Attention all DIY-ers! What are you working on?

[Tuckins1]

Our house was a complete gut job, so this was only one of ALL of the rooms....

The before pics were taken the day after the old owners moved out.... ICK!!!

 

[Tuckins1]

More (during construction)

 

[Tuckins1]

Starting to come together!

 

[Tuckins1]

Done! (We have since gotten some new appliances...)

 

[TBjumper]

Tuckins your kitchen is fab!

We had a fugly back den/office with wood paneling that needed to be updated. We have put new windows in, and we are working on replacing all the stained trim to white. I went bold and painted the wood panels blue with white trim. I have a white couch for the room too. Since the pictures were taken we have replaced the old door, with a new white one (with windows) and trimmed it out as well. Still a work in progress but isn't that true of home ownership in general??

 

[TBjumper]

And here are some in progress pictures, I don't have an "after" yet as we aren't done.

 

[TBjumper]

sick of these yet?!

 

[Tuckins1]

sick of these yet?!

Not at all! I love seeing everybody's hard work! It looks great so far!

We also had a fugly back den with wood paneling.... I guess that wood paneling was REALLY popular way back when. Thank goodness that trend has passed!

 

[TBjumper]

Thanks, the paneling was a beeeotch to paint but once I got it done, the lines of the panels add a really cool texture effect. I have a white couch and a fluffy white rug, and I am going to do some bright yellow drapes on the bay window. You can kinda see the flower pot that was the inspiration for the color scheme on the window in the "DenDuringPaint3" picture. The new pottery barn book has a room in it that looks like what I am hoping to achieve with this one. I need to get the reallllly wide base boards too.

We have done our hall bath, which about ended our marriage, (joking, kinda HAHA) after we did slate tile on a diagonal for our first tile job. My husband was OVER it when we were finished

 

[Tuckins1]

I luuurrrvvve slate! We used it on our fireplace hearth (you can see it on the cabinet pictures), and I would have loved to use it on a floor, but our house is too small, and it would have made any room feel too small. Perhaps when we redo the basement....

 

[TBjumper]

Believe it or not the hall bath that we used the slate in isn't huge. We did wains coating up to about the 4ft mark on the all, and painted the wall a taupe color. The white on the wains coating helped make sure the room wasn't too dark. We were worried the tile would over power the room but it looks good. The only thing I don't love is that with natural slate there is some unevenness to the floor tile to tile, not enough to look bad, but enough to make stubbing your toe in the middle of the night a total PITA. I'll have to take some pictures. We are almost done with that room as well, but need to do crown molding, and find a light switch I like.

 

[Tuckins1]

Can't wait to see pics!

 

[hawaiianorangetree]

Tuckins, your kitchen project looks fantastic! I love the bench tops. What an amamzing job you guys did! Kitchen renos are such hard work. We were without a kitchen for about 6 weeks... no sink, no stove, nothing! I always have a lot respect for people who do their own kitchen renos.

 

[Tuckins1]

Tuckins, your kitchen project looks fantastic! I love the bench tops. What an amamzing job you guys did! Kitchen renos are such hard work. We were without a kitchen for about 6 weeks... no sink, no stove, nothing! I always have a lot respect for people who do their own kitchen renos.

Thanks much!

 

[artdecogirl]

Tuckins, that turned out just beautiful!

 

[hawaiianorangetree]

Here are the before and after shots of our kitchen (which is still a work in progress).

The whole reason we renovated the kitchen is so that i could see the TV when cooking.

 

[Echidna]

OMG, HOT, the difference is unbelievable!!! Great job.

Congrats to all the DIYers. Looks like hard but rewarding work! I hope to be joining your ranks in the not too distant future...

ETA: TBjumper, I have been trying to convince FI that we need to paint our living room that gorgeous blue with our white trim. Did it shrink the room visually? I can't help thinking it would be like living in a jewelbox

 

[Tuckins1]

Here are the before and after shots of our kitchen (which is still a work in progress).

The whole reason we renovated the kitchen is so that i could see the TV when cooking.

Wow HOT, what a difference! Great work!

 

[Tuckins1]

Done!!!!
I love them! They look pretty good for 87 year old cabinets!!

 

[Tuckins1]

Books!

 

[that_someone_special]

Looks great. I wish I knew how to stain stuff... I have like a million things I could work on!

I don't have pictures but when I started dating FI.. his place... was a mess. Teal on wall everywhere, the bathroom was PURPLE.. a bedroom was PURPLE (the others were teal and off-dirty-white). We have painted every single room except for the kitchen because it needs some plaster work.. but soon...

I think the biggest change was our sun room which was green walls, blue ceiling (a very flat unhappy scheme for a sun room). It is now "candlelit ivory" and completely brightens the place up!! The other one would be our dining room which had green, teal walls and a semi teal ceiling with dark wood.

We will be replacing the bathroom vanity soon (I hope! I already bought one!) and painting AGAIN in there to change the colors (it was purple, changed it to green, it now has to go to a neutral due to the wood color of the vanity).

The biggest issue has been clearing FI's junk out. He is a pack-rat. Finally though after almost 4 years of cleaning and painting, and donating... and tossing... people come over and compliment us on our place instead of wondering why we have random cr@p everywhere.

If anyone wants to come over and help me strip two windows that would be great. They were painted for some reason.


ETA: I forgot to ask.. did that used to be a coal fire place? Ours is shaped just liked that (square) but still has the front to it. It's non functional though.

 

[Loves Vintage]

Tuckins!!! I love, love, love those cabinets. So gorgeous! The leaded glass if fantastic! And, I love the little windows above too. Too cute! Do you use the fireplace? Does it let off a lot of heat?

I have to go back to find your before pictures now. ETA: Oh, wow, what a difference! What was behind the cabinet before? Tile? Do you have three windows in the front? Reminds me of my first house. Sigh. Is it a colonial?

 

[Hudson_Hawk]

Tuckins, those built ins are just gorgeous, I love the mahogany stain!

I finished my bookcase this weekend. I'm going to take pictures tonight after I make DH haul it upstairs to the nursery. Considering it was my first time working with wood and constructing from scratch, I think I did an OK job. It's in no way perfect and there are things I'm not happy with, but I had fun and I'm proud of it.

Pictures forthcoming.

 

[NewEnglandLady]

I'm so impressed by everybody's projects! Tuckins, those built-ins look amazing!

So this weekend I had a little surprise DIY project. So about 80% of the exterior of our house is cedar shingles (typical for this area), but there is one section that is painted white. I noticed there was a little bit of mildew growing, so I took out the power washer to get rid of it.

While power washing the house, I decided that I may as well power wash the front porch since it was grey and dull and I figured it was dirty. We just moved in a couple of months ago, but it looked like the wood hadn't been stained in 10 years. So I power washed it and was pleasantly surprised by how beautiful the cedar looked when it was cleaned. So 2 hours later, the porch was bright and clean. DH and I ran out to get some stain to protect it on Sunday morning--an hour and a half later, it looked like we had a brand new front porch!

I love fun little projects, especially when they take less than 4 hours to complete. I need to get some before and after pictures.

 

[Tuckins1]

Thanks all!

Bean- no it wasn't a coal fireplace, just really small. We can't make too big of a fire because it gets very smoky inside. (I guess the flu just can't handle too much smoke at a time) I would love to see your new bathroom!

Loves Vintage- It actually does let off a lot of heat, but since the thermostat is right around the corner, it actually ends up making the upstairs really COLD because the thermostat doesn't kick on as much. We have a huge wood burning pot-belly stove in the basement too, and we don't use it much for the same reason. (Although once the heater went out when it was -16 outside, and the potbelly stove kept the house at 65 degrees until we could get the furnace fixed!) The old cabinets has fake brick paper behind them and no actual cabinet sides, the shelves were just sitting on thin strips of wood that were attached to the wall. Yes, our house is a colonial (built in 1923) and it used to have three windows in front... We replaced all of the windows, and now it has two small double hungs on the side, and one large pain in the middle.

HH- Thanks much! Can't wait to see your handy work on your bookshelf!

NEL- Thanks! Good work on power washing! I just love cedar shingles (when they are taken care of)... Can't wait to see pics!

 

[that_someone_special]

OK so this is weird, I am reupholstering some chairs- 6 that are dining room chairs, and one that was FI's moms.. it has an older style to it but the fabric was just ripping out of it. So we took the layer of fabric off... and there was another underneath! Took that one off and there was another!! When we got to that layer I could hear something squeaky under it.. hmmm.. So I take THAT layer off and there was a layer of straw or something!!! It was fabric, then some kind of pulped paper or stuffing or something (compact and very dense, maybe 1/8" thick) and then a VERY compact layer of straw, maybe 1/4" thick.

OK so has anyone ever seen anything like that???

There was black muslin on the underside too that must have been super old because it was just falling apart and turning my hands black. Uhhh so gross.

 

[Hudson_Hawk]

Yes Bean, that's a very old chair-how cool! Furniture used to be stuffed with all sorts of stuff, really whatever was on hand.

 

[zoebartlett]

Tuckins, the cabinets look awesome! It's funny, I noticed the print you have above the fireplace. I'm thinking of getting the same one for the wall above our fireplace too.

The one DIY project I attempted ended up getting broken during our move. My husband and I had painted a bookcase black (it had been stained). It looked pretty good, but when the movers unloaded it off the moving truck, we saw that it had a huge hole in the back. It went to the dumpster right then. It would have looked really nice in our guest room, too. Oh well.

 

[Hudson_Hawk]

Zoe, FYI for the future, Home Depot carries backer board that you can use to fix stuff like that. They'll even cut it to size for you.

So without further ado, here is the finished book case project. Taken with my phone because my camera is on the fritz.

 

[Tuckins1]

Zoe, FYI for the future, Home Depot carries backer board that you can use to fix stuff like that. They'll even cut it to size for you.

So without further ado, here is the finished book case project. Taken with my phone because my camera is on the fritz.

HH, it looks great!!