Mood Board for Our Sunroom

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After posting about my Sunroom tour the other day {you can check out the details on our Sunroom here}, I really wanted to put together a Mood Board for the room.  I’m not sure if I will buy these exact pieces and I’m not sure if we will be able to get to this project completed this year, but it’s always fun to be able to look at the things you would like to have and maybe find a better deal down the road anyway.  😉   I just love looking at the eye candy in the mean time.

So in this Mood Board, most everything is from Pier 1.  The ceramic stool & the flooring are not.  I love what Pier 1 carries, but I don’t always love their prices.  So I’m going to keep an eye on this stuff and maybe if I hit the right sale at the right time, I can get what I want for less.  Or we might try to buy wicker furniture off of Craigslist or from a garage sale and spray paint it the color that we want.  These are just all ideas now, a little bit of inspiration for the room.  I saw most of this in person already.  I was in Pier 1 last week.  I love looking…..well I bought a platter holder for my counter top…..but I really wanted to buy all of this stuff.  😉

OK, now let’s look at the details of this Mood Board.
  • First let’s check out the great color that would be on the walls.  The walls will be wainscoting, hopefully PVC wainscoting.  We have seen it at Home Depot already, but I haven’t looked to see if they carry it at Lowe’s or not.  It was about $42 per pack.  Anyway onto the color on the walls,  it’s Valspar Evening Stroll.  It’s blue/green in color.  It might not be the color I go with, but I do like it.
  • The settee & chair are hand-woven out of banana bark and mahogany. They seem very well constructed and seem like they would last long and wouldn’t sag in the seat area.
  • The outdoor rug is a little too expensive, but I liked the design.  I will shop around for either 1 or 2 outdoor rugs OR I might just reuse the two that I already have in the Sunroom.  I’m not certain what I want to do yet.  I’m not in love with the ones I have.  They have palm leaves on them and are beige.  {you can see the pattern in the picture below}
  • As for the cushions, they-are-gorgeous-in-person!!!  Let’s get a closer look at the cushion design.  They have a very luxurious look to them.  Though I’m sure I could find something similar at HomeGoods for a lot less.
 
  • The hanging lanterns are just too cute.  I would hang them in one of the corners.  Probably the corner that I can see from our Living Room, so I could enjoy them year round.
  • The table & chairs are really cute, but I’m not sure whether I want white or a dark brown color.  We will see what I find.  Hopefully something I can repurpose to keep costs down.
  • The flooring is a vinyl water resistant plank look by TrafficMaster Allure.  We used it in our Laundry Room and I think we might use it in the Sunroom as well.  The room might not always be 100% waterproof, so this would be a good flooring to put down so we can close up the gaps in the wood deck flooring that is there now.  We have some work to do to close up gaps in the flooring and on the walls, but I think we will be good once we are done with the room.  We could even buy a small heater for the room and get more use out of it in the late Fall or even when family is over for Christmas.  😉

Here is the ceramic stool that I already bought from HomeGoods a few weeks ago and lives in the Sunroom already and I only paid $35 for it, so I have already saved myself some money from what I had showed you in the Mood Board.
You can check out my first post ever on my blog to see more ideas for sunrooms or outdoor spaces.  Link.
So there you have it our Mood Board or Inspirational Eye Candy for our Sunroom.  Anyone redecorating their Sunroom, porch or outdoor space?  Let’s here about it….leave a link in the comment section if you want.  I would love to see what others are doing to make their outdoor spaces more like home.

Thanks for stopping by everyone! Have a great day! I would love to hear your comments, so please leave one if you want. I love sharing and inspiring others, but I also love feed back and sharing of others ideas and thoughts. :)

Weekend Bloggy Reading

Our Home Tour – The Sunroom

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Oh our Sunroom…..how I dislike you.  Let me count the ways.  First it is all white paneling.  Don’t mind the paneling at all, but it wasn’t installed the right way, it was cut wrong at the top where it meets the beams and it has started to peel now & come away from the walls in some places.  Basically it’s indoor paneling that shouldn’t be in the elements over the years, so it’s falling apart now.  This room is not an air tight/water tight room unfortunately, so we need to buy PVC paneling to redo this room.  Though I do need to find out if we can paint PVC paneling first.  That would be a bummer if I couldn’t paint this room.  Then I want to paint it a nice Sea glass blue/green color.  This room has 13 windows plus the screen door.  Let’s see what other problems does this room have…..oh yeah, the wood deck that this was built on….well the wood planks are not spaced close enough together for our liking.  Let’s just say that is how the bugs get into the room now.  So we want to find a product that will withstand some water if it came in and cover the floor completely.  Other problems are the really old windows.  Just to replace the windows it will cost us about $850 and they are just storm windows.  Plus we hardly have any screens because the previous owners probably broke them and never replaced them.  Grrrrrrrr!!!!  So it gets super warm in this room.  I would like to do some sort of canvas panels for the ceiling.  Maybe construct something that would hang from the ceiling and that you could slide back and further so that it might not get so hot.  The roof is made out of plastic material.  It’s a corrugated product.  I’m sure you have seen those wavy roofs somewhere.  Ours is an opaque white, so we don’t think it’s letting so much light in, but just that the room is really all windows and there are only 5 screens, that makes the room hot.  Hopefully with screens in all the windows, it will make the room cooler in the end.

So we will in the future, tear down all the paneling and replace it hopefully with PVC paneling so we don’t have to worry about it getting wet.  Replace all the windows and replace the screen door.  We already have a screen door that we bought at Restore {Habit for Humanity} for $13.  Love that.  Figure out a flooring material that will stand up to the weather and of course get a love seat, chairs and a bistro table so we can eat and relax out there with no bugs.  :)  Of course I will decorate this room over time.  I have some decor already like the three lanterns in my Living Room. 😉
So here is how the sunroom basically looked when we bought the house.  Nice blank slate, but with some problems.  Those windows were not closing properly due to the support poles below not being installed correctly.  So we had the poles replaced, you can check that out here and now the windows basically close all the way, but not 100% perfect.

Not sure if you can really see in this picture how much space is in between the boards, but let’s just say if you are walking in heels, your heels are going through the spaces for sure.  So we want something that is wall to wall and that will be ok in the elements, just in case it got wet.  Maybe we will use the same flooring that we used in our Laundry Room, check that out here.  It’s TrafficMaster Allure Flooring.  It’s vinyl flooring and they do sell an 100% waterproof version of this flooring.  It’s a little bit more expensive then the one we bought that was just “highly water resistant”, but I think it might be worth it.  It would look like we had hardwood floors in this room.  Nice!!!  Then I can buy an area rug or reuse the two I already have.  We will see. 😉

One of our first furniture purchases was our outdoor dining set.  So we decided to keep it up here in our Sunroom until we were done cleaning up our very dirty yard.  We bought this set from Fortunoff’s.  It has 8 chairs actually and it also came with two reclining chairs with ottomans.  Really nice set for the price.

Now steps in the ugly wood beams.  The room just never felt finished to me.  Then I think the 2nd year that we owned our home, we had a hail storm and the hail {quarter sized} made holes in the roofing material.  So we knew we had to replace the roofing material, so we painted the beams white before the contractor installed the new roofing material for us.  We don’t do really high ladders, so this job was for the pro’s.  😉
Oh, so much better.  We used Benjamin Moore’s exterior white paint for this job.  Because we didn’t primed, because we didn’t think we needed to {lesson learned}, it look us three coats of white paint to get it completely covered.  We love it now.  We painted the beams when the old roofing was still on, this way we didn’t have to be careful when we are painting.  Nice!!! :)
You can see the new roofing from this picture.  It’s an opaque white.  Brighter then what we had up from the previous owners.  We believe it was a smoked color, but it didn’t look that way when it was up.  We hope that this new opaque white roof will reflect more of the sun.  We also had the contractor install soffit’s & gutters.  The rain just used to run right off the roof and the wood beams were just sticking out from underneath the old roofing.  Not very finished looking, so we had it finished off.  We love how it looks now.  Much better.
You can see the beams hanging out in this picture.  We also need to power wash the wood that is at the bottom of sunroom in this picture.  I think we might paint it white for now also and then when you have the whole house resided we will have them side the whole thing so you don’t see that anymore.  We also want to make boxed out columns for the support poles in white PVC material.  It would really finish the look off we think.
And you can see the beams in this picture too.
This is what the sunroom looks like as of today.  Here are the reclining chairs and ottomans I was talking about early.  Plus some outdoor pillows, the outdoor rugs we used to have on our pool deck & a new little addition I just bought last week from HomeGoods.
Here is a closer look at the new little addition to the Sunroom.  It’s a ceramic end table or ceramic stool.  Whatever you need to use it for.  I’ve been eyeing this one at HomeGoods since the being of the season, but I didn’t want to pay full price for it.  It was on clearance already when I saw this lovely last week again, so I knew I had to buy it and for $39, marked down from I believe the original price was either $59 or $69, this was a good deal.  You typically see these going for $99 or more in some places.  Score for me!!!
Close up of the details.  I love that the flowers are carved out from the ceramic.  It just makes me happy to look at it every day from my Living Room.
Here are some inspiration pictures I have saved.  I would love for this room to be even half of what these rooms look like.  I just love how comfortable they look.  It makes we want to go on vacation.  I would love a “vacation room”.  Wouldn’t that be nice to have in your home?

This room has the similar exposed beams like our Sunroom has.  I love the curtains, the lanterns and all the furniture.

Ballard Designs
I love how they framed out the window in a Turquoise color and left everything else white.
House of Turquoise
Love the gorgeous petals table & chairs.  All the metal on the walls is really unique.
Ballard Design 
I know in this picture it’s all about the outside, but my Sunroom is all about being outside for the most part. 😉  I love all the nautical stuff that they decorated with.
Ballard Design 
What an awesome idea…..put a mirror in the Sunroom.  Love it!!!
House of Turquoise 
Now this picture is just gorgeous.  It’s probably a house down by the beach.  I love the dark wood floors with the dark furniture.  Everything else is light, but it’s so inviting.  I really like the idea of the shingled siding.  Maybe when we redo our siding, we could put this kind of siding just in the Sunroom, but in the same color that we side the rest of the house.  Or at least that is my thought right now.
House of Turquoise 
This sunroom is so warm and inviting.  Looks really comfortable.  In this house this is obviously a 4 seasons Sunroom, so they don’t have to worry about the elements.  But I really like the colors and the warmth of the room.
House of Turquoise 
Again, this is another similar room to our Sunroom.  I wish we had the windows from the floor to the ceiling though.  We have the same similar beams & even roofing it looks like maybe.  Love the curtains & the colors.  Very inviting….very much part of the home this way.
House of Turquoise 
Love the dark wood decking, the light colors on the walls and I love how the Turquoise & Red go so well together.  Turquoise really does go with most colors.
House of Turquoise
My inspiration really takes me in a lot of different directions.  Oh decisions.  Nuts!!!  Who knows what I will pick for this room in the end.  I love it all.
Paint Colors I like so far:

Valspar Blue Lagoon

Valspar Evening Stroll

 Anyone loving Turquoise right now?  What color and who is it made by?  I would love to get more ideas.  Anyone remodeling a Sunroom or Patio/Deck area?  What colors are you using?
Thanks for stopping by everyone! Have a great day! I would love to hear your comments, so please leave one if you want. I love sharing and inspiring others, but I also love feed back and sharing of others ideas and thoughts. :)

Tile Overhaul

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Happy 4th of July!!!

Have a safe & fun day!  We will be going right across the street to our neighbors for a party and fireworks.  It’s great to have good neighbors!!!
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When we bought this house we expected to rent our apartment to someone we didn’t know, but instead my Mom lives in our apartment now.  If we would have know that my mom was going to be living with us, we would have updated this apartment more when we first moved in.
This every old white tile had really seen it’s better days.  No matter how we tried to clean the tile, it never looked clean, even though it was clean on the surface.  This is the kitchen tile.
It makes me dizzy to just look at this tile with the diamond inset.  This had to go, but what was going to be the easiest way.  It’s a smallish apartment and it would be really hard to have to pull up all this tile and the mess it would make.  We were trying to keep expenses down as much as possible.
Here is a close up so you can see how much it looked old and dirty.  We bleached, we steamed, we tried it all and we couldn’t get them cleaner.  Yup even tried the magic eraser – nada!!!  So it had to go.
Here is the before of the bathroom tile.  The tile was a little smaller in this room, but still white and dirty.  See the whiter base trim tile on the wall?  OK that really doesn’t go well.
OK, so here is what we were starting with the bathroom floor.  Not so bad looking from a far.
Looking closer and it’s just like the kitchen tile.  Clean on the surface, but still dirty looking.  Drove my Mom nuts that she couldn’t get it clean.
Even some chips in the tile {the dark spots are the chips}.
Now this is what the bathroom looks like with it’s new tile.  Do you likey?  We likey and my Mom is super happy too.
So do you think they are real ceramic tiles?  Nope….they are vinyl.  Did I trick you?  They look pretty real right?

Here you can see the kitchen floor in the background and the bathroom floor.  Plus the threshold in between the kitchen and bathroom.
New view from kitchen into the bathroom.  I love that it’s all one type of flooring now between the two rooms.  Flows so much better now.

Before and After of the Bathroom.
We put up new 3 1/2″ PVC baseboard trim in the bathroom.  So much nicer then the 2″ tile trim that was in there before.  It just popped right off the wall thank goodness with no harm to the walls.  Bonus!!!
Before and After of the Kitchen.

OK, so here is the product we used.  TrafficMaster Allure Tile.  You can check out this post to see how we used the same product in our Laundry Room, but it looks like wood instead.  This product is a floating floor, so you can go over ceramic tile or any other tile that is smooth, or over cement flooring that is even.  If you have an uneven floor you can even it out or have a contractor even it out for you and then lay type of flooring down.  This tile flooring was $50 per box, which covers 24 sq. ft.  There are different prices for all their different flooring.  They sell this product at Home Depot.  This product is “water resistant”, not “water proof”.  TrafficMaster does have a line in this same type of material that is “water proof”, but costs a little more, so you could use it in a bathroom.  It’s an easy product to install.  Each piece just sticks to each other.  They are pre-glued.

Here is the glued area {the grey area is glued}.  They are pretty hard to get apart after you press down on them.

Well I hope you liked our mini makeover.  We did these two rooms in two days.  There were three doorways to cut around, so that took some time, but other then that it went pretty quickly.  If you have any questions at all about the product or how to install it, just let me know.

Has anyone used this product in their home?  Do you love it or hate it?  Do tell!!!

Thanks for stopping by everyone! Have a great day! I would love to hear your comments, so please leave one if you want. I love sharing and inspiring others, but I also love feed back and sharing of others ideas and thoughts. :)

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Weekend Bloggy Reading

Still Airing Out Our Dirty Laundry

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This weekend & last weekend we did more work on our Laundry Room.  New exterior door and flooring is what was next on the to-do-list.
Here is what the screen door looked like.  We hated it and it had to go.  It was very old, we couldn’t clean it up much more then we did already.  I didn’t take pictures of how the screen door was attached, but let’s just say it wasn’t going to stay up well for much longer.
Here is the door.  Yup the window grill is so yellowed that we couldn’t do anything with it.  Plus it was broken and we didn’t have the piece to glue it back.  It all had to go.  We did paint both the screen door & exterior door just to clean things up a little until we could afford to redo this room.
Close up of the ugliness.
This is the doorway from the inside.  See that extra piece of wood.  We had no idea why this was there and we still have no idea why the previous owners had it there.  We assume since there was a gap between the floor and the door frame itself, that they thought this would be better so no one would trip maybe.
Here the whole entire door is out and we are down to the framing for the door.  And no extra piece of wood anymore.  This way we can put the flooring right up to the framing.
New door frame is in now.
Here is one picture from the outside down to the framing.
Introducing our new door.  We love it.  We went with a steel door @ Lowe’s.  We still have to paint it.  This is just the primer the door comes with.  We will also install a screen door soon.  Just have to buy one.
We bought a door that has the blind and the grills in between the window.  We love it.  No dirt this way.  A little more money for this type of door, but it was worth it for us.  Since it’s in the Laundry/Utility Room, it would get dirtier in there.  This way I don’t have to worry about the blinds getting dirty from the inside or the grills getting dirty from the outside.  Win, Win!!!
Close up of the blind & grills.
This past weekend, we finally had the time to do the flooring.  We love the product we bought for this.  More on that in a few minutes.  So here is our cement floor that we wanted to cover up.  We didn’t want to spend to much money, but we still wanted it to look nice.

We put down some subflooring.  It is only a 1/4″ thick.  We were trying to bring this flooring closer to the laminate flooring height in the Family Room.

Here is the flooring we picked.  It’s TrafficMaster Allure flooring.  Here is the link.  They sell this at Home Depot.  It’s thin material {3.8mm}, but it’s vinyl so it’s durable.  This one is only water resistant.  But they do have a waterproof one {can be used in a bathroom}. They also have a line that looks like tiles also.  Here is the Link.   There is even one that looks like cork flooring.  So pretty good selection.  This is a floating floor.  It is only stuck to each other with glue that is already on the product.  Easy peasy!!!

Here is the flooring in the room.  The hubby first started to use a utility knife to cut the vinyl like the directions tell you to, but it’s not that easy to keep the line straight unless you use something that has a straight edge and it really starts to hurt your hand.  It took 2 hours to do our 8’x10′ room, so that wasn’t going to work out.  Hubby broke out the chop saw and that worked perfect.  It does make a mess with little pieces of vinyl flying around, so do this outside.  But so worth saving my hubby’s hand, plus the cuts were nice and straight this way.
Here is the flooring all installed.

Because it’s a floating floor, we were able to put the washer, dryer & freezer back in the same day.

Because this is vinyl and has glue on it, it does have a slight smell to it.  We really don’t leave the inner door open in this room, so it really hasn’t been a problem for us.  But I have read that you can put a bowl of baking soda in the room to absorb the smell.  I will be picking some up to hopefully take the slight smell out sooner.
Here is the actual box.

Here is a close up of the flooring.  It’s a little redder here then it is in person.

It’s more this color in person.

Looks like real wood flooring, doesn’t it?
We have some moulding to install, some more storage to install and something to cover up the ugly furance & hot water heater. And hopefully something to cover up the pipes for the washing machine. Plus of course some decor to finish off the room.
Check out the first post here for the beginning of this project.

Thanks for stopping by. I would love to hear from you, so please leave a message. Have a question? Would love to hear it.  Have a great day everyone!!!