What We Do For Fun

Our entire Saturday was spent doing home improvement projects. I am actually very happy about this because we have been wanting to get started with house stuff for a while and now we are finally able to do so which is really exciting!

Our day began at Lowe's, where we bought trim and paint for the mantle that Bryan has been working so hard on, and sandpaper, wood conditioner, and stain to refinish the dresser that I got for FREE from my parents house!

After our trip, we got to work:

It look me about 2 hours to sand and the condition wood, but that whole process is for another post...

Here are our projects side-by-side. We decided to bring the dresser in for staining since the garage is SO dusty from cutting wood for the mantle.

I decided to stain the dresser a rich brown with a little red in it. You can see below how much darker it is than the original stain (this is after only one coat--I will do the second coat tomorrow!)

The mantle's looking great!! We had SUCH a hard time deciding what to do since our fireplace is at the end of one wall and the corner of another....we couldn't do a traditional mantle where the corners hang over the top, but thankfully we found a solution after looking through my Better Home and Gardens Decorating Book.

I actually had to tell him to stop moving for this picture because all the others were blurry! He works too fast!

Pre--tty. And this is only with one coat!

Putting the first of the tile on. My job was to get out all of the glue from between the cracks....fun (not).

Yay tile!

The "almost" finish product. Bryan still needs to do the grout, add trim to the bottom, and I will paint all the wood white and then we're done!

Be looking out for two very exciting "before and after" posts in the next few days!