my steal of a deal

When I started this blog a year and a half ago (my blog is almost a toddler?!) one of my intentions was to blog about the progress we were making on our house. You see, we have only been in our sweet little 70s brick rancher for about two and a half years now. Since you see I gratuitously added "70s" into my description, you can tell the house has needed what we like to call "updating" (also known as ripping out the ugly).

However, in that time I have only shown you one major update, and I didn't even show you the final result. My bad. Here is our finished wall (just a year and a half late...) By the way, this project only cost us $75 and we had a $50 Lowes gift card so $25 smackeroos to add what feels like 1000 more square feet of openess!

Ignore the ugly chairs, I do plan on recovering them in a lovely white cotton duck fabric...eventually.

Now for a little home decor. See all that lovely expanse of linoleum in our dining room? Yeah, I hate it. Our plan is to put tongue-and-groove wood flooring down eventually (read: years from now) but until then I have been on the search for an area rug to break up that ugly mass. We are talking years of my time invested in finding the perfect balance of rug-I can't-live-without to money-I-can-justify-spending. (Sorry for the overuse of dashes there.) I finally finally found one that I liked at Big Lots! There were only two left and neither of them had price tags. All the other rugs around them were between $50-$75 though, which is fabulous for a 5'x7', no? But I chickened out and went home rug-less.

I called my friend Taylor and explained the whole situation in detail and she did just what I needed her to do: convince me it was the rug for me. Or at least to buy it, try it, then bring it back if it stinks. So I marched myself back to the store, grabbed one of the two remaining, and went to the cash register. While I was standing there I noticed a small tag on the rug that displayed this magic number: $35. Heck yeah! Ring that puppy up! So he did, and do you want to know what it said?

Sit down now if you aren't.

It said $10!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Yes, you read that right. I made some joke about the Big Lots police knocking on my door later that day demanding their $25 difference and then high-tailed it outta there!

So here is my chocolate brown and cream herringbone 5'x7' gem of a dining room rug in action:

And here is your close up:

So there you have it, post numero dos on home reno/home decor. Maybe the next one won't be a when my blog enters the teenage years...

hole in the wall

Yes, we have a giant 6 foot hole in our wall! When Eric and I bought our house back in February of '08 we had BIG intentions for it. It wasn't necessarily what some would call a "fixer-upper," but it had lots and lots of potential for improvement. Slowly but surely (as we like to save up for home improvements, not credit card them) we have made some small changes in our house. We have literally painted every wall in our house, minus 2 bedrooms. Eric's music room is tan and we actually like the color in there. We are holding off on painting the 3rd bedroom because it will one day become a nursery...therefore paint choices will be made upon discovery of the sex of said future child.

Sooooooooo back to the original idea of the post, the wall. It is the wall that separated the living room from the dining room. As the trends of today have dictated, we love an open and airy floor plan. Enter: sledgehammer. NOT! I am a little bit of a freak when it comes to destroying my house and I didn't want drywall dust everywhere. So we carefully covered every inch of our furniture in both rooms and tacked sheets up in all the doorways leading to other parts of the house. We are now on day 6 of the project (it is a lot more waiting than I anticipated) and we are almost done! But guess what? NO FINISHED PICTURES FOR YOU! Ha! I will post them later...guess you will have to come back and see them!!!




I will leave you with a before shot of the dining room:













Eric trying to walk through the wall...












And a during shot!