Blue bathroom renovation

When we started the buying process on our house in Dec of 2010, we knew there was some aesthetic things we wanted to change.  Flooring, paints, window coverings, appliances & such.  

We did the flooring before we moved in, we painted (almost) the whole house before we moved in, some curtains have been done, laundry room has been painted blue & grey so the next room I wanted to work on is...da da da THE BLUE BATHROOM!!

My decorating skills are sub-par, to say the least.

My mom & sister on the other hand are great at it, so I needed a little extra help.  My mom came and spent a couple days here last week and helped me paint, paint, paint, shop and give me some more ideas for things that we didn't get finished.

It's not completely done yet, but here are some sneak peaks.  

**The color on the walls was a dirty off white**

I still have some more things to finish, but I will post final pictures when it's done.  New light fixtures, new hardware on the cupboards and a few more fun things.  Stay tuned for another post this will of the finished project.

Thanks again, Mom for all the help!!

Hard water & Calcium Deposits...GONE!

**EDIT:
I see a lot of you coming over from Pinterest, and it is greatly appreciated!  This product really does work on pretty much everything that water has stained.  I have a client that used in on a bath tub ring & it worked great.  I have since had several people order a bottle and they are all happy with it.  If you have any questions or would like to order a bottle, please visit my site or email me at amy(dot)coolidge(at)conklinibo(dot)com

So, I've been on a little hiatus from being a Conklin IBO.  But, I am back at it again.  So if you are interested in anything that I'm going to talk about, please visit my site.

As some of you know, we have a blue bathroom.  Yes, blue.  Everything except the walls.  It's actually an ok shade of blue.  Thank goodness.  But anways, the bathtub faucet has leaked for as long as we have had the house, and I'm sure for years before that.  A few months ago we had a plumber out to fix something else and we had him look at the bathtub faucet to see if he could fix the leak.  Sure enough, it worked!

I don't know how many products I have tried to clean this...

Probably pretty much every cleaning product that says anything about being able to remove calcium deposits, lime scale, hard water, etc.  With a lot of scrubbing and money down the drain, nothing ever worked.  I figured we would just have to end up buying a new bathtub if we ever wanted to use it.

Now that my head is back in the game with being a Conklin IBO, I decided to try their cleaning product that is supposed to work on stuff like this.  I love all the Conklin products that I use regularly, so I was hoping this was going to be the same.

Got my order about a week later, and got started on the bathtub.  Wow, I couldn't believe how it literally dissolved all the crap away.  The directions say to mix it into a gallon of water with different concentrations depending on the severity of the calcium and lime deposits.  It says if it's really bad, just use it full strength, so that's what I did!  Poured it on my scrubber sponge, then wiped it across the area where I was working, then scrubbed like crazy!  Now, this is years of constant water dripping, and where we live, our water is really hard, so all our faucets get like this if I don't wipe them down all the time.  

You ready for the after pictures??

In case you wanted another 'before' picture

Little over half way done

Can you believe it?!?!?

This is the stuff!!

No need to replace the bathtub now!  Even though I wish it was white, this bottle was A LOT cheaper than a new bathtub!

So, if you have any type of mineral deposits on pretty much any surface, you need this stuff!  It is amazing and for a whole quart of it, it only costs $8.80!!  

For the bathtub, at full strength, I probably only used 1/4 of the bottle.  So it only cost me about $2 to have a clean bathtub.  Well worth it!!

Please visit my website and click on the "Shop Online" header on the left hand side. 

All of their cleaners are amazing.  I use the multi-purpose cleaner on everything else & I love it.  One quart is $11.30 and since it is a concentrate, it makes 16 22-oz bottles of cleaner!  

Lets compare Mox® to 409.

409 Cleaner: 32-oz = about $7.00 

Mox® makes 352 oz of cleaner for $11.30

Almost 10X as much cleaner for about $4.00 more.

Conklin is a top of the line company and has so many great products.  Please don't hesitate to contact me if you have any questions!

**If you have Pinterest, please pin this so everyone can see it!**

Finally can unlock the front door!!

Made it through the first week...only 3 more to go.  

So we closed escrow on our house last March.  Somehow, we never got keys to the front door.  Not sure if the previous owners didn't have any or they just didn't make it into our hands.  So, we have been using the back door for the past 13 months.  It's really not a problem if it's just the two of us.  But with me having Caylob almost every day and when people get here when we get here, one of us has to go around the back, walk through the house & unlock the front door.  

Not that people aren't welcome in our back yard, they are.  It's just the dog is overwhelming.  Especially since most of our friends & family have small children.

I've been meaning to call a locksmith for quite some time now & today was the day!!

I'm sure this guy would totally appreciate that I secretly took pictures of him. 

Took him almost an hour & a half, but we now can unlock the front door...from the outside!!  And a bonus, the key is the same as the back door!

Work day

My parents were kind enough to come back again this past weekend to help us get some more stuff done around here.  Chris & I decided that we either need to get rid of a bunch of sheep or get to working on the fencing around the soon-to-be pasture because these ladies are just plains expensive to feed with the cost of hay being so ridiculously high.

Fencing it is!

This past Sunday we (meaning the men) pulled out all the old railroad tie fence posts that were rotten and/or not inline.  Which meant all of them came out.  Chris & my dad sunk two corner posts and hopefully we will have more time this weekend to work on it again.  We've already bought the seed for the pasture, and it just needs to be gone over with the disc again and it should be about ready to plant.  Can't wait for it to be all lush and green out in front of the barn!!

While the boys were busy pulling fence posts, my mom & I had a massive burn barrel going on.  We got a huge pile of old wood burned up and the junk piles behind the barn are starting to diminish.  I have been slowing burning more and more each day & today is the first day since Sunday that I've had to use the lighter to get the fire started back up.

Me discing one evening last week

Lovely friend in the wood pile.  When I smashed her about a bajillion eggs came out, so I'm glad I got to her before those suckers hatched!

FREE railroad ties.
The previous owners left us with this wonderful pile.  We are going to use a few for fence posts but have no idea what we are going to do with the rest.

All the posts are gone along the front.  Can't wait to get the grass growing and the new fence up!

No survivors

Chris brought this home from Home Depot yesterday.  Just for me.  

My husband is so sweet :)

3 gallons of some pretty great weed killer.  Gone.  Took me about an hour to mix it and spray everything I could find that would be hard for Chris to get with the tank sprayer.  Flower beds, cracks in sidewalks and cement driveway, the two dirt driveways, the perimeter of the sheep pen.  Pretty much everything that was green that wasn't planted by me or the previous owners.

I hate weeds, but hate pulling them even more.  

Thanks, Honey!

Check, Check & Check

I love checking stuff off lists!  Especially when it's one this big!

I've got a few more checked off in the past couple of weeks

#63.  Convince Chris to get a massage from Tami

Tami and her husband are good friends of ours and she is also a massage therapist.  I've been getting massages from her for a couple years now (about once every 6 wks or so)  I've been trying to convince Chris to let her work on him, but it hasn't worked yet.  Two thursdays ago, she came over because she was my valentine's day gift from Chris.  Major husband points!!  After I got off the table, her and I convinced him to jump on.  Needless to say, he has already said a couple of times "It probably wouldn't hurt if Tami worked on my back again"  Ha ha.  Now he's hooked too. :)

#71.  Buy a stand up/chest freezer for all our butchered meat

Did this not too long after I made the list.  Just forgot it was on the list.

#80.  Remove the giant juniper pile from in front of the house

We've been waiting on this for months.  I think it was like...last August that a friend of ours ripped most of the juniper out of the ground.  Come to find out, there were several giant wasps nests in there.  So we couldn't pull it the rest of the way out till the wasps were gone.  They have been gone for a while now, just no time to pull it all out...until this past weekend.  Hooray!!

Just after we bought the house...this is only like 1/2 of the mass.  It was huge!

1st round of juniper removal

2nd round of juniper removal

Ta-daaaa!!!!  Now i just need to get working on getting on the remaining debris out of there, but it looks SOOO much better!

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Handy-man? Nope, Handy-woman!

Well, part of buying an older home with a lot of 'originals' is that some are easy to replace and some, not so much.  This was an easy one.

About a month before our wedding, our friends/Chris's former employer/our vet gave us an extra shower head (a new one) that they had from when they remodeled their bathroom.  It has been sitting in our cupboard for a while and I totally forgot about it until our trip to AZ last week.  AZ has some crazy water conservation laws, and the shower head that is in my sister's new home is...well...very low flow.  And with my incredibly thick, curly hair, it took a while to even get it wet.  This reminded me that we had a brand new shower head sitting in our bathroom cupboard that hadn't been installed yet.  I decided that that was going to be my project for Monday.

Old showerhead...

Typical shower head.  Flow and pressure was decent, but it was old and we have really hard water out here so it was all corroded. 

Now, I've never done any type of plumbing work by myself, so I was just hoping for the best.  

This is what I ended up with...

Then of course I had to take a shower that afternoon to try it out.  

Quite wonderful!!

DIY?? Who me???

Sitting here enjoying a peach margarita after a fun, successful day.

Started off with us taking a ewe lamb to the sales yard.  She just didn't make the cut & with feed prices so high, we can't settle for "I like parts of her".

I was talking to my dad yesterday and he asked what my plans were for Saturday.  I told him I didn't really have any plans and Chris was going hunting for most of the day.  He suggested that we do something together since my mom is in AZ with my sister and sweet baby Sawyer.  I suggested that he come down (a 2 hr drive) and help me with a project that I saw on Pinterest.  I told myself I would never join that site because I didn't need another excuse to sit in front of the computer.  I caved on Friday.  SO many good ideas!  He willingly agreed and he was going to be here sometime in the morning.

He got here about 10 this morning and we got to work.

These are the ideas that I saw on Pinterest, and knew we had to make something like this, this, or this.  If you don't have a Pinterest account, you may not be able to view the last 2.

We have so much extra wood behind our barn.  I had an idea of which wood I wanted to use, but my dad and I headed out there to take a look.  Amazingly enough we found what probably used to be an old barn door or something but it was pretty much already put together and we just had to cut it down to fit.  The color was nice, it had worn pretty evenly so there wasn't any bleached spots or really bad boards.  We hauled it over to shop and started working on it.

First, we had to remove some of the old nails so we could make it all the right size.

Then had to cut it down to the right size

Then nailed on the legs that were to be attached to our bed frame

(And for those of you who think I just stood around and watched, oh no.  This girl knows how to use a hammer.  When I was probably about 6 my parents bought me my first tool belt for Christmas.  Not one of those plastic play kinds either...a real one!  There are some fun pictures of a much, much younger me helping my dad add on a master bedroom to their house)

AND Taaaa Daaaaa...this is the final product.  I LOVE IT!!

My grandma was a very avid quilt maker.  She made quilts for everyone and I have at least 3 of hers that she made.  This one on our bed is the largest one I have from her and she made my sister and I one specifically for when we got married.  I love her quilts.  Reminds me of when we were growing up.

I love the rustic-ness of the headboard.  It fits well with our house and our room.

Thanks dad for coming down for the day and helping me with this project.  It was a great day!

Incoming Storm

There is a storm rolling into our part of CA.  Tonight we were on our way to town to get some stuff from Home Depot and the sun light was peaking through the clouds right before it got dark.  It was pretty neat looking.  I wish I had had my other camera with me instead of just my phone. 

There is big irrigation pond on the way to town and the sun was reflecting on the water.  We stopped and just looked at it.  So quiet and peaceful.

I'm pretty excited about tomorrow.  My dad and I are building something that I've wanted for a long time.  Since my mom is in AZ with my sister and my hubby will be hunting tomorrow, my dad and I are are going to get 'crafty'.  Except it's going to be with a saw, a hammer, barn wood and a bunch of nails.  I'll take pictures along the way so you can see what we are doing.  It's gonna be great!

Linking up to Farmchick's Farm Photo Friday, you should too!

Catch Up

Ok, so it's been over a week since I last posted.  I can hear my mother yelling at me :)  It's not like I'm so super busy during the day that I can't take a few minutes to post what we're up to.  The weeks just get away from me and I forget.  BUT, no more excuses.  I've told myself that I'm going to try and blog at least 3 times next week.  We'll see how that goes.

This is going to be a picture post, because that will pretty much show what we've been up to.

First off, I've been busy in the front yard.  This is a flower bed that is right in front of our house on both sides of the entryway.  They had been neglected for a while, so last week I got out there and pulled all the weeds and planted flowers, and then put mulch over the top to help keep the weeds down.  The mums were $1.49 at Home Depot.  Can't beat that!!

Last Saturday, we didn't have much on the calendar, so we went out to the barn to see what we could clean up.  Well, we found a metal barrel and a bunch of wood that needed to be burned so we could make room for the sheep.  There is still A LOT more to go, but we got a good start.  The hubby was having fun!

This past Monday, I was really busy chopping weeds.  See, I think our property is the only place where these lovely pole weeds grow.  We have SO many of them.  No matter how hard you try to keep up with them, they grow back 10 times as fast.  But out front by our mail box was starting to look a little overgrown, so I got the shovel and started chopping.  It took me a while, but it looks a lot better!

Before

After-so much better!

On Tuesday, Chris got off work a little early because he hurt his back over the weekend and had to make his first trip to the chiropractor.  I've been begging him to do this for years, but a muscle spasm finally pushed him to go.  Anyways, we got to take this sweet boy to a pick-your-own pumpkin, pumpkin patch and he had the greatest time!  As he was carrying his pumpkin, he was saying "I got my punkin patch"  So cute.

Tomorrow, I will have a surprise to show you.  It's something I have been waiting a long time for and it has made this week draaaag on like no other.  It's going to change our lives...just a little.  

And for those of you that know what it is...don't say it :)

Linking up today to Farmchick's Farm Photo Friday. You should too!

Nasty shag carpet? I think NOT!

Things are a little slow around here this week.  They are picking the other 2 properties and the grapes here at our house are just doin their thing, and laying in the sun.  Doesn't make for an exciting post, that's for sure.

So, the next improvement on the house was the flooring.  Ooohhhh...the flooring.  Let me tell you, it was nasty!  All the original flooring.  Green shag carpet and all.  The previous owners had renters in the house for 18 years, and their animals too.  Let me just tell you that years of dog smell and cat pee in the carpet doesn't make for a nice aroma.

In the beginning, Chris was convinced we were going to be able to wait on replacing the flooring until we couldn't handle it any more.  Well, I was already to that point.  No way I was going to live in a house that smelled like it did.  But, to help prove to him that it was not salvageable, we went through AT LEAST a dozen canisters on the vacuum cleaner, full of pet hair.  It was quite lovely, if you could imagine.  Now me, being very much anti-pet hair, that was proof in itself that there was no way we were going to get it all out of the carpet.  It just grosses me out for some reason.  And I think we went through at least 6 canisters of carpet deodorizer.  You know that powder you can sprinkle on the carpet and let it sit for a couple hours...or a couple days and then vacuum it up?  Yeah that didn't help either.  So Chris finally caved and we went carpet shopping :)

Would you want to keep this?  Don't get me wrong, it wasn't the shag carpet itself.  I grew up on brown and orange shag in the living room and yellow shag in the bedrooms...but it was clean.  THAT is the key.  Clean.  Not nasty and filled with pet hair and pee stains.

Brown shag in master

It doesn't look green, but this is green shag in the living room

Living room & dining room

Kitchen with the linoleum.  

Ripping out the carpet :)

Kitchen & Dining room after the carpet was ripped out


And now the glorious after photos

 The hallway that previously had green shag

 Dining room and kitchen-no more green shag or linoleum

 New carpet in the living room

 New carpet in the master bedroom

oh look, he does do floors :)

The two spare bedrooms got new carpet as well.  The only flooring that didn't get replaced was both bathrooms and the laundry room.  The linoleum isn't in too bad of shape, so those rooms can wait.

One of many transformations

We will start harvest on Monday, now.  Since Central California has a storm coming in, with a 40-60% chance of rain, Chris didn't want to risk the grapes getting rained on after being picked, so we're gonna wait till the storm passes.  A good rain while the grapes are drying on the ground has the potential to completely ruin that season's crop, and that makes for a VERY upset farmer.  


So, while there isn't too much going on around the farm this weekend, I'm going tell you a little about our house.  Papers were finalized in March of this year on a place with a ranch style house that was built in the early 60's, on 10 acres.  About 8 of it is planted in vines and the other two consist of the open land around our house and the 'pasture' area around the barn.  


When we bought the home, pretty sure EVERYTHING in it was 'the original'.  The carpet, the linoleum, paint, windows and i'm pretty sure the kitchen cupboards hadn't been cleaned since the house was built.  


So when blogging times are slow, I will show you little pieces of our home that we have changed over the past 6 months.  First, Chris & I, with the help of my parents, painted the ENTIRE interior of the house.  Now that was quite the chore.  The walls were white, but didn't look white because of the years of wear and tear.  So they are all now 'Seaside Sand'.  I wanted some color in our bedroom, so this is what we did:

The inside of our closet

The north wall of our bedroom (don't worry, we completely finished it)

I know, paint isn't all that exciting, but just know for the next post that the ugly nasty brown, shag carpet that you see didn't last :)