Glidden are providing us with the supplies for this project in order for us to share this makeover experience with you. For more on Glidden Paint and where to buy, click here to view the full line of paints.

Now that we have wrapped up our extensive living room makeover, it is time for the final room in our Glidden makeover series: The kitchen! Once this is complete, every room in the house will have been officially made over and completed. (The bathroom and master bedroom weren’t included in this series as they had both been painted fairly recently and weren’t in need of a re-do.) May 2013 is going to be a significant month for me, as it will mark the 10th anniversary of my mom’s passing. By mid-May of 2003, I had become an overnight homeowner, inheriting this house after the very sudden and unexpected death of my mom. I began the strange and slow process of dealing with everything mom had left behind and beginning all of these much-needed renovations. It’s so bizarre to me that it’s already been ten years that my mom has been gone and ten years that I’ve been DIY-ing this home. It’s interesting timing how we’ll be finally finishing all of the major renovations of the home right around the 10th anniversary of all this. It will make me feel good to really feel like I am starting the next chapter of my life and putting some of this behind me. 2013 is all about fresh starts for me!

As eager as I am to complete this renovation, I know it will be a big job – we left the living room and kitchen until last, as we knew they would be two of the most disruptive rooms to tear apart. So I wanted to ask if anyone here who has done a kitchen remodel has advice for staying sane during it? I know cooking will be difficult, and since we’re still transitioning off Nutrisystem, I’ve been focusing on easy, ready-made meals – we’ve been doing granola bars for breakfasts and lunches with Nutrisystem dinners at night. For extras, we’re sticking with things like hardboiled eggs, bananas, and oatmeal; I figure I can embark on elaborate culinary adventures after I have a space to cook in again.

Although I’m sure I’ll be tearing my hair out when my pots and pans are stored in the living room, I cannot wait to get the kitchen revamped. It’s always been one of the ugliest rooms in the house, from the chipped, broken cupboards to the lack of dishwasher. Even the curtain is torn! Time to discard the last of the “Old” and usher in the new.

Watch this space to see our final makeover unveiled – and let me know how you handled your own kitchen renovations, if you’ve done one!

As I mentioned in my last post featuring our Glidden living room makeover, this room was time-intensive due to the elaborate crown molding and batten trim in the room. I wanted to put together a separate post detailing how we achieved this effect – we received complimentary paint for the project, but this post wasn’t required by the client; I simply thought this tutorial could be useful to anyone else faced with how to paint crown molding in their own home. I did include my Amazon Associates link for the special tape we used below, so if anyone decided to purchase it for their own project, I will put the 10 cents earned towards my next renovation project.

This house was built in 1929, and the living room features some of the most elaborate molding I’ve seen. Previously, the walls and crown molding were all painted one solid color:

For years, I’ve been thinking how impressive the room would look if I painted the trim a contrasting color from the walls. Inspired by the ceiling, I thought about various “Checkerboard” style paint jobs, eventually deciding that I’d like to do the walls deep red and the crown molding black. This was a bold choice, and one that would either look fantastic if done right or terrible if done wrong.

After a month of working on the room, we have completed the project, and while my color scheme would not be to everyone’s taste, it turned out exactly how I envisioned it and I am thrilled. Jai worked very hard not only to meticulously paint the trim, but also in coming up with a creative solution to the problem of taping off the crown molding to paint.

We knew this project would be fraught with challenges. For starters, none of the lines in this old house are truly straight; not to mention, the crown molding and trim has many, many curved angles and covers the entire ceiling and all four walls. Figuring out how to adequately tape the rounded portions of the crown molding was one of the biggest issues we encountered.

As with most DIY solutions to renovating an old home, the solution was rather unorthodox. After a fruitless search for any type of circular stickers or tape that would cover the wall at each point where the crown molding curved and joined together, we decided the only way to cover this area would be to cut our own circular sections of tape to fit. Jai found a small paint jar that was the exact right size to fit this area, and used this as the template with which to cut the tape.

The first step was to lay a portion of Scotch-Blue Painter’s Tape Advanced Delicate Surface on the cutting board. Jai did this so that when he put down portions of tape to trace and cut, they wouldn’t lose their stickiness as quickly.

Using the paint pot as his guide, Jai carefully traced around the bottom to create a circle in the size we needed.

Once the circle was traced, he carefully cut out the circle with scissors. This isn’t a project for the paint of heart (Typo caused an unintentional pun so it stays!) – he cut over 40 of these circles in order to have enough to cover the room!

To tape off the room, we first laid down a strip of regular painter’s masking tape in strips. Then Jai would cut his carefully crafted circles in half, placing them directly over the sections where the regular tape met up. We had to be very careful with how we placed the tape in order to ensure that it right up against the crown molding. It’s recommended to use the Scotch-Blue tape for all the sections over the regular masking tape, but we had already spent $40 on all the tape we had bought and didn’t want to go out and buy even more. We tried using the regular masking tape to make the circular portions as well, but it just didn’t stick well enough – the Scotch-Blue is a lot weightier.

The actual painting process took time, not only because Jai was being careful with the paint to get the best possible result, but also because we were working overtime at our jobs during all of this and had to work on it during stolen moments in between everything else. We were concerned during the taping process, because the masking tape kept peeling off; and because it had to stay on the walls for about a week and a half, we worried that as soon as we peeled it off, all the red paint on the walls would come off as well. Fortunately, that did not happen!

I give all credit for this project to Jai’s steady hand and attention to detail. The project was as time-consuming as we expected, but well worth it. If you have a complicated paint job coming up, I hope that sharing how we dealt with our particular crown molding and batten trim issue will give you some inspiration!

Glidden are providing us with the supplies for this project in order for us to share this makeover experience with you. For more on Glidden Paint and where to buy, click here to view the full line of paints.

As we mentioned at the end of last month, we’ve been working on our living room makeover. We knew that this room was going to be complicated, and from start to finish it took a little over one month. This was part due to the bold color choices and ambitious choice of painting the extensive crown molding and batten trim a contrasting color from the walls; not to mention, we’ve been working overtime and dealing with things like taxes in between. It was tough having my couch stored in the middle of the kitchen and having no entertainment center or seats all month; however, the results were worth the inconvenience.

For the walls, we chose Red Delicious and for the trim we chose Onyx Black. It’s a very bold, Gothic color scheme, which is exactly what I was going for! I wanted to paint the room’s elaborate crown molding a contrasting color, which I knew would be a big job and a bit of a risk. We put a lot of time into very carefully taping off the trim so that the paint would look as straight and even as possible, and I give all credit to Jai for doing an amazing job! I wrote a separate tutorial explaining how we did this, so if you’re curious, click here to read it.

One of the reasons this project took a while is because the red paint required a lot of coats to cover completely – about 6. We started with 2 gallons of the Red Delicious, and we ended up buying another gallon on our own while Glidden sent us an additional three gallons simultaneously, so we went from not enough paint to a bit of a surplus. A friend that was helping us paint had also painted one of her rooms red using a different brand of dark red paint and had the same problem, so I think it’s just the nature of deep red paint. If you’re planning to do a room this color, be prepared for more coats than with most other colors.

So, what do you think of my goth living room?

As a London-born British expat living in the US, I’m a long way from home – but there are constant reminders of the my nationality. Some are subtle, yet important cultural differences (Lack of tea) and some are larger (Like filling in the extensive paperwork to renew my greencard!). But as a blogger, one of the biggest differences that I’ve noticed is the lack of resources for bloggers outside of the US.

America is the central hub for PR and advertising, so it stands to reason that much of blogging culture would focus on brand outreach for US-based outlets; but time and again I have been struck by the lack of opportunities available to bloggers outside of North America. It’s not just about PR opportunities being limited stateside – there’s are fewer tools and communities geared towards UK users. So much of the success I have achieved so far has been through the networking and resources I’ve accessed in blogging forums and groups, leading me to brand opportunities, providing me with unique means of social media promotion, and interesting discussion and tips on everything from SEO to plugins. Accessing these resources is a lot harder for UK residents, who are often disqualified due to location and are at a disadvantage with many of the social aspects of networking in forums due to the timezone difference.

Inspired by this, I began working on number of projects last year which I am very excited to unveil to you today: International Blogging, Bloggers Britain, Bloggers London, and British Giveaways.

The International Blogging Network aims to solve the issues facing non-US blogs by providing an inclusive, extensive resource for bloggers and brands to network on a global basis. The initial launch will include sub-sites for 6 countries, and I will be taking suggestions for future sites.

Bloggers Britain, the first site to launch in this network, provides a directory of UK bloggers searchable by brands and readers in addition to a forum which provides PR opportunities specifically for British bloggers, including product reviews, sponsored posts, brand events, and more. These forums will also offer the critical networking support that has been so crucial to me, including areas where bloggers can exchange ideas, ask questions, support one another’s blog posts and gain social media followers. Bloggers London is an offshoot to this network that will focus on brand events and outreach that are local to Londoners. Finally, UK bloggers will be able to further promote themselves via British Giveaways, a companion site to Contest Corner. By offering a giveaway database exclusively for competitions open to the UK, British-based bloggers will have an additional promotional tool at their disposal to gain exposure for the giveaways which they host; plus, Brit Contest Corner readers will now have a resource specifically for them, eliminating lengthy searches through giveaways that they are ineligible for!

For brands, Bloggers Britain will mean an easy way to get their product in front of influential UK blogs. PR representatives can submit their requests for distribution to the network, bridging the gap between brands and worldwide audience. In addition, British companies who wish to break though the American market can submit their requests for distribution to my US blogger counterparts. Because I have colleagues, connections, and business knowledge in both countries, I’m in a unique position to connect PR representatives, brands, and social media influencers in both Britain and the United States.

I’ve been strategizing and gathering information for my international blogger outreach since late last year; when I mentioned this project to brands I was working with on Holiday Gift Guide features, I got a lot of eager feedback and assembled a waiting list of clients looking to get their products into international hands. There are countless US companies that want to increase their visibility overseas and don’t know where to start, so I’m thrilled to be able to launch a resource for them.

This is just the beginning of several new projects I have in the works, which have been in the planning stages for many months. I have more sites in the pipeline, and though I had planned an April launch for them, I wasn’t sure which order I would be tackling the projects in. That changed when I saw that Collective Bias was hosting a contest giving one of its members a chance to win a trip to London in June to attend the Cybher conference – I knew that the timing was serendipitous, and I took it as a sign to launch the Bloggers London site first. I’ve been working tirelessly this week on launching these new sites, and have debuted them just in time for the April 25th deadline!

You’re already familiar with how much I love Collective Bias and its Social Fabric community, so it should be no surprise to hear that I am impressed with their overseas efforts. I have noticed over the last few months that they have been working hard to provide opportunities for their UK bloggers, which sets them apart from so many other social media firms. They are sponsoring a cocktail party at the Cybher conference this year as part of their British outreach, and I think it’s brilliant. The British blog market is expanding fast, and it makes so much sense to cater to this audience – the brands who do so now are getting a jumpstart on what I believe will soon become a powerful market leader.

I think I would be the perfect person to attend Cybher this year, because I feel like I have a lot to offer and a lot that I could learn. As a British person in America, I am in a unique position with having know-how and contacts on both sides of the pond, along with industry and cultural knowledge of both. The timing is ideal – I can’t think of a better conference for me, the webmaster of Bloggers London, to attend than a blog conference in London! I believe my forum is going to be a useful tool to connect London bloggers with sites such as Social Fabric and other brands that want to work with them, and this would be the ideal opportunity to network with as many people as possible. Can you imagine how quickly I could grow this forum if I had a chance to network in person with potential members and PR representatives? It’s an exciting prospect! Not to mention, there is much to be learned from their workshops: For example, one of my goals in the coming months is to expand my Google+ presence, so “The Art of Plus Size” keynote about G+ would be very informative.

And on a personal note, it would be fun to return to my birthplace – I haven’t been back to the UK since 2011 and I’m getting really homesick. It’s tough to live almost 5,000 miles away from half of my family, but part of my goal with these international sites is to position myself to better work and live between both countries so I can spend more time in England. If I am selected to attend this conference, I may be able to sneak in a little visit with family before the conference starts – although my dad’s home of Liverpool is over 200 miles North of London, it’s so rare that we are on the same continent that I’m sure we can figure something out!

Thank you to Collective Bias for hosting this contest – regardless of whether I win, it’s inspired me to carve out time to get these sites launched this week!

Readers: I would love to hear what you think of these new resources, especially if you’re based in the UK!

As members of the Nutrisystem Nation Blogger Panel, Jai and I received the Nutrisystem program free of charge in order to share our honest opinions with you. Always consult with your physician before embarking on any weight loss or exercise program.

After 11 incredible months, we’ve reached the most exciting part of our weight loss journey: Sharing our final Nutrisystem results with you!

Beeb’s Final Weigh-In:

Starting Weight: 164.5 lbs
Goal Weight: 110 lbs
Final Weigh-In: 128.8 lbs
Total Weight Lost: 35.7 lbs
Total BMI Points Lost: 6.1

Jai’s Final Weigh-In:

Starting Weight: 217.5 lbs
Goal Weight: 158 lbs
Final Weigh-In: 166.4 lbs
Total Weight Lost: 51.1 lbs
Total BMI Points Lost: 7.8

Our time on this program has been more incredible than either one of us could have imagined – we have learned so much and gone so far during our time on Nutrisystem. I’ve linked up all of our previous posts below, so you can see how far we’ve come and check out all of our thoughts, tips, and strategies:

And this is by no means the end of our journey – although our official time on Nutrisystem has come to an end, we will continue to share monthly weigh-ins & recaps with you, sharing our insights on the process of transitioning off Nutrisystem and maintaining our progress. I’m sure everyone is wondering what life off the plan is like, so we are eager to share how we plan to keep these healthy habits going and continue to maintain and make additional progress. We also have a super special giveaway for one of our readers to win a 7-day Nutrisystem breakfast sampler, so click here to enter that!

Want to lose weight and get healthy on Nutrisystem? Take advantage of their online support forums & community and join today by calling 1-888-853-4689 or by visiting Nutrisystem.com.

Happy Easter, everyone! This has been one particularly busy week for us.

As you’re probably aware, we’re working on a total home makeover using complimentary Glidden paint. This month’s project is our living room, which we are painting red and black. It’s looking great already so I’m really looking forward to the final product. Having one of the main rooms torn up for construction is always a challenge, especially since my couch is now in the kitchen , but it’s all worth it and I’m so excited that all my home renovations will finally be completed by summer.

Also on the agenda this week were taxes. This is no small project for me since I’m self-employed – since I don’t get a W-2 from an employer, I have to make sure I print off copies of all my pay stubs (In the form of check stubs, PayPal receipts, invoices, etc.), tally up all expenses, and so forth. This means spending a great deal of time pouring over my paperwork and records in order to ensure that I have all the paperwork I need, inputting numbers in spreadsheets to come up with expense and revenue tallies – and that’s just to make sure I have everything I need for my accountant. I don’t even do the actual tax preparation anymore! I used to do everything myself, but with the immense amount of time it takes to research tax rules and regulations each year, it’s less expensive to hire an accountant than to take that much time off work. Not to mention that my accountant is very knowledgeable and just rocks in general!

Since Murphy’s Law is always in effect, this jam-packed week also included a broken dryer. Luckily, I have a great fortune to have a fiancé who can figure out how to fix almost anything, and he identified the there was a crack in the element. We found the part on Amazon for $20 (And yes, that is my Amazon Associates link, just in case you have the exact same broken dryer and want the part too ), so I ordered it with a gift card and got it a little over a week later. Jai replaced the part, just as he did with the furnace, and it’s been working like a champ ever since…which is good, since we had a ton of laundry built up!

What have you been up to this week, readers?

2013 is a big year for me. January marked my 10th anniversary with Jai; May 2013 will mark the 10th anniversary of my mom suddenly passing away and the unexpected turns my life took as a result of that; and in September, I will turn 30 years old. This decade has been one wild ride, that’s for sure! I’ve been working hard to put some of the past behind me this year and create a much-needed fresh start in many areas. Jai and I have both been making big changes in our diet and fitness, losing over 75 pounds between us; and as you can see from my previous post about painting, we’re putting the final touches on a decade of renovations.

When my mom passed away, it was a completely unexpected tragedy in our family. After she died, I inherited our family home, so I literally became a homeowner overnight at 19. It’s hard to explain the subsequent course of my life to others, because it was such an insane situation, and I really don’t know anyone else who has been in that particular position before. I always liken it to moving into a house that someone else lives in, without moving any of their stuff out. My parents had a lot of stuff here, partly from decorating with things they liked and having experience dealing collectible items professionally; add to that the fact that they had boxes and boxes of family history on both sides, from important family photos to my Grandmother’s clothing – stuff I wasn’t about to toss out just to make more room. After a lot of hard work, I have pared things down, but I still have boxes and boxes of stuff in my attic marked to sell on eBay or save for the rest of the family. It’s ironic, because I’m not a knick-knack person at all!

The house also needed some work, so Jai and I soon began the process of renovating the entire home. After close to a decade, we should be pretty much done with everything by the summer. We’ve added a driveway, a deck, improved attic space, added shelves, made furniture, completely renovated every single thing in the bathroom – tub, shower, toilet, sink, walls, you name it – painted, the list goes on. At the moment, we have two rooms left to paint, work to do in the kitchen and future dining room, and then it will primarily just be little touches, like buying a new dining set, picking up blinds or roman fabric shades for all the windows, add even more shelving, and taking care of other small details. It’s been a very, very chaotic 10 years because between the construction debris and storing/sorting through a lot of family items, the house has always been in upheaval, which drives me seriously c-r-a-z-y. People wonder why it’s taken so long, but as the saying goes, you can get construction done quickly or inexpensively, but never both at the same time. As a teenage homeowner with extremely limited resources, I did my best to get progress rolling along with slim funds and little time, since I still had to go about the business of building my life as an adult, starting my business, and coping with the aftermath of everything that had happened in wake of my mom passing away. It has not been an easy decade by any stretch of the imagination, but I feel like this year will be one of putting the past to rest and building for my future. They say that your 20s are supposed to be the best time of your life, but for me personally, I’m looking forward to a bright future in my 30s!

What milestones has 2013 brought for you, readers?

We’re on the fourth month of our Glidden Home Makeover series, and on Monday we finished painting our converted attic space. Behold, Jai’s new office, painted in Blue Cloud and Cool Cobalt:

My dad painted these little birds on the wall for me when I was growing up, since this used to be my childhood bedroom. So we thought it would be a nice touch to leave this decorative inset as it was!

As with the rest of the house, the original paint job was very old, so these cream shelves had gotten stained over the years.

We also improved the space by reinforcing Jai’s computer workbenches and adding more cabinet storage.

And there you have it! We’re really happy with the results. Since this was my childhood bedroom, it was bearing the same shade of pink paint that I had chosen at age 9, so it was way overdue! It wasn’t intentional, but we realized the humor of painting over a girl’s pink room with blue paint for a guy. This will continue to be Jai’s office, with half of the area continuing to house the spare bed (And soon, our futon as well) so that it will have a nice living/seating area as well. Now that we’re wrapping up all these years of renovations, we won’t have to use the upstairs as storage anymore – although we still have two rooms left to paint, so we’ll be playing furniture Tetris for a little while longer until the whole house is complete. I can’t believe how much we’ve gotten done in a relatively short period of time, considering how much else is going on. It’s so exciting! This month, we start on the living room, so stay tuned for that makeover!

For more on Glidden Paint and where to buy, click here to view the full line of paints. Glidden are providing us with the supplies for this project in order for us to share this makeover experience with you.

I wanted to be a writer for as long as I can remember. Even as a child who had just recently learned how to write the alphabet, I wanted to grow up to be a journalist. This desire never faded, and I got into the industry professionally when I was in my early teens. Back in those days – the late 1990s – I was still using a typewriter to craft my articles. I was working for a newspaper at the time, and would type up my first drafts on an ancient manual typewriter. To this day, I blame my heavy-handed typing on the amount of force I had to use to press those manual keys down!

My grandma got an electronic word processor around this time, which was immensely easier to use since you could draft up what you wanted to say before committing it to paper. What a concept, huh? The most hateful part of typewriters to me was the fact that you would inevitably hit the wrong key and have a permanent blotch on your paper – Wite-out was just a fact of life. Even better was when you were really in the zone writing something and the letters started to fade as your typewriter ribbon ran out of ink. Ugh! But both the word processor and my relic of a typewriter would be rendered obsolete once we had PCs of our own. As I type this, I think how much more time-consuming this would have been to write in 1997!

It never ceases to amaze me how quickly things have changed and what we’ve gained with technology. In 16 years, I’ve gone from using my extremely heavy typewriter to write articles for newspapers to using a tiny, light laptop to compose articles within WordPress for my own media outlet. There are some pros and cons to both sides of the coin – if you think changing a typewriter ribbon is obnoxious, try finding the right kind of printer ink! – but I feel so lucky to have had such a variety of experiences in my career. The little girl in the photo above never could have anticipated the methods with which she’d be creating stories to share with others as an adult – she just knew she’d be doing it no matter what the medium or setting.