Laurel

Decorating & Finishing Touches, Design Inspiration, Good Buys, House & Home, Tips & Tricks

What to Know Before Buying a Sofa

March 19, 2019June 27, 2019by Laurel1 Comment

Sofas! Everybody needs ’em. Usually, you don’t buy them frequently, every 5-10 years or so. Sometimes, more years go by if you’re lucky. Unless, you’re me, of course. I buy a sofa at least once a month, sometimes I buy more like 4 in a month! Because I’m an interior designer, I am always hunting for sofas for my clients. I’m constantly keeping an eye out for new places to buy sofas and I’ve found quite a few great stores. So today, I’m going to show you my secret stash of sofas, as well as tips on what to check before you buy, just in case you’re in the market! People are constantly telling me they need to sit on a sofa before they buy it. But, really, you don’t! You just need to know what you like in a sofa and what to look for to get that comfort. And I’m about to dish, ya’ll!

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Daydreaming, Decorating & Finishing Touches, Design Inspiration, Home Upgrades, House & Home, Painting

Designing my Kitchen: Inspiration for Phase II and a Phase I Plan

March 12, 2019July 26, 2019by Laurel8 Comments

I would love to gut and completely reconfigure my kitchen, but right now my savings are focused elsewhere! So in the meantime I’ve begun Phase 1 of the kitchen renovation. This Phase is to hold me over until I can do a Phase II gut renovation and really move things around. Phase I includes a lot of cosmetic updates that have a big visual impact, but smaller financial impact: removing the sheet vinyl, refinishing my hardwood floors, painting the cabinets, and painting the walls. But while I’m elbows deep in those projects, I’ve still got kitchen planning on the mind. I’ve been pinning tons of inspiration of old kitchens and kitchens with old vibes, so when I’m ready to renovate, my vision for the space simply needs to be detailed out. In the meantime, I’m ready for Phase I to transform the space so it no longer looks like this hot mess!

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Daydreaming, Design Inspiration, Exterior Upgrades, Gardening, Home Upgrades, House & Home, Lifestyle

Potager Plans and Garden Inspiration

March 7, 2019July 26, 2019by LaurelLeave a Comment

It’s starting to inch closer to Spring here in Portland, OR. And by Spring I mean, it’s March but the weather is still 27° in the mornings and it’s supposed to snow next week, but hey, who cares right? ME. I care! It’s FREEZING and I am over it. I am ready for warm weather and sunshine and sitting in my backyard enjoying the heat. So I’ve begun daydreaming and planning and pinning my backyard renovation. It’s a long ways to completion since demo and rebuilding of the garage is not on the docket until next summer, but I do want to get quite a few other things done out here this year.

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Home Upgrades, House & Home, House Tour, Videos

February House Tour!

March 5, 2019July 26, 2019by LaurelLeave a Comment

This post is about a week late. I had a bunch of issues uploading this file to youtube! I thought it was related to storage on my computer since my startup disc was almost full. I keep all of my photos on an external hard drive. When I went to delete some excess photos that were duplicates of what I had on my hard drive my computer froze and I ended up accidentally wiping all the photos from my hard drive. And I mean…. ALL THE PHOTOS. I’m trying to have that restored right now. I went to get my laptop looked at too and found out the whole reason I was having trouble updating was related to not having updated to the latest operating system. Doh! Fingers crossed I can still recover all the photos. It would be pretty sad to lose all the progress shots and before pictures of this crazy house, not to mention all the personal photos. Luckily, just a couple weeks ago I did create a new House Tour page which you can find in the main menu, which will show you all sorts of before pictures. Hopefully I can get my photos back and add even more before shots to that page. In the mean time I’ve switched to a cloud based storage system and will be backing that up to an external hard drive as well. Oh technology! Oh what an idiot I am…

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Home Upgrades, House & Home, Painting

Painting the Stairway and Updating Electrical & HVAC

February 19, 2019June 27, 2019by Laurel5 Comments

The stairway at Berrybrier has gone through some pretty dramatic changes in the last year. When I first bought the house, this area was dark lit by only a single bulb on a pull chain at the top of the stairs and a small square window squeezed in at the bottom of the stair. That little window had never even been trimmed out and a screen sat next to it waiting to be installed. The stair railing was almost black covered in god knows what and the light fixture wasn’t centered on anything.

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Decorating & Finishing Touches, Furniture Upgrades & Builds, House & Home, Painting

Installing a Vintage Medicine Cabinet

February 12, 2019July 26, 2019by Laurel15 Comments

I grew up in the same house almost my entire life. It’s the only house I ever remember living in. My parents bought it when I was one and a half and they still live in that house today. I had a bedroom in the center of the house with no outside windows except for a skylight, which sounds a lot drearier than it was in reality. My room was always light and bright and I never had to close the curtains to change. My room was right next to the bathroom which had been redone in the 1950s. It was all green and black tile with floral wallpaper and an old sink. There was even some neon orange accent tile that some previous owner then painted black, but by the time I was in middle school the black paint was chipping in a few places exposing the orange. There was this great vintage mirrored medicine cabinet in that bathroom. It may have been original to the house. It had a lovely arched top and two hinged, adjustable wings which was just perfect for checking out your hair before the middle school dance. I loved that medicine cabinet! It was so great for looking at your hair from all the angles, because it had two hinged, mirrored sides.

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Demo, Home Upgrades, House & Home

Sliding Around on the Newly DIY Refinished Kitchen Floors

February 5, 2019June 27, 2019by Laurel9 Comments

THE FLOORS ARE REFINISHED!! THE FLOORS ARE REFINISHED!!!! FOR THE FIRST TIME SINCE PURCHASING THE HOUSE IN AUGUST 2017 I CAN WALK AROUND THE ENTIRE HOUSE WITHOUT WEARING SHOES!

To say I am excited is an understatement. I am ecstatic! I am overthemoon. I am a proud mother with a new born floor and this baby has been long anticipated. Remember back in September 2017 when I ripped off the two layers of vinyl on the kitchen floors and thought refinishing the floors would take a couple weekends? Bahahahahaha. Boy, I am an idiot sometimes. Because, in realityland it took about ten thousand weekends to finish these floors. So I finished in March 2018 about 6 months after I started.

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Good Buys, Home Upgrades, House & Home, Plumbing

Installing the Bathroom Sink, Faucet, and Bathroom Accessories

January 29, 2019July 26, 2019by Laurel1 Comment

So, it’s the first week of January 2018. My bathroom is finally functional again now that it’s painted, tiled, and the toilet’s installed. My sister moves in and it’s time to hop on to the final task for a functional bathroom: installing the sink!

I’d originally ordered a pretty pedestal sink for my bathroom, but I realized that the pedestal would take up precious floor space. Floor space I needed for storage. In particular, toilet paper storage. So, I returned my original sink and ordered a new wall mounted sink. Now, because the walls weren’t tiled in here, I wanted a wall mounted sink with a little bit of a backsplash. The sink had to be pretty small in size too, in order to meet code requirements and for ease of access to the room. The sink is immediately to the left inside the bathroom, right beside the door, and there’s only about 14″ depth available before the sink is sticking out. I couldn’t move the sink over closer to the toilet because code requires 15″ from the center of the toilet to any other element. It was a tight fit! I ended up landing on the Kohler Greenich Sink because it fit both my constraints.

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