I quit getting manicures about three months ago because my hands always look gross. I’ve got splinters and cuts and bruises. But you’re gonna get roughed up when you spend your all your time scraping… And sanding… It’s all worth it, though. Take a look at this beauty. After DAYS of working on it, we finally got our old wooden door down to the grain. What a transformation!! It went from this… To this… To…

I am a person who likes routine is boring. I get up at the same time every day and go to the gym. I eat the same oatmeal mix every day for breakfast. I watch exactly 20 minutes of whatever’s on HBO every night before I go to bed. Our latest DIY task was made for me. We put polyurethane on our new wood floors to protect them. You paint on one coat and let…

We are a socks-only household right now. At least, we are in our upstairs. Even with the unfortunate dying of his air compressor, Mark finished putting in the wood floor. The next task was sanding it. We rented a belt sander and finished fairly quickly and inhaled a heck of a lot of sawdust along the way. Now, we’ve been doing a lot of sitting. Just sitting and admiring our floor. I did a couple…

Ladies and gentlemen, the time has come. It is time to put in the floor. The purple stuff is called the underlayment. We put that down to eliminate moisture and dampen the sound of me walking around in my heels. 🙂 Once that was down, Mark aka the incredible DIY machine, started putting down the pine flooring. He started in the hallway. We wanted the floor boards to all flow the same direction from the…

“Orange is the New Black” is the coolest, hottest show on Netflix…and we have the coolest, hottest wall in the ‘Burgh. That is 100% our opinion. Feel free to disagree. 🙂 My husband, Mark, LOVES the color orange, and I once had a makeup artist tell me that it was my color. (I immediately went to the mall and bought like 10 orange tops.) Using good ol’ Google, I read a bit about what the…

We’re at that stage where we’re ready to paint the upstairs walls. While I hate the actual act of painting, I don’t mind picking the colors. Designer Steve helped us figure out what paint suited our tastes and complimented our house. Mark would like the rowhouse to have a modern, industrial feel, but we didn’t want just white paint on the walls. We went for a color called “shark.” It’s more of a cool, gray…

A few blog posts ago, I told you how I HATE painting. Well, it turns out, I LOVE using paint stripper. This can of heavy duty acid that burned off little flecks of my skin is (surprisingly) bringing me a lot of satisfaction! Since we blew out 5 walls in our rowhouse, we have several old doors just sitting around. These doors are classically beautiful and made out of gorgeous wood. You can’t find doors…

In my family, the number of women have always outweighed the number of men. My poor dad…even our cat, Peachy, was female! Now that Mark and my brother-in-law, Kevin, are part of the family they’ve helped even things out. 🙂 The last few weekends have been pretty “male heavy” at our Lawrenceville rowhouse. Lucky for me, these men ARE. DA. BOMB. Mark and Kevin rented this lift and used it to put the drywall on…

I know how to dress for work. (Shout out to one of my favorite people…news anchor legend, Peggy Finnegan) Apparently, I do NOT know to dress for DIY home renovations. Because it’s warm and humid out, I work on the house in shorts and a short sleeve t-shirt, sometimes a tank top. That is not a smart choice of clothing when you are working with paint stripper that could burn the hide off a cow….

60 is the new 40. My parents talk, walk, move, laugh, work and paint as if they were newlyweds and this is their first house. The only difference is when we go home, they fall on the floor and go to bed almost right away. 🙂 Nevertheless, they are a GODSEND during this priming/painting process because guess what…I HATE painting. I try to look like I’m having fun in the pictures. But I am NOT…