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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…

Y’all know that my husband, Mark, is the STAR of this DIY blog. You would think that I (being his wife and all) would be his #1 sidekick. Well, he tosses me to the curb when this guy shows up. Look at them…I swear Mark and my dad are like peas in a pod when working together. We called my dad in because the man could be a professional painter and we need his skills….

I thought our “dusty days” were over. Remember this picture from when we first did our house demolition??? That man has returned… Mark is spending his days sanding our drywall. He mudded and taped all the creases and seams on our second floor, and the sanding smoothes everything out. I follow behind him and wipe the walls with a damp cloth to remove any extra sanding bits or dust. We’re trying to get the smoothest…

Our roof work took a full two days. We had to run back to the store for more “ice and water shield” and we took our time with the project because we didn’t want to fall off. As I mentioned before, it was slightly nerve wracking to be that high off the ground but I got used to it (and actually liked it) pretty quickly. My very wise Nunny would say it was all good…