Farmhouse Love Episode #15

I am a wee bit behind on my Farmhouse Love posts. Mainly that's due to several rooms not being 100% finished, and me not wanting to show them until they are perfect. Well, this house has a long road to go, and it is constantly evolving, so I just decided to post what I have and then when/if I make updates, I can share them then.

Our master bedroom is one of the last rooms I chose to paint because people don't see it like they do other rooms in the house. I have been itching to paint it since we moved in, but the same can be said about every other room in this house, so it had to wait for its turn.

Before I show you the rest of the after pictures, I'm going to show you what we started with.

We looked at this house on two separate occasions, a few weeks apart. The first time we came this is what the master bedroom looked like. The owners were obviously in the process of stripping the wallpaper. If I had to date this room, I would say late 80s, early 90s. What do you think?

When we came back the second time, it had fresh paint. 

What we didn't know is that they mostly painted over the wallpaper they weren't able to strip, and even covered some of it with drywall mud. It was a hot mess.

The master bedroom has two closets on opposite sides of the room. This one is mine.

This bay window is nice. On move in day an observant friend noted that this room likely used to be a garage. It makes sense because the floor is concrete and it steps down from the rest of the house. This window was probably where the garage door was.

Here is Peanut Head's closet, with these odd little Hobbit drawers underneath it. The drawers are deep, very heavy, and not equally spaced apart. They make me twitchy.

Therefore, I covered them with drywall.

Now we can scarcely tell they ever existed. 😊

I started painting the ceiling and walls last May, and once we had consistently nice weather,  I dropped the project like a hot potato.

I picked it up again in October, at Peanut Head's insistence. I had been pinning faux brick walls on Pinterest for the last year or more, and Peanut Head went along with my crazy plan. He usually does, even when he thinks I'm cray cray.

We started by putting up these 4' x 8' panels which we found at Lowe's for $35.98 each. We used four panels for this wall, and they were a gigantic pain in the rear end to put up. After reading various tutorials, we went with the suggestion to cut out the half bricks on the ends. It's not a super precise process, so there was a fair amount of cussing involved. Peanut Head has a potty mouth.

Once they were all cut to fit, we slapped them up with some Liquid Nails and drywall screws. Some of the screws were removed once the adhesive dried.

The next step was to come in with drywall mud and a drywall taping knife to apply a German Schmear. It took a few evenings, but not near as long as it took me to retexture all the walls from the bloodbath that removing the wallpaper was.

I will say I was happy to have that nasty green carpet as a drop cloth. I was not careful at all.

Once everything dried, I sealed it all with a coat of watered down white paint. You can use a clear coat, but I was worried it might yellow over time.

Also, I caulked the corners and where the paneling met the ceiling for a cleaner look.

After this wall was done, we ordered carpet. That was in November.

Throughout this past year working on this room, I was always working on something to go with my final vision. One of those things was to make a half dozen or so dog bed covers. The dog beds get stinky and dirty so fast that I wanted to have a quick way to change out clean covers, so I started making very simple covers using this 10-Minute Pillow Cover tutorial. The only change I made was to add an opening for the handle of the dog bed for easier moving.

I'm not ashamed to admit that I've been a pillow cover making fool this past year. After my first cover I was hooked because it's an easy way to change your pillows without having to store a bunch of pillows. Of course we still have more pillows in the house than Peanut Head would like. What is it about men and pillows? I love my pillows.

In the making of so many dog bed covers I decided that I really like fleece for the covers. It's super easy to work with and it still looks nice after washing.

Plus, it's soft like my babies.

This one isn't fleece, but I fell in love with the pattern and the color is the exact shade of yellow that I wanted for my accent color in this room.

I also refinished our dressers and nightstands. This particular dresser was a hand me down, and although I don't love the way it looks, the drawers open and close like butter. It's hard to find good quality dressers with drawers that open and close smoothly.

I painted it with some cabinet paint and put some drawer pulls on it and it's a completely different dresser.

I've started folding all my clothes with the Marie Condo method and I will never go back. It's so easy to find what I'm looking for, and my drawers are never messy. I still think Marie Condo is a little whackadoodle, the way she talks to inanimate objects, but she nailed this folding method.

When Peanut Head goes out of town, or Stinkerbell goes to one of her various Civil Air Patrol camps, I sneak into their drawers and Marie Condo fold everything. They don't appreciate it, but it calms me.

I don't have a before picture, but I painted this dresser and the hardware, distressed it, and added some trim and decorative accents. I've had this dresser since I was in high school. It even survived a house fire back in 1984. It used to have a mirror, but that didn't survive the fire. I've been looking for a mirror for it ever since and I finally found one at a consignment shop.

Isn't it beautiful? It's larger than the dresser itself, and it probably weighs more too, but it's perfect. I didn't change anything about the mirror. I fell in love with it and I painted the dresser to match the mirror.

The previous owners left this shelf unit in my closet when they moved, but it needed a little TLC. Even though it's basically particle board with a laminate coating, it took regular latex paint just fine. A couple coats of paint and some contact paper and I was pretty happy with the result.

This area for my jewelry isn't finished yet. I want to make an earring holder and I haven't gotten around to it yet.

After the carpet was installed, it took awhile for Peanut Head to start on the trim. Neither one of us was in a hurry as there is always something to be done around here. He even made my closet door look like a little barn door.

We've had these mission style nightstands since the late 90s, and they needed a little refreshing.

I painted them and added new knobs. Each nightstand has nine knobs, so I just went with a cheap contractor's pack of knobs and they look just fine.

This is Peanut Head's closet and it still needs a major overhaul, but he ran out of winter days to work on it. That is not a problem. Ain't no one ever complained of running out of winter in Idaho. He'll get to it next year.

He did make this little hook board to hang his farm pants on instead of laying the nasty, dirty things on the window seat all the time.

It took me awhile to get things hung on the walls. I think that's one of the hardest decisions to make in a room because it takes some playing around with and holes.

Here's our new and improved window seat. You know I bought some pillows for it and made some new covers for them, don't you?

I also ordered cushions from Patio Lane and I love them. They're made with Sunbrella fabric so they won't fade and they have zippers! Now I can take the covers off and wash them. That makes me happy.

The folks at Patio Lane were super nice to work with and they called me when they had questions and to let me know when they shipped. I wasn't paid to say any of that either.

The buffalo check bedding came from Bed, Bath, & Beyond and the grey quilt came from Pottery Barn before it was on sale. I actually got it for my birthday over a year ago, and I stored it in my closet until we had the new carpet installed. Originally I had them switched so the buffalo check quilt was folded at the foot of the bed, but the grey quilt is slippery because the fabric is velvety. We'd be sleeping at night and the buffalo check quilt would just slide right off the bed like it was catching a wave. Not fun in winter.

I made the bed skirt using another Pinterest tutorial, and yes, I made some more pillow covers. Peanut Head complains when he has to take them off the bed at night, but we're not super dependable about making our bed every day, so he doesn't complain that much.

I still need to post about our home gym and our living room which are also mostly finished, so look out for those soon.

Farmhouse Love Episode 14: Mud Room and Storage Room

Good-ness. Fourteen farmhouse love episodes? When will this end? Well, by my count I still have at least seven more spaces to paint and cute-ify, and I do still have that day job, so it could take awhile.

Welcome to our mud room. This room is a work horse in our house, and it does have mud in it on occasion. This is real life right here. Except for that pitcher of flowers. That is totally staged. It would get knocked over in a heart beat if I for real left it in this room.

The mud room looked like this when we started on this project in early November. It was pretty cluttered, and I'm not going to lie, it's still cluttered, but there are things in this room that we need.

The shoe organizer for the gloves and winter hats worked well for us. A little unsightly, perhaps. I would have hung it on the back of a door, but both of the doors to this room are pocket doors, so that wouldn't work.

It was at this point that I realized I needed to take before pictures. I had already started removing everything off the shelves, so you aren't even getting the full picture of how much crap I was able to cram onto these shelves. I will say that there is not less stuff on these shelves in the after picture.

And that's it. I took three before pictures. Then I took everything out of the room, washed the ceiling and walls, and started painting. 

The rest of the room came together pretty slowly. 

We took it one storage solution at a time, starting with the upper shelves to store all of our paper products.

Now we can really stock up so we're ready for the zombie apocalypse.

After the upper shelves went up, we made this coat hook board from another gnarly piece of wood that Peanut Head drug in from the field. He's really good at that.

I found the cee-ute farmhouse hooks on Amazon. You can find them here (affiliate link). I like them so much that I bought another pack of ten after I bought these. I don't even know what I'm going to use them for yet, but I have them.

I feel like I should tell you that we never have only three coats in here. I moved all of them to the kitchen table while I took these staged photos.

We have more boots than you see here too, but Peanut Head and Zoe were wearing a pair each. I did take the boot trays outside, in our 20 degree weather, so I could clean all the horse poop off them. I didn't want to gross you out, but you should know that they regularly have horse poop on them because these boots were made for walking around horse poopy areas. Our backyard. And sometimes our porch. 😱

Here's a real life picture of our coats, although there are two coats missing that Zoe and Peanut Head are wearing. Remember, it was 20 degrees when I took this picture. This morning it was zero degrees. Usually there are so many coats hanging up that you can't even see the coat hooks. And that's sad because they're so cute.

After the coat hook board went up, Peanut Head put the shelf above it. These cute bins came from IKEA, and they hold our gloves and winter hats. Each family member gets exactly two bins. If you want them, don't buy them from Amazon. I saw them for $25 there, and IKEA sells them for $2.99 each. The internet is cray-cray.

The bins are working out well because we can easily reach up and bring a bin down to rifle through it. It's a stretch for some of us, and sometimes I trip over boots that certain family members suck at putting away properly. I get cranky about that.

I know this is cluttered, but I need all of it. All of it. Believe me, I did consolidate and simplify. Remember though, real life.

The cleaning implement board (I don't know what else to call it) was made from another piece of gnarly trash wood. We added some hooks and a mop/broom hook bar (??) we found at The Container Store. If you haven't been to The Container Store, I'm telling you right now that you haven't lived. 

We used to have two small key hook strips over the light switch with exactly eight hooks. I asked Peanut Head to make me a barn door looking key hook rack and he went a little Tim the Tool Man Taylor on it.

Now we have fifteen hooks so we can even hang our sunglasses up. We have a lot of keys, I know. Four of those carabiners have exactly the same keys on them too. We have several outbuildings with way too many doors because every structure was built onto trailer park style. You think I'm kidding, but I'm not.

The only thing I'm going to say about that, besides what I've already said, obviously, is that plywood is not siding. Seriously.

Anyway, we have four sets of the same keys because we tend to misplace keys. At one point we had a full set laying out in our pasture for an entire winter. Keys fall out of coat pockets, get left in coat pockets, fall off the ATV, you name it, it's happened. Although to my knowledge we haven't had an animal eat any keys yet.

And that's it for the mud room. I'm very happy with the way it turned out, even if it took three months to finish. To be honest, that's the only way we could have pulled it off because we were using it for all but maybe two days while the painting was done. While the coats and boots were out, and mostly on my kitchen table, I was twitchy.

We also tackled our basement storage room, but this one came together much faster. We worked on it over two or three days on our Christmas vacation. This project provided me with so much relief. It was a disorganized mess and it was so depressing to try to find anything. I didn't take any before pictures of the disorganization though, so you'll just have to imagine it.

This is actually a before picture, but it was taken after I pulled everything off the shelves. This particular section of shelves was used for canning jars. I can say that with confidence because the former owners left some canning jars here. We do not have that many canning jars, so something needed to be done to be able to use this space.

Enter Peanut Head, a crow bar, a level, and some other assorted tools. I'm just going to put this out there. There was a fair amount of cussing.

The shelves are actually sturdy now, and everything is level. Always a bonus.

When he was finished he asked me if I was going to paint them. I snorted at him in response, and he walked away with his level and his hammer whilst shaking his head.

Now all my paint fits, and dare I say it, I have room to grow. Don't tell Peanut Head that I said that last little bit. 😉 He's a little grouchy about my paint habit.

I like to gaze at all the possibilities.

I easily spent a day just making labels for all our bins and organizing their contents. We started this project while putting away Christmas, so I used the opportunity to purge some things.

This section makes me so happy. We had all this stuff for our annual holiday bake-a-palooza scattered about, and we didn't know what we had until we rounded everything up and counted them. This had to be done every year. No more. We have a running inventory now.

This is the other side of the storage room, and we have dedicated this to Peanut Head's garden prep and seedling birthing area. Indoor nursery? Call it what you want, it's where our garden takes root, literally.

All that wood there is the leftover from the dismantling of the shelves on the other side. Maybe Peanut Head will build more shelves on this side? Maybe we'll build another exterior structure with plywood siding? We don't know yet.

Peanut Head is giddy about adding a second grow light. Well, as giddy as Peanut Head gets. He has plans to run some plumbing over here so he can water his babies without making umpteen trips up and down the stairs with his watering can.

This cute little section is right under the stairs, and I'm using it for my empty canning jars. We only have four onions left from our garden last summer, so we've decided that next year we need to grow more. We also have a 5-gallon bucket of potatoes on the floor there.

When our neighbor delivered them to us, Banebridge retrieved a fallen potato from the ground and ate it whole, dirt and all. He has a voracious appetite.

Baney and Gunny Man have been naughty dogs. Since Baney is vertically inclined, he has the ability to scan the countertops at eye level and easily dip his head into our 2-1/2 foot tall garbage can to retrieve yummies. In this picture you can see the detritus from an entire loaf of bread, a bag of hamburger buns, cold medicine (which thankfully he was not able to penetrate), a half gallon ice cream carton (empty) and who knows what else. Baney was not picky about discarding wrappers, and I know this because I poop scooped the yard after the binge session.

I'm giving most of the blame to Baney because I know that Gunny was merely present. Since I witness the dog food consumption daily, I know that Gunny didn't have a chance. Baney inhales his food so fast that he has this little snorty routine where he has to clear the crumb dust from his nasal passages after hoovering his meal. Then he looks over longingly at Gunny Man delicately nibbling at his food. After that, he saunters into the mud room to make sure we didn't spill any delectable morsels. I will say that Gunny has never eaten so well since Bane has joined the household. He knows if he doesn't eat it now, it will not be there to eat later.

You may have also noticed the stools on the couch and chair? That's our attempt at keeping the boys from lounging on the furniture. My favorite is to see a cat curled up between the rungs of the stool legs. It's like the cat is mocking the dogs. Cats are the best.

That's my DIY update for this month (or two). Next up we are putting the finishing touches on our home gym, and after that I get to tackle our master bedroom. I'm super excited about the bedroom. I've been buying things. Until next time . . .