Sunday, January 18, 2015

Faux Lava Rock Fireplace Demo

I knew when I moved into this house a year and a half ago that the fireplace would be one of the first things to go and I'm so thankful for the men in my life, because today it did! Today we focused just on the demo of it so this is just the first portion. 

Tools needed:
Tarps
Crowbars
Wire cutters
Hammer (small and large) 
Sheetrock knife 
Large straight edge
5 gallon buckets 

This took about 3 hours to do. 

Before:

We did very little to prep for it. We basically laid down some cardboard and a tarp over that. We started from the edges by using a crowbar (and using a peice of wood to push against so we didn't break more sheetrock than needed). 


We used 5 gallon buckets for the little pieces and just stacked the larger ones.  


Once all the rock was down. We took a hammer and found the closest stud, working out way away from the fireplace. Once it was found, we did the same thing lower on the wall so that we could have two points to make a straight line. We used the straight edge to mark and then cut the wall and did the same on the other side of the fireplace. 
You can see in the picture how we cut both sides and then tore down the sheetrock in between. 


Here's our progress for now. The next update will be of the installation of the new tile and mantle! 




Thursday, January 1, 2015

The Outdated Kitchen

So my first few posts are just going to be past projects that I've done so that I can include everything on here😊

1. The Kitchen
When we bought our house, we wanted something that was functional to live in while we updated it, so this was it. I loved the set up of the kitchen so everything worked out when we updated it. 

It took a few weeks but we got all of the cabinets and walls painted. We didn't paint INSIDE the cabinets because we we still living in the house, and with three dogs, leaving food around just wasn't an option. 

Started by taking the cabinet doors off and bringing them to the garage. 


We were thankful enough to have a friend with a sprayer so all of the cabinet doors were sprayed. 

I read a lot about whether to paint the walls or the cabinets first and I obviously chose the walls. It wasn't too horrible, but painting the cabinets first would have been quicker because I wouldn't of had to tape off the cabinets (when painting the walls) to turn around and tape the walls when painting the cabinets. I bought lots of tape...

After many coats of white paint and then hanging the cabinet doors up (and then a couple more coats because of the way the doors looked in the light) we were all done with the painting. 

We had ordered the flooring from Lowe's and thankfully my husband is handy enough to install it! 

Tahdahhhhhhh the finished product: