Christmas projects

Foyer

For Easter, Nana & Grandad wanted to give us a new floor for the dining room. However, we decided to use the floors for the foyer. We are systematically removing all traces of carpet in the house! With some help from Terry, Ryan put in slate tile and I painted the walls and trim. Now instead of two armoires and a ton of books (relocated to closet in playroom with the filing cabinet), Ryan has a little home office and I have somewhere to stash my crafts. It would be nice to fit a sleeper sofa in there too though. I see a visit to IKEA in my future.

Best Room in the House!

The playroom has four pretty windows, two of which look out onto the front lane and the neighbor's lovely garden. The ceiling has dropped beams (aesthetic only?) and a HUGE, DEEP closet for lots of room for toy rotation. The playroom is also our guest room.

Pineknot

There are a few houses in the neighborhood with cute names. Even though Uncle Charlie says its pretentious, I have been trying to come up with some good ideas. "Pineknot" was the name of Ryan's grandfather's lobster boat in Vinalhaven, ME. Maybe we will go with that. Maybe even "Vinylhaven" itself since we have awful vinyl siding on the sides of our house.

Stenciled Stair Runner

After a lot of research of beautifully painted stair risers, I still could not budge Ryan on the idea. His main qualm was that painted floors would look worn very quickly. I had a pretty piece of lace that I translated into a stencil. I thought that if I did a runner on either side of where we walk, that the pattern would hold up pretty well. I lightly sanded the finish off and stenciled away with a little measuring here and there. Ryan hates the stairs, but I love them! Every once in a while, I give the stairs a shellacking. 

Good Enough for Who It's For

Nana offered to take the kids again for a week this year. She says that even though I don't feel stressed, I still need a break from them.

Yesterday, before Ryan came home, I painted out the trim in the dining room. Since I spilled all over the carpet, I decided I should try to clean that up today. But then this morning, I woke up with a fabulous idea. I should PAINT THE CARPET!

When we bought the house 8 short months before, the last owner had just put down new berber carpet in the dining room. Since we have 2 & 3 year olds, we didn't even make an effort to keep the carpet clean. At some point, we will redo the kitchen and dining room with a new floor extending between both rooms, but until then...

I found a recipe online from a mom who did a ratio of 2:1 paint to water. She didn't specify which type of paint to use, but I used (white) enamel. I found that a foam roller (my favorite invention) did the move even job, but I ended up using over a gallon of paint for this small room. When I applied the paint, it looked streaky, but evened out by the time it was done drying. The lighting makes the carpet look like the same color in both photos, but actually, you can see in the second photo that the stripes are the original carpet color. 

Dining Room Carpet with STAINS

After paint treatment

Ryan called during the process and he said I was acting suspiciously so he came home early. I was nervous, but much to my surprise, he was pleased with the result! Ryan is always impressed how I manage to move heavy furniture by myself. I think that means I should be moving the furniture back by myself too. 

New House

After we first moved to Bethesda and checked out the housing prices, we realized that if we wanted to stay in the DC area, that we would have to find a different neighborhood. One day, we were checking out a great taco place in Gaithersburg and noticed on the GPS that there was a concentration of streets nearby. Once you get past the industrial park and oxygen tank parking lot, you turn into a beautiful, wooded town with historic homes. We loved it there immediately but the only house for sale was out of our price range.

Years past and we decided to take the plunge and look into buying a home. We knew we wanted an older, fixer-upper and focused on far away towns like Poolesville, Boyds and Potomac which had farm houses with big lots. This meant that Ryan would have to get another car and spend up to an hour driving on 270. Yuck.

We had an offer in on a 3 story bungalow in Takoma Park that was bank-owned. While we waited and waited to hear back on that house, we started to get cold feet. Ryan was obsessed with Redfin and kept seeing a house in Washington Grove that was really cute but way too small at 900sqft. Once our offer was rejected in Takoma Park, I made an appointment to see this tiny house. Much to our delight, the upstairs of this house was not counted in the square footage! We made an offer and it was accepted!