Lauren Clark Photography » Blog

The farm room is near completion! All I have to do to finish this room is put up my family tree wall, hang the mirror, buy the bed and hang a light! Everything else is on the walls!! I love the way it came out, now you need to come and visit me so we can put this room to good use.

Isn’t this the cutest little side table ever? I bought it at a second hand store downtown Stillwater and it was NASTY when I picked it up, but thanks to reading Design Sponge Online every day I could see the potential. It was pretty wounded with black and red paint chipping off of it and originally had 2 drawers, but I took one out for open storage. I sanded, primed, spray painted and then once it was dry I roughed up the edges and replaced the ugly knobs with some beautiful ones from Anthropologie! This project cost me a whopping $41 and breaks down like this…spray paint: $6, side table: $15, Knobs: $20 .

Here are a few places where I bought some of this cute stuff:

Word FARM and Record Player: Urban Outfitters, $10/letter that I spray painted yellow and then distressed

Cute cow, lamp, pillows, drapes, bookshelf: Pier 1

Gawdy frame: Hobby Lobby during the half off sale

Green rug: big SPLURGE at Eurway in Frisco

Cute knobs on the red side table: Anthropologie $10/each

AND!!! An almost finished amazing bathroom with the most perfect limey, olivey green in the whole world.

We painted the “farm room” a few days ago this pretty color…

My little sister, Magen, is coming into town tonight and I decided to decorate the room for her so she wouldn’t feel like she was camping in our house. I am still waiting on my BED from IKEA and Josh will need to refinish the floors in this room and then WAHLAH! It will be another room complete.

I bought this 1940’s Royal typewriter off of Craigslist in Lubbock for $50 and with a few extra typewriter ribbon’s from Ebay I have been writing a letter a day on my new letterhead (see that below) and love it! There is just something about hearing a loud clunk each time you type something and I can’t get enough of it!

I really like this pouf that I bought from Pier 1 here in Stillwater the other day, it’s quirky, impractical and RED!

The bathroom is coming along nicely, Josh spray textured the walls today and will be starting the tile tomorrow.

My new letterhead, envelopes and business cards that Brent Holloman designed for me with my rooster logo from Into The Darkroom. My new blog is in production and will be done sometime soon!

Josh and his dad are hard at work on the only full bathroom we have in our small house on Doty St. They ripped it to pieces last week and after the plumber left around lunch today (to move all of the plumbing over a good 2 feet) they are re-sheet rocking it! Josh says that he should have it finished by the end of the week by the time my little sister, Magen, comes to visit us.

Here are more pictures of the house this week as requested by a lot of you! It will look much worse before it starts looking any better…

Ick, the kitchen will be the last remodel of the house since it will take the longest.

The Kitchen plan: 1) paint the cabinets white 2) New beautiful hardware from IKEA 3) Butcher block counter tops 4) HUGE farmhouse sink 5)gorgeous mosaic tile backsplash 6) new oven 7) new floor tile

The Living Room: After I saw how disgusting it looked in the last post we decided to tidy up the place for the next picture. This room hasn’t had much work other than take off the trim and rip out the green carpet.

The Farm room looks much nicer today than it did when we bought the house. Josh put a fresh coat of primer, new baseboards and soon to be refinished floors!

We are painting this a light greenish blue tomorrow.

Drum roll please! Here is the gutted bathroom, it can only look better from this day forward.

Here is the only improved picture I have for you today, my cutesy backyard.

Before…

And After! Josh has made this room absolutely BEAUTIFUL! He sanded the floors, retextured the walls, primed and painted 2 coats to seal off the old smells, put in new trim and a new light! The color in this room is just lovely and I have never painted a pink color before in any of our houses, but now I am a believer in pink. This is Valspar’s Rose Madder found at Lowe’s.

Here are the chaos rooms:

Living room, ick. At least I have one room that is finished and has no clutter.

The Master has been painted and we setup our furniture last night, but it still needs some sprucing up before I reveal the finished room!

We are working hard to get this house done in a month, and I will be back to work in the internet world off and on until the end of August when I come back full steam!

Remember when Josh was up in Stillwater working on the land once a month for 2 weeks at a time? Well on one of those trips I sent him house hunting and he casually looked into buying a house instead of renting in Stillwater, and when he was on his way home he told me of a few that he thought would work. They were all too pricey  for how small they were and then he mentioned one more that had 1350 sq. ft for a bargain basement price and I just knew in my heart that this house on Doty. St. was our new house. It was like marrying a person on a blind date, once I saw the information on it I could have put the money down without every seeing it in person, and that is just what we did, we made an offer on it the next day. I still hadn’t seen the house on Doty St. until this last week when we rolled into Stillwater with our 30 ft. long U-Haul rig to live there and let me tell you my first impression…

Nausea. Pure, nausea.

You see, since we have been married the only houses that we have lived in were brand new, and I had never experienced a junked out smelly house before. The smell was the worst. I think I could have handled the holes in the wall, the dark green carpet and the linoleum during the first impression, but the musty, hot, cat poo, smoke and mold smell just would not go out of my nostrils no matter how long I stayed in the house!

So here is my new house. My lovely husband, Josh, is living in this little house remodeling it for me until I move up there in 3 weeks and it will look completely different by August! His mom and dad have been helping him so much and I really, really appreciate them. Thank Ya’ll!

Enter my “Before” house tour…

I do love this large window in the living room. Josh has already ripped out the green carpet and refinished the beautiful wood floors underneath in the last week.

The doors will be replaced along with new 3 inch thick white trim around the wood floors.

The kitchen was quite a gunky surprise since it looked tidy in the realtor photos. It was after I saw this room that we upped the reno budget a few thousand dollars. Josh will paint the cabinets, put in new tile, new backsplash, new hardware and new sink! Needless to say… a new oven has been ordered also.

What the? I’m not so sure what these changing mats were doing on the dining room walls. In this room: new paint, new tile, new trim, new light fixture.

Can you see the sweat dripping down my face? This is INDOORS my dear friends, Stillwater’s humidity might just get the best of me.

This is the “farm”  room, and it will be my favorite room of the house because I get to decorate it however I want (plaster white deer head and all). New trim, new paint, new windows and new light will grace this lovely room.

This is the master bedroom and the last room of the house to have the lovely green carpet, which has already been disposed of along with the cat poo that was all over it (yuck).

This will be my new office, and Josh is going to paint it a bright coral for me.

The bathroom will be completely gutted and I finally get to have beautiful mosaic tile in our house! We have already found the perfect tile on tileclearance.com

The backyard is so green and has a ton of trees and a small hill, I will love growing my garden back here.

The dogs just love it!

Here is the latest photo of our land! Josh had a white rock road built from the country road to our future home site.

This is our huge burn pile right where our house will be!