Nice Day for a White Wedding

Not much has happened around the house lately because we've been busy getting married!  We had the most amazing day for our wedding on July 12.  The weather was perfect and it felt so great to have all of our family and friends gathered to celebrate with us.  We had both the ceremony and reception at Parkwood Estate in Oshawa which was a beautiful venue for a wedding.

We did the decorating and flowers all ourselves, so kept it simple.  Ferns and palms in urns and lanterns on each of the tables surrounded by three small arrangements.

 After the wedding we were ready for a break so we took off to Bermuda for a week.  We drove to Boston and headed out on a cruise from there.  We couldn't believe how clean and beautiful the island was.  We spent some time strolling through the small towns and villages, we went caving and we spent a few wonderful, relaxing days on the pink sand beaches.  It was just what we needed!

But, now it's back to reality.  We have a bathroom to complete and many overgrown gardens to dig out.  With just over one month of summer left, I'm hoping we can get quite a bit accomplished over the next few weeks before it's time to go back to school!

Bathroom "Pin"spiration

While we're taking a break to recover from a few busy weeks, I thought I would take a moment to share a few inspiration photos from Pinterest.

Once we made the decision to install beadboard, the rest of the plans fell into place.  Our colour scheme will be white, gray, teal and a few hints of yellow to hopefully make the yellow tub seem less intrusive.

All photos courtesy of Pinterest

The room currently has some poorly installed hardwood floors - not original to the house and they look horrible compared to the original ones.  I know some people will hate this idea...but we are going to...paint them!  Yes, we are going to paint hardwood. I've been reading up on painted floors and painted wood is actually historically accurate to the time of our house, so no need to be upset!

We still have to figure out the panel to cover the front of the tub as well as a beadboard panel above the tub which will provide us with access to the plumbing to the upstairs bathroom.  We'll need to get into there again when we renovate the second floor bathroom.

Hopefully I'll have some reveal photos to share with you soon!

Bathroom Sneak Peek

I mentioned in my last post that we were starting to reno the main floor bathroom.  Although we haven't gone as far as removing the tub, it has still turned out to be a fairly big project.  It's not finished yet, but I thought I would give you a sneak peek of what we've been up to.

This room was most likely redone in early 90's and had harvest gold fixtures with pastel pink and blue wallpaper (matching the wallpaper in the kitchen).  All of the walls and even the ceiling were wallpapered.  We're not sure about the future of this room.  If we ever add an addition off the back of the house, we would love to relocate the bathroom and make this space part of the kitchen.  For that reason we have decided to keep the tub for now.  It's old, but in great shape and it doesn't make sense to rip it out.  We have plans to cover the front panel, but I'll share more about that in another post.

When we started removing the wallpaper, we realized that it was going to be more work than we had anticipated.  We have now found eight different patterns of wallpaper in the room!  Some were like cardboard.  Others had been covered with adhesive and drywall compound.  It was definitely like taking a trip back in time!

After finding so many layers (including 6 layers on the ceiling!) we realized that by installing beadboard 3/4 of the way up the wall, we could reduce the amount of paper to strip down.  We love the look of beadboard and it is historically accurate to the time of our house, so it seemed like a great option.

We originally bought 4x8 sheets of beadboard, thinking that it would be a quick install.  But, after taking a closer look at some of the intricate cuts we would have to do under the stairs and around the window, we opted to buy the tongue and groove pine panels instead.  They have been much easier to work with and were still fairly quick to install.

At some point the original mouldings were removed from this room, so we opted to add in larger baseboards and capping on top of the beadboard.  We went with 8" pine boards around the bottom and 4" boards for the capping.  We still have the final mouldings to add in, then the whole room will be primed and painted.

I can't wait to get everything painted and get the new toilet and vanity installed, but for now we have decided to take a break to recover from our wedding.  It was a busy week, doing all of the final wedding preparation while starting this project.  We were hoping to have it finished before the wedding but we just got too busy.  Hopefully after some relaxing time, we'll be back in full gear for the remainder of the summer.

Whistle While You Work

We've been hard at work this week and things are really starting to look different around the house.  I feel like I have a million incomplete projects on the go right now, but I think it will stay like that until the electricians are done.  They started on Tuesday and have most of the main floor rewired and they're now making their way through the upper floor.  We're really impressed with the job they've been doing.  They're keeping the house really clean and have only had to cut three holes so far.  That's a big difference from one of the other electricians we had quote the job, who wanted to take all of the ceilings down. It will feel so great to be able to move all of our furniture back in and have an organized garage!

I was so happy to see the light fixture in the living room go up.  Painting it black completely changed the look of it and it makes the space feel less formal and more like us.

Yesterday afternoon we were finally able to pick up our new dining room furniture.  What a  great Kijiji purchase!

Now we just need to recover the chairs, find a chandelier, remove the wallpaper, paint the wainscoting, hang drapes, rip out the carpet, install new crown moulding, find lamps for the buffet, hang artwork...and the list goes on.

Although we've been mostly working outside, we have started one project in the house.  The first pieces of wallpaper were torn down last night in the main floor bathroom. We decided that this would be a great room to start in because it's small and we can complete it fairly quickly.

 We have a great plan for this room, which I will share in the next post.  Hopefully everything goes smoothly and we have have an updated bathroom to reveal soon.  But for now, it's back to removing wallpaper.