Sometimes I forget that things don’t have to be perfect before I can show them to you.  I have to remember that the beauty is in the process itself.

Before I started blogging myself, I had literally only ever read about 2 blogs in my life.  But now it’s a community that I feel at home in. That being said, it’s hard to not feel like everything needs to be styled just right before I can show you the reveal.  There’s so much eye candy out there, and the pressure to live up to it is a little ridiculous at times.

One of my favorite blogs, House*Tweaking, has a tagline that reads “…because home doesn’t happen over night.”  I love that! Just because I don’t have a final “before and after” doesn’t mean we haven’t made huge strides and I can’t show them to you.

So with that in mind, here are various updates on where we are with the house.

The bathroom off the downstairs den is finished! We painted the room Delta Sandbar (by Valspar) and had some custom built ins added around our pedestal sink.  We did all the painting in this room ourselves, including the trim and cabinets.

We weren’t crazy about the sconces we had picked out from our local lighting store, so we caved and bought these from Lowe’s.  I think they look a million times better!

We put a new lid on the toilet and after a good cleaning it looks brand new.  Finally, I added this Threshold shower curtain from Target to pull in the awesome 70’s green tub.

We finished painting the den in Churchill Hotel Maple (by Valspar) and moved in some furniture and a rug.  We painted this room ourselves as well.  The lighting is kind of weird in here because it doesn’t get a ton of natural light…I promise it looks good in real life!

This room still needs lots of decorating, but it’s getting there.  I definitely want to add many more pops of color.  It’s very bland right now!

We moved the vintage chest I found into the butler’s pantry to store serving trays and platters, as well as some bar essentials.

And we moved our old handy-me-down Ikea bookshelf into the space where the refrigerator used to reside.  Because we don’t have a ton of cabinet space, we plan to add baskets to this unit and use it as our pantry for the time being.  We also installed a wine glass rack above the shelves for extra storage.

The biggest changes have been taking place in our master bathroom.  You can see the various stages here, and a peek at our new tile floor here.  The few people that have seen the picture of the tile floors and then seen them in person all have the same comment: the tiles are so much bigger than they look in the picture! The tiles are actually 12″ by 24″, so they are pretty substantial.

We had our vanity custom made, which actually ended up being cheaper than finding something pre-made to fit the 9-foot wall.  Given that this was our inspiration for the vanity, we were extremely pleased with the way it turned out!  Now it just needs paint and hardware!

I included the picture of my handy husband so you can see how high the counters are.  Since we were already going custom, this was a must for us.  I’m 5’9″ and Charles is 6′, so the extra height will serve us well.

We ordered our vanity lights from Lighting Direct online, but weren’t crazy about the way they were installed.

So the hubs switched them around and now we like them much better!  (Plus they won’t collect nearly as much dust.)

And the tile shower is really taking shape. (All of our tile came from Lowe’s.) If you recall the options that we had for the layout of the master bathroom, we decided to go with the smaller shower to make the room flow the best.

The grout is going in today, then we will just need to add hardware and glass.  Depending on our budget, we may wait on the glass and do a right angle shower curtain for now.  Possibly something similar to this.

And last but not least, we got rid of this awful and tiny front porch light.

And got this one instead.

So there’s a few updates. Any questions about sources, just ask!  The house is definitely taking shape and finally beginning to look like a home.  I promise to share more updates with you soon! :)