New Additions

A lot has been going on at Ardsley- so, I wanted to take the time to show you some of the new additions to the bedroom, living room, and office.

 First up is the deer head in the living room. I took some pictures of the process because- it was a process. I love this laser level that we purchased from Lowe's. It suctions to the wall. It has been pretty handy so far. When it suctions to the wall it is kind of noisy but it was super helpful. The picture hanging hook- well I am just amazed it holds that deer head. But it has been at least a week since we put the deer head up and it is still there.

My boyfriend has allowed me a lot of input into the house- but sometimes I come over to the house and he has just decided to do something that I had no idea about. So far it has been all good stuff- but my favorite thing he has done so far is add baseboards in the office.  In this picture you can see the office with no baseboards. It looks pretty unfinished. 

After: Office with baseboards

The office also got a new door. Three doors needed to be replaced in the house- the office door included.  I really liked how the old door looked- it had a bunch of glass panes, but it was not in great shape and it only had a screen door to prevent someone from busting all those pretty panes of glass in and being inside. The new door still has glass but there is a security door that adds more security. 

Another room that got some additions is the master bedroom. The additions was bedding. My boyfriend had college bedding that was ok- but he didn't have a dust ruffle or a sham that matched. I spent weeks online looking at every website I could think of looking for "manly" bedding. Now, could I find gender neutral bedding- yes. However, I found it impossible to find bedding that looked like a man lived there.

We ended up creating our own between a couple of stores, Bed Bath and Beyond and Target, and I like the finished product. Please ignore the fact that the shams do not have pillows inside them.

The Living Room and Office

One of the first rooms that we started working on was the living room. The house had a great feature to it- what the realtor called a 'florida room'. That is just fancy talk for a sun room that has been finished. The layout of the house is as follows: you walk into the front door and step directly into the living room, to your left is the dining room, and to your right is the 'florida room'.

Here is what that area looked like when the house was purchased:

As you can see this area is not too bad. That is probably one of the reasons that we started with it. Here is the work that has been done on it so far. Like most of the house, most of the work that has been completed is painting the rooms. I love neutral colors, and if it was my choice the whole house would be some shade of tan or cream. Lucky for the Lowes and Home Depots paint departments, my boyfriend likes some color. 

As you can see, one of the biggest changes, other than the color of the walls is that the floors have been refinished. The hardwood floors were in horrible condition when the house was purchased. Since my boyfriend wanted to get the floors refinished in the house, we had to complete all the painting before that could happen because the whole house is hardwood except the two bathrooms and kitchen . We started working on the house in December 2010. The house has three bedrooms, two bathroom ( both of which had wall paper up before we started to paint), kitchen, dining room, living room, and office. The only room in the house that has not been painted is the guest bath and in a future post you will see why. The carpet in the florida room, which will be used as an office, was replaced with hardwood floors. We think that it helps the house flow a little better.  We also took the mirror over the fireplace down.  The office and living room are painted the same color- a nice manly green color.