Category Archives: Reno

Follow Me – A Blog Update

April 21, 2014Categories: RenoSarah @ 702 Park Project

I have to say that I am loving the new blog design that I debuted back in February. I think it looks a lot more sophisticated, and I love the color scheme. Plus the functionality and ability to customize my own site has been sooo nice!

Unfortunately, I’ve been hearing from a few of you that were followers on my old site that you have not been receiving the posts by email since I changed over. I’m so sorry for the inconvenience!

Hopefully, it’s an easy fix. Just enter your email in the “Let’s Be Friends” section of the sidebar to the right. Be sure to click the “Get It” button. Even if you’ve tried this before and it didn’t work, please try again now. If you still do not receive emails, then please contact me via my contact page to let me know so that I can find a solution.

Thank you all so much for following along with me. It means more than you know! If you’d like to get even more social, you can follow me on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Bloglovin, and Pinterest. :)

Questions, Opinions, and Decisions

April 17, 2014Categories: Decor, RenoSarah @ 702 Park Project

One thing I’ve come to really love about blogging is that I have an audience to pose questions to, and in turn I receive a wide variety of ideas and opinions. If you’ve been following for long, you know that I love to hear what you think about certain options. So today I wanted to revisit some of those questions and bring you up to speed on where we stand!

1. TV in the Bedroom — Yay or Nay?

The majority of you answered that a TV in the bedroom is a no-no, and we have to agree. For now, we are putting TVs in the den and in the office.

No TV here. Just our very very sparse looking room. (By the way, that’s our new king size bed! Yay!)

2. To Paint or Not to Paint?

Most of you answered that we should keep the closet simple and white, and again, we agree. White it is!

3. Closet Suggestions Needed!

While we’re on the topic of closets…remember our storage issue? A lot of you had some great ideas. We decided to get a pair of these, since they extend to 7 feet, don’t rely on the walls for support, and got excellent reviews…and we had a pretty awesome coupon. We haven’t gotten around to setting them up yet though…I’ll let you know how we like them when we do! (Down the road, I’m really hoping for some custom built ins. Patience, grasshopper…)

4. Countertop options.

We got a wide array of answers and suggestions on this one. The votes were spread pretty evenly between painting the existing countertops, installing concrete countertops, and simply buying new countertops. Sorry to disappoint you, but we still haven’t made a decision. The kitchen just really hasn’t been a priority lately. But I can tell you that we have ruled out painting them. I’m really interested in this new faux-marble laminate, but Charles understandably worries that they will look cheap. The pictures I’ve seen look great (like here and here), but I need to see it in real life.

5. It’s Not Always Black & White.

Once again–still no decision. This will be a DIY for us, so there’s really no rush. I have to admit, I’ve been a high-gloss black advocate from the beginning, but after all of your interesting suggestions, I’m starting to question that! I played around a bit on Sherwin-Williams’ Paint Visualizer Tool and came up with some pretty cool options…

Fuschia

Teal

Hunter Green

Maroon

I haven’t even shown these to Charles yet, so I’m interested to see what he thinks. I feel more unsure than ever about a color choice, so I think we’re just going to have to go for it and dive right in! It’s just paint, right?!

There it is. As you can see, we’ve made a lot of progress in some areas, and virtually none in others, but that’s just how it goes I guess. Check back soon for more updates and decisions! :)

Weekend Work

April 15, 2014Categories: Decor, RenoSarah @ 702 Park Project

Y’all. This weekend. It almost killed me.

Charles and I worked all day Saturday until 1 am, and then had another 14-hour work day on Sunday. I don’t think I’ve ever been so tired. By Sunday night, neither of us could really walk, and all our muscles hurt. We literally were crawling around on the floor and cracking ourselves up. I think we were delirious from all the primer fumes, cleaning product fumes, and the thought that we might be almost finished.

You see, we busted our butts all weekend because we had an appraisal on Monday afternoon. I never realized how important the appraisal was, but it basically determines where you stand with your mortgage and how much insurance you can get. So it’s pretty important.

We prepped (7 hours total) and primed (5 hours total) the entire master bathroom, including the vanity, the master closet, and the upstairs hall bathroom. So now they are VERY white, but very clean. They look way better than before! I’ll be sharing pictures with you later this week.

On Sunday, in a matter of about 4 hours, we took the formal living room from looking like this…

To this…

It’s definitely not finished, and I’ll probably be changing out and adding some furniture and a rug, but wow–what a difference!!

When we moved our stuff in, we pretty much created what we call a “work out of” room on each floor. On the first floor, it was the formal living room. I’m embarrassed to even show you the before picture, but it certainly adds a little drama to the reveal!

I plan to add a rug…maybe gray or navy…and long drapes. I’d also like to find a couple of chairs to go opposite the sofa, and I’d love if they had a little gold in them. I’m definitely planning to switch out the end tables and coffee tables too. They are hand-me-downs that are much appreciated, but need to go!

And probably my favorite part of the room: my grandmother’s silk scarf that I had framed.

It’s an original Polo scarf that was given to her years and years ago, and she gave it to me before she passed away. When we were little, my cousins and I used to play dress up with her many many scarves, and this one was always my favorite. It means so much to me, and the colors are just perfect for this room. I plan to do a color scheme centered around this piece…navy, white, tan, pink, teal, and gold.

So now you can see why we’re so tired…we did the things that we had planned to do in the next 3-4 months in one weekend! This week, I’m resting!

By the way, many of the items in the pictures above are for sale. You can find them here and here.

Curb Appeal

April 8, 2014Categories: Just For Fun, RenoSarah @ 702 Park Project

Last night I was browsing a few articles and posts about curb appeal, so I thought I’d share them with you. In my opinion, curb appeal is so important because it’s the first impression people have of your house. It sets the tone for what to expect inside, and it says a lot about you as a homeowner.

Even though there was still loads of exterior work to be done, we had the exterior painted back in June, just a month after starting work on the house. You can read more about the evolution of our painted house here. And here’s our most recent shot from the street:

Anyway, here are a few favorites I’ve been catching up on lately…

1. This Old House did an article on the biggest curb appeal transformations in 2012. Here are a few of my favorites.

2. Piggybacking on 2012, I also enjoyed the 2013 round up. A few more favorites…

3. If you still need a few more before and afters, check out this selection from HGTV.

And just for fun, here’s a little progression of our house!

Now we need to get the foundation painted, put the shutters back on, put our mailbox and “historic home” plaque back up, and landscape! Seems simple enough, right?

Do you have any good before and after curb appeal shots? I’d love to see them!

Linked here.

Soffit Prophet

April 4, 2014Categories: RenoSarah @ 702 Park Project

If you had asked me 5 years ago what the bane of my existence would be today, I think “soffits” would have been about 287,260,287,629th on my list. But here we are.

Today, I’m happy to announce that our soffits are officially finished. Yep, you read that right. Finished!!

Let’s review, shall we? When we bought the house in May, it looked like this.

Gross. By July, most of the house had been painted and the porches were stabilized, but the soffits still needed a lot of work.

So the job of repairing and/or replacing the soffits began in November. You know that saying, “It has to get worse before it gets better”? Well it definitely applies in this case.

And then it stopped. Seriously. Stopped. The contractor’s boom basically died, and he refused to get it fixed for quite some time. (We still have it in our yard…I’m thinking of ~~selling it off for scrap~~ decorating it as yard art.) Finally in March, there was nothing left for his guys to do on the inside, so it became necessary again. Behold–the rented boom!!!

And last but certainly not least, they painted the new soffits!

What’s left you ask? A large amount of trim needs another coat of white, the foundation needs to be painted, the back porches need to be painted, and the shutters need to be reinstalled. We plan to paint the floors of all the porches ourselves.

We’re so close!! Can you believe it?!

Updates, Because Change Takes Time

April 2, 2014Categories: Decor, RenoSarah @ 702 Park Project

Sometimes I forget that things don’t have to be perfect before I can show them to you. I have to remember that the beauty is in the process itself.

Before I started blogging myself, I had literally only ever read about 2 blogs in my life. But now it’s a community that I feel at home in. That being said, it’s hard to not feel like everything needs to be styled just right before I can show you the reveal. There’s so much eye candy out there, and the pressure to live up to it is a little ridiculous at times.

One of my favorite blogs, House*Tweaking, has a tagline that reads “…because home doesn’t happen over night.” I love that! Just because I don’t have a final “before and after” doesn’t mean we haven’t made huge strides and I can’t show them to you.

So with that in mind, here are various updates on where we are with the house.

The bathroom off the downstairs den is finished! We painted the room Delta Sandbar (by Valspar) and had some custom built ins added around our pedestal sink. We did all the painting in this room ourselves, including the trim and cabinets.

We weren’t crazy about the sconces we had picked out from our local lighting store, so we caved and bought these from Lowe’s. I think they look a million times better!

We put a new lid on the toilet and after a good cleaning it looks brand new. Finally, I added this Threshold shower curtain from Target to pull in the awesome 70’s green tub.

We finished painting the den in Churchill Hotel Maple (by Valspar) and moved in some furniture and a rug. We painted this room ourselves as well. The lighting is kind of weird in here because it doesn’t get a ton of natural light…I promise it looks good in real life!

This room still needs lots of decorating, but it’s getting there. I definitely want to add many more pops of color. It’s very bland right now!

We moved the vintage chest I found into the butler’s pantry to store serving trays and platters, as well as some bar essentials.

And we moved our old handy-me-down Ikea bookshelf into the space where the refrigerator used to reside. Because we don’t have a ton of cabinet space, we plan to add baskets to this unit and use it as our pantry for the time being. We also installed a wine glass rack above the shelves for extra storage.

The biggest changes have been taking place in our master bathroom. You can see the various stages here, and a peek at our new tile floor here. The few people that have seen the picture of the tile floors and then seen them in person all have the same comment: the tiles are so much bigger than they look in the picture! The tiles are actually 12″ by 24″, so they are pretty substantial.

We had our vanity custom made, which actually ended up being cheaper than finding something pre-made to fit the 9-foot wall. Given that this was our inspiration for the vanity, we were extremely pleased with the way it turned out! Now it just needs paint and hardware!

I included the picture of my handy husband so you can see how high the counters are. Since we were already going custom, this was a must for us. I’m 5’9″ and Charles is 6′, so the extra height will serve us well.

We ordered our vanity lights from Lighting Direct online, but weren’t crazy about the way they were installed.

So the hubs switched them around and now we like them much better! (Plus they won’t collect nearly as much dust.)

And the tile shower is really taking shape. (All of our tile came from Lowe’s.) If you recall the options that we had for the layout of the master bathroom, we decided to go with the smaller shower to make the room flow the best.

The grout is going in today, then we will just need to add hardware and glass. Depending on our budget, we may wait on the glass and do a right angle shower curtain for now. Possibly something similar to this.

And last but not least, we got rid of this awful and tiny front porch light.

And got this one instead.

So there’s a few updates. Any questions about sources, just ask! The house is definitely taking shape and finally beginning to look like a home. I promise to share more updates with you soon! :)