Hi friend! I’m so happy to have the first home decor project of the new year done! This mudroom makeover is a project I’ve had on my mind for a long time now, and it was relatively painless to accomplish since I hired out most of the heavy lifting.
I’ll give you a quick look at the glorious ‘after’ here, then I’ll show you the before and walk you through the process of how we transformed the space from cluttered to calm.
Hi friends! We’ve been knee deep in back-to-school preparations over here and I’m sending my son off to his first day of 1st grade today! #whendidhegetsobig?! Even though it’s always bittersweet seeing summer come to an end, I’m actually ready for school to start this year and that’s a first! I may or may not have been counting down these last couple of days like Christmas was coming! Come this afternoon, I might be changing my tune and all sappy missing my boy, but right now, I’m all #yayforschool! We’ll see if “my kid gets himself ready for school by himself without me nagging”
Slowly but surely, we’ve been working on turning our playroom into the media room that it was always intended to be. We moved into our house about 6 years ago, and for the longest time this room was a big ole storage dump, but we ended up cleaning it up and making it work as a playroom a couple years ago. Now that our son is older and he and Dad enjoy playing videogames together, we wanted to swap out the basketball hoop for a tv and bring in some seating so that the adults and kids can be in the room comfortably at the same time.
Three cheers for the long weekend and short week! I hope you had/have a good one! It helped us transition into the summer vacation that I swear snuck right up on us. But, we were lucky to have a few really nice, sunshiny days this weekend to go to the pool, which made it start to feel like summer. Mama even got herself a pina colada. #whoa! And Jordan dipped her itty bitty toes into the water for the first time. I just died over her in this swimsuit and hat! Too cute!!! I’m paranoid she’ll get too much sun on her delicate newborn skin,
You guys!! After last week’s One Room Challenge office update went live several of you let me know I had the bench legs on wrong! Thank you! One sweet reader, Beth, emailed me privately so as not to embarrass me! Isn’t that nice?! But, it’s okay! I remember thinking when I put the legs on, ‘this looks funky, I need to check to see how they go’, but then forgot! Oh well, easy fix, another turn and the legs are all good!
And we have the pillow covers from Arianna Belle just waiting on their 20×20 down-filled inserts to give these babies a place to call home!
Ever since we showed our soon-to-be baby-girl’s nursery, a frequent question has been about the bench seat. It was an easy and inexpensive DIY project, and the bench seat definitely adds to the charm of built-in bookcase. I really wanted the seat to be functional and not just a pretty spot to look at. We only have 2 months until she is here and I envision my 5-year old sitting on this bench seat while we’re in here together and also her when she gets older.
We only have one week left before the big, final reveal of our nursery on the One Room Challenge and I’m really crossing my fingers that everything falls into place! There are still some last minute orders that have yet to arrive. #pleasehurry!
I mentioned before that had it not been for the ORC, we probably wouldn’t have gotten started on the nursery yet, especially since we didn’t yet know the gender, but given I’m drawn to neutral spaces anyway, I figured Sita and I could design a neutral nursery and then add in touches of color once we found out.
One of my favorite #loveitmoment in my own home is the wide horizontal stripes I painted in our foyer that continue around our staircase. It wasn’t difficult to paint the stripes, just tedious to measure perfectly and then tape the wall very well. The area in the staircase is really tall and being on that ladder so high up and painting wasn’t my favorite thing, but the outcome was worth it. I love it because it adds such personality and makes a bold statement in a space that was otherwise kinda bland.
When I cleaned out and organized my closet, I decided to do something funky to the walls. I’ve been crazy for Thibaut Tanzania wallpaper for ages and knew I’d love to see it in pink in my closet, but figured painting it would be easier and cheaper than the real deal wallpaper. The back wall is the main wall you see when you enter my closet, so I wanted to remove the jewelry that was hanging there previously, and make it more of a feature wall with framed art. I really like how it turned out!
Ever since I painted that wooden box in a geometric pattern using two shades of pink, gold, black and white, I’ve been thinking of doing something similar to my office doors. Because this is a space just for me, I can do what I want with it, and if I like bright pink, bright pink it is! I want to be inspired by the place where I spend my time dreaming, creating, and blogging.
I took my time choosing three colors that I planned to use on two doors: Sherwin-Williams Coming Up Roses (below), In the Pink (light pink) and Bohemian Black.
Happy Monday friends! Moving slow here (and that’s typical of Mondays in this house). Got some good morning snuggles in with my son before getting him to school in the nick of time – he’s usually up before me, but today my little sleepyhead slept in. We got our first “cool front” on Saturday and there’s nothing Houstonian’s enjoy more than the first day when temps dip into the 70s after a long hot, humid summer. It was perfect because we had a Saturday early morning PK4 playdate in the park, and everyone had a great time talking while enjoying their coffee and donuts/kolaches while the kids played on the playground.
Our mudroom door has now been painted Sherwin Williams Comfort Gray. As you can see, Comfort Gray isn’t really gray, but a light blue with green undertones (in person- not sure how it’s showing on your screen). It’s the same color we painted our dining room (although we lightened that paint by 75%), and I’ve been itching to use it somewhere else ever since. I had the sample quart still, so that’s what I used. After three coats, I still had some left.
I posted a sneak peek on Instagram and got a few questions about how to paint a door,
What an accomplished weekend! We managed to attend a PTO happy hour, two kiddos’ birthday parties, clean the house (including laundry!), rearranged James’ bedroom (switched up the bed and dresser), and finally hung the four family photos that have been sitting against our bedroom wall for months now! That one felt really good.
Another project that took less than 10 minutes was transforming our entryway console table. Check out the difference a little bit of marble contact paper made!
This console table was one of the furniture pieces that moved from our old townhouse to our new home over four years ago.
A design trend I’m seeing everywhere these days is the colorful geometric pattern. I’m crazy for it, and have some fun notebooks that make me happy just looking at them. I wanted to bring more geometric pattern into my life and yesterday, created a colorful, decorative box for my office. All you need for this project is an inexpensive wooden box from the craft store, craft paint, paint brushes, painters tape, and clear enamel spray to give your box a glossy finish.
MAKE A GEOMETRIC PATTERNED BOX
I started with a rough sketch of how I wanted my pattern to look,
Hi friends, no Wardrobe Wednesday here as I just want to savor the last drops of summer before school starts (too early!) for us in just two weeks. I can’t stop time, but I can enjoy the lazy days we’ve been fortunate to have recently and for the next couple weeks. I want so bad to be present in the moment with my child and it’s difficult to do that for every moment of the day, but sometimes, those moments happen and you don’t even have to try.
The morning when James declared, “I want to paint!”, I admit my first thought was about how messy it would be and how I’d have to pull out all the supplies and the kitchen counters would have paint everywhere,
Thank you so very much for weighing in on my paint-color dilemma in the dining room! I read all the comments and really appreciate the feedback. It reminds me why I started blogging in the first place- to have other women who love home decor to bounce ideas off of. My husband is not only color-blind, but pretty nonchalant when it comes to the decor choices in our house (unless he hates something), so I like that I have Y’ALL to share these things with! :)After putting eight samples on the wall, the color I chose was Comfort Grey by Sherwin Williams in semi-gloss,
How many samples of paint does it take to find the right color for a dining room? Apparently, at least eight. I’ve been to the paint store three times in the past three days to continue testing paint samples, and I’m not even sure I have a winner yet! I’m determined to decide today though because Sherwin Williams is having their 40% off sale and I want to take advantage of it! (It ends Monday).
As a big user of PicMonkey (a free online photo-editing site), I always wished they had a larger selection of fonts to choose from. In the past, they have expanded their options, but now you can access all the fonts you have saved to your own computer! I was so excited to see this new development! But, I recently had to wipe my computer to fix an issue it was having, which meant I lost all the fonts I had downloaded over the years. Boo! Over the weekend, I went back and redownloaded and installed (most) of them again.
