Porches and Petals

This was my first ever attempt at making apple pie from scratch, and it came out great!   We have planted three apple trees in our backyard this past year, so hopefully we're going to have many apples for many years to come.  I was happy to find a good apple pie recipe! I baked the Apple pie in this ceramic pie Pan and it came out great, as well.  My table cloth is handmade with fabric that I bought from a fabric store when we were still living in California.  The little peach tea pot is something that was a gift with flowers many years ago. The little coffee sign was a Dollar Tree purchase, and the grape vase was a thrift store item.

It was a long time coming, but I finally did some renovations to my foyer.  The Main thing I did was to seal all of the edges around the floorboards and paint the walls white.   I decided to go with white for the floor is well. Since moving to this house, I often felt that the foyer was very dark and creepy.  I decided I wanted everything to be all white so I could see any little creatures that were moving along the floor.  I think the white floor is going to be hard to keep clean, especially because we don't have a paved driveway in our yard, yet. Because of that, when it rains, which is very often here in Virginia, the yard gets very muddy, and we end up tracking mud all over the house.   In these "before photos," you can see the wallpaper that was original to the house when we bought it.  The wallpaper is actually in fairly good condition, and fairly attractive. But, since I have a fear of spiders, I did not want the busy wallpaper...

Here are photos of the first completed project in our new house.  I decided to start with the pantry because the room was small, and not too overwhelming to paint.   Unfortunately, the winter weather kept us from doing a lot more the past few months.  Frankly, it was just too cold and miserable for anyone to want to work on a house that needs so much done, inside and out.  Now that we've been having many days of warm, Spring weather here in Virginia, we've already gotten a lot more done. My dad, James, helped me paint the walls of the pantry.  Unfortunately, it took several coats to get good coverage. We  used Olympic Assure with primer.  For the floor, we used a grey by C& M Coatings that was purchased at Lowe's. It's amazing how much cleaner and fresher a coat of paint makes things feel!   Before Before shot of pantry floor Pantry after new paint After

Welcome to Libertad's home renovation!  In this blog I will be chronicling the renovation of this 2-story house built in 1904 that my husband and I just purchased this December.  As you can see, the house needs a lot of TLC.   Here is a back shot of the house.  It was listed as as 2874 sq. feet.  There's a lot of rooms, and tons of space!  Since taking this photo, we've already removed the piece of chain link fence that was behind the guest house porch.