Hello, There!

Why, hello there! I’m Shauna. Wow, that sounds so hokey. But how else am I going to introduce myself, and my little blog? I am a software engineer by day, and a crazily planning do it yourself-er by night. My husband, Ryan, and I have a house in far out little suburb of Cincinnati. Our house was a spec house built in 2007, but as most homes in Ohio suburbs do, it has builder grade everything – all of which I want to remove. And this is my documentation of the process!

I only started fixing it up, piece by piece, a few years ago, in 2011, but I am gaining momentum and have become more obsessed with making our house beautiful. I keep building confidence with the projects I try, as nothing has been a disaster, and everything has turned out very well. I think that my software engineering background has made me realize that I am capable of doing a lot more home projects than I had ever imagined – as long as I do the research, and consider, and if something goes wrong / not as expected, step back and work towards a fix.

Some projects I have tackled in the last 3 years, which I will be detailing here ASAP:

Getting pendant lighting put into our kitchen
Replacing our old brass light over our dining room table with a beautiful silver chandelier
Fixing up our downstairs bathroom – huge towel bar removal, repositioning of the toilet paper holder, new toilet paper holder, new mirror, new towel ring, and new paint
New light fixture over our kitchen sink
Painting the entire downstairs (with my mom and a good friend – and it still took months of weekends)
New dining room table and chairs (replacing our old hand-me-downs)
Upstairs guest ‘my’ bathroom – removed the huge towel bar, put in Container Store hooks for storage help, new toilet paper holder, and a new towel ring – such a work in progress
Great room – new roman shades
Entire downstairs – painted all doors black (from white), and replaced ALL hardware (door handles, deadbolts, hinges) with silver hardware (was all brass – yuck) – this is the project that began the mayhem of house addiction
‘Painted’ the kitchen cabinets, and transformed them from the nasty ‘builder oak’ to a beautiful dark, dark brown using Rustoleum’s Cabinet Transformations – more on that later – biggest difference a project has made in the house. Even though this is technically ‘paint’ the wood grain shows through beautifully, and everyone agrees – they look like they were restained, which is exactly what I was going for!
Put up a shell tile (white iridescent) backsplash in the kitchen – work in progress, this baby is taking forever, but I’m almost done, and the change is amazing
Removed our completely useless upper cabinet and range hood under that cabinet in the kitchen, and replaced it with a beautiful stainless steel range hood – wow; amazing; that space up there was useless for a shortie like me anyway, and I believe that this makes our kitchen look so much bigger!
Got an amazing ‘slide in’ stainless range / stove on Craigslist for $400. Amazing deal, and we’re loving it! We’re still in a race to replace our other appliances with stainless steel (currently we still have a black dishwasher and a black refrigerator)
Replaced our outside builder grade lights with beautiful, modern looking, huge lights
Bought and spray painted silver a Joss & Main starburst mirror, and put it over our mantle. Finally something beautiful over the mantle!
Installed light timers to automatically turn on and off our outdoor lights – we always forgot to turn them off, they would burn out, and they were just a pain. This is such a great fix!

Here are some pics of items accomplished that I will be blogging about (already completed – the easy part)…

I call this my ‘doors to black project’ – before and afters of the white doors with brass hardware, and the After black doors with silver hardware!

And this shows the progress I’ve made on our kitchen so far! The backsplash is almost done! I am going to have the backsplash reaching to the ceiling behind the range hood.