Friday High Five

Phew.  After sprinting to the finish line with Millie the fliphouse, I finally have a little down time. This week was also my birthday week so I gave myself permission to take a break (of course by take a break I mean do laundry, start to clean our own house, do minor Millie work, some design work, and start to sort piles of staging stuff and flipping tools).  One thing I'm still working on catching up with is reading other blogs.  I'm such a blog addict and I've barely read any in the past 2 months!  So now that I'm trying to catch up on the amazing happenings in the blogosphere, here are 5 things that grabbed my attention. **links seem to be a big glitchy this morning. Until I can add proper links, click on the images to go to the source**

1.  Ok, sorry, gotta start with some shameless self-promotion here.  Did you see my week of reveals on Millie??

2.  I'm positively swooning over this DIY fabric patent art over at The Gathered Home.  Amazing image and the perfect way to showcase it! (and that wall color is just the cherry on top)

3.  I love love LOVE when Emily Henderson let's her readers into her styling world and we get to see that images like this aren't just a quick and effortless shot.

Those succulents aren't some celeb who just wake's up perfect.  It takes trial and error to create the perfect vignette.

4.  How adorable are these DIY clay planters from Design Love Fest??  Not sure if my sculpting skills extend this far, but let's just say I wouldn't be upset if these were hanging on my wall.

5.  And in un-plant related news, Sarah and her hubby over at Sarah M. Dorsey Designs took this rather ho hum rattan chair and completely transformed it!  I like to think I'm a creative person, but I would never in a million years have thought to do this.  Job well done!!

I hope this got your ideas flowing.  Have a wonderful weekend!!

Millie: Bathroom Reveal!

I hope you enjoy these updates as I learn to navigate through the business of flipping houses.  This flip, Millie is the most challenging and most exciting yet! You can find more about this house and about my 3 previous flip houses here. After a week of reveals, we've finally reached Friday and the last space inside the house to show you: the family bathroom!

Originally it was giving me a bad case of the blues.  A very bad case.

But no more

One of the key things that I did in this bathroom to make it feel so much larger was to pull both the sink and the tub of the floor.  Now that you can see the tile floor continuously, the bathroom feels much more spacious.

And the shower curtain still makes me weak in the knees- SO perfect for the space!

Aside from my sheer excitement to be wrapping up all the interior work, I'm also very relieved that the yard didn't fare too terribly over the winter.  After all the time and energy that I spent on it last fall I was afraid that it would be back to a mess this spring.  Let's take a walk down memory lane.

Same house, same vantage point, but it looks a bit different, no?

While not in bloom quite yet, the view on this charming little street/walkway has changed for the better and the neighbors couldn't be more happy.

Who knew this...

was hiding under all this?

And this, I kid you not...

turned into this (disclaimer: when I say turned into, I do mean took many many hours of sweat and hard labor).  For a reference point- the holly filling up the left of the before pic is the nicely trimmed holly bush to the right of the porch.

I couldn't be happier with the transformation that this house has gone through!

If you missed the rest of my week of reveals, go check out the kitchen, bedrooms, master suite, and living areas.  I dare you not to want to live here!

I'll leave you with one last picture.  This image is of one of the basement murals and I think it's a great way to conclude this renovation.

Sunset and Journey's End

Millie: Living and Dining Reveals!

I hope you enjoy these updates as I learn to navigate through the business of flipping houses.  This flip, Millie is the most challenging and most exciting yet! You can find more about this house and about my 3 previous flip houses here. Let's recap the week so far:

Monday I showed you my favorite room in the house, the kitchen

Tuesday we took a nap in the upstairs bedrooms

Yesterday we found sanctuary in the new master suite

Today reveal week continues on the main floor!

When I got the house it just looked dreary.  She was a sad house.  It was once beloved, but it's maintenance fell to the wayside as it's owners and the home itself aged.  I didn't put the dining room and living rooms  through significant renovations like the kitchen or former reading nook had, but now they are so much cleaner, smoother, fresher, and cozier than they started.

I scraped painted over wallpaper, repaired plaster and ceilings, got the walls skimcoated, painted, polished lots of wood trim, and had the floors refinished.  Look at those floors shine!

Not drastic, but the ceilings are smoother, the makeshift shutters are gone, and now the woodwork is the star.

The gorgeous woodwork all got polished and the 8 delicious vintage fixtures all got rewired (along with the entire house).

The dining room is the mostly the same story as the living rooms with the addition of canvas ceilings (which got stripped and repaired) and it started with horribly textured and damaged walls.

Tomorrow I'll conclude my week of reveals with the family bathroom that just makes me smile, a revisit of the exterior work that I spent my entire fall working on, and any other goodies I haven't shared yet.

I'm so sick of working on this house, but wow is it a cool place.