tiny.k is a blog devoted to interiors, photography, and anything else I find inspiring. I'm a freelance web developer by day and scour the internet for beautiful things by night. I live in the midwest (nope, not all farmland) with my husband, our daughter, and two dogs.
Photo of our dog, Bird, is by Jay Fram. Check him out, he's awesome!
Photos by Janet Kimber, via Poppytalk's flickr
Inspired from this photo on Emma’s blog, it’s nice to know that if we never find time to actually renovate our 2nd floor that at least we could make it look far better than it does now. Doh!
Photos via Martha Stewart
Photos by Christopher Baker via Country Living
Lovely photos above and below by Christopher Baker… as I would cover the whole inside of my house in wood paneling, I’d also love to cover the outside in cedar shingles and ivy. ;)
Photo by Christopher Baker
Photographers for either of the bottom two photos couldn’t be found but I loved the simplicity of each, and the casually-formal gardens in front.
Photo on left via House Beautiful; right via Country Living
The heat index yesterday was around 117 so we thought it would be a good time for an outdoor project. Really, the weather was exceptionally nice a few weeks ago and that’s when the idea popped into our heads but we’ve already dug up half our yard so it’s onward and upward from here. :)
Since we have lots and lots left to do on our house (basement, 2nd floor, backyard, paint the exterior, landscape, and so on) we needed a smaller project to help get us motivated for all that’s remaining. Conveniently enough it happens to be summer and we thought this would be a nice project where Ada can be outside “helping out,” which she loves. :)
Nathan’s been doing all of the manual labor while I watch Ada, and since he had a brief stint working with a stone mason for a year, he actually has more of the necessary skills for this project anyway, so I only feel half-as-guilty.
For the materials we are using blue stone for the patio, crushed gravel for the sidewalk, and limestone for the curbs. Everything has been dug out, the french drain is in, and the gravel base is (mostly) in! It feels good to be working on the house again—I have such an addiction for this kind of work!
The only somewhat “off” thing about this project is that it’s a patio for the front of our house. I find very few houses with a patio in front but for some reason it feels right with this house. The front patio was never in style but we’re bringing it back anyway!
If given a choice between practical and beautiful, I will almost always choose the latter. Always. It’s a sickness of mine that has led to a countless number of impractical decisions, including the purchase of our 9.2 cu. ft. SMEG.
It’s been one year since the little beauty arrived and while I absolutely adore it and want to use it forever, my better-half disagrees. It took us a long time to actually do it, so in the event someone else is thinking about getting one, here’s what I think:
Having said all that, I have absolutely no regrets about buying it, but I know Nathan does—he feels it’s just a little too impractical for a family. I’m still blinded by it’s beauty so I feel great about the decision, even a year later, but I wanted to share my thoughts just in case someone else was considering one.
Note: We purchased this through sears.com and while our experience may have been a fluke, it was a complete nightmare. It took months for it to arrive! We were told they were in stock and ready for immediate delivery but that was not the case and customer service was completely unreliable.
Oh, well hello there! It’s the pendant I waited 12 weeks to get AND that I got on sale. A major sale. It must be a popular marketing tactic to wait 12 weeks prior to shipping an item out—after three or four weeks you tend to forget you even ordered a light, and then once it arrives you’re just so happy that you got something, anything, in the mail, that you tend to think extra-highly of your newly arrived item, regardless of what it actually is. In this case I was excited about both! Look at her! LOOK at her! :)
Hallelujah, we’ve found a paint color! A few weeks ago I decided that an after-dinner coffee break was essential to life-with-a-child-productivity and I can honestly say we’ve done more in the past few weeks than we have in the previous four months added together. The main thing accomplished? The exhaustive process of picking out paint colors and painting.
I don’t know why we are so bad at settling on a color but within the past month we’ve had twelve different swatches of paint up on our walls. Giraffe-esque in a very bad way. We tried every single light gray/white color we could think of but our living room gets such strange light that any color we tried ended up looking completely different in the day than it did at night.
From left to right: Revere Pewter, Stone Harbor, Smoke Embers, Barren Plain
We tried Benjamin Moore Revere Pewter, Stone Harbor, Barren Plain, Smoke Embers at 100%, Smoke Embers at 75%, Smoke Embers at 25%, and a few other random colors that never made it beyond a 2′ x 2′ patch on the wall. Side note: I am well aware of just how completely neurotic we are—it’s not Nathan’s fault, I bring him down.
After sitting with each of the light colors for a while, we decided to go dark. Really dark. Gentleman’s Club dark. We desperately need some things to warm up the room but I’m totally digging it! Nathan thinks we should paint the woodwork dark as well, but I’m on the fence… it’s so much work and I just don’t know if we have the energy even with my post-dinner coffee break.
I’ve been feeling a little on the down-side of things for the lack of time life seems to have as a full-time working parent, but getting the bathroom finished up helped momentarily perk me up. There’s still a long list of things left to do but I’m not sure we’ll ever get to those (quarter-round, trim piece under the mirror, patch holes, etc., etc..). In the meantime though, I can’t say I’m not excited with how things turned out. :)
The towel bar was found in the coat closet when we bought the house, which we prepped and painted glossy black. The screws are brass which stand out nicely against the glossy black—an insignificant detail I’m sure no one notices but it’s one of my favorites.
And there above… that tiny, tiny orchid, is the only “color” I’ve managed to bring into the bathroom. Le sigh… my color phobia continues.
Before (realtor photo)
Our bathroom is almost done! Here it is before we bought the house (previous tenants belongings). We kept the medicine cabinet, the floors (love those!), the vent (not pictured) and tub but scrapped everything else without regret… bye bye pink tile.
Gutted
We had new plumbing and new electric put in throughout the house which was great! I love the idea of knowing everything inside the walls is in great shape and worry-free!
Left: durock installed; Right: v-groove paneling
The vapor barrier and durock went up next, along with the same v-groove paneling we installed in the kitchen (just along one wall). I love, love, love it… but I have to say I’m a little worried about it with the moisture from the shower. So far so good but it’s always in the back of my mind.
Paneling and baseboard installed
The floors and vent are my favorite part of the bathroom… why can’t they still make vents like these nowadays?
Tile going in
Above are photos of the mammoth tiling project. I think we probably could have done this with less expensive tile but at the time we got caught up in having to make a decision quickly and chose this tile over spending a weekend hunting for a cheaper version.
More tile...
More tile.
Black grout going in
Above is uncle Joe who we owe our second unborn child should we decide to have more kids. He helped us night after night after night on this! Thanks Joe!
Narrowest sink we could find, installed
And here’s the bathroom looking in from the hall. It’s the only bathroom in the house so far so we had to get the majority of it done prior to moving in. We’ve been in now for seven months and it’s almost done. Almost!
When we sold our last house it was very bitter-sweet. For seven years we poured everything we had into the house—blood, sweat, and tears quite literally. We slowly finished parts of one room and would almost immediately jump onto parts of another, never completing one single room until the very end when we decided to put it on the market. It had less to do with our attention spans and more to do with our needs—when water starts pouring down your back stairs, you tend to devote a bit more of your resources to the problem at hand.
Our new house is drastically different than our previous one. We are also different than we were in our previous house; we are older, have a baby, and our style has started to become a bit more… well… us. The best part of buying a new house was being able to take what we learned in the past and apply it to a new project. Plus, I’m obsessed with houses, so I really enjoy any amount of rehabbing, decorating, planning, and/or designing when it comes to my home.
While we are in no way finished with the house, we are almost finished with the kitchen. And. I. Love. It. We still want shelves over the stove (love open shelving, especially when filled with things that warm-up a room… make it feel lived in), and need to finish up some painting and small odds-and-ends, but here’s where we are now:
I’d say the kitchen was a moderate-budget kitchen. We splurged on a few things, but I don’t regret a penny that we spent. The dishwasher and oven are from IKEA, as are the cabinets that we sanded down and painted. We also bought them all during their kitchen sale so we ended up saving a good amount. The floors we redid ourselves (err… Nathan and his brother did), and I love them. It was questionable what was underneath the three layers of flooring but we lucked out and they were in great shape!
The main splurge was the SMEG refrigerator, which although it is small, makes me happy every time I see it. It was one of the biggest headaches to order (they are advertised as being available to quickly deliver through Sears, but we did not find that to be the case and while they confirmed three different delivery dates, we didn’t get it until three months after those dates had come and passed. It was worth it though. Look at that little guy! Adorable! I feel it is necessary to point out that we do have an old refrigerator in the basement where we keep things we don’t use every day.
The other thing we splurged on were the three pendant lights. These are really more beautiful in person. Really. They are made from translucent bone china and give off the most intimate warm glow, so day or night they are really pleasant to look at. I highly recommend these (they are from DWR and are on-sale now).
In our previous house we used tractor-trailer flooring (new, not used) for our counter-tops. It was a really inexpensive way to have butcher-block-ish counters (i.e., bottom photo found here) but we didn’t plane them down like we should have and they were a bit uneven. This time we went with marble.
All the major stuff is done now, but there are small things that we probably won’t get to for a very long time… i.e., the shelves we want above the stove (see way below, where the picture is hung a bit too high), the piece of trim that goes below the stove and above the oven (see below), missing paint on one of the side-cabinet doors, and a few places in the floor where there are tiny holes from old outlets (we had new electric and plumbing put in).
The missing piece mentioned above might not be all that noticeable to everyone, but it’s there… See it? It’s right there above the oven… Right. There. It’s small though, and I can live with it never being replaced now that I’ve lived through one entire, constant-in-progress renovation. It’s really nice to have the bulk of the room done.
Here’s what it looked liked when we first bought the house back in the Spring (2010):
And then after we gutted it:
And now, where the shelves will soon be:
There have been a few changes in the past two years. The first of the two major ones is selling our first house. After working on it for 7 years, we packed up our things and said goodbye. It was both a really hard decision and a very liberating one.
The above was my favorite room from the house… and one that was for this little lady we like to call Ada. She is also a fun little project we’ve been working on for the past two years.
So with a new house and a new little lady, much inspiration is needed, especially since the new house is not new but really just new-to-us… and needs lots of work.
