Thursday, June 30, 2011

Before & After (almost finished!)

Hellooooo!

Yesterday I told you that I'd be posting pictures of moving and our adventures so far. Well, I kind of lied. I feel like before I show you moving pictures, I should show you as much as I can of the house in its (semi) finished state. I got really excited about taking cute pictures of the house today and making it all homey. I must say, taking pictures of houses is harder than it looks! I get lots of my decor and photo-taking inspiration from my new favorite blog, Young House Love. They make room photography look way easier than it actually is. I promise it's even cuter in person, but here is my best attempt at showing you our little house! I'll warn you, this is a very picture-heavy post.

Before we got here, Thomas' Aunt Marisa sent us some pictures of the house we would be moving into, just so we could see a little preview of it. We didn't take before pictures of everything, so I'll be using pictures from her blackberry as the before shots. Also, we only have access to about half the house due to the repairs being done, but I went ahead and photographed the more finished rooms today.

First, the kitchen.
Before
 We didn't do much visible renovation in here, mostly just filled it with our LOTS of cute kitchen stuff!

 Thomas and his dad were able to get the dishwasher working, and we also removed the old window treatments.

This fridge was nice, but broken. It was also really heavy. The boys were able to finally get it out to replace it with our much smaller white one.

After
 On the left you can see one of Thomas' favorite things, his magnetic spice rack. It's cool looking and useful. A hook housing my extensive apron collection is also there.

 We're planning on changing the look of the cabinets, maybe by putting a cool fabric over the plastic inserts to modernize them a bit.

 One of my favorite things, the adorable green Crate & Barrel teapot.

From here you can see out into the laundry room, where the tree damage is still being worked on.

Now for the dining room.
Before
The previous owners used this as an office. We decided to use it as a dining room and moved the old stuff out.

After
We used books from our wedding centerpieces as well as my bridesmaid's dried bouquets in an old vase. The chair cushions are from World Market and our friends Sam and Scott gave us the adorable posey placemats from Crate & Barrel.

Here's a view of the whole room (although it isn't from the same angle as the before shot, sorry).

This is one of my favorite things in the house. My super creative Mother-in-Law (aka MIL) arranged it, and I think it's so adorable.

This is the "den" which I refer to as the living room
Before
We moved this couch to Thomas' music room. We also removed the old window treatments. Since the house is so high up, people can't see in, so we plan to leave the windows uncovered for extra natural light.

We laid out the room differently than the previous owners, as you'll see below.

After
 There is still work to be done--obviously, there's a huge boarded up window where the glass supposedly just fell out due to swelling before we moved in. I took the liberty of photoshopping in a mirror, which we hope to find and put up soon.

You don't even want to know how long I spent (terribly) shopping this mirror in. That's what I get for trying to use Gimp instead of the real thing.

We also repurposed the blue glass we collected for the wedding by putting it in all the window sills to catch the light. The wall with the TV is where the old couch used to sit.

Here's a book shelf we're still working on.

There to the right, you can see the room we haven't photographed yet because it's holding the stuff from the rooms that are out of commission.

Here is a preview of that room, which we're calling the front room. More to come!
Before
We took down all the pictures and are slowly replacing them. This is a view into the kitchen.

We also donated these shelves and set up the room a little differently.

I plan to recover this cool chair with some printed fabric.

After (preview)
 We found this green table runner on sale at Crate & Barrel. The cool tree came from our friend Jessica who got it at BB&B.

My dresser wouldn't fit in our room, so we're using it out here instead. We got lucky and found the bronze lamps pretty cheap at Target along with the pretty cream shades.

Isn't this awesome?! Our friend Lyndsey painted it. She's extremely talented. It is now hanging in the front room where everyone who comes in will see it.

Now for one of our favorites, the master bedroom.
Before
The room was originally painted a dark grey and had beige window coverings.

We're happy that there is quite a bit of closet space. This is my closet.

The closed door is Thomas' closet, which is also good sized.

After
We wanted to really lighten up the whole room since it is small, so we used a coat of KILZ primer and two coats of Valspar's Meadow Mist. This is another place my MIL came up super handy, being the pro painter that she is! The color is a light sea foam in person.

We ran across these cool stick on leaves at BB&B. Being the tree person that I am, I fell in love.  The curtain's are IKEA's Lenda, and they were really easy to hem since they come with iron-on hem tape.

The sconces are from Home Depot and they act as a replacement for bedside table lamps. Finally, the beautiful pillows were handmade for us by our friend Deana. They are perfect!

We made this 'dresser' out of our two end-tables (which won't fit beside the bed) put together, and hung the mirror from our actual dresser over them. It ended up looking really nice and it's super functional.

Finally, another big transformation, the bathroom. Photographing a tiny bathroom is hard. Trust me, it's cuter in person!
Before
We only have two pictures of the bathroom before, but you get the idea. It was pretty grungy and in need of updating.

The moms and I were pretty appalled at the condition of the tub before. No way I was taking a bath in that! But again, Andrea (and a little Tom and Mari) to the rescue, and the tub is beautiful again!

After
 Isn't is pretty?! The shower curtain is from Target, and for the paint we chose a light springy green, Valspar's Summer Rapture. It looks greener (and not as yellow) in person.

We thought we'd have a lot less storage in here than before, but having a medicine cabinet and over the toilet shelf gives you more room than you'd think.

The beautiful cross stitch was done for us by Thomas' awesome Aunt Helen. It says "A marriage is a friend for life--a lover's sweet embrace. A faithful partner one can trust, and dreams to share and chase." The colors fit perfectly!


 If you ever wondered what the inside of our shower looks like...now you know:]

Ahh. So fresh and clean! I had to use flash here to capture the full white effect.

I know I just barraged you with a million pictures, but we wanted you to see what we've been looking at for the last couple of weeks. Hopefully you enjoyed it! Tomorrow I really do plan to post moving pictures! 

Here's a final picture of Jack lazing on my mom's makeshift bed. 

-T, K, & J

Wednesday, June 29, 2011

It's all good in the neighborhood.

Hey again!

We're going to try to keep up with the blog pretty regularly (especially at first, while we're both temporarily unemployed...ha), so I'll probably be updating with little random things a lot. It might be TMI for some of you, but I know others will appreciate it:]

For those of you who haven't been to Georgia, the architecture here is really different from that of Texas--and we LOVE it! There are lots of old two-story houses with big wrap around porches that are painted fun colors. Personally, my biggest aspiration in life is to live in a cute little yellow house with a huge porch, like this one (but I guess I'd settle for smaller).

We live in a part of Atlanta called Chamblee, but it's often referred to as North Atlanta. The area is quickly transitioning and the houses are a really interesting mix of huge, new "McMansions" and little old houses, like ours. We've been taking some pictures of the newly built mansions around our house to give you an idea of what we're looking at. The architecture is modeled after the older houses in the area, but on a much larger, fancier scale.

 This is the biggest house we've seen so far.

 I LOVE this house. It's right around the corner from us.

 We're noticing a red door trend in the neighborhood. I'm down.

This one is on our street.

 We saw these last two on a walk tonight. They are huge.

The final big one.

Contrasting these houses with our little house, pictured below, and our neighbor's house, is pretty funny. The people next door are a really interesting family, supposedly "old hippies" who have a ton of kids and a really weird combination of stuff around their place. They hang their clothes outside on a huge line--in this Georgia humidity, I wonder if they ever dry?--which we can see from our window (pictured below), and the husband drives around regularly with a canoe on top of his old Volvo. They also recently chopped down a tree in their yard, but they left the entire thing (cut in huge pieces) just piled up around their house. We like their house though, because it has a lot of character. It's really interesting to see the difference from house to house.

This is our house. We love the blue shutters and cute front steps.

Our view of the neighbor's clothes line. My mom thinks it looks like Swiss Family Robinson.

Tomorrow the State Farm adjuster is finally coming (I mean hello, a tree fell on our house 4 days ago!) and we should learn more about what can be done to fix the ceilings and roof. Mold was discovered in the insulation at the back of the house--no surprise since it was built in 1947 and it's so humid here--so the back two rooms have been blocked off and work has stopped until the adjuster comes. It's being called "secondary damage" since it was obviously there before the tree, so State Farm will decide what they're going to cover and hopefully reconstruction will begin soon!

I'm going to post some of the miscellaneous moving pictures we took this week, as well as some of the fun stuff we've done since we got here. There might also be some cute Jack pictures too...the best part of course!

-T, K, & J

Tuesday, June 28, 2011

So...our house got smashed by a tree.

We've been talking about starting a blog for quite a while. Moving finally gave us an excuse to do so, and we've never done this before...so it's kind of an adventure all around! To start off, we thought it would be a good idea to give you an update on the last couple of weeks:

A week and a half ago, we packed up a U-Haul with our families and headed to Georgia. The drive took 18 hours and was grueling at times, but we finally got here on a steamy hot Sunday and started unpacking. Our little house is a definite fixer-upper, but we like that. Our families happen to be great at fixing things up, so it works out perfectly. We painted two rooms, got to use lots of our new tools, and eventually got the house looking pretty cute (pictures to follow soon, hopefully).
 Our dads postulating about whether it would all fit (there was major doubt).

 It all fit!

 Finally, my dad gave it one final push (or at least pretended to).

Thomas' parents headed home almost a week ago, but my mom was able to stay for a few extra days. That was the original plan anyway. Being from Texas, we're not used to rain, or trees...both of which exist/happen to the extreme here in Georgia. During a rainstorm in the early evening last Sunday--exactly one week after we moved in here--one of our neighbor's trees was struck by lightening, splitting in half with the large (60 ft. or so) top half landing right across the back half of our house. We didn't know what had happened until we heard/felt rushing water inside and started frantically moving things out of the three back rooms of the house, both of which had been hit pretty hard and ended up with big holes poked in the roof. We were very fortunate that the tree fell on one of the main support beams (says Thomas, who knows about these manly things) and none of us were hurt. We had also gotten renter's insurance exactly three days before the incident, so that worked out perfectly too! My mom even decided to stay a few extra days to see how everything goes.

We're currently in the process of seeing what the home owner's insurance will cover as far as structural damage, and we're hoping that the roof and ceilings can be fully replaced. Sadly this all happened before we had a chance to take pictures of the house, but the rooms we spent the most time on are fine--they're just full of stuff from the others. Within the next couple of weeks we should have pictures up so you can all see what we're seeing!

So far, we really like Atlanta. The city is great, the people are friendly, and it's really nice to have family here. There's lots to do all the time, and we're both trying to focus on looking for jobs (but it is hard amidst all the craziness of a tree falling on our house).

Below are a few pictures of the damage done in the house. Most of you may have seen it already, but just in case you haven't...
 The part of the tree still standing.

Where the tree hit the house, and smashed a little shed.

The smashed shed half way through the tree removal process.

The tree extended all the way across the house and broke another tree that was standing there.

 Damage in the laundry room ceiling.

Close up of the laundry room hole. Hello leaves!

 The branch that actually came through the roof.

 The hole in Thomas' music closet.

 Tree branches in your closet are never a good sign.

Close up of the closet hole.

The leaky ceiling seam in the guest bedroom.

This will probably be the most interesting post you ever see on our blog. We're not "glad" it happened, but we do look forward to telling our kids this story. It was definitely interesting, and it looks like our adventures in Atlanta have already begun.

-T, K, & J