Home is Where the Hearth Is

If you read my last blog post, you would know that our new puppy Ziva has been keeping us busy! As she has gotten older her behavior is improving. . . some. She has gotten better with potty training and now sleeps through the night, so Matt and I can get a little more rest.

Grady and Ziva waiting by the door

 

Grady and Ziva sleeping in the kitchen

 

She stole my chair outside

 

Posing for a picture

Since Ziva has been better behaved, we have had a little more time to work on our house. When we first moved in, we painted the living room and the den. We wanted to paint the hallway, bathrooms, and our bedroom, but ran out of time. The first thing we did after we moved in was to paint the hallways. We found out that painting takes a lot more time than we originally thought.

When we planned to paint the living room, we thought we could finish in one day. Well, it ended up being a week project. We had to buy all the supplies, including a 10 foot ladder to reach ceilings, and calculate how much paint we needed. At first we decided to tape off all the corners and molding so we did not get paint everywhere. Once we finished one section and took the tape off, we realized that tape was not working at all, so we had to go back and touch up all the spots where the paint leaked through. Then we found out that our 10-foot ladder wasn't tall enough to reach the ceilings safely, so out we went to buy another ladder. We had to shove them in the back of my little car which in itself was a hilarious ordeal.

Just standing on the ladder painting the trim along the ceilings was interesting enough. It took us 4 times longer than we thought, but we finally finished painting the living room and den just in time for us to move in.

Painting the living room

 Grady was supervising our efforts, but you can see the light wall color here

 

Matt painting the den

Our next project was to put in a fireplace in the living room between the built-in bookshelves. Originally we thought we could take out the cabinets ourselves, but after 20 minutes of trying and failing, we realized we did not have the right tools to do that. So we hired someone to take out the shelves in the middle of the wall. It took the guys a really long time to get them out so I am really glad we had someone come and do it.

Here is what it looked like before.

We used the middle shelves and cabinets in our pantry for storage.

 

After we had the cabinets/shelves out, we had our gas fireplace installed and then Matt built a frame around the fireplace. Matt did most of the work on this and he did an awesome job. Of course there were some hiccups along the way, but that is expected, especially since neither one of us has ever completed a project like this. After the frame was built, we added stone around the fireplace. It sounds like it was a quick and easy project, but in reality it took us about 2 months from start to finish, since we both work full time and are usually too tired after we get home to work on stuff like this. But here is our finished product:

 



 

I think it turned out great and now we can enjoy a nice warm fire on all those cold Ohio winter nights! Especially if we have any more winters like this past one (actually sometimes I think it is still winter, since this morning the temperature was 35 degrees!)

 

We have a lot more projects that we want to do around the house, but it will probably always be a work in progress. Now that the weather is getting nicer, we want to put up a fence in the back yard for the dogs and for privacy. I'll keep ya posted on how that one goes :)