Introducing Involving Home!

I’m so excited to introduce Involving Home to you! I’ve been thinking for awhile that I should separate out my own personal home adventures and decorating from Involving Color, and with my new site redesign I thought now would be a good opportunity to do so. I have so many great posts planned for you, lots of progress and ideas on our kitchen renovation to share, DIY tips and tricks, and recipes. Make sure to subscribe to this feed if you want to continue seeing these types of posts from me!

I thought for my first Involving Home post I’d give you a few stats on me and my house. I haven’t really given the full rundown before, especially all in one place.

I live in the DC area and got married to my now husband, Marty, two years ago. I’m 30 (it still feels weird to say that – when did this happen?!?). I work full-time in a corporate type job and blog for fun on the side. I vividly remember driving home from work one day in typical DC traffic and wishing there was a better resource for finding paint colors. I would Google paint color names that I liked and hoped that they came up, but I didn’t really see a lot of good resources to browse paint color ideas. I thought, hey, I should do that! So I did, and here I am. I don’t really have much web design experience, so doing the galleries has been a learning process to say the least. I love love love reading blogs about DIY and decorating, so I originally included my own projects in Involving Color while I figured this whole blogging thing out.

We bought this little fixer upper in 2009 and have been working hard on it ever since. Marty owned a townhouse when we met, so he had experience in home ownership, but I was a first timer. Neither of us had any DIY experience, but as soon as we started on this house we were hooked.

Our house is only about 1650 sq. feet with no basement which is a great size for us right now. It has 3 bedrooms, 2.5 baths, a one car garage, and just the right amount of living space. We have a single living room (no formal living room or den) but we do have a separate dining room and a laundry room. We may stay, we may move one day, only time will tell. There are some major benefits to having a smaller home (I’m talking about you, utility bills) and it is certainly a lot less expensive to furnish. I suppose that could be looked at as a downside, too, if you’re addicted to decorating like I am. For now we are doing renovations on a budget, doing what we like, but also keeping in mind that this may not be our forever home.

We’ve done lots of projects so far, beginning with our powder room that started out with what I called a public restroom sink (the kind that attaches to the wall), dated wallpaper, an old light fixture, and an old medicine cabinet mirror. We replaced it with a pedestal sink  (a Craigslist find), a new light fixture, mirror, and painted it Sherwin Williams Sea Salt.

And then there was our patio that was probably one of the biggest transformations so far. It was a mosquito infested mud pit before we ripped out the existing deck and had a flagstone patio installed and added a bit of landscaping.

Our dining room got a major facelift. It was a plain white box before we painted it Benjamin Moore Iced Marble, added crown molding and shoebox molding, replaced the light fixture, found the table on Craigslist for a steal, and got the side table from Ballard.

Our kitchen renovation is our current project, and I can’t wait to share with you some of our progress (hint, it starts with back, ends with splash – yes!). It was a dated 80′s kitchen before we ripped out the old cabinets and put in all new ones from Ikea along with appliances and kashmir white counters. We still have lots more planned for the kitchen, so stay tuned!

We redid our “shoe closet” that was a dark hunter green before we painted it Sherwin Williams Iced Marble and added a couple of shoe cabinets.

Here you can see how they look open (this was taken before I spruced it up with a rug and accessories)

The entry got a little makeover too.

As you can see I have a thing for shoe storage. We put another shoe cabinet in our entry to hide the shoe clutter that was ending up by the front door.

Our living room is a work  in progress. That right cushion on the sofa is where I’m sitting as I write this :)

It’s where we spend much of our time hanging out and watching TV.

So that’s a little bit more about me and our home, and if you’re an Involving Color follower and you’d like to still see my DIY projects, please make sure to subscribe to this feed! I also included the new Linky Followers widget in my sidebar which is a really need following tool if you haven’t checked it out yet. I’m including this feed on my existing Facebook page, so if you’ve “liked” my page, you’ll get both Involving Home and Involving Color updates.