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Monday
Oct312011

Jane Marvel, Giveaway! Yes! 

Happy Monday! How was your weekend? We got a random snow storm. It beat up my car and left branches all down our street. Seems over 1M people in and around NYC lost power. Totally weird. Unheard of before Halloween! Speaking of.....Happy and Safe Halloween!!

Today we have no tricks! Just a treat! In my line of work I have great relationships with all sorts of amazing brands! One Lady I have loved for many years is Jane Marvel, and her awesome selection of vegan options, graphic medallion patterns, fun sunflower prints and so much more hugging the best in travel gear, including the best make up bags ever! I personally have a huge stock pile, and know for fact if you own a Jane Marvel, you'll wind up with more and more. So today, lucky you, enter to win a Jetsetter by Jane Marvel! Super durable, lot's of capacity, and of course beautiful!

Giveaway info:

  • Prize: One (1) Jane Marvel Jetsetter Bag MSRP $119, you choose color/fabric.
  • How to Enter: Leave a comment and tell us what your favorite pattern/fabric/vegan option from Jane Marvel is!  
  • Extra Entry: Tweet :Jetsetting with @JaneMarvel and @Makeahouseahome !!
  • Giveaway Ends: Sunday November 6th at 9:00pm EST
  • How Many Lucky Winners?!: One Lucky One!
  • Ships to: US Only
  • Also: Please only enter once, with the exception of the extra entry. We select our winners using random.org and will select a winner by November 11th and notify by email, so use a real email address!
Wednesday
Oct262011

Down Down Guest Room

Hello Lovely! Today we are venturing into a room you have yet to see! Downstairs we have a tiny little guest room originally meant to be for a maid or au pair. It's the way to get to the only bathroom downstairs. The whole back corner of our downstairs is a reminder of how freaky things were back in the day. A maids quarters. With a separate entrance and everything. Accompanied by a swing door into the rest of the house. Totally makes me mad. Not that I am against maids or au pairs' or anything like that. Just that this house was built to shove them in a corner with a tiny room. That makes me mad.

With supplies from Cutting Edge Stencil, Behr paint from Home Depot, and two unused paint-brushes from our Purdy three pack, I was ready to conquer another guest room.

small

If I could take a moment of your time and vent....I am really upset with our Home Depot. We are there multiple times a week. We spend God knows how much money on supplies, and we even do the DIY check out most of the time. You would think we are model customers and would be treated 1/2 decent. Nope. The staff is always rude, like you are disturbing them to open the spray paint cage or don't know how to answer simple questions like "Where are your nails located?". We have been able to push that under the rug because there are only two hardware store by us, and True Value keeps minimal hours sadly. But this time, oh this time, I about had it.

This time, they refused to mix paint for me. They simply wouldn't color match. All four paint employees were too engrossed in their (colorful to say the least) conversation. Three ran and the one left behind refused to color match a swatch. So I picked from the shelf on this project. No matter how rude they have been in the past, at least I left with the product I wanted. Even if 1/2 the time they didn;t mix the paint right. So there. I huffed and puffed. Not happy.

I seem angry today. I promise I am not. Moving along.....I hope you will forgive the photo. It's so tiny it's hard to photograph the room properly. Here she is. Or was...

stencil bedroom

gray paint

Just big enough for a daybed. This is a temp bed passed down by Joey's amazing Aunt and Uncle. It's done us well with all the guests we have packing the house each year. I almost want to treat this bedroom like a hallway or a foyer. Like an emergency-guest-back-up-room. I want it to be something you pass through to get to the bathroom, but don't spend too much time it.

I thought to get rid of the icky beige which was a total downer and painted it a crisp super light grey. Then I stenciled the wall (along with help from my friend Duane) across from the bathroom door with a grey a few shades darker. Keep in mind I wanted that color to be a rusty purple. But you know what happened.

cutting edge stencils

small guestroom stencil

guestroom wall color

The whole bad experience kinda disappeared when I got to work in the room. Dealing with Cutting Edge Stencils in a whole other story. Their products are high quality, current, and their team is so sweet and responsive. Earlier this year we stenciled our bedroom with Large Rabat, and this time we landed on something just as sweet for the downstairs guest room. Welcome, Kagami.

one wall stencil

 whole wall stencil

Pretty sweet, eh? This room is far from done. We have a little list for her which includes:

  1. Hang Art
  2. Find a better bed solution
  3. Find and install fan
  4. Find one small perfect piece of furniture
  5. Dress the windows
  6. Style and Accessorize

purdy paint brush

So what's the deal with the Purdy brushes we were testing out? First off, they clean up awesome with laytex paint. Pretty much good as new. Oil is super hard to work with when it comes to cleaning, but I have to say, it's worth saving the brush after cleaned! I also got a little daring when I realized how well the Purdy brush could cut. Are you ready for this?

 cutting in

I started taping off the room....then stopped. I didn't need to. So the final break down between yesterday's oil based review and today's latex based review is this:

  1. Easy to clean, and reusing is definitely an option
  2. No stray brush hairs at all. Zip. Nada.
  3. Can cut like nothing I have ever used before.

I am not dissin' blue tape, we know we need it for the million other things we need to tape off (like the stencil itself!), but it surely cut the prep time down 75% or more.

So there ya have it! Guestroom #2 in motion, Kitchen in motion, and pretty soon we will be revisiting the dining room!

Do you have a tiny and awkward room in your home? Share photos in the comment section below! We want to see how you dealt with the space!

 

Tuesday
Oct252011

Step by Step. Day by Day.

Hi there! Hope your Monday was kind to you! We have been busting our behinds to get things in check and the Kitchen has been the beast of the to-do list. We added some reclaimed wood to add some interest on the window wall, laid down some new floors (temp), and refinished the hardware on the doors leading to the mudroom. We have been in process of refinishing the cabinet doors and replacing the hardware when Joey brought to my attention everything looked a little too white, and drab.

messy

As I looked around our completely horrific mess of a kitchen, it hit me! Resort to the moodboard, something is missing.

kitchenAhhhh, yes. The color! Where were we going to add that red without it screaming retro kitchen or country barn?

red

The door into the mudroom was the perfect choice! With some simple tools and the patience of a saint, we transformed the boring white, into a vibrant and fun focal point.

french

First we taped off the doors to spare the glass any blood like stains.

joey

Then we carefully selected the color, Glidden Door and Trim Gel, in classic red. Next was to review a three pack of Purdy Paint brushes. We chose the 1.5" for this project. Gel is tricky when it comes to using a brush again, and we figured this was the brand to test it on.

The process went something like this: Dip brush. Paint. Gasp! The gel and Purdy paint brush combo - awesome call when all was said and done. The first layer of paint on the door looks like someone smeared blood over a white wall. It's really scary until you get that second layer on. It's oil based so we had to wait eight hours in-between. Those eight hours were painful. Oil is a beast to work with.

The paint brush was SUPER easy to work with. Not a single stray brush hair, and it held up to the weight of the gel quite nice. It also cut better than any brush we used before. It took a lot of paint thinner and cloths, but the brush was totally save-able! Even with such thick oil based gel. Pretty awesome. Tomorrow we are going to show you what the brushes look like after oil vs. after latex paint.

dirty

We also had this super gross problem to solve. This is a week of build up. See the mudroom had these tiles before we put the glossy white floors down and it crept into the kitchen a bit. When we laid down the floors in the kitch, we didn't properly merge the door frame with the floors, hence the gross canal build up of life every week.

floor

Luckily a simple strip of painted wood solved that problem. We simply nailed it into the floor and made sure the door can glide over it easily. Now for some paint thinner and goo-gone, and the door frame will look good as new!

red

So the door is done and dried and we really dig her. Perhaps this is a step in convincing Joey we should paint our front door something bold and fun! If you look hard at the pictures above you can sneak a peek at the newly finished cabinets we have going on. Yep, we are 70% up! Though the door wasn't technically part of the list, it feels good to add a little bonus to the room. The cabinets on the other hand are going to be the best thing ever to check off! The sink and counters will be here soon! I have the perfect title for that post....