As I mentioned in my last post, we bought a new home! The home shopping process was very casual, we had a year lease at an apartment so we wouldn't be rushed, so mostly online browsing and the occasional open house. Moving to a new city can make the home shopping process a little daunting. You don't want to fall in love and subsequently buy a house in a bed neighborhood. Or even a neighborhood that isn't quite right for you. With that in mind, we just kept an eye on Zillow to see if there was anything that sparked our interest, and also popped into a few open houses to get a feel for the typed of homes we were looking at. At one point Matt had convinced me that we could live in a high rise apartment on the waterfront. After checking one out, the allure quickly started to fade (only 1 parking spot!). Anyway, long story short, we found a cute little home that we couldn't stop thinking about and now we are living in it! Let's just get to the pictures.

This is the living room. It's open concept so this is the view from the kitchen area with room for a dining space in between. I think my favorite thing about the house in in this photo, the windows! I just love them and feel like my dreams of living in an Anthropology window display can come true with these babies. There's a wood burning fireplace as the focal point, and a cute but tiny spiral staircase that leads up to a loft area, which I'll show you later.

Looking back at the dining rooming kitchen area from the living area. The exsisting kitchen is slightly closed off due to cabinets, but we've got plans for days on opening this up. At the very back of the house there is a door to our back yard. A real one this time! It's still little, but there's soooo much more potential than our last baby yard.

Here is a closer look at the kitchen. It's tiny, that's why you can only see half at a time. At least it gets great natural light (when the sun is out. Hello Portland winter, good bye sun).

If you take a slow and methodical trip up the spiral stairs (they're tiny) you'll find this adorable loft space. It's just a funky little space that we think will be a fun little lounge area someday. Matt has a desire to get a record player and an Eames lounger so he can sit up in the loft an be sophisticated. So far our plan is 50% lounge, 25% hair salon! and 25% office area. The lounge area will be the main part where the railing is.

If you turn around you'll see another back door that leads onto the deck. That little cave-y area on the right will be the office area, and my salon chair and stuff will go in what is half way a closet on the left.

Now, take an even slower trip down the stairs (because they are terrifying the first time), and we can check out the bedrooms and bathrooms. First up will be the master. Apparently we have a thing for giant mirror closet doors. The nice thing is that it makes getting the whole room in a picture easy. This room is much smaller than our last bedroom. It's actually very cave like and dark, but I don't mind. That makes it easier to sleep in on the weekends. I think having the deck directly over our window contributes to the darkness in here. We would love to add some wood planking underneath, and maybe if it was lighter it would reflect more light into our room.

E may have lost square footage in our bedroom, but we definitely gained some space in the bathroom. And look, it's all in one space! I spent at least a day cleaning this space like a crack head before we moved in because Ew! I can handle my own dirt, but not other peoples. I even took off the glass door frame, scraped the old silicone off and reinstalled it just to be sure. Also, how do I get rid of the soap scum or hard water stains on the glass? I have tried clarifying shampoo, Bar Keepers Friend, some soap scum remover from HD, Cleaning Bubbles, Mr. Clean Magic Eraser, a razor blade, and this weird Eco Stone thing made from recycled bottles that just seemed to scratch at it a little.

The guest room is toward the front end of the house and doesn't have the cave like qualities our room has. The window looks out the the front entrance. The wall is the exterior of the living room, you can see just a little bit of the window on the very left. I'd love to create a living wall to pretty up the view from this room.

This room has a decent sized closet, but those doors. Ew! I'm not saying I want more mirrored closet doors, but these are just sad.

And now for the final stop on our tour, the main bathroom. I don't really have anything positive to say about this bathroom. There is a laundry closet in there opposite the bath tub as well. For now, it is what it is.

Well that's it for now. Sorry I didn't take any shots of the back yard. Maybe if we clean up all the leaves back there and there's a nice day (#longshot). Oh, and stay tuned for kitchen updates. I'm not promising a timeline or anything, but things are happening!

Nikki Kelly

It's actually a little weird looking at them since it's been almost 5 months since this was our home.

This bedroom was never actually used. The "bed" is literally an inflatable mattress ontop of some boxes and leftover plywood. Classy!

This bathroom got a brand new tile floor along with some new baseboards.

Our sad bedroom was like this until the end. Real bedroom furniture is in our future of reals this time. We already have a bed and bed side tables, and a new dresser is just around the corner. Getting rid of our bedroom furniture helped to light a fire under our asses to remedy this embarrassment.

New tile floor, paint, and baseboards for the tiniest bathroom in the house as well. When we got our new kitchen countertops people asked if we wished we had done this sooner. I did, however the bathroom floors were so gross and embarrassing that they were the winner of the "I wish I had done this sooner" contest.

The guest room really didn't change at all, it was probably the first room to look "finished".

Again, another area that was never fully realized. We had dreamt of building a wall of pipe shelves on the right hand wall. Also, never used this fireplace.

Did you know we had a basement? Well we did and it was huge but we never used it. Matt's brother was a life saver and basically took care of the basement for us. Paint, clean, stage.

And that just leaves the backyard. It was way overgrown from this point. The tree was probably double this size and needed some trimming. The spring growth spurt was just crazy.

Ok, so now that we've said good bye to the old, here's a quick sleek peak of the new!

I'll give you the full tour next time!

Nikki Kelly

So, I stalked my dad's travel schedule via my mom and talked him into helping me route a nice rounded edge like the one on the front of the steps. Dads are great like that, especially mine.

Fancy round edges were quite a hurdle in the top half of the stair makeover project. I may have routed the wrong side of one, and set the bit a little too high on others. I don't really want to talk about it. What's important is that they eventually were routed and I could move on to staining, notching out a spot for the railing, and installing them.

I also templated and cut out the skirt for under the stair overhang on the side. Perhaps I will call it a slip, you know, since it's "under" the stairs. Whateves, to template this I taped some old resume paper we've had laying around for the last 8 years, attached the railing and cut around the spindles with an exacto knife. Maybe I'll regret that once we move and I become a trophy wife jobless. Who knows!

Tracing the template onto the plywood was pretty easy, but I did need to selectively sand some edges to get it to fit into place. Once it did I painted it and installed it.

And added some molding to make it look pretty. I used the same baseboards, but for the top piece I riped the top inch to make a smaller piece. It just needs some caulk and touch up paint.

I'm so excited to have this project behind us! There's nothing like a big life change to light a fire under your ass to get some projects done.

Nikki Kelly

Yep, we finished the bottom half (also the more visible half) of the stairs, but not without a late-in-the-game-hiccup. Picking up from where we left off (cutting the treads to size), it was time to stain! Since we wanted them to match our hardwood floors that we put in I had taken a scrap piece of tread wood and a spare piece of flooring to Sherwin Williams to get a stain match.

When I picked it up it looked ok to me, so I took these pristine slabs off wood and got to staining. So far so good, well except for the no gloves part. I forgot to grab a pair from the color department at work and at this point I was way too excited to get started to worry about stained cuticles. Sacrifice.

I even took a quick little break to take a picture with my unsoiled hand to document the process. Also, we really need to clean out/organize the garage, but that is for another day.

Things were moving along smoothly. Maybe a little too smoothly. With two coats of stain applied and an hour of recommended drying time I applied some poly with a brush. That's when things took a quick turn from "perfect and as planned" to "what the what?" With each stroke of the poly my nicely stained treads went from espresso to more of a reddish brown color. Not quite what I was going for.

I tried to salvage it by rubbing on some stain after the poly dried, but it was useless. I had to admit defeat. I grabbed my reddish brown stair tread and an espresso-y stained piece of flooring and headed back to Sherwin Williams. The guy that was working was super helpful about re-tinting my stain. He even sanded the whole thing so we could try it out a few times to make sure it was right. He also told me that I should wet the treads a little to open up the grain because oak is well known for having a tight grain that is difficult to stain. Well known to paint store guys, not so well known to me. Since it was pretty much dark by the time I got home I would have to put off sanding all my hard work off until the next day.

Thankfully, Matt's knee has been healing up quite nicely and he offered to help me do some sanding, aka the worst job in the world. What a sweetie!

So I re-stained the treads using the Sherwin Williams guy's water suggestion, and sprayed the poly on instead of brushing and that seemed to do the trick. I sprayed 3 coats of poly and gave them a light sanding with some 320 grit sandpaper in between each coat, which made them smooth as buttah. Seriously, I've always been lazy about the whole sanding between coats thing, but I am now a convert! I even bought one of those little sanding blocks that holds your sandpaper all nicely instead of just holding it around a foam sanding block.

I left the treads to cure while I was on fall break, aka tagged along with Matt on a work trip before Thanksgiving. Which, btw was awesome! I haven't had a "fall break" since high school. It didn't hurt that it was probably 10 degrees in Denver when we left that Sunday morning, and by lunch we were sitting on a sun drenched patio tasting wine in Napa. In tshirts, no less!

Anyway, once the Thanksgiving festivities wrapped up I got to work installing all my hard work. The first step to installation was attaching the risers. We applied a generous amount of construction adhesive on the back in a zig-zag pattern along the back before squishing it onto the exsisting risers. I had the stairs resting in place so that I could push the risers up to meet the bottom of each step.

Once the riser was tight against the bottom of the step I shot a nail in each corner to hold them while the adhesive dried.

Action shot! What, you don't wear those paper masks on your head when you're working? I think I must have forgot it was up there after painting the risers.

Risers, done! I decided to fill all my nail holes and seams at this point so I had less chance of getting paint on my freshly finished treads. I also covered up some scuff marks left from the stain on the treads. It's more noticeable in the third picture up.

We used pretty much the same technique to attach the stair, except we applied the adhesive to the exsisting treads instead of the new ones, make sense?

That way I didn't get my hand covered in construction adhesive while lowering the tread into place.

Look how excited I am to be finished. Or maybe look how tired I am. Either way, I was pretty stoked.

Now, let me get out of the way so you can check out the stairway glamour shots!

The match is a little closer looking in person, but even here it's not too shabby.

Now I just have to get to the top half (womp womp). Until then, it's Christmastime! I feel like I need to make some sort of ornament like I have in the last few years (here, here, here, and here) . I love all the Himmli stuff, but I don't think I have the patience for all those straws right now. Do you like to make a Xmas thing each year? That's a thing, right? If so, what are you making so maybe I can copy it!

Nikki Kelly