Year of Organized Living- Garage Make-over

When my parents bought our home in 1977, the previous owners had used the garage as a play room for their twin daughters. The walls were painted bright pink and the floor was covered in pebble textured red tile. Over the years, the pink paint faded and the tiles chipped off.

Last year, prior to moving back into my house, we took the first step to our total garage make-over. We had painters come in and replace the tile floors with epoxy. They painted the walls a white-grey color to match the floor. Dan installed rows of super bright lights. The idea was to keep the garage clean and an unwelcoming place for bugs.

After nearly a year, we have finally finished the garage with the addition of new shelves and a workstation for Dan. It's an organization paradise!

Here are some before pictures of the garage.

Dan bought a whole bunch of cupboards for my side of the garage, before he bought his own workstation set-up. I love my new cupboards and have somehow managed to still have available storage space in them. It helped organize a lot of stuff that was cluttering the interior of our home.

A few weeks after getting my cupboards, we went to the Orchard Supply Hardware store in Burbank, so that Dan could pick out his Gladiator workstation. This was our first experience with Orchard and we couldn't have been more impressed.

The staff was incredibly friendly and helpful from greeting us at the door to processing our order. We saved money with a "We Pay the Tax" promotion that they had over Memorial Day weekend. We also joined their free rewards program that gives us a portion of what we spend back in the form of a gift card. They really sealed the deal, when they gave us free assembly on all of our giant cabinets, usually a fee of around seventy-five a piece. We saved hundred of dollars at Orchard.

After all of our troubles with multiple local Home Depot locations, we are now loyal Orchard and Lowes customers. We don't even mind that Lowes and Orchard are a further drive as we never plan to shop at Home Depot again. Never!

Delivery day came and Dan was very excited to get his new workstation.

Dan with the first big pallet off of the truck.

And there was more....

I really never imagined that the garage could look so nice and be so organized. The Gladiator system has tracks for the walls where Dan mounted various hooks and baskets to hold all of our gadgets. Everything is off the floor and in its proper place.

Dan's new work bench and cupboards look fantastic. Naturally it's his "man-cave", so I can look, but not touch! I'm just happy that he got his tools out of our pantry and now I can use that space for food storage. Organizing the garage directly impacted the organization of our kitchen. I'm loving it!

Patio Spring Cleaning

I'm exhausted.

Dan and I have spent the last couple of weeks spring cleaning our home in anticipation of having a few friends over for a BBQ this past weekend. The primary focus has been the patio, which has been a wreck all winter.

The floor was covered in dirt and sawdust from when our flooring was replaced. The sawdust was absolutely everywhere. It took several days of sweeping and hosing to get it clean. I'm pleased to report that you can almost eat off of it.

We don't have green thumbs. All of the beautiful flowers that Dan's mom planted for us last fall have shriveled up and died. It looked like we had tumble weeds in our planters. The only one that survived was our cactus, Spike.

We started to get complaints from the HOA about the state of our planter boxes, which was followed by a letter sent out to the entire complex urging residents to do some patio maintenance. We took the hint and decided to replace our dead plants with cactus. They're drought resistant and covered in scary spikes which seems to equate to "Leave Me Alone". We like low maintenance.

Other than easy care, we think that they look pretty.

Planting them was a little dicey. I did all of the planting and when I tried to plant this cactus with a little yellow spikes, my hand was punctured all over. The spikes went right through my gardening gloves and I spent about half an hour with tweezers trying to get them all out. They stung.

Dan gets to plant the scary ones next time!

Unfortunately, we have had one cactus casualty. This was the first one that I planted and I think that I was too rough. My gardening techniques are not exactly refined. The others seem to have taken root, but this one is withering away.

We acquired another new plant that was a gift from friends. We will probably plant it in the box to replace the dead cactus.

We have one very cool non-plant addition to our patio. We desperately needed a ice bucket for entertaining and Dan found one better than a bucket, he found an ice boat! I imagine that the patio might slowly take on a nautical theme.

This ice boat makes me want to have more friends over!

Home Sweet Home- New Floors

When I inherited my childhood home, the first thing improvement I made was ripping out the carpet. My mom loved having carpet in the house. The only room that we didn't have carpet was the kitchen. Even the bathrooms had carpet. Gross, I know.

I put hardwood downstairs and tiled the bathrooms and kitchen. I had initially planned to put hardwood on the stairs, hallway and bedrooms. Several people talked me out of this idea, arguing that it would be too costly and difficult. They argued that carpet has a nicer look and feel. In America, there seems to be a generational preference towards carpet. I feel like the older generations really push towards sticking with carpet, yet most of my friends that are in my generation, want wood.

The old people persuaded me and five years ago, I bought carpet. It was plush, cream colored and expensive. Fancy carpet. It looked beautiful.

I have two cats and although they are housebroken and well behaved, they still shed. Fur can problematic in thick carpet. No vacuum can quite keep it all clean. Cats sometimes cough up hairballs and I don't always notice them until a stain has set in. Let it be known that Stainmaster carpet an be defeated by cat puke. Slowly, the beautiful carpet, looked less beautiful and more grimy.

Last month, we decided to do something about it and headed to Lowe's Home Improvement. They had a good offer running on laminate flooring including installation. We had a really great experience with Lowes, but more on that in a future post.

The hardest thing was picking the right color flooring so that the laminate on the stairs didn't clash with the existing hardwood downstairs. We went with American Beech. It's not the same, but they both have a warm reddish tone that compliment rather than clash.

I was a little nervous about going with laminate rather than hardwood. However, the deal was so good that if it doesn't wear well, it won't seem like such a waste to replace it down the road. It looks just as nice as the hardwood.

We left carpet in the guest bedroom, but had the laminate put on the stairs, hallway and in the master bedroom. We had to take all of our bedroom furniture and temporarily store it on the patio. It was quite a task.

Here are some before pictures with the dirty carpet.

it took two men, a day and half to finish the job. I was impressed that unlike other contractors from other major home improvement stores (ahem HOME DEPOT), they were professional. They even covered Dan's car and put out a sign to alert the neighbors.

Here are a few shots of the work in progress.

We love the finished result and can't stop smiling over how beautiful our new floors look.

The transition from bedroom to tiled bathroom.

We have one last step to finish the project. Since the carpet sat higher than the laminate, we have to do touch up painting around the edges. It should really look great once the painting is complete.