Sink Hole

Last weekend, Steve and I decided we needed to get out of  town for a bit.  We headed up to Minneapolis to explore (and of course, check out Ikea).  We had a sink picked out that we were hoping would work for our laundry room.  I also had a long list of picture frames and other accessories to help get our house feeling more pulled together.

We got to Ikea and were greeted with this sight in the marketplace:

Yeah…apparently they are doing some renovating of the marketplace.  Quite the let down to this girl…so, we didn’t pick up any fun things to decorate with.  Boo.

They DID have our sink and cabinet in stock though (I checked that before we went), so we brought this lady home with us:

Our new sink love is the LILLÅNGEN from Ikea.  It has a very slim profile and as a bonus, comes with 2 hooks to hang towels on and has a small shelf inside to set hand soap on.  While we were there, we also spotted a faucet that complemented perfectly:

GRUNDTAL faucet from Ikea.

We took our purchases and headed home…where we got started with the worst part of buying ANYTHING from Ikea…

Luckily, we weren’t missing any pieces, we didn’t get in any fights, and we got it assembled in under an hour.  Win.

Here it is sitting in our laundry room.  You can see the outline of where the old sink was…this really helps you get the scale of how much smaller this is than our old sink.  We have a bit of an interesting situation since our hot and cold water pipes come up through the floor instead of out of the wall like usual, but we’re brainstorming ways around it.  Details to come once we are at the sink installation point…

Anybody else have the  LILLÅNGEN sink?  Embarking on an European/American plumbing conversions anytime soon?  Sink stories to share?  Let’s start the week off on a good note

We’re Being Social

Happy Saturday!

I’m getting ready to head to the gym and then back to the laundry room to make some progress.  Just wanted to drop a quick note to let you know that DIYTheory has gone social!

The blog is linked to the following places, so if there is a way you prefer to read your blogs, you should hopefully be able to do so!  If there is a way to read blogs that I don’t have, feel free to let me know so I can figure out how to add it.

Facebook:
http://www.facebook.com/diytheory

Twitter:
@DIYTheory

BlogLovin’:
If you haven’t joined BlogLovin’, it’s a great way to read blogs you love in one spot.  My favorite part is that they have an app so you can get all your fav blogs at your finger tips.  If you have joined, DIYTheory is on Blog Lovin’. Follow my blog with Bloglovin

Of course you can still follow via email subscription, through WordPress or continue to just check in.  I like to give ya options

What are you all up to today?  Anyone else on facebook or twitter?  New blogs I should check out via bloglovin’?  Want me to stop typing and start working on the ol’ laundry room??

Fancy a Coffee?

For Christmas, we gifted ourselves a Keurig.  I am not a coffee drinker and Steve lives on the stuff, so I assumed we were pretty much getting it for him…but then I discovered the world of Keurig cider, cocoa, and tea!  So now I love our Keurig too.  What I did not love about ol’ K is the amount of counter space it hogs.  This was not jiving with me…after trying the coffee machine near every conceivable outlet in our entire kitchen, I came up with a plan.

We moved our media stand into the “dinnette” nook to use as a coffee bar table.  I grabbed some things we had around the house and FINALLY hung up our word art that’s only been sitting around for 6 months or so.  The only thing I bought for this was the his and her mug holders.  I found them at Hobby Lobby and got both of them for $7.00 total thanks to an awesome 50% off sale.

I wanted to have one side as a coffee bar and one side as a wine bar…however, the universe is thwarting my efforts right now, so Lucy’s food has been promoted to the special kids table as a place holder.

I lucked out and happened to have 3 baskets in the closet that fit perfectly.  The dishes in the cabinet is my mismatched china collection…remind me to blog about it someday.  I needed somewhere to put tea, and I had a blue glass wide mouth jar down in the basement that did the trick nicely.

I found my little mirrored tray for $4.00 at Goodwill.  My jars were from Target along time ago, I just personalized them with chalkboard vinyl and my Silhouette.

I’m loving this small piece of completed-ness in our house of chaos.  It feels SO GOOD to finally have something on the walls.  Anyone else doing some reorganizing?  Did you put together a coffee bar?  Move your entertainment center somewhere else when it no longer worked with your house??  Do tell!

Linked up with: The Gunny Sack.

Sketch It Up

We’ve been plotting and scheming our grand master plan for the laundry room.  We had some ideas floating around but with our clean slate, we needed a way to visualize our plans.  We sketched out some ideas, heck, I even drew what I was thinking on the wall…about that time we realized we were being incredibly silly.  They make technology for this people!

So we downloaded Google SketchUp and Steve nominated himself to learn how to use it.  Google actually has some great tutorials on how to use SketchUp and after watching some of the videos, it’s on my “to learn” list too!  It seems reasonably easy and endlessly helpful.  After several drafts and brainstorming, here is what we are thinking…

We’re going to do some built ins around the washer and dryer.

There is a small shelf for laundry detergent and fabric softener.  The bar on the left will be for hanging clothes and the staggered bars on the left will be used as a drying rack for clothes we don’t want to hang on the hanger to dry.  The storage on the top will be mostly decorative since it’s 8+ feet up and I can’t reach it without a stool, but we’ll definitely have some pretty baskets up there to look at.  We tried the sketch-up with out this extending to the ceiling and it didn’t look as custom as this does.
In addition to the built ins for the washer and dryer, we’re also going to build out a mudroom area.

This is a rough drawing and we are going to add some hooks to this as well.  We’ll store our shoes in the cubbies under the bench and have some bins for mittens/etc in the upper cubbies.  You may have noticed the sink, we built that off of specs on the ikea website.  We wanted a small sink that was close to the wall for this room.  We’re hoping that once we see it in person, it won’t look super “bathroom-y” and more “cool slim functional sink” instead.

Here it is with the walls/doors included.

We are planning to do the bench and built ins in white, the floor was the closest we could find to our actual tiles and the walls will be a really really light gray.  I’m still brainstorming accent colors for the room, but since it’s a beige box right now, I still have some time.

A view from above:

and yes, those are the dog bowls you see there, got to make sure to account for that!!

I’m so excited to have a plan and Google SketchUp was amazing in helping us visualize our brainstorms.  Now that we know how easy it is, we’ll be doing this for our future rooms as well.  Best part?  It’s completely free to download and use.  Anyone else ventured into SketchUp land?  Did you find it as fun as we did?  What do you think of the laundry room redo?

The Master Bath Master Plan

I promised last week I’d be back today with our Master Bath master vision.  Since we’re basically back to bare bones, now is as good of time as any to finalize what we’re thinking.

1) New Vanity — Probably goes with out saying, but our old one is cut up into 20 pieces and super moldy.  I’m loving more open vanities to help make the room feel bigger.  I went, where else, but to good ol’ pinterest and am loving this look:

Source

2)  Since we’re remodeling the bathroom, we’re going to take the opportunity to get rid of the nasty bulky Jacuzzi and replace it with a slimmer profile, more modern tub.  Like this:

Source 

3)  We’re going to do ceramic tile for the bathroom, I’m loving the wood look ceramic…not sure if it’ll fit in the budget, but this is the vision

Source 

4)  More lights — we only have a 4 light octopus light bar and it is not enough light.  Since we’re starting from the studs,  Steve is going to wire an extra light box at the top of the mirror.  We’re also going to frame out our existing mirror.  I’m thinking something like this:

Source 

So that’s a little bit of what we’re thinking, I’m excited to get past the frustrating part and get to the progress part…stay tuned!  I can’t wait.

Bustin’ Down The Wall

Remember our bathroom disaster that is currently unfolding?  Well, we’re in a waiting period in there because it needs to dry out before we can do much else with it.  We have a lot of stuff we need to do in there and as we were thinking, brainstorming, and generally feeling frustrated about the bathroom, we got a fantastic idea…it was high time we took a sledge hammer to the house and ripped out the most frustrating feature of our house.

Give up?

We laid into the laundry room with vengeance.  I was so tired of the lack of flow in that room and it’s the first room we come home into, so while we’re waiting on water to dry upstairs, we’re getting down to business down stairs.

Biggest problem of the room, right here.  The door straight ahead goes to the garage, the door on the left is for a small closet, and the door on the right goes to the kitchen.  They are all big doors and they are all in the way of each other.  Not to mention how small the room feels.  We have 9 foot ceilings in here too, but it doesn’t feel like it because the room is so claustrophobic.

Enter a plan, stage right.

Closet is coming OUT.

First, we removed the honkin’ laundry sink.  We love our laundry sink, just not in our laundry room.  It’s way to big for the small room.  This guy is being relocated to the basement for brush washing, etc.

I’m ready to smack the first celebratory hole in the wall, look out world!  Don’t worry, we know that the best way to demolish something is not to pull it down piece by piece with a hammer, I just really wanted to hit it.

We took the trim off the door framing, not sure when/if/why we might need it again, but it’s in good shape, so we pulled it off nicely and took it downstairs.

Yeah, we realized here how dusty it would be…we went and got our masks.  However, we took the reciprocating saw  and score around the studs and peeled most of the sheet rock off in decent size chunks.

Once the Sheetrock was all cleaned off, we nicely took apart the studs.  It’s worth noting that this wall was in no way load bearing…but if you aren’t sure, be sure to check before you start pulling stuff down.

We did surprising little damage to the Sheetrock we want to keep, so that was good news, some patching and we should be back in business!

View from the back corner.

View from the peninsula.

I had a really hard time capturing how much more open and bright the room feels (because it is still not much square footage), but we are excited about the progress so far and ready to move on to the next phase!  Patching and fixing the wall and floor so we can move into the fun part — building some shelves and organization!!

Anybody else bust anything up this weekend?!?  I have a new found love of demolition….

**Update: If you are thinking of demo-ing a similar wall and are interested in the process we followed, this is what we did: identify the Sheetrock we want to keep in tact, score the edges with a utility knife between the “coming down Sheetrock” and the “save it Sheetrock ”, cut to the studs with reciprocating saw and take out large pieces of the Sheetrock.  After the Sheetrock was down, we took apart the studs carefully so we didn’t ruin the Sheetrock (again…be careful of what you don’t want to demolish)…and that was it, some quick clean-up and we were in business.**

Tales of a New Homeowner – #5

Remember my “unfinished projects January”?  Yeah…January’s over, and yeah, we failed.  We dug into the bathroom, got the painting done, painted the vanity and the trim, installed the extra layer of subfloor to level everything out and we were getting ready to install the tile last night.  However, when I walked in the house after work, this is what I saw:

I swear, some days, our house does not want our help….

So, sadly, no matter how much I yell at the ceiling, what was freshly painted and white now has GIANT ugly water spots on it and we were off to investigate.  Upon further inspection in our master bathroom, we discovered the the shut off valve for the faucet (that we took off, oh, 2 weeks ago or so) didn’t actually work to shut off the water line …are you seeing where this is going?   We thought we would try to slide the vanity out so we could see what kind of problem we had back there and to give it all a chance to dry.  Sadly, the vanity did not slide out….why?  Because our house hates us….(if you are seeking the real reason, they installed the vanity and then tiled the Jacuzzi around it leaving absolutely no extra centimeters to wiggle around and slide it out)

After a LONG deliberation (it’s also worth noting that I got home at 8 p.m….so it’s now 9 p.m.) we decided there is no way around it, we have to see if we have a problem under the vanity.  We got the backboard loose and saw a lot of mold.  DRAT.  Drastic measures were taken, a SawZaw and hammer were involved, yadda yadda, and out came the vanity.

The good (or bad, depends on your perspective, I’m taking it as good for the sake of sanity) news is that 1) it was drenched with no way to dry out and 2) there was a decent amount of green bathroom mold on the wall.  It was very robust mold though, so I suspect this water problem had happened before and one of the prior homeowners left it…that, I’m not so shocked about.

This is roughly 11:30 at night since we had to shut the water off for the spewing faucet situation.  This is also why there is a complete lack of photos.

We have ripped out the vanity, ripped out the sheetrock and ran fans in there all night to dry it out.  The good news is the floor doesn’t seem to be rotted and the insulation and studs behind the wall were also unscathed, so we should be set.  We’re trying to make the best of this situation and we made a plan for the bathroom (which I’ll tell you about tomorrow, for now I’m still having a mini pity party for myself).

Anybody else feel like home renovation is an uphill battle some days?  Do you sometimes drive your spouse crazy by yelling at the ceiling??  Me either….

S’more, S’more, S’more!

Hope you all enjoyed your Super Bowl Sunday.  We spent it with some friends and (per usual) I volunteered to bring dessert!  I went to my Pinterest board to see what sounded good and S’mores Bars got a resounding yes.  I have 3 or 4 variations pinned, but for the Super Bowl, I went with this one:

Yum right?  They were really easy to make (except for the spreading of the marshmallow fluff…that one will need some more practice) and DELICIOUS.  The perfect consistency of marshmallow, chocolate, and graham cookies.  Serve it warm and it tastes like a more delicious campfire s’more.  You can find the recipe here if you want to try your own.  I will be printing this one out and adding it to the ol’ recipe book.

How was your Super Bowl?  Did you try any new, delicious and easy recipes that I should pin?  Anyone else only capable of making dessert….?  :-)

Daffin’ dils…

I happened to be on the front porch today picking up a package that was delivered in the mail and was shocked when I saw this:

Wait Elizabeth, I’m not sure what I’m looking at….that’s okay folks, we’ll zoom in.

Yep, it has been such a confusing winter here in Omaha (Monday it was 67 — no joke — and today we are waiting for 2-10 inches of snow to arrive) that my daffodils think it’s spring.  In case you were wondering, there isn’t a way to stop a daffodil bulb once it starts to bloom…but I definitely googled it JUUUUUST to be sure.  I planted a dozen daffodils and a dozen tulips, so here’s hoping the rest stay put in the ground where they belong until oh…April maybe?

Anyone else having a confusing winter along with us and our outdoor plants??  Are you getting snow this weekend?  Enjoying weirdly warm weather?  Just happy for the weekend?  Me too.