Entries Tagged as 'Lake house updates'

A Dash of Spring

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01.2.13

Well January I’d like to say that you will be missed but I’d be lying. Who thought this cold gray month was a good idea anyway? So since it’s Friday and since it’s February and since we are inching our way closer to spring with each passing day I’ve decided to bring a little life into the house in the form of a $6 bunch of tulips.

Decorating-for-Spring-with-

It’s no secret that I love to pick up flowers at the grocery store while food shopping. They make me happy and if that isn’t reason enough to spend $6 then the shot in the arm of springtime in the living is definitely what the doctor ordered.

I love tulips because they’re just so bright and fresh. I usually opt for super bright colorful bunches of flowers but this time I chose to go with a solid white bouquet. I think the solid color feels elegant. It also give me that dash of white I’ve been craving until I muster up the energy to paint the living room.

It’s beginning to feel like spring inside, now if only the weather would cooperate.

The Day I Finally Broke Down and Bought a New Dishwasher

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31.1.13

Hi, I’m Back! Whatever I had kicked my butt. I felt like I just needed to crawl into a ball and take a nap. So so happy to be back in the land of the living.

There are certain days when being a homeowner feels like one of the best decisions you ever made. For us Sunday was not one of those days. It all started out like any other morning.Nik and I woke up made a pot of coffee and turned on the fireplace.

We have a pellet stove insert in our fireplace which uses small wooden pellets that drop from a hopper in the top of the fireplace to a small pot where they burn and produce heat. It turns on with the flip of a switch and can almost heat our entire house. We rarely use our home’s heating system except at night in the bedrooms. It also has a fully closed front so when the stove is on you can’t get near the flames.

Anyway back to the story, we turned on the fireplace as usual and went about or business, made coffee, emptied the dishwasher. Fifteen minutes later I went back in the living room. Smoke began billowing out the heat vents…Rut Row, that doesn’t look good.

I turned it off, took a look and thought I saw the problem. The hopper was releasing the pellets too fast and it couldn’t catch fire. I adjusted, turned it back on….and BOOM. It puffed a cloud of soot and smoke into the living room the likes I had never seen.

Bryan…Bryan…BRYAN!

He must have sensed the house is on fire panic in my voice, because he got out of bed and appeared in the living room quicker than I thought possible. The smoke continued to billow out of the stove, pouring into the living room. We opened all the windows and doors to let the smoke out of the house. It was 7:30 am and about 20 degrees outside.

A few hours later after the smoked cleared, the stove cooled down and the house warmed up they pulled the entire it out of the wall. It’s an insert which means it sits inside the existing fireplace opening. It can be pulled out but it’s HEAVY and not that much fun to do. They got to work fixing it and saw that soot had accumulated in the vent pipe preventing proper airflow.

I bet you’re wondering what all of this has to do with a new dishwasher.

While they were working I finally got around to finishing up that load of dishes. I have a love hate relationship with our dishwasher. It’s old and needs to be replaced, but technically it’s still going strong so other things get fixed and replace as the loud clunky dishwasher keeps chugging along. Until that very morning when I turned it on and the water began pouring out of the door. It was a FLOOD. Eight towels later and me erupting into a fit of laughter because there was nothing to do about it. We figured out something had clogged the drain.

Now four hours after the fact. The house stilled had a faint odor of smoke, the floors were covered in soot and the kitchen floor was flooded I had had it.

I did what any rationale person would do. Fed up and tired I looked online to make a giant impulse purchase. First I tried Lowes, no luck, everything was too expensive or downright ugly. Then I tried Sears and found this beauty of a dishwasher. It had all the things we were looking for. It was stainless steal, sleek looking with top panel controls. It had good reviews and a great price. I yelled to Bryan “I found a new dishwasher, it’s $399.” He yelled back buy it I’m sick of fixing stuff, and that’s how I finally broke down and bought a new dishwasher. It should be here in about 2 weeks. I can’t wait and neither can my dish pan hands!

Choosing Paint for the Living Room

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23.1.13

Well, we don’t have a color choices for the Living Rooms walls yet but we do have paint swatches! Where are those HGTV helper bees fixing things up in the background when you need them?

After our conversation yesterday about white paint Bryan and I ran out to the paint store to get a few samples. While we were there our conversation went something like this:

Me “Hun, which paint chip do you like?”

Bryan “They’re both white”

Me “Yes I know they’re both white but some are warmer and some are cooler”

Bryan “I’m not totally convinced there’s a big difference”

That conversation basically gave me all the go-ahead I needed to pick out 4 whites without much more input and bring them home so I could test them out in the space. Sometimes you just need to bring them home to really see how they’ll work.

For those of you would like a refresher here’s a recent wide angle view of how the Living Room looks now after completing our first project of the new year when we rearranged the furniture

Some of the whites are warmer and others are on the cooler side. They are all by Benjamin Moore. Painted in order from top to bottom they’re Frostine, Vapor, Decorators White, and Paper White. So far I think our room may be able to handle a cooler shade since it’s a Southwest facing room which tends to get a ton of sun during the day.

When we got home I painted the white samples on the wall along with 4 other samples of grays that my sister had brought over for me a while back. Thos samples are also by Benjamin Moore so I could see the difference and help with the decision making process.

It’s a little hard to photograph the difference in the whites since it’s a subtle but noticeable in color change in person. I tried to get it in the truest light which meant leaving the shades mostly closed causing a slightly blurry picture.

Traditional Spaces design by Seattle Design-build RW Anderson Homes

So far Bryan likes the grays which I’m ok with but something keeps drawing me to white walls. He’s worried that the trim will disappear if it’s white walls and white trim, something I’d be willing to fix with painted gray trim.

Traditional Entry design by New York Architect Clawson Architects, LLC

I could even be persuaded to paint the doors black to give it a little drama and contrast. I have a feeling these paint swatches could be up for a while before I make a decision.

Can you tell what my favorites are? Anybody else have paint swatches on their walls for ages?

Please tell me I’m not the only one!

White Walls, Are You On Board?

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22.1.13

image via

Hi all, I hope you all are having a wonderful week so far and I hope some of you enjoyed a nice long weekend.

The topic of the day on my mind is white walls. Are they totally your style? Or are they not for you? I used to be in the not-for-me camp but gorgeous images like the one above have been changing my mind. I’m really dying to paint a room white and I think our Living Room’s blue paint is on the chopping block. I’ve loved the blue for a time but as my style changes over time the blue just really isn’t going with how I want our whole house to feel.

image via

Bryan’s not really 100% on board with white walls (he prefers more of a sand color) which is why I’m hesitating. But truth be told we rarely agree on any kind of color whatsoever. If I say green he says okay and picks a green that belongs in a fishing lodge in Montana. I’ll pick a more soft muted green. We could go round and round for hours in a paint store disagreeing on colors. Lucky for me he tires of any kind of debate involving shades of paint quickly leaving me to make the decisions.

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I asked my sister this white wall question over the weekend, She made a good point. That white walls may look totally gorgeous in beautiful photos but can feel a little cold in real life.

So what do you all think? Are you for white walls? Do they leave you feeling cold?

Let us know in the comments.

I Like To Move It Move It

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13.1.13

It’s amazing what a little furniture shuffling can do for how you feel about a space. After three years of living in our house and 2 years of living with the furniture in the living room the same way I was ready to get my redecorating mojo on and switch things up.

New-Arrangment-Living-Room

Certain types of people really like to rearrange their furniture, others leave it in the same configuration for a while. I tend to fall into the former category, so when Bryan suggested to me that we change up our living room furniture arrangement for a different layout a few months back I was all for it. Since then it was more about waiting for the right moment when we had some time to get to work. After Christmas when all the decorations were stashed in their boxes and I marked it our our 10 Projects we’d like to complete it 2013 list it was on like Donkey Kong.

As a little refresher, here’s what the room looked like when we toured the house back in 2009 and what it evolved into after a few years of fixing it up. We loved it and it stayed that way for a while but we felt like we were ready for a change.

Other than moving furniture around we did add one new thing to the room. My mom and sisters bough me this fabulous new rug that I was dying to get into the space which meant moving all the furniture around anyway so we just went with it and tried the new arrangement.

Mid-way through here’s what the room looked like during the chaos of mid-shuffle as we skootched and slid the furniture into the new position. It always looks worse before it looks better and we worked quickly to get it rearranged and cleaned while the little guy was napping.

While we were moving furniture all around some of the problems we were trying to solve were:

Poor Use of Space: To make the long and narrow room feel more cozy. When you were standing in the room with the old arrangement the couch felt shoved up against the wall making conversations awkward.
Uncomfortable TV Watching: This room also serves as our primary TV watching area. The TV over the fireplace even though it’s large still felt a touch too far away to be comfortable viewing distance.
Lack of Floor Space for Playing: Nikolas can usually be found laying on the floor with a few trucks sprawled out around him. We found ourselves continually moving the coffee table out of the way so he play.
Awkward Flow: At some point in the future we’d like to open up the wall on the left where the cutout is so it flows nicely from the Kitchen (which is on the other side of the wall into the Living Room. But before jumping into anything crazy we wanted to make sure we would love how the room worked without any furniture up against that wall.

After a couple hours of shuffling around, cleaning under couches and tweaking things we were left with a new arrangement that we are really big fans of.

The big change in the room was the reorientation of the sectional. We spun it around so the shortest end was on the wall underneath the windows, bringing it out into the middle of the room. Behind the couch was ample space to move the chairs to create another seating arrangement. The bookcase was switched to the opposite wall with the small buffet landing on the wall where the bookcase used to be.

And if none of that made sense, here’s how the changes look on a poorly drawn quick sketch I drew up below.

Now that we’ve had a chance to live with it for a while we absolutely love some things while other are likely to change. We love the placement of the sofa. When you walk into the room now it feels like home. This is easily our favorite layout we have tried to date. The room has always felt too long so dividing it up helps to minimize the length and brings the conversation area into the center of the room. Lake-House-New-Living-Room

We also love the chairs located behind the couch. It feels like a room inside a room where you could sit and chat for a little while during a party.

The bookcase we like for now but aren’t completely sold on the height of it The storage that the bookcase provides though can’t be beat and a lot of Nikloas toys can be stashed in bins on the bottom shelf where he can get them himself and put them away.

On the other side we placed the recently refinished buffet which looks good there but I think it’s a little short for the space. At some point we may swap it out for something taller and a little less wide. All in all though we LOVE the new arrangement. It’s so nice to freshen up a space working with mostly what you have and feeling like you have a whole new room.

Living-Room-New-Arrangement