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This past weekend has been more than eventful! To start things off, Saturday my friend Ashley and I went to town painting my basement with waterproofing paint. I painted for about 9 hours straight. It was hands down the best decision I have made for this house. With major rainfall, our basement would be slightly damp for a few days and leave behind stained concrete. I would regularly spray the cinderblocks with bleach, but this was only a temporary fix until the next major rainfall. My waterproofing paint of choice is by Behr. I stuck with one of my usual Behr colors, natural gray. I knew I didn't want stark white, so natural gray was a nice alternative and kept my house looking consistent throughout. I managed to get about 3/4 of my 700 square foot basement painted with a 5 gallon bucket of paint. I purchased a one gallon bucket to finish up with, which I will likely do on Friday evening.

Here you can see the area I was unable to finish.

Here is a few before and afters of a few corners of the basement. You can see the mildew build up.

I really am impressed with the coverage of this paint. My cinderblocks were obviously bare, making them extremely absorbent. I applied the paint with both a roller and large paint brush to get into the mortar lines. You can see cracks in the most left wall that I kept the paint away from until I patch them. I wanted the caulking to have bare cinderblock to adhere to. I will update later about how patching the cracks turned out.

In the meantime, our fabulous 60's plumbing decided to take a crap in our kitchen. So, we called out a plumber who quoted us between $200-$600 to figure out the issue! Thank goodness I trusted my instinct and didn't have him fix anything. I tore apart the bottom of the sink to confirm my theory that the sink wasn't the problem. I was correct. So... I called up my father-in-law and he agreed to come help me find the problem Monday.

Then came Sunday. Brent and I went to a preseason Steelers-Packers game in Pittsburgh (I'm a steelers fan and unfortunately he is a Packers fan...hehe). On the way, we stopped in Canonsburg, PA at my favorite candy store, Sarris. My grandparents used to take me there all the time as a kid. Unfortunately, silly me bought chocolates that would have to sit in a car on an 87 degree day for hours. They didn't survive :(

Then it was off to the game! Such a long, hot day, but the Steelers won!

After the game we went to Hines Ward's (former Steelers player) new restaurant, Table 86. Poor service (it's only been in operation a week or so), but AMAZING food.

And then there was today, Monday.

My father-in-law came up and we spent about 6 hours replumbing our basement drain system to the kitchen. We relocated our washer and dryer to a better (for me) location. This will allow me to designate a specific area to laundry needs, instead of them sitting in the middle of a basement wall in front of gobs of piping/electrical/window. If you look at the first photo in this post, I moved them about 6 feet to the left in front of the painted section of the wall.

My plan is to hang curtains to divide up that space and install a corrugated metal ceiling. I have shelving I am going to install behind the washer and dryer. Some day I will get around to staining the floors, but until then I threw a few excess pieces of carpet down there.

Here is my inspiration laundry area.

Stay tuned for updates as this project progresses!

Hey everyone! In my usual fashion, I have about 20 projects going at one time, but today has been a super productive day for me! I finally wrapped up painting my basement with waterproofing paint and I'm just waiting on a longer dryer cord to arrive and I'll share the final product! In the meantime, I've done so much organizing, cleaning and rearranging. Today I swapped my first floor bathroom vanity mirror with one I had been using at my makeup vanity. It is much more proportional to the vanity size.

I washed the drop cloths in hot water with about four cups of bleach twice, leaving them to soak each time for about two hours. I then dried them on a permanent press cycle in order to preshrink them. I anticipate these covers will get stains and when this happens I will simply wash them with bleach.

As I have mentioned in previous posts, we acquired a couch and love seat from moving neighbors. Being young and on a tight budget means being resourceful. We sucked it up and spent $110 having them professionally cleaned (twice, because I was not satisfied with the first job and insisted they come back). After having them cleaned, we moved them into our awkwardly laid out family room. And so began my slipcovering adventure...

I read a few tutorials and had a mental picture of how this should go, but execution was a whole other story. I was not going to do any fancy ruffling, just simple lines. I did not do any piping, however this would dress up the slipcovers a bit.

My next dilemma was trying to decide if I wanted to do individual seat cushions or keep it simple and slipcover right over top. Because of the style of couch, covering the back cushions individually was not an option due to them being attached, however this would have been my preference. I would like the final product to look more reupholstered than slipcovered, but without entirely unupholstering the couch, this isn't possible.

So far I have completed the sofa and used one whole drop cloth for the main body of the couch and about half of the other drop cloth for the sides and cushion cover. I decided to do a single cushion cover verses individual.

I purchased two 8 oz drop cloths in 9' x 12' from Home Depot for about $19 a piece. 10 oz drop cloths would be really hard to sew on a standard sewing machine. I purchased heavy duty nylon upholstery thread and new upholstery machine needles.