Batering at its best - the results

Remember in a previous post when I organized a friend's kitchen in exchange for a granite countertop for my bathroom? Well, I promised to show you the finished product, so here it is ...

I've always wanted a waterfall faucet, so I did some hunting on ebay, and found this one for cheaper than a standard faucet would have been from Home Depot or Lowe's (and a bonus ... shipping was free!).

This little bathroom has gone through a complete metamorphosis. Here's what the countertop looked like when we bought the house ... (kind of like an ugly caterpillar.)

Here's what it looked like a few months ago before we retiled the floors (thanks to the flood), which then led to repainting and replacing the toilet ... (lots of changes happening, chrysalis stage.)

And how the bathroom looks today ... (a beautiful butterfly!)

... I'm thrilled with the results!

Batering at its best

Remember in a previous post a few months ago when I was wishing for new bathroom counter tops to go with my new flooring? Well, I'm making it happen ... 50% anyway. A friend of mine just happens to install granite counter tops, and he approached me willing to trade my organizing skills in his kitchen for a beautiful, granite counter top. How perfect, right? He's a bachelor, but getting married soon, and he wanted his space organized before his soon-to-be-wife and all of her stuff moved in. His kitchen wasn't bad, just lacking a woman's touch! Here's how I helped:

Pots & Pans Before ..... and ..... Pots and Pans After

Spice Cabinet Before ... and ... Spice Cabinet After

Tupperware Before ... and ... Tupperware After

(He's eventually going to install a Lazy Susan here, but it needed a temporary solution.)

Pantry Before ... and ... Pantry After

Under Sink Before ... and ... Under Sink After

Utensil Drawers Before ... and ... Utensil Drawers After

Dishes Before ... and ... Dishes After

(This isn't a dramatic change, but it's an open front cabinet, so it must look it's best!)

Catch-all Drawer Before ... and ... Catch-all Drawer After

(Just sounds better than "junk drawer," right? Come on, we all have them!)

He was a very happy customer, and his fiancée was even more thrilled. I finished it just in time for his housewarming party. Can't wait to get my granite counter top. Hopefully I'll be posting pics of it in a couple of weeks!

Think outside the box hedge

After many months of neglecting my flower beds and the yard in general, I finally decided to do something about it. I dusted off the garden shears and went to work. I trimmed some limbs and even bought some new plants to spruce up the front beds. I was really on a roll. But eventually I had to face something that I'd been dreading. A real quandary of sorts that left me scratching my head ...

this ...

This, my friends, would be a not-so-pretty box hedge in my backyard that is dead only in the middle, courtesy of the last freeze. Lovely, eh?

So, what would you do with this?

Well, here's what I did ...

... that looks soooo much better, right?
(Insert sarcasm here)

(sigh)

But then I had a green thumb moment and it just came to me.

I now know exactly what I'm going to do with this awkward space, and it's going to be fabulous.

Any guesses? Check back soon for updated pics on what I decided to do!

Down to the Wire

Whew! We completed our flooring redo with just minutes to spare. Did I mention that we had a deadline of a week and a half, because we were having 13 family members over on Father's Day? Oh yeah, minor detail.

Kent was still grouting the last room less than 24 hours before our get-together, and I was still hauling leftover tile, tools and junk out of the house, oh about two hours before our company was due to arrive. Yikes! But we did it, and we're thrilled with the results. I feel so much more productive in our "new" office, our master closet seems bigger and the new tile in the bathrooms give the rooms a richer look. There's still some minor finishing work to do, like the baseshoe, but the hard part is done. Check it out:

How about those new toilets, huh? They're flush-riffic! (Yes, we realize that we are a little too excited about our new high-efficiency porcelain thrones. It's not normal, but we're OK with that.)

Huge props to my hubby! I'm so lucky to have such a handy guy!

If you give a mouse a cookie ...

We're in the middle of our mini-remodel, I can't help but think of the children's book If You Give a Mouse a Cookie as we go along. If you haven't heard of it, it goes something like this:

"If you give a mouse a cookie, he's going to ask for a glass of milk. When you give him the milk, he'll probably ask you for a straw ..." and the requests go on and on.

We started out just wanting to replace our damaged floors. But the tile we picked clashed with the existing paint color in the study and hall bathroom. So I repainted both rooms to match. Now a dresser in the study doesn't go with the newly painted walls as well. So I painted it black. Since we're tiling both bathrooms, the toilets had to be disconnected and removed. Might as well just get new toilets then, right? Now we want new bathroom countertops to go with our new floors and toilets. But our bank account needs a break!

So just remember ... if you give a girl new tile, she's going to want to remodel the whole house.

Help! I'm a hoarder ...

... not really. Completely the opposite actually. But at the moment our house is probably the closest it will ever be to looking like a hoarder's house (Do you ever watch those shows on A&E and TLC? Disturbing ...).

We got some water in part of our house during last week's storm/flood. The study, hall bath, master closet and master bath were all saturated with water.

So we pulled up and trashed the affected carpets/vinyl tiles and have decided to replace it all with ceramic/porcelain tiles. Thankfully no damage was done to our hardwoods!

This meant that EVERYTHING that was touching the floor in these rooms had to come out and find a temporary home. Our guest bedroom and master bedroom received the brunt of the stuff.

So, our master bedroom which normally looks like this ...

... now looks like this!

Thank goodness that my eyes are closed for the majority of the time that I have to be in this room!

Aren't you just dying to come stay in our spacious guest bedroom?

I know it will all be beautiful and even better than before once it's complete, but for now, this organized person is going slightly insane. And to think that some people live like this (and much worse) ALL THE TIME!

Shame on me!

Yes, I'm alive, and no, I haven't abandoned my blog! It's been ridiculously long since I've blogged, but in my defense, I did have a couple of things working against me. 1) Our computer was having some major issues, and we didn't think it was going to make it, but luckily a friend at Kent's work revived it for us. 2) We "lost" our camera for about a month and a half before we decided to break down and buy a new one. And you know what they say, if you want to find something that you've lost, just buy a replacement ... sure enough, we found our camera about a month later! But that's ok, because we got a better camera for a great deal thanks to Circuit City going out of business, and now we have a "back-up" camera. So ... let's play catch-up!

One day last year, our two-year-old, stainless steel, GE microwave just stopped working. Of course, the warranty is only good for one year, and it was still so new that we didn't want to pay to replace it already, so Kent messed around with it and found that it worked if the front panel hung down from it's wires like this ...

Nice, huh? We were going for the industrial look. So for about a year, I've lived with this ghetto microwave and stood about five feet back whenever I needed to zap something in fear of the radiation that it must be emitting! But a couple of months ago, I reached the end of my rope with it. We did the research and realized it was about the same cost to repair it as it was to replace it. So off to Lowe's we went. Kent forgot what a chore it was to install, but he was a trooper. Check out those muscles!! ;)

And voila, the finished product! So happy to have a functioning and aesthetically pleasing microwave again!! (It's the little things ..)

More to come soon (I promise!). It's late, I'm tired and Kent still isn't home from his Kansas trip. He left Monday morning, and was supposed to come back earlier this evening, but storms caused massive delays. He and the other guys he is traveling with made it to Dallas, but there were no more flights out tonight, so they decided to rent a car and drive home. That will put him home around 4 a.m. ... yikes!