Before and Afters Archives | Page 20 of 51

Before and Afters

All Things Home

evolution of my home | part 8 | the guest room

First of all, thank you so much to all of my readers who have answered my questions from yesterday! I have been trying to respond to all of them, but I haven’t been able to keep up! I am reading all of them, though, and I’m taking notes, writing down some ideas and I’m definitely seeing some patterns that confirm some things I’ve been thinking about. Thanks for being constructive, encouraging, critical, and honest. It really is helping me and I feel a new excitement about my blog and how I can make it better. I’ll share more about that once I’ve had time to digest all of the feedback and figure out how to formulate a plan around what I’ve learned. I am listening, though, and really appreciating the time you have taken to respond. I was pretty bowled over. In a good way. For those of you who have

July 21, 2015 33 Comments

Bathrooms

evolution of my home | part 7 | the three bathrooms

And now it’s time for part seven of the history-of-my-home tour when we look at all three bathrooms in my house. Let’s start with the upstairs bathroom… This is the bathroom that’s next to the boys’ room and guest room and it’s in the original 1940’s part of our home. It is teeny-tiny by todays standards. I think there’s no more than about 6″ between the toilet and the tub and you can easily reach the paper on the opposite wall from the potty. The wide angle lens I’m using makes it look a little bigger than it is. When we moved in, we painted the walls in a pale aqua, Jeff built the shelf for storage and I made a shower curtain out of remnant fabric and then another one for an HGTV.com project. Other than that, we left it alone. There just wasn’t much I could do to change this

July 12, 2015 22 Comments

Before and Afters

evolution of my house | part 6 | the master bedroom

…and now we’re at the master bedroom in this “evolution series” and, oh my, it’s a doozie. This room made me want to hit my head against a wall for years. It stumped me. I kept making stupid, decorating decisions that I knew were stupid as I was making them. I wasted so much time and money on things I wasn’t in love with…all for the sake of getting it done. Sigh. Tell me I’m not alone. A couple of years ago, though, after yards of fabric and gallons of paint, I finally got on the right path and I’ve been able to see it through to completion. So, let’s start at the very beginning. A very good place to start. Humming along? Okay. THIS two-tone mauve wall was definitely NOT one of my favorite things. And what’s worse than a two-tone mauve wall is adding yellow, red and green

July 6, 2015 28 Comments

All Things Home

evolution of my home | part 5 | the family room

And now it’s time to take an in-depth look at the history of my family room. This is an awesome space for entertaining and hanging out, but it’s a bit of a tough one when it comes to arranging furniture. It’s long and narrow, with a bit of a strange traffic flow, so when I start getting the urge to shuffle furniture around, this room is usually where I start. Here’s how it looks now… …and this is how it looked when we first moved in. It was beige, beige and pinkish-beige. I couldn’t wait to de-beige. When I had the chance to paint the kitchen, I took the color into the family room. I went with yellow, because I thought it would work with the green kitchen counters and the stone fireplace. I made curtains out of a multi-checked fabric, white twill slipcovers for some French chairs I

July 1, 2015 34 Comments

Before and Afters

the evolution of my house | part 4 | the kitchen

And now, it’s time to walk through the evolution of my kitchen. This is part four in a series where I’m showing how each room in my house has evolved over the nine years since we moved in. I have always loved a good before and after, but the truth is that there are usually a lot of steps between those two pictures. In the case of my house, each room has been years in the making…pieces bought and sold, projects completed and everything eventually brought together to make each room what it is today. I’ve learned a lot as I worked on each space and I think my decorating style has become more focused and refined in the process. It is my hope that this series encourages you, as you see that each “after” was a slow process, not an overnight change. So, this is what the kitchen looks like today…

June 28, 2015 16 Comments

Before and Afters

the evolution of my house | part 3 | the home office

Thanks so much for all of the great feedback on this series. I’ve enjoyed going through my house in a bit more detail and seeing how far this home, that was not love-at-first-site, has really come along. If you missed parts one and two, here they are… Part 1 – the evolution of the living room Part 2 – the evolution of the dining room And here we go with part three, the home office. This was the room that had me most stumped when we first moved in. It was originally the kitchen in the 1940’s part of the house, but when the addition was built on the back, including a new kitchen, this room became little more than a glorified hallway. An ugly glorified hallway at that. One I would just slink through on the way to somewhere else. The floor was a patchwork of linoleum with some exposed

June 24, 2015 43 Comments

Before and Afters

evolution of my house | part 2 | the dining room

This is part two in a series that’s a more in-depth follow-up of my 2015 summer home tour. Showing the entire house in one post made me realize what a change this home has undergone and I thought it would be encouraging to others if I share the slow process from “before” to “after”. If you missed part one, the evolution of my living room, you can check it out HERE. Now, onto the dining room,which sits adjacent to the living room through a large arch. Because these rooms open to one another, I’ve always painted them the same color and treated the windows the same. Here’s how the dining room looks today… Here’s how this room started out. You can see Jeff snapped a picture before he ripped up the carpeting. You can also see that the room had the same shiny pine trim as the living room, dingy

June 21, 2015 40 Comments

Before and Afters

corner cabinets in shutter gray

While I was finishing up the slipcovers I shared yesterday, Kriste worked on giving a few pieces in my dining room a fresh coat of paint. (She was standing in front of the sink, mixing paint, and the light was so pretty, so I had to snap a picture.) I wanted to give the corner cabinets and buffet in the dining room a little makeover. The first time I ever used a tinted wax was on these corner cabinets and it got away from me a bit. Well maybe more than a bit. The end result looked streaky and I’ve wanted to fix them for a while, but again, there was always something more important to do. The interior was painted a cream, but the original reddish stain on the cabinet had bled through, so it had a pink tinge in a few places. Again, something I wanted to fix, but not enough to

June 9, 2015 35 Comments

I’m Marian, a painter, writer, and lover of all things creative. From art and antiques to home projects and everyday life, I share my journey in hopes of inspiring you to embrace your own creativity and make beauty in the spaces you live.

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