we are.....pooped

This weekend was the Mother of all weekends. We are so over the top exhausted. As I type this Joey is still in the kitchen laying down flooring (it's 11:10pm on Sunday night). We spent the weekend, with the help of our dear friend Duane, prepping for our Big 4th of July Bash and moving forward with some much needed updates.

 old kitchen floors

Joey finishing up the *new* kitch floors

We over did it this weekend, even for us. Duane and I conquered a rather large guest room. The icky blue in the guest room is now a crisp semi gloss white (Frost to be exact). This room has plans, but for this week, at least, it will remain white. Lucky for Joey and I, our favorite artist, happens to be one of our favorite friends, and he had agreed to do something amazing for us. Duane has has happily volunteered to paint our children's room. Two years before we even plan on having a child. Best part is, he doesn't think we are nuts for planning so far in advance! He will be doing a 360 degree mural in his delicate and detailed style. To say the least; we are stoked.

Here is a lil peek...more to come!

We re-mulched the front yard, potted some plants, cleaned, cleaned, cleaned, did some 4th of July shopping, ordered our patio furniture, worked on building the bed, planned some our London trip, ate and rested a little, and will be sleeping like babies for the rest of the week. Let's just say we have a lot of how-to's (and how not to's) coming up!

And, I am happy to report - our final touches on the entry way are now final-final.

Thanks to everyone for their input and suggestions - you really helped us decide!

The kitchen floors are from Ikea and called Tundra. The paint is from Home Depot and called Frost in semi-glass. We also will be working on our outdoor rooms floors this week, which is next to the kitchen. Super high gloss white panels from Ikea as well. More detailed posts coming very soon about all mentioned. Also, we didn't forget the video tour of upstairs - we just wanted to finish some updates first! We hope you had a productive weekend too!

A Day In The Park (Slope)

This past weekend we had a wonderful time hanging around some of our old stomping grounds. We explored the Brooklyn Flea at it's new venue in Park Slope, then headed over to our trusted Trailer Park to see what new vintage finds we would come across. The wonderful thing about Trailer Park is that it's 1/2 vintage goods, 1/2 custom furniture.         

The most amazingthing happened while we were there! We found what will now be our new kitchen counters! We are going to have them custom built and insert a farm sink! The best part is, both Joey AND I were super excited about the find. These are very high quality, custom cabinets and counters, for about the price you would spend at Home Depot. Do you have any great home shops you go to in the City or Brooklyn? Please Share!

                  

  

We promised to show you our screw up.....

....and here it is! So our house is "mostly" renovated. I use quotes because the most difficult parts are not renovated. The kitchen, all the bathrooms and the 1400 sqft basement need work, and a lot of it. We don't exactly posess the spend to just "get it over with", so we decided to start with the kitchen, and just spruce it up a bit. 

Our plan is simple:

• Paint the walls white
• Paint the backsplash white
• Lay down some wood floors
• Change out the hardware
• Start buying new appliances, bit by bit

We went to Home Depot to pick out some stark white paint. Simple, right? Well believe it or not finding white paint was rather difficult. We had a hard time figuring out what everything meant, so we just bought two tins of the whitest white we could find, and we got painting.

You can see from the photos above the dull yellow icky-ness needed to be dealt with pronto, and resurfacing with white made the kitchen look and feel brighter. We painted EVERYTHING from the ceiling to cabinets, to backsplash to walls three times. Joey even made me a nice little shelf from scratch. We felt good, like weekend warriors. Then while sitting in traffic on my way home from work that Monday it hit me. We painted the ENTIRE kitchen matte white. You know, matte, the kind of paint everything sticks to! The kind that's hard to clean. The kind of paint you never paint your trimmings or KITCHEN! Hence, we need to redo everything before we lay down the floors or do anything else.

We just wanted to share what NOT to do and hope you can learn from our little mess up! Oh well, a few more tubs of paint and another weekend of work is a fair enough price to pay for such a blooper.