Flowers of the week

I'm trying to continue to bring fresh flowers into the house every week if I can. It's such a fun and inexpensive way to bring a splash of color into the living room or kitchen and I love it. Since it's summer I thought I should try and keep bringing in flowers from our yard since we have them. This week it's Daisies from the backyard...

The Furnace project

Our recent project on the basement is getting our furnace replaced, and we will be moving some of the duct work. We had 3 estimates done, and then chose our guy to do the work in a couple weeks!

In the meantime, to save some money.... we (and by "we" I mean Matt) tore out the old duct work. That way we dont have to pay to have the old duct taken out, something Matt thought we could easily do, and when they come in it will be all ready to put in the new furnace & re-route the duct.

The Basement: the plan

Matt measured everything in the basement again, and drew up a plan for our basement remodel. Its fun to visualize what we are working towards!  I added notes to his drawing, labeling what we are thinking each room will be used for...

 

Happy 4th of July!

Happy Independence Day! We are thoroughly enjoying our 4 day weekend! Yesterday we spent the day downtown Seattle, and met up with my parents for lunch at "Matt's at the Market". Afterwards we walked around Pike Place Market a bit and then downtown. I even met up with my girlfriends later for drinks and to see Twilight.

Saturday we decided to be productive and Matt spent about 5 hours in the basement working on things, while I spent the day working in the yard (and boy did it need it!).

I was inspired and decided to try and make some festive decorated sugar cookies for tomorrow.

Sweet Peas! I LOVE these flowers, probably my new favorite. I have always loved flowers, but I was inspired by a DIY blog lately that I read, and they say getting some bright/inexpensive flowers once a month is a great way to keep your house feeling fresh and colorful. Picked these up at the market for about $5, and boy is it worth every penny.... they just make me so happy! =)

After a long day of yardwork... mowing, weeding, trimming. Brought in these pretty yellow flowers and some lavendar from our yard, and put them in a short little vase on our living room coffee-table. Cute right? I'm going to make this a new habit.

The Basement: after some more demolition

Here are a few pictures of things.... "after demolition". After our long Memorial Day weekend, we got a ton out of the basement, but then realized we needed to take out even more walls/dry-wall, as well as all of the ceiling in the basement (not just the drop ceiling in the living room).

Next on the list will be replacing our furnace and having some of the duct work moved. We had 3 guys come in this week to give us estimates (since we aren't doing this part ourselves)... now we just need to wait and see how much that will cost and then hopefully we have this done in the next few weeks.
Just a couple pic's for now. I'll take some more after we take this last trip to the dump and all the piles of dry-wall and debris are gone so everything is a little easier to see.

Hard at work.

The former "office" (small bedroom) in the basement. We are tearing out these walls and moving them to the right to make this room much bigger.

 

The Basement: Here we go...

Memorial Day weekend was.... Basement demolition weekend in the Glassman house. Matt and I, tore out all of the cabinetry, shelving (and there was a lot), drop ceiling, and drywall from our basement. Pretty much everything down to "the studs".  After 3 long days we took it all to the dump in a huge Uhaul, and 3,320lbs and about $270 later it was all gone! woo hoo. Now for the remodel which will realistically take us about 4-6 months.

In a 1919 house, with various previous owners and remodels - there are a lot of fun surprises when you tear things apart. I'll just leave it at that for now.

Here is the living room. We are taking out the wall on the left that currently connects to another bedroom, and making this a much larger space for a living room and bar area. It could be great once we have kids also for a big open play space.

The kitchenette. At least its already plumbed. We are thinking we will replace this with a more modern looking bar set up with sink, mini-fridge (or wine fridge if I get my way), and microwave. I really want glass front white cabinets also to house all our extra glasses and barware. Can't wait!

Stairs coming down from our upstairs living room. We are tearing these out once we get a contractor to help with the structural upgrades, and these will then be flipped around facing the other direction coming down into our new living room in the basement.

The horrible old drop ceiling with florescent lights.

The is one of the basement bedrooms. This is the one connected to our living room where we are taking out the wall and making a much larger living space. Currently a storage area for us... =)

The 2nd "extra bedroom" in the basement. This one is quite small and probably would only fit a twin or full bed. We are going to make this into our new den/office once its finished.

The "work room" or tool room, it is much bigger than it looks, and we are going to put in a drywall ceiling and walls and make it an extra bedroom! Once we tore out all the cabinetry you can see even more how much extra space it provides. The plan is to create a new "work room" in our new garage once we build it.

More of the work/tool room.

The back stairs leading up to the back yard.

Pile for the dump.

Bedroom remodel

So, not a major undertaking... but we felt that we should finally remodel our master bedroom before we move on the the major basement project. Plus we had boxes of left over bamboo hardwood floors in our basement from when we did the rest of our upstairs. So we moved all the furniture out of our bedroom, and our "1 weekend" project was done 4 weeks later. I shouldn't have been surprised. Everything takes us longer than usual, partly because we find other things we want to also do on weekends (like a bar crawl, haha) and partly because some things just take us longer (like moving electrical outlets...).

Well its finally done. No longer sleeping in our office on a mattress. I love how it turned out, and glad we took the extra time to do the nice moulding.

Here are a couple pictures of the room "before".

A really old picture, before we bought our house.

After just some paint the first year/two of our house.

And... After! new floors, white moulding around the floor and windows, new blinds...