Living Room Renovation

Our living room was the quickest transformation of the whole renovation project. We finished painting it all in just one day! Luckily we only had two coats to put up thanks to our Behr premium plus paint. (Totally not sponsored, we were just so happy with the quality!) As stated in the previous post about our bedrooms, we used the same paint color throughout the house: Subtle Touch on the walls, and Bakery Box for the trim.

Thankfully the floors were in good shape when we bought the house, so all they required was a good scrubbing with our mop. Just a few coats of paint was all this room took to fix up.

Before

After

Once we finished painting the bedrooms we felt like pros so tackling the biggest room in the house was a breeze! The paint edger we used mentioned in the previous post saved us hours of carefully working around the trim and baseboards.

Painting tips:

• Make sure to have all supplies ready before you start! This makes it so much easier to complete the task at hand because getting started is truly the hardest part
• Paint the trim first. You will not have to tape off twice if you paint your trim and baseboards before painting the walls. Pro tip: you won't have to tape anything off if you use an edger!
• Speaking of edgers, get one! I cannot emphasize this enough! It is an amazing tool that will save you time, money, and tears.
• When you reload your brush, paint in a "W" formation on the wall. This distributes the paint evenly which gives the best finished look!
• Use a drop cloth. I underestimated how much paint I would spill/splatter when painting our bedrooms. Using a drop cloth, especially in carpeted areas, will insure the protection of your floors!
• If you spill latex paint, use rubbing alcohol to clean up dried spots. Most spills you will see and wipe up immediately, but for those little dried-on bits that you didn't see, rubbing alcohol will help you clean them up like they were never there.
• And lastly, be patient, especially if this is your first time painting. It takes some time to get the knack down. Don't try and rush through your project because the final product will show it! Trust me.

Make sure to follow me on Instagram to stay up to date on where we're at in house projects. Keep an eye out for our kitchen renovation post. This was by far our biggest project and change in the whole house! I will be adding subsequent posts after the big projects series to showcase our home decor which is one of my favorite parts of home ownership. Thanks so much for continuing to come along through this series on our fixer upper projects!

Our very own Fixer Upper

Raise your hand if you've been under the spell of Joanna Gaines since Fixer Upper debuted in 2013. I have a strong feeling I won't be the only one with my hands up in the air. Yes, both hands.

Fast forward 5 years. My husband and I are now seriously starting to look for a house to buy after settling in to our new town. I was no longer just stalking Zillow for dream homes that are way out of my league and far above what our bank account has to offer.

We looked at a few houses with our awesome realtor Tish and waded through the first round of looking. Then one day we happen upon an unassuming home in a smaller, quiet neighborhood. We walk in and it hits me - at first not with beauty and potential but with a strange smell - years of dog pee and funk. It was like a palpable scent. 

I was in love.

Not with the odor, of course, but with the potential. Beautiful brick fire place in the large, open living room. A decent sized kitchen and large back yard. After the second walk through we were sold. A few weeks later, luckily so was the house - to us! 

Time to get to work! Luckily, Jeremy nor I had ever had any experience working on a house in any capacity, but I had years of HGTV shows cataloged in my brain and ready to go. 

This was our time to shine.

I'm going to be going room by room sharing in our trials and triumphs of what we accomplished and what we learned along the way. Hopefully this series will be inspiring and entertaining because after a long and somewhat traumatic experience we all deserve to look back and laugh, right? 

Thankfully everything has turned out for the better and we have been blessed with a stronger marriage, lowered "perfection" expectations, faithful friends who showed up to rescue us in the pits of our despair, and our trusty sidekick of a pup who is just along for the crazy journey.

I hope you'll stick around and see what our fixer upper has to offer!