Home Depot Adventures: Wiener Mobile Edition

So on our latest Adventure to Home Depot, we had a little surprise... the Oscar Mayer Wienermobile!!!!! I had to yell at Alex, 'STOP, STOP, I want a picture of the WienerMobile!' I think I yelled so loud that people outside of our car heard me, haha! It definitely lightened the mood for us before running HD errands, anyway, the little things that make you smile!

Our Deck Redo Continued! Lower Level Construction Included!

After we took the original planking off the upper level of our deck, Alex started putting the new boards down that we picked up on our huge Home Depot Adventure.

Then... FINALLY! A real deck with normal spacing! So exciting!

With the first level complete, Alex began framing up the lower level...

And here is Alex in process.... happy face!!!!! HAHA! But seriously, he is doing a great job getting the lower level completed. Maybe he is making that face because he has quarter sized blisters on his knees??? Could be!

And adding the stairs between levels.... so far looking good! Next blog will be the finished product!

I really want...

So I have caught Father of the Bride on TV a couple times now, and each time I am just dying to get a glass window at the top of our stairs similar to the one in the movie...

How cute is that window? So that is on my wish list.

While I am at it... how perfect is the Bank's house from the movie? Hooked on Houses featured the Bank's house, I loved looking through all the photos (also where the photos below came from, awesome blog!).  I remember watching when I was little and thinking that was the perfect house for a family, hoping I would get one like it someday. When Alex and I looked at houses I wanted the colonial style with the staircase front and center when you walk in, wonder if I was picturing this house in my mind a little?

And I still love the kitchen, for this movie being made in 1991, the style of the house still looks nice, not dated, I think the traditional style always looks classic! I love the wood countertops and white cabinets, I am hoping to get our wood countertops soon.

And of course when I looked up a picture of the backyard I just had to laugh, how gorgeous is it? We have been working our booties off on our yard and it would never look this lovely. But hey, maybe someday! I love the vines grown up on the pergola, I hope our vines start to take off soon!

That's all for now on dreamy movie houses :)

"Honey, I think this brick is loose!?!?!"

Yep, that was a quote from Alex as he pulled on a brick that looked loose and then... CRUMBLE! The whole corner just fell apart, we knew the corner was in rough shape when we bought the house, one of those things we should have written in the deal to be fixed, but since we asked for so much else we thought we could wait on this one. Turns out, when brick and mortar isn't looking good, best to do something about it right away because it is brittle stuff when space gets between it.

Unfortunaletly for us, this happened when we were in our house for about a month, so we were already deep into our rennovating, and this was one type of repair Alex could not do. So we had to shell out money to get this fixed ASAP. The work was done very well, so we were happy with the result, it was a bummer it was expensive to fix, but it looks so nice now!

Home Depot Adventures: Deck Materials and Lumber Edition

Before we could start rebuilding the deck, we had to go to our favorite place in the whole world! You guessed it, the Home Depot! Alex and I have gone on many adventures at Home Depot, and I am sure there will be many, many more, so I will try to blog about the exciting trips- or I guess you can call it the trips that make you want to pull your hair out and have a mental breakdown. There's no better time to pull out a camera and capture the moment!

So we needed to get wood to rebuild the top (existing frame) of the deck, and then build a new lower level deck. Here is one cart full of lumber- if you are wondering there are 36 boards on that cart.

And the other cart, this one has 16 boards, two 4x4's, and other materials like deck nails, joint frames, and the stairs. Alex and I did this on a Saturday night, so HD was pretty empty and their staff was non existent! I pushed that cart from the lumber department to the registers in flip flops! It might not look hard, but the weight of the lumber was crazy! I can't believe I did it, then as we got to the registers two guys said, 'oh no one helped you with that' as they just stood there, nice job HD. Most of the time I find their staff to be pretty awesome, but not on a Saturday night!Now the fun part, we rented a Home Depot truck to bring the lumber home, thank goodness they helped us load it! The truck was $20 for 75 minutes, not a bad deal. I had to snap a photo of us in the HD truck, good times!

We then unloaded the lumber and returned the truck, then it was time to get to work!

The Kitchen Nook

One thing we knew for sure when we picked our house, was that this kitchen nook made no sense and had to go! The cabinets lined along the walls on both side, so if you opened cupboard doors, they would hit each other, so when ever this was done, it was just a poor idea.

What we both wondered was, what was the purpose of this space? Storage, eat-in area, or what??? I did some research, and what I kept finding was something like the photo below, it was sort of like a booth, lots of Dutch Colonials built in the 1920's seemed to have this.

But did we want a booth? NO! We were sure we wanted it to be an informal eating area, and maybe have additional storage since we were giving up a lot of cabinets space. So we started taking out the cabinets....
Basically, Alex started by unscrewing the screws that secured the cabinets to the walls. Then carefully pulled them away from the wall.

And we finally ended up with a blank space! Just needed some paint, and of course, we needed to re-tile the floor since they tiled around the cabinets.

So Alex had a lot of fun with that, using a tile cutter is a pain! Most of the tiles needed to be cut to fit the odd space. Oddly enough, now we want wood floors in the kitchen and nook, so who knows, we might redo this sometime.

And the tada! This is what it looked like when we finished, we had a taller pub table we put in the space, and 2 corner shelves that we were able to store some dishes and glasses on. And then... I re-did the space a little more...

First, I hated the table in the middle of the nook, you couldn't move around it, so I needed to be able to put the table against the wall. Problem was the top of the table had space on either side so you could sit around it, and I just didn't like the cherry wood on the table top anyway.
So I went to Ikea and bought a slab of butcher block countertop, which was an idea that I found on the Lettered Cottage Blog's Butcher Block Counter Swap. Funny thing, just like Layla and Kevin, Ikea didn't have the $40 countertop in stock, so I had to get the $80 one, darn Ikea! After picking that up, I removed the cherry wood countertop and attached the butcher block on top of the base. And wala! Instant new table that fit the space much better, and looked cuter! The butcher block slab cost about $80, and it was kind of a pain to unattach the original table top, but everything turned out great!

So here is the nook currenly, we have a 'Wine Tasting' sign above the nook, and on the walls in the nook we have 2 framed wine label prints and then some framed historic pictures of the neighborhood I was able to print. We left another black stool to the left in the nook, but that might not stay, still trying to come up with a better idea for that side of the nook, open to suggestions if you have one! And I hope to add my antique window chalkboard to the space once it is complete!

UPDATE: 10.29.10 This last photo is an update after finishing my antique chalkboard and sanding and painting the table!  So much better than those crummy cabinets!

Our Deck Redo

Since our 'Operation Ugly Yard Overhaul' is nearing completion (I hope), we decided it was time to start a new project in our backyard. Our deck has been a problem that we have known about for a while, the wood was untreated and left outdoors for who knows how long so it became rotted and warped, so it was time to tear it apart! Here is a photo of Rocco on our deck, the wood is green and rotting...


Another huge problem, the spacing of the boards, over an inch!!!! Our poor little pup Sadie got her whole paw stuck in one of these cracks one day, and just cried and wailed! It was terrible, it gave us more motivation to fix the problem ASAP.

We began by taking down the vinyl deck railing, which I must say, isn't very high quality stuff, I would never use this in the future, it came apart all the time and was squeaky.

Then Alex had to unscrew all the boards and take them off. I carried them away, didn't use the drill!
So now we have just the frame and are ready to get new boards! We are planning on doing a two level deck, so this deck will be level with our house and we will have stairs leading down to the lower deck. I can't wait to have more room to entertain! But for the upper level, Alex is going to build in a bench at the boarder instead of having the railing all around, I think it will be perfect! Can't wait to show the afters!