Dogwood Cottage Updates and Approaching the Finish!

What a crazy summer it’s been for us with more announcements and adventures and projects and progress than I have been able to write about here.  Every week I feel like I have so much to tell you, just not enough time to do it!  It’s been over a month since my last update on the Dogwood Cottage and one of the reasons is because we’ve been working on it so much! (Among a hundred other things!)

I barely know where to start with all the updates, but we’ll start with the exterior details!  After several gallons of fresh paint, we finally got this house looking just right and our painter did a great job helping us get the look we wanted!  We chose Sherwin Williams Alabaster for the exterior and it was the perfect creamy white we had envisioned.  On the shutters, we chose SW French Moire and it was also the perfect choice to complete our plan and give it the cottage feel we’re loving.  We have a new front door we’ll be adding soon, which will add yet another tone to the palette, but I’m already swooning at how it is coming together so far!

Even the blooms are showing off and loving their new backdrop!

But I have to say the icing on the cupcake was when we finally got to see one of the main things I’ve been waiting for… the newly striped awnings.

I knew when I first saw these original awnings that we would want to keep them as just the right piece of vintage “jewelry” for this old house.  They belong here after all this time.  But they did need a little updating so Abby and Lily and I gave them the makeover they’d been begging for and now I basically gasp at the sight of them every time.

There’s even one in the courtyard!

Black and white has always been one of my favorite classic combos, and we chose it again for the bathroom floors!  Abby found this one at Lowes online and it turned out to be gorgeous!

Believe it or not, after years of all kinds of DIY, this was my first attempt at tiling and I was determined to do it.  Abby and I did most of it, but we had amazing help from Dave and Beau making several of the cuts and keeping us supported!

I also wanted to mention this leveling kit we used that my brother and our friend recommended and it is awesome for leveling the tiles while keeping them perfectly spaced.  You can find it via my affiliate link HERE.

It took us a couple days to lay it and then a few days later we grouted it with a charcoal gray grout!

It was a personal accomplishment for which I’m proud of us and it gave us the experience and confidence to do the hall bath next!  We used a black hex tile, also from Lowes, for this one, and it went even quicker.  Abby made the cuts herself with the wet saw for this one and Beau helped us by keeping us constantly supplied with water for grouting!

We went with white grout on this one and it’s just –eeek!  That’s all!

In other floor news, we hired our helper to refinish the wood floors for us and it was a huge job to get them all sanded..

Then we had to choose a stain color.  We ended up going with Minwax Golden Oak and it does look great!

We ran into a few issues with dark stains on these wood floors due to 70 years of living! And even after sanding and staining, the floor of the nursery still showed dark spots near the wall which we weren’t happy with.

Since carpet is not an option and Abby and Beau did not want to go with a dark stain, we went another route!  Painting!

It was another process I had never tried, but now I have and I love it!  After seeing a couple tutorials on this, I went for it with first a coat of Zinsser Bullseye Primer…

I cut in and rolled on one coat of primer, waited overnight, then did a coat of Valspar Porch, Floor and Patio Paint.

And then after letting that dry overnight, I did one more coat of the paint the next day!

Trim will go in this week and then it is really going to start coming together.

I love this look for the nursery which we will be finishing shortly after they move in and after Abby finalizes her design plan for baby girl!

One more big project to update you on is the kitchen floor!  It is definitely one of our favorite features of the house, but then we say that about all of them it seems.  Abby and I both fell in love with the idea of doing penny tile to keep with the vintage cottage feel and we knew we wanted a simple pattern as well.  I really wanted to do this whole floor ourselves, but being inexperienced with laying tile, we decided to hire our helper to do it because he would be faster and has the experience we don’t have.  So we planned it out with him, dry-fitting the pieces and deciding on the pattern.

And then our guy got the tile laid and Abby and I jumped in to grout it last weekend so keep things rolling while he worked on other things.  So, we did get to have a hand in it after all and I can’t even describe how much we love the finished look.

Stay tuned to hear more about the dining room soon!

There’s one last floor to tile and that’s the laundry room, hopefully getting done this weekend!  Kitchen appliances and countertops going in soon as well as bathroom vanities and all the lighting too.

Are you loving all the progress?? In some ways this has felt like it has taken us a while to transform, but when I look back at where we started, I can’t believe how much we’ve done in a relatively short time.  It will be move-in ready in just a few short weeks now.  We’ve loved having so many of you on this journey with us!  You can keep up to date more in real time and see more of these projects on my Instagram!