Wednesday, February 26, 2014

Made It To The Minors!

That's one small step for The Fogue Abode, one giant leap for blog-kind! -Mrs Fogue (with a little help from Neil Armstrong)

So I feel like we just jumped up from the Peewee League to the Minors!!!

You can now find us listed HERE!!!!

Along with all the other really awesome housing blogs in cyberspace. Yes I am geeking out just a little! So many blogs that I look up to like Young House Love and Thrifty Decor Chick and they are now my peers.

Ok, so its not that big of a deal to anyone but me, I will climb down off of my pedistool now.

But thank you to everyone who is reading our blog and all the awesome comments from facebook and likes. Spread the word to all your friends to check out what we are doing next!

Monday, February 24, 2014

Metal Treasure

On of my treasured finds a few weeks ago at the local flea market were a few old metal chairs. You remember the kind your grandparents had when you were younger. Yeah that kind.

They were yellow and light blue so I decided to try my hand at some spray painting

About half way through I realized I forgot the before picture so this is about half way done.

Two coats later, ta-da:

I'll admit I skipped the preferred primer stage. But these already had paint on them and it wasn't chipped anywhere so I just painted on top of it. I'll update you a little later on how they hold up.

Update: We have had these chairs out for 2 full years now. We had a huge storm blow through last year which blew them over and scuffed the paint. But I now love that natural wearing they received. Besides that, they pain has held up awesome. They are easy to wipe out when they get dirty.

Friday, February 21, 2014

Happy One Month Homaversary!

Hello there! Sorry I have not been very active lately. I do have a real life day job which has had me going to one meeting after another. I've been to Texas and Alabama all in the past week. So now that I'm back (and our one month anniversary with our new home has past,) I figure I would give you a walk through again of the house. Remember our original walk through here. Oh how empty and different it looks. Looking back at the pictures, I have realized how much work we have actually done. So here we go, another tour of our home to see what improvements have been made.

The Family Room - We have added lots of furniture, beautiful curtains, some of my flee market finds like the ladder shelves and the hutch. It really feels like home now. Still lots to do! Paint, put stuff up on the walls! Those are the main 2 projects

The Laundry Room! Its bright yellow and has the essentials, including the cute Lost Socks sign my mom made for Christmas. I still need to add a shelf over the washer and dryer and a few little nick-nacks on it.

The Dining Area! Look at my most treasured Flee market find. This old butcher block which is now our mini-bar. And I've added a few items to our built-ins.

The Kitchen! Still one of my favorites. I love my dark granite and my flat top stove. If only we could shut the dang smoke alarm up.

The Living Room! Still needing furniture, but I have my mantle decorated.

The Hall Bath! I've got the essentials in there but not much else. I have big plans for this guy, but it is at the moment pushed down my list.

The Hall! Hopefully soon I can whip some paint on these walls and splash up a chair railing. Maybe touch up the ceilings with a grey-blue?

The weight room aka bedroom 3! Yes we have equipment in there, no it has not been used since we moved. Shame on us!

The Master - Basically all we carried over. I'm still debating what I want this room to look like. Lots of potential here folks.

Master Bath - Big plans for this guy too! I would love to do a huge upgrade. Saving pennies!

Well that's all folks! What do you think so far?

Tuesday, February 11, 2014

Trim Action

I pretty much took the weekend off when it came to house projects. It was our first weekend with the new furniture and I felt like being a couch potato. So vegging around and enjoying the beautiful white snow took up most of the day on Saturday.

The Fogue Abode's first snow!

Then we had our Valentine's Date night on Sunday. It was our first date night in a long time, well probably since our Anniversary last May. We enjoyed our traditional date night activities of Outback (we are blooming onion addicts) and a movie.

In between the snow, vegging on the couch, and date night, I did manage to sneak in a little work finishing up our paint job on the living/dining/kitchen. Our white trim was looking a bit mellow. It had plenty of scuff marks, some paint drippings from our job and the previous paint job, and lots of dirt and dust.

I started the job by taking a bucket of pine sol and a brush and giving them a good thorough cleaning. I didn't want my paint brush to be clogged up little dust bunnies now did I. Once this dried, I took my handy dandy 2" Purdy XL Premium Angle Brush, my hand held paint bucket and about a 3" x 12" piece plastic drop cloth and got busy working on the trim.

The technique is basically just like cutting in on your walls. Luckily, most of my base boards had a thin gap between them and the floor so I just slid the drop cloth under them and didn't have to be to careful on the bottom section.

Now the paint I chose to get, much different from my wall paint selection, was a white semi-gloss trim paint from Sherwin Williams. My wall paint was a Satin finish which has more of a matte finish compared to the semi-gloss, but is a little more difficult to clean. The reason I went with the semi-gloss on the trim was simply because I knew that dust bunnies love to hang out on your trim and the semi-gloss would be much easier to wipe down with a damp cloth (or even a dryer sheet which works wonders if you're in a hurry.)

So here it is before, I know its difficult to see how groody they look from the picture, but trust me, they had become an eye sore with my freshly painted grey wall.

And here is the after, I just love the look of the crisp white against the grey. Also another reason I love a white finish as opposed to the natural wood, you can just whip out a fresh paint coat and having them looking good as new in a mere hour.

So, what are you guys planning for a Valentine's day celebration? Will it be filled with any house projects?

Thursday, February 6, 2014

Inquiring Minds Would Like to Know:

The 5th Wall AKA the Ceiling!

Traditional Bedroom by Grand Rapids Architects & Designers Visbeen Architects

My inspirations which I found here.

Have you painted your ceilings? Are they just plain white and that's the way they should be? Do you have popcorn ceilings? If you have gotten rid of the popcorn ceiling in your house, what methods did you find work the easiest?

Wednesday, February 5, 2014

Bright Lights, Big City!

Or should I say big family room! I know that you have seen our enormous (or at least to us) family room which we introduced to you nearly 3 weeks ago back here .

Knowing that we had a lot of space, we went and bought a lot of furniture, or so we thought. After 4 1/2 very long weeks, the furniture we purchase from Ashley's back here finally made its grand arrival yesterday in the freezing rain and ice. I will say that the delivery guys were pretty great and tried very hard not to track any mud in. I know some folks just don't care and tromp through your house like a bull elephant in a china shop as my momma always said.

So, back to the story, they deliver all of our furniture and we quickly go to arrange it. First we tried a set up very similar to what the previous owner had. It looked a lot like this.

But that just didn't work. It was way to spaced out and did not accomplish my goal of a warm and cozy family room. So I tried another option. Since I had so much room I decided to make virtually 2 different areas. The lounging tv area and a little nook behind it with a bench and our doggie supplies so that we can easily take the girls in and out. Possibly a little play area for little ones one day (way down the road, don't get any ideas.) So far this is what I have accomplished. Looks a little better and I need some additional pieces in the back, but it's not feeling like "Ah ha! This is it!"

So what are some of you opinions on furniture placement for a large room. You can find tons of info on how to make a small room feel larger, but there is some neglect in the area of how to make a large room work.

Sunday, February 2, 2014

Super Transformation Sunday

Happy Super Bowl Sunday yall! This weekend we worked on transforming our open kitchen, living, dining rooms with a soft grey that we picked out Thursday. Here we are on the flip side to share of few techniques we learned and finally get to the before and afters!

The key to any good paint job is the prep work. Half the prep work they try to hassle you into is pretty much worthless. Start with your supplies, once you've picked your paint color, you just need 3 simple items, a cheap paint pan, a roller brush (we used the larger thicker roller because we have textured walls,) and a good edger brush. I recommend a Purdy or TightSpot 2" XL Premium Angle Brush which we picked up at our Sherwin Williams store. If you take a little extra time to be neat, then you can easily avoid the messy drop cloth or the painters tape which seem to be more of hassle then they are worth. Just lay out a garbage bag to keep your bucket of paint and your paint pan on. We painted 3 whole rooms with just these couple of items (Chris laid a small drop cloth down to feel more comfortable about drips.)

Don't forget to spackle those nail holes closed. I did this the night before to give it time to dry, then on paint morning I went through and lightly sanded each hole. You may want to slather a little primmer on these holes to, but unless your going from a very dark to very light color, you can skip the primmer step.

Then have one person tackle the edging (me) and one person come behind with the rolling (the Mr.)

Here is me getting my edge on!

And here's the Mr. working on those stairs. Eeek!

After a day of painting, we transformed 3 rooms into a light, airy modern feel with a little Mindful Grey. (Now to get some furniture in here.)