holiday home

David and i are kickin' it into over-drive. the goal is to have an invitable home come the holidays. lucky for me i have a sister-in-law who helped me battle resistance and get this wall done. thanks Rafaela!

there are 3 shades of grey up on that wall along with a dirty stain from the flood we had. i went all back everything especially since the stove loves to rickashays things onto walls

it's all about paint! look at how lovely our base cabinets are? they were rancid before!

i'm not sure how i feel about these handles. with the counter top having that annoying metal and black stripping i feel i should simplify them even more..like something skinnier. i didn't know it at the time but i'm wanting to go industrial here.

i still need to finish painting the rest of the walls a solid fresh white, get some shelving up on, and then get some large graphic artwork

but look how far we've come:

home improvement

how's the bathroom you ask? the bathroom was on hold because these housing peeps broke a huge hole in the wall to fix a leak on the apartment below and didn't patch up their mess for 2 weeks. but after maya's harassing tactics someone finally came in and did their job yesterday. since we couldn't do anything in the bathroom my impatient behind moved onto the ugly NY wood cabinets. with the help of my uber strong hubby i repainted them and installed a new counter top from ikea. progress is being made! renos are stressful for me. not having a home for items, tippy toeing, and cleaning up sawdust and drywall is not cool but having a place i can relax is :)
here are the before photos. after photos coming soon

are you seeing the layers of personality left behind? and that hideous paint job? would it kill you to remove the plate before painting?

i can't wait to share what i've done. oh i can see the finish line already

and the saga continues

i had no idea what i was in for when i decided to work on this bathroom project. i feel like Mike Holmes. nothing is as it seems. 4 days of stripping paint stressed me the heck out. imagine applying stripper on the ceiling. what happens is gravity pulls the weight of the stripper and paint down leaving the layers below unaffected. did everything come off after 4 days of stripping twice a day and 2 cans later? of course not. so i started sanding to level as much as i could. mind you i'm working on a ceiling exhausting my muscles. now that's done i'm plastering everything to smooth it out. it's looking slightly better. no paint in sight. my goal is to have a clean smooth surface to work on before i leave for Toronto for Canadian Thanksgiving this weekend. in the mean time lets bump those gross images in my post below with some fresh inspiration.

phase I: remove band-aid

so what had happen was i barfed when i saw the state of my hubby's home. let's just say he was livin' beyond bachelor. i didn't have time to get nitty-gritty with my tools when i just moved in so i did the next best thing...SHOP. i covered some of the flaws with expensive shower curtains, matching towel sets, and started organizing. however, band-aids can only last so long. and they look damn gross when you peel them back. i spent the weekend and today stripping paint. 4 layers of it! hopefully this week i can get a nice neutral paint job in. then replace sink with a cabinet, replace hideous light fixture and mirror, retile the dirt mcgurt floors, and of course re-stage this beaut. *WARNING: THESE IMAGES ARE GRAPHIC. VIEWER DISCRETION IS ADVISED*

what this tight-fitted hot mess can look like: