My Dream Pantry...

 Doesn't everyone dream of a big pantry that is well organized and easy to find things? Almost like a mini grocery store? I want to make it happen. The house is set up strange with two bedrooms on opposite sides of the house. Since I like the rooms close together we are turning the bedroom directly behind the kitchen into a pantry. (With hopes to add another room to the other side of the house one day) We took the door out that you see and are turning it into a complete wall.

                         Currently....                                                                       Inspiration....

 The washer and dryer are in the kitchen... Can we say 80's?! This is not ok with me. The wall behind the washer and dryer leads to the bedroom which will be the pantry/laundry room. (Eventually we want to build a separate laundry room, but for now this is the way it will be).

I think this has been my husband's favorite project so far... He had a lot of fun tearing the wall down.

 Tada! It now opens to the pantry room. Next we need to re-route the plumbing and electrical and then we will put a door in (I am hoping my husband will let me use the door we took out from the back and use it as a pantry door) and build the wall up flush with the wall you see.

 My husband really loves the doors with the frosted glass that say pantry on them. He doesn't usually have to many opinions on decorating so I want to do that for him. But then I saw this....

WOW! Isn't that gorgeous?! http://www.thriftydecorchick.com/ This site has GREAT house decorating ideas... How can I take off the back door to my house that is super cute and not use it like this for my pantry door? I have some sweet talking to do to see if I can convince him to change his mind.

Evalyn's Room

The room that I almost cried about leaving in our current home is my daughter's room. When I found out I was pregnant I began the search of ideas to decorate a room for a boy or girl. I had a hard time finding an idea for a boys room, so I was extremely excited when we found out we were having a girl. That same day we went and bought the paint and I went to work. I spent a lot of time making sure it was the way I wanted. I am not good with change and thought about doing her room exactly the same...



 I love the colors and the idea, but I had to find something new to do. This is what her new room looked like before I started my work.

 Yup you see that... Popcorn ceiling... Yuck!

 The flooring isn't finished. Closet doors falling off.

Yes, that is a deadbolt instead of a door knob... Not sure what this room was used for..

I had decided I was either going to paint the room all pink or paint it the same way. I started googling the paint colors I used in her first bedroom when I came across this blog that had used the same colors.

http://theellwoodavenuechronicles.blogspot.com/2012/04/scarletts-vintage-teacup-inspired.html


I fell in love! I wanted the same tea cup vintage feel for Evalyn's first room and that is why I chose the colors I did. This was a way to bring the old room into the new room with a new design. I also LOVE stripes!

So I started my work... I scraped the popcorn ceiling off and re-textured. It is a lot simpler than it sounds. I did it with no help from a man. :)

I have started the stripes. I wish I had made the light pink stripes a little wider now but I am not going to change it now. I still need to do the brighter pink thin stripes. I am also having trouble finding where the flooring was purchased so I can finish it.

 Here is a picture of Evalyn she loves to drink from a straw so I distracted her today with playing with a cup while I worked.

Securing things up

This is the back view of the house... There are three doors on the back of the house. We have a daughter that is 20 months that LOVES to play outside. Having three doors to the backyard didn't sit well with me, especially since we have a pool and need to put a gate up. So we are leaving just the french doors that lead to the backyard from the living room.

While the house was for sale someone decided to practice their BB gun shooting and shot the back window out on the door. We replaced the back french doors with nice new doors with the blinds in them. They are dual pane verses the single pane doors that were there. Now I can use the old doors to decorate...

  We also took the swamp cooler out and had to board up that whole too. I will add pictures of the new doors soon.

                                                                                          Isn't my husband cute?!

The beginning

Welcome to the beginning of The Ancient Home on Rome...

When my husband and I got married and moved in together we moved to a one bedroom apartment. There was a big problem with this. We each had 2 cars, after we had been married for a few months my husband also received a work vehicle. We were in trouble, where do you park 5 cars in an apartment complex. So we bought a house with a two car garage. This to presented a problem when we realized you couldn't park cars on our side of the street. The streets were so small that you could only park on one side and it wasn't our side. We also kept growing the collection of cars. We started parking cars down the street, at friends houses, parent's houses, out of state, where ever we could find a place.

We finally decided we were ready to move into a place that had enough space for all of our cars. We were so picky about all the qualifications for the home. My husbands list was a well, wood burning fire place, no less than a half acre, and a septic system. My qualifications for the house were to be fully built and livable (I had to add this one, you should have seen some of the half built homes my husband showed me), and a pool.

Living in Las Veags' crazy housing market it took us a little while to find what we were looking for. The house had been for sale for about a year when we found it. We realized we weren't quite ready yet to buy the house. Six months later the house was still for sale, several buyers had made offers then walked away. We decided to throw our hat into the ring and see what happened. It took another six months but we ended up buying the house that matched all of the things on our list.

Now starts the renovations. It was built in 1985 (for Las Vegas this is considered an "old home"), but has a lot of 1970's rooms and ideas mixed with 80's on the inside, like pony walls with the spindles from the ceiling, popcorn ceilings, and the hanging cabinets in the kitchen. It does meet my stadards of living but I can't live like this for long. So we begin our work.