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Kitchen and Family Room: Painting

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We have painted rooms before, three rooms, a bathroom and stripes in the hallway of our apartment to be exact. So I would say we are no strangers to painting. We are aware of the do's and don'ts.. the important Repair. Prepare. Paint. What we were strangers to is the repairing. All the previous walls we had painted were pretty much new. They came with the original contractors paint.. so repairing was not needed. Nor did we need separate primer.. the paint plus primer combo pretty much worked. Step one, I took pictures of all the repair jobs on the walls.. thank god the family room area had been already taken care of by the contractor and we only had to deal with the kitchen part of the walls. We took the pictures to show to the Home Depot guy so that we were certain the products we were purchasing we correct.      The job required sanding the bumpy, uneven areas till they were smooth, filling in the holes with joint compound or spackle, waiting for it to dry and then re-

COUNTDOWN TO BABY GIVEAWAY - Little Momma Boutique

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4 weeks to go till baby arrives.. 4 weeks to go! is it time to freak out yet? so lets continue to celebrating another week closer with another giveaway.. This week I am teaming up with  Little Momma Boutique , brimming with beautiful  handmade children's items perfect for gifting, photos and special occasions. Each item is handmade by Hiedi and materials are carefully selected to offer quality products. Every items is inspired by items she personally makes for her own children or have created for others.   Little Momma Boutique  is giving away the most precious little candy cane elf hat. Hiedi's red and white candy cane hat was featured in the 2012 Holiday Issue of Giggle Magazine! To Enter: - Visit  Little Momma Boutique 's adorable shop and tell me in the comments what your favorite creation is and leave your email address so I can contact you when you win :) - Visit Little Momma Boutique's  Etsy  page and click on the Heart to favorite it. - F

Kitchen and Family Room: New Flooring

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When the wall between our family room and kitchen see details here came down we had to deal with two different flooring, old carpet and newish laminate. The plan was to find the same laminate.. we found the box in the basement, how hard could it be? Harder than we thought.. that particular one had been discontinued.. and finding something similar was not an easy task..  Finding a flooring that was kind of close but not close enough would seem like a mistake.. so we decided to go different, this way it would seem like an intentional design choice.. I had always wanted a chocolaty dark floor.. The next thing to take into consideration was the transition between the two floors.. generally what is used it a T- Moulding, that strip you see in the above picture connecting the two floors together. Not the prettiest option. Pinterest to the rescue..  Adding tile to the mix would help to blend the two different brown together and there would be no awkward bump in the floori

COUNTDOWN TO BABY GIVEAWAY - Sweet Melody Designs

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5 weeks to go till baby arrives.. 5 weeks to go! so lets continue to celebrating though I am freaking out a bit I am also so uncomfortable I can't wait to get to the end another week closer with another giveaway.. This week I am teaming up with Sweet Melody Designs , an enchanting shop full of beautifully whimsical art for children. Each print is a print of an original creation hand drawn by Carrie. All of her art can by customized to any color palette of your choice. Sweet Melody Designs  is giving away an adorable 8x10 of her Baby Elephant Sleeping on the Moon print.  To Enter: - Visit  Sweet Melody Designs 's adorable shop and tell me in the comments what your favorite print is and leave your email address so I can contact you when you win :) - Visit Sweet Melody Designs  Etsy  page and click on the Heart to favorite it. - Follow my blog via  Bloglovin' It's as simple as that! Extra Entry - Get an Extra Entry by Tweeting about this Giveaway

Kitchen and Family Room: Renovations

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We are into day nine of our renovations.. we lost a few days due to the Thanksgiving Holidays... we hopefully have only a few days of work left though.. phew. Here's a look at what we started with and where we are now.. So, we started with this wall... the wall divided our kitchen and our family room. While both spaces are large I hated the idea of not being able to keep an eye on D.. and with another one on the way.. I think the open space would just make life easier.. and just think about how wonderful it would be to be able to entertain in an open floor plan. This is the view from our kitchen. Now looking at the same wall from the family room. To the right, the green room is what would be a formal living room. Notice the faux wood pillars along the wall, outdoor lantern lights hang off them.. the walls are a faux textured plaster like pattern.. now the interesting part.. the faux texture was not something that was painted on, instead they are plastic like panels nail

COUNTDOWN TO BABY GIVEAWAY - Cartesian Yarnistry

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Happy Thanksgiving! We have a little over 6 weeks before baby arrives.. so I am celebrating another week closer with another giveaway.. This week I am teaming up with  Cartesian Yarnistry , a dorable baby crochet delights, creating delicate, heirloom elegance designs for precious moments in time.  Susan of Cartesian Yarnistry aims to t o create "once-upon-a-time" precious memories of Babies and Toddlers in the genre of Crochet Wearable Art, while offering heirloom products to last a lifetime. Cartesian Yarnistry  is giving away an adorable newborn turtle outfit perfect for your babies first photo op.  Shades of Green Turtle shell attached beanie rolled brim style. Turtle shell hexagon pieces in multi-green shades surrounded by soft fern including tiny tail & embellished by forest green edging around entire shell. To Enter: - Visit  Cartesian Yarnistry 's adorable shop and tell me in the comments what your favorite creation is and leave your email a

Hiring a Contractor

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pinterest So we hired our first contractor to help us create an open floor plan in our kitchen/family room. The work involved knocking down a wall, installing a window, new flooring etc. Didn't seem like much, just not something we were willing to try do ourselves. We started with an estimate in mind.. but having no experience we had no idea what to expect. I started by picking up the Home Improvement Guide at our grocery store.. picked out a few names of contractors and Googled them. Checked out their website, saw if they had any reviews or complaints and then made phone calls. We had a total of six contractors come out and give us estimates. You don't need to get six estimates.. but I would recommend getting at least three. We met an interesting mix of people. Of the six two declared our wall, separating the kitchen from the family room load bearing (this makes it a bit more pricey and difficult to knock down, but still doable). And then there were four. Our estima