasses- I had help drinking that.  The pot rack above the sink is not my favorite feature of the house but it has started to grow on me.  It may get a Krylon makeover come spring. 



This is a shot of the kitchen looking toward the front door again.  Please disregard the glass of wine.

The bar stools came with the house but there are one.two.three.FOUR of them!  That island is large.  Some people in my life want to rip it out (cathygraham) and I have to pat her down when she visits for fear that she's packing a sledge hammer to "rearrange" my kitchen.

moo.

This is my chalkboard wall!  This is my absolute favorite part of the kitchen.  I used chalkboard paint and painted the wall from floor to ceiling.  My dad helped me by trimming it out with a basket-weave trim.  The copper cow was a birthday gift from my parents.  And he's doing a great job holding my chalk. 

Just for the record there is in not an intentional cow (or wine) theme in my kitchen.

Massive island

moo.again.

Every room needs a little turquoise.

My mom and dad gave me this awesome dining room set.  My dad repaired one of the legs on the table.  My mama painted the set and covered the seats in the beautiful vintage barkcloth.  I love this table and chairs!  A lot.



This is another shot of the dining room.  To the right is part of my curvy purple couch- I'll post about that later.  My mom helped me to paint this room a creamy yellow and paint the ceiling white.  It took primer and lots and lots of layers of paint.  There are no windows in this room and the previous colors were too dark for a room with no natural light.



I love Christmas decorations!

My tree is large.  Also, my other purple couch.  Doesn't everyone have two purple couches?

This room was the first room Mom and I painted.  The top is a light grey and the bottom is a dusty purple.  I love this room.  Giving credit where credit is due- My mom painted a lot of this room and trimmed out the top.  I pushed her around on scaffolding and rotated Carol King, Carly Simon and Patsy Cline in the CD player.  She did an amazing job and I'm so grateful for her.

My drapes are custom Cathy Graham's.  Be jealous.

My mantel was my favorite part of decorating for Christmas!  I had bought that red, glittery "Merry Christmas" sign a few years ago and it's like it was meant to be on that mantel.  :)  Fate via Goodwill.

The hallway entrance has the exposed brick because it was once the outside wall of the home.  I love this look.  The key on the wall is the key to the original front door. 



My entrance hallway is long and narrow-ish.  The church pew is perfect for this area.  I purchased the keys above the pew from a high end boutique, Goodwill, and spray painted them.  They had a lovely gold pastic-y look going on when I first obtained them so a makeover was needed.



Christmas decor wouldn't be complete without my creepy Santa head! 

And now I leave you with my Dudley dog- he's also in the Christmas spirit!



Despite the look on his face I'm certain he loves his Christmas sweater. 


Now I need to get busy wrapping some gifts to go under that tree!



Counting Pennies

I wanted a home. I had an apartment since I moved to this town, but it didn't feel like mine. I wanted something of my own to make my own. I started looking at houses in November 2010. I closed on my house in early 2011.   It's a downtown brick house in a historical town.  I love it.  My home was built in the 1850s and is in need of a little lovin'- this blog is to chronicle my projects.  

One of the small projects that became a big project was my back door. When I bought the house the back door was rotted out. This allowed water underneath the door and right onto my kitchen floor. So instead of just changing out the door we had to cut out part of the floor inside. This calls for help!

The door was installed and it's fabulous. But I still had a section of plywood flooring in my kitchen. Not exactly ideal. I knew it would be impossible to match and repair the floor to the current flooring in the kitchen. I also knew I didn't necessarily want traditional tile or laminate. So I headed to my good ole Lowe's and the bank to get the supplies to tile my floor in pennies! I prepped the floor by painting it so it looked like this:

Then my mama came to town! And we started to glue and glue and glue pennies.

At this point I ran out of pennies. Bummer. This usually wouldn't be a problem except that it is a bank holiday and so I had to try and hustle the cashiers at Lowe's for pennies. Seriously, they didn't want to give them up. And then even that wasn't enough. So I went and knocked on my neighbors' door. My next door neighbors were so kind as to give me all the pennies they had. It ended up being just enough and was obviously meant to be.

I didn't want the grouted look to hold the pennies in so I bought two boxes of Famowood Glaze Coat pour-on epoxy. It was pretty painless but I'm glad that I had two extra hands helping to mix while I spread the epoxy. Thanks, ma!

The kit was a two part mixture that you combine, stir, pour into another container, stir again and then pour onto the surface. I used two kits a the suggestion of my mom and I'm so glad I did because it made big difference. I don't have pictures of this step because I haven't trained my dog to take pictures and it was a four hand process with only the two of us. BUT! Here is the end of the process!

I absolutely love it! It is currently hardening. I think the package said 72 hours but because I used two kits I want to play it safe so I'm keeping it covered until this upcoming Friday. I didn't want any dust or grey dogs getting on the epoxy so I used a plastic drop cloth and the help of my mom to make a tent to cover the area. Next step is to trim it out after it completely hardens and it's done! On to the next project...