Some before and after photos

Folks, what can I say? It's cold. I'm trying my hardest to thaw out so that I can get some work done around here, but I guess the best way to do that is to just start moving...

Before I do, I want to share with you some photos of some of the projects we've been working on. I finally found my photo editing software and can now upload new pictures. Remember to click on the photos to enlarge.

I posted a before and after video clip of our deck a few weeks back, but for those of you who didn't see it (and because we're so darn proud of it) here is a before and after photo.

Before (poor, poor, deck):


After (va-va-boom!):


On to the inside of the place...

Our living room fireplace wall before: (notice the dark heavy tile for the fireplace surround - it's ok but we wanted to lighten it up)


The fireplace after: (We went with small tiles that resembled limestone. The real limestone tiles were too thick and wouldn't slide right under sides of the mantle. To avoid "dismantling the mantle, we opted for a thinner tile that gives us somewhat of the same look for more than half the money and effort. It really lightens the feel of the fireplace, I think)



The walls in the above photo are now drywall mud white. You can't tell it in the photo, but I applied a certain texture to the wall. In a couple of weeks, we'll be priming them and then painting. Here is a photo that poorly shows an approximate shade I'm shooting for. It's warm yellow. We will eventually be putting pine planks on the ceiling, painted out white, but until then, we'll just give the ceiling a fresh coat of white paint.



It's been fun trying to figure out ways to turn a contemporary home built in the 70's into an "old" house. There is no trim around the entryways into the living room, kitchen, or hallway. Adding trim would be somewhat tricky because of how the corners meet. You may have read here before about the decorative relief that I'm doing around these entry ways. I now have photos to share:) The reliefs were done using a large stencil and drywall mud instead of paint. I still need to sand the reliefs to smooth out a bit, but they've turned out great! I have a couple other entries to do and it is rather time consuming, but it will give some character to otherwise boring entries. The stencils will be rather subtle - painted out the same color as the walls and maybe antiqued a bit.

These are a little hard to see...

The first one shows the pitted effect I've added to the walls.







I have other photos, but I need to get to work. Right now, Jeff is moving our electrical junction box from the hallway to the laundry room. This will get it out of view but will also allow us to raise the ceiling in our hallway from 7 feet to 8 feet. All the wiring was in the way above the 7 ft ceiling which made raising the ceiling impossible (unless we wanted to just box it all in with drywall, but I didn't want to have to look at that every time I walked down the hall).

Hope everyone is having a great weekend!

Kim