Between Two Pheasants...

One month later and a lot of progress has been made on the kitchen. Ugh, but it's not done. We are inching toward the finish line. OF COURSE it always takes twice as long as you originally plan. After the cabinet doors and drawers were in, Tom and Nate took out their aggression the counters and back splash. By far it was the most gratifying as well as messy part of the reno. We are so lucky to have talented and amazing people in our world. Tom and his lovely wife, Betty, are our neighbors who have renovated/restored several homes. (They also give us fresh chicken eggs and figs from their tree) They gave us the confidence that we could take out the counters ourselves and even offered to help. While they worked, I pulled out all my mom-tricks to keep the girls occupied outside. In process pics:

I find that one of the most aggravating part of doing any sort of home improvement is that once you spruce up one area, everything else looks a little sad and dingy. Such is the case with our front porch. Our house is looking beautiful but the front porch is a totally Debbie Downer. Wah-wah! At some point in this Pheasant's House's history, the owners painted the red concrete porch red. Probably to match the brick, but it looks so bad. And, the color of the concrete below is pink. There's NO WAY it can look good. The paint has been peeling off over the years and left the porch with a blotchy red look. Like, worse than a teenager's face. It looked even worse once we power washed it.

So, here's our beloved home between May 1st and Memorial Weekend. This first picture shows the giant hole in our siding that was covered up with sheet metal. We took out a wall a/c unit when we put in the mini-split system. Hence, the hole. Knowing we were going to patch and paint the house anyway, we left it. So ugly. Here's the next phase in the process on this part of the house. Patching the hole! Our new handyman (not to be confused with The Handyman), Ricardo, and Jesus took siding from underneath the double window to match the second story siding. And, here's the patched hole. Viola! As you can see, the back of the house has also been primed, but the trim paint hasn't been put on. Not sure about that smiley face. By mid-May, the back of the house started looking like this. Lots of patching and extra layers of primer. May 16th, front of the house! Shut the front door! Literally, it's yellow and beautiful! A close up of the front porch. T...

If you live in California or have been following our news, its been raining for nearly two weeks straight. That means there's been no progress on the exterior paint until last week and now it's raining again. Booooooo. Well, we need the rain, so Yeah! But, boooo! I want my house to be painted so badly. Anyways... Jesus spent four days at our house last week, working on the back of the house where the laundry room and 1/2 bath is located. Check out the progress! First two days = scraping, scraping and more scraping...

Question: how do you really freak out your neighbors? Step 1. Paint your house bright blue. Step 2. Change color to gray half way through. Work progresses around the house. Here's the latest Front of the house:

You know when you're waiting for something, and waiting, and waiting, and then finally you get to do it. It's bigger than your birthday or Christmas or a trip to an ice palace. Okay, maybe not that last one, but what if you had to wait TWO whole years for your birthday. That would suck, but then it would be amazing when you actually had your birthday. Well, 730 days after moving in, we are getting our HOUSE PAINTED!!!! It's so exciting! It's so expensive! It's so exciting! It's so expesive! Okay, well there is a little mixed emotion here because picking out paint that you're supposed to love for a decade or more is hard. Like, really hard. Maybe even harder than picking your child's name? Okay, maybe not. But, the time is finally here and we have to get down to business. Actually, Jesus is getting busy (heehee) on the house. He's going to work on it slowly...on the weekends...which is good because it gives me more time to think about colors. Today,...

I don't even remember how many areas of wallpaper we've removed by this point--it all just runs together. I do know that after the old office's paper is removed, we just have one more to go! Hooray! After we moved the office to the guestroom (which used to be Cinderella's room, btw), we started to remove the wallpaper. It actually came off fairly easy but there were a few issues. Like the stairway and 2nd floor landing, the plaster was in bad shape in a few places. It was crumbly in a few spots. We also found evidence that the thick, striped paper was actually the second wallpaper in this room. We found some beige paper with tiny red flowers on it. There was a considerable amount of glue behind the wallpaper (joy). It's the yellowish-brown stuff in the picture below: And the windows were in bad, bad shape. This room, located on the South-side of the house, gets full sun so one of the windows takes a beating. The glazing had pretty much disintegrated t...

Our wonderful painter finished the entryway/stairs two weeks ago, and I haven't had a chance to blog about it since because I have been staring at the walls. Who am I kidding? It's the crazy holiday season and there has been no time for blogging! We picked the color Oyster Bay by Sherwin Williams for the walls and it is gorgeous! It's green, it's blue, it's gray. Depending on the light and time of day, it could be any one of these colors and they are all beautiful. We even got the thumbs up from Jesus on the color choice, which made us feel even better. Check it out! In these pictures, the green really shows through.

Big news here at the Pheasants' house. We have been busy removing the wallpaper in the entryway, stairway, and the second floor common area. For those of you keeping track, we've now taken down wallpaper in seven areas and only have two more to go! Woohoo! I have to give a shout out to Big Ken (my dad) for starting the process of removing the wallpaper back in October. He removed about half of it and I took down the rest. Remember this print? There was a lot of it!

Wow! I can't believe it's already been over one month since my last blog post. We've had a lot going on in our world and the energy to blog about it has been at a minimum. I do want to share with you our awesome guest bedroom makeover! We actually finished it right before our friends, B&J, came to town at the end of July. When we moved in, you'll recall the room looked like this: In mid-June, my sister came in and took all the wall paper down but the glue decided to hang out a little longer. The tedious process of spraying, scraping, and sanding was left up to my Handy Man and he made great progress on the glue: Before spraying/scraping and sanding and after: Realizing this was as good as it was going to get, we started priming with TWO coats of Kilz. We chose the Kilz Max because it was supposed to cover up foul odors and this glue has a serious chlorine smell. In all honesty, I can still smell a faint whiff of glue. Here's the room "primed...

I hope everyone had a fun Fourth of July. We spent our weekend working on the upstairs bathroom and hosting a roll-your-own-sushi party on Friday night. I love when we get to actually enjoy the house! You will remember that the bathroom looked like this when we bought it. Then, in May, we took down the wallpaper and painted the walls, but we still had a lot to do. This past weekend, we tackled the vanity, cupboards, trim and ceiling, and let me tell you, it looks A TON better! Wow! Here are a few "in process" pictures, because I want to wait to post the big reveal until the new hardware and light fixture is in.

Goodbye June! Hello July!  We've been spending a lot of time outside since the days are longer and evenings are so nice. The downside is that our ugly, dirty-white, exterior paint keeps staring me in the face. I want to punch it! We have a long way to go before we have the money saved to paint our house, but a girl can still dream, right? We have gone back and forth about painting the house in a more historically-accurate color scheme, but they all seem too pastel, brown and dull. Source