Updated Design

Design for the front yard and porch with the colors we chose to paint the house (the green here is darken than what we chose, but I'm lazy). The back of the house currently has these colors, but we were waiting to do the rest until after the new windows were put in.

Other than that, this is updated to show the new windows we put in (yay!) and I drew up a better door (so that it matches our actual door). And again, the porch columns and railing are an idea of what to replace the really crappy iron railing and columns with. Still deciding on column style, a basic square post or a boxed and bricked post, or boxed and bricked with a taped post top...

One of these days, I need to draw up a map of the garden idea and post it. It'll be easier to ID all the plants and locations with a top map. There's a lot of native plants and drought-tolerate plants along with fruit trees/vines (kiwi, avocado, orange, lemon, lime and California grapes). Although, we semi-recently added blueberries to the growing mix so the grapes might be replaced with those.

Exterior Updates and Color Idea

I took some time on earlier this week to check out some books at Borders for bungalow color, window and other miscellaneous ideas. In one of the books (Bungalow Colors: Exterior by Robert Schweitzer) had exactly what I was looking for colorwise; a page full of color combos! I had my camera with me for this exact thing (and taking photos of other ideas in the books).

A couple weeks ago I did a sketch of the front of the house to play with color, column, door and window options (no railings on it so it'll be easier to play with). Using Seroco paint colors, as found in the book: Light Blue, Green Tint and Pea Green.



I bought a new front door for our house for my mom's (early) birthday present. I found an awesome one on craigslist for $50. i haven't taken a new photo of it yet, but here's the one from the craigslist ad we got it from:



Recently, we put in a brick path on the side yard. Soon to be covering the entire area, although with a pattern change since there's a concrete area further up to the side.

Color Idea?

We went to Home Depot yesterday and chose some colors to play with and try out. But, we ended up with pretty much the same color scheme that we used on our last purchased home (a stucco Victorian/Craftman Bungalow).


Pretty similar to the colors we chose.

House Idea. Mind you, the house has wood siding and I didn't put that detail back in.

I added in a railing on the left side of the porch since we're thinking of putting in a stairway on that side.
Also of note is the door. We currently have a blank wood door and we want to find one that has window panes on the top half.
We're thinking of tapered columns and got a quote from a company for an idea of what it will be cost wise.


Window idea detail.

And now back to coming up with more logical ideas. Those colors totally work on our old house, but definitely not on this one. In the mean while, we've got these colors painted on random windows in the backyard in different combos. Need to sand that off, haha.

Studio, New Projects

It's been a couple of months since I've done any updates on the bathroom. There's a good reason for it: we haven't worked on the bathroom in that time. Life got busy and what's left now is finishing small things around the room. We have worked on a couple of other projects around the house, as you can see below.

We've evicted a renter in the studio, had to remove ALL of his junk as he abandoned it and it's finally back to clean and in shape to have someone rent it for a couple of months. It was NOT livable at all. He had piles everywhere. It was digusting. It took about three weeks to clean it out. Two loads to the dump. A garage sale. And we still have so much of his junk left that we ordered a free dumpster from the city. Not only that, but we're owed thousands of dollars in rent that we're never going to get.



My boyfriend and I will be renting the studio near the end of summer, when he graduates from UC Irvine. Until then, it looks like we might have a renter from the East Coast who needs a place to stay for a few months until his fiancé can move out here, too. We now have a buddy living back there, awesome! We kept some of the furniture that the evictee left, so it's partially furnished for the guy. Although, we're trying to find him a real bed (free, craigslist, of course).



New projects around the house!


We got bored and decided the bathroom in the studio had a really stupid ledge that needed to have colorful tile on it. We had a lot of mosaic tile sitting around waiting for a project. We just need to paint the walls in the bathroom now.



The hot tub area now has a wood-topped roof and is waiting to be painted once the weather is dry.



We're sanding the house so that we can start figuring out colors and start painting. So far, we know that we want green walls and a blue door. We just need to decide on which ones and then figure out what we want to do for the trims and frames.



We're thinking of adding columns to the front porch, as all we have right now is this lame iron decorative railing system that we hate. In the mock ups I did in Photoshop, the house looks AMAZING with columns. All of the other houses in the neighborhood have columns and we're thinking that at some point there might have been earthquake damage (or an insane person) and the columns were taken out and replaced with the iron railing and iron columns.

Swanstone

So, following the Swanstone bath surround being damaged and refused on delivery, we wanted to see what would be in stock. The only colors instock for the style we want comes in either white or tahiti desert (pinkish-orange). Yeah, no. Definitely not going with what's instock. Oh, but it would have been so nice if a color we liked was instock! A shower, in our new bathroom woud have been a up to a week away!

We found sample Swanstone tiles at another dealer that we could bring home. We compared sawgrass and seafoam. Seafoam blends in way, way too much. We realized that the sawgrass was the perfect color and "texture" for the room. We had them continue with our original order.

Two-to-three, possibly four weeks until our bathtub surround is delivered, again. Until then, we are definitely going to be wanting showers. Running around in the sun all day? Sweaty! So, we'll be putting up plastic around the bathtub temporarily and putting the fixtures in.

A shower would be so nice right about now.

A few accomplishments

Only a few things were accomplished in the past few days:



• The last of the greenboards were put up (pictured)
• Moss-colored grout was smoothed in
• Fixtures in the tub itself (stopper, drain completed)
• Mudding, sanding on the walls
• Electrical work for the new fan/light

Tonight, the tile was glazed. (Mmm, smelly, noxious fumes...)
Tomorrow is more mudding, and possibly painting.

We found out that the Swanstone was sent from the manufacturer yesterday and will be 7-10 days until it arrives at HomeDepot. We were originally told it would be 7-10 days from the date of ordering, which we ordered several days ago... so, we have a ways to go to be completely set.

We picked out Behr's "Green Tea" paint for the walls. It's a calm green-blue. At this point, we know we want to have orange, red and green in the front rooms (living room and dining room). Most likely blue for the kitchen. The bedrooms, half bath and spare room/office are still undecided. Color!

Green tea will definitely fit in with the bathroom. The new bathtub is insaney comfortable. Our previous bathtub was smaller than normal. We now have 4 more inches in height and I can't remember the width, but it's significantly wider. The water in the tub is a watercolor blue, which I find very cool and relaxing.

We're still undecided what we want to do for the framing of the window.



It would be great if we can find glass identical to the sink and have that as the sill. We could to a mosaic frame. Wood frame. We really don't know yet.

We are, however, planning to create our own shelving above the toilet. Organically-shaped mosaic shelves. Our idea, so far, is that each shelf (most likely 3) will have a different shape. They'll be from the wall to the right of the window to the opposite side of the soon-to-go-in toilet; basically corner shelves.

Color Choices

We needed to find a way to open up our small bathroom and keep it bright, but we didn't want all white. Almost everything was white in the original bathroom and it was very boring. It had absolutely no style. We want style.

We all really liked green-blues, some darker woody reds and white. And we noticed we liked a mix of lines and curves for the bathroom. The vanity is very square, the handles for the doors are a little curves, the sink is square, yet smooth and the faucet is rounded. Organic meets geometric.

One of the first purchases we made was for the sink vanity and shelving unit. We originally looked at square sinks by Sofia, but really fell in love with the sink we ended up buying. We really liked the green sink.




The tile we chose has some green, grey and some fallow tones. It has a textured, "frosted" detail to it. The tiles were 40% off when we bought them, so we ended up saving a lot.


(In need of washing/cleaning at this point)

Each tile has a different tone to it, and this definitely will help get rid of the plain, boring look that the small white floor tiles had before. We decided to tile the entire floor. In the original bathroom, the sink vanity did not have tile underneath. Our new sink vanity will be sitting on tile and the matching shelving/cabinet that will be next to it has legs, so we'll be able to see the tile beneath it.

For the base moulding around the floor, we picked out colors based off of the color of the tile. We went to Home Depot and played with the interactive Behr color center. We had a piece of our tile with us and had the machine take both a smooth color (one scan sample) and a textured color (three different color samples taken from rotating the tile for the scanner).

To be continued...