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Master Bedroom Roomspiration Style

September 30, 2011

Welcome to another round of Roomspiration! It’s time for the Master Bedroom link party today hosted by the lovely Rachel from Just a Touch of Gray. I can’t wait to go see all the awesomeness that everyone is linking up because I could use some Roomspiration in the bedroom! Don’t tell the hubby! (wink, wink.)

There has been so much awesomeness linked up over the past two weeks, you should really just go check it all out! Here is the schedule of previous Roomspiration posts and next week will sadly be the end of the party.

Entryways – Abode Love
Living Rooms – View Along the Way
Bathrooms – Homemaker on a Dime
Guest Bedrooms – DIY by Design
Craft Rooms -  Family Brings Joy
Dining Rooms – Involving Color
Nurseries – a la mode

Our master bedroom is not blog worthy at the moment but hopefully it will be in a few months. Right now the walls remind me of the color of poop with maybe a hint of purple in certain light. I’m not really fond of the color and would like something a little more romantic.
I know that upholstered headboards are all the rage right now and I do love them but this fun design caught my eye.

We have some nightstands but are hoping to find something that has three drawers and is more like a small dresser.

We have a white shabby chic Comforter that I found at Target on clearance for $22. Have I ever told you how much I love Target clearance?   I really enjoy white bedding, it makes it really easy to mix in color and patterns. 

I am loving the gray color scheme right now but I’m not sure where we’ll really go with our bedroom.  Here is some eye candy from Pinterest that I love to look at when I think of Master Bedrooms.

I have this pinned three times on my Master Bedroom board so I obviously like this room.

I also love color in the bedroom, especially the blues mixed with gold!

I could add so many more bedrooms, there are just a ton of different styles I love and it’s going to be hard deciding on what to do in our bedroom. I just want a room that feels calm, relaxing and peaceful with a touch of romance! Do you love your master bedroom? What do you love or hate about it? I’d love to hear from you! I did a series on Master Bedrooms a few months ago on why your Master Bedroom isn’t just for sleeping in. It’s a great reminder on how to keep our bedroom a sanctuary for our marriages along with some great tips on how to keep the flame burning for your hubby as well!

Also, I will be hosting Roomspirations on Monday when I reveal the new Cloffice. I scored an awesome desk off CL yesterday and can’t wait to show you! I hope you’ll come back and link up your closets and nooks! Do you have a fun space in your home that you use for reading, crafting or an office? Do you have well organized closets that make your friends and family jealous when you open the door? What’s in your closets? Come back on Monday and link up with me!

By 8 Comments Filed Under: master bedroom, pinterest, roomspiration

Random Thursday

September 29, 2011

I have many things swirling around in my head and so I thought I’d share them in a random post.
Yesterday I spent most of the day working on the desk for the cloffice. It was a CL find at $15. It wasn’t exactly what I wanted but close enough and the price was right. After stripping and sanding it down it was time for paint. Well let’s say my vision didn’t work out as planned and I was back to the drawing board. CL to the rescue and thank goodness! So for $100 I have a new desk that doesn’t require any work. Sometimes I am so not wanting to spend $100 on a good piece of furniture that fits the bill, which can be a downfall. Instead I spent $15 on a desk, bought stripper and tools for $20, spent another $12 on tester paint and now I’m not even using the desk for the intended space and spent $100 for a desk that fits. So I actually spent $147 for a desk and at least 10 hours working on a desk that I won’t even use where I wanted to use it. I will use the desk in the youngest daughter’s bedroom so it’s not a complete waste but still…..lots of time, energy and STRESS into a desk. Lesson learned for me, sometimes being cheap ends up costing me more in the long run.

Random thought number two:  I love fall, who doesn’t love fall? It’s so beautiful and the weather is usually great!

I’m sad I really haven’t done any fall decorating but it’s enough just to work on the cloffice right now. Did you decorate for fall? Did you use traditional fall colors or maybe you added some blue? I’d love to see what you’ve done for fall! I am hoping the weekend of my birthday, which is coming up soon, we can spend a day just looking at beautiful fall colors!

That is all I want for my birthday, a day with my family enjoying God’s beautiful creation! Oh wait, and some cake. I love cake!

Another random thought for the day is what’s your favorite color?  That question makes me feel like I am in elementary school and you being my friend is dependent upon if we like the same color or not.  I have always loved blue and gray and I find myself always buying blue, black or gray clothing.  I love these two outfits from my clothing pinboard.

Do you pick the same colors for your wardrobe all the time?  Have you found those colors “work” for you so stick with what works?  Or are you more of a wild card and wear whatever?  I need some new clothes because I’ve lost at least a good ten pounds which I’m happy about.  So I’m having a hard time buying anything because I feel like I have to same 3 colors in my closet yet I like those colors and the way they look with my skin/hair.  If you have any tips or tricks I’d love to hear from you or you can just pick my clothes out for me.  :)    I have a straight body that needs the illusion of curves so whatever you pick out just avoid things that make me look like a triangle.  HA! 
Final random thought for the day, I’ve read The Help, Water for Elephants,  One Thousand White Women and The Memory Keepers Daughter in the past month. I enjoyed all of the books except for The Memory Keepers Daughter which was an interesting read but kind of depressing.  Anyone have a book suggestion for me?  I really am missing reading before bed but I have a hard time just going to the library and selecting a random book off the shelf.  I am on goodreads so if you are on there, let me know and we can follow each other.   I am always on the look out for good books to read but I don’t do sci-fi, fantasy, vampires or scary stuff.  Once again, I have a wild imagination and it needs no help in imagining weird, scary or strange stuff.  I also don’t do books that have half naked people about to engage in sex on the front cover.  I think I read all of those in Junior High and High School along with every Danielle Steel book out there.  Did you read all her books? 

Well that’s the randomness of today’s post.  If you made it this far through my rambling, Enjoy the day!  Today is a blustery kind of day here yet the sun is out so I’m off to enjoy the day!

By 3 Comments Filed Under: random thursday

Roomspiration Nurseries

September 28, 2011

Good Morning Beautiful people! I’m hard at work on my cloffice but I thought I’d share a sneak peak with you all this morning. Here it is, the one and only sneak peek you get, the rest will be revealed on Monday when Roomspiration comes to The Blooming Hydrangea when I will be hosting the closets and nooks portion of the party.  I am really excited to show you what I’ve been working on but we’ll all have to wait until Monday

  Today we are going to pay a visit to Shelli at a la mode where she is hosting the nursery addition of Roompsiration.  She has one beautiful nursery, make sure you stop over and check it out, even if you don’t need Nursery inspiration! 

If you missed any of the other rooms, it’s not too late!  Just click on the link below and you can check out all the awesome inspiration being linked up and link up your own as well!

Entryways – Abode Love
Living Rooms – View Along the Way
Bathrooms – Homemaker on a Dime
Guest Bedrooms – DIY by Design
Craft Rooms -  Family Brings Joy
Dining Rooms – Involving Color

Who doesn’t just love a room for a sweet baby?  I mean really, is there any room that is more fun to decorate than the nursery?  A place where you bring your precious new life home to sleep in, rock in, cry in, poop in, play in and most importantly, grown in.  Now for the hubs and I, we just didn’t have a lot of dough sitting around when it was time to create a nursery for our first baby.  Which is cool, I was a young un’ and barely 23 when our first baby was born.  So today I thought I’d pin some nurseries to share with you all and dream of what a nursery would look like if we were having a baby now, which by they way, we are NOT.  We love babies, I miss them, I want one but we took care of things and so there will be no more babies in our home.  I know, it’s sad but four children is just perfect for us and I’m getting old.  Plus, hubby would want the nursery to look like this:

I’m just not feeling it. I was thinking this would be my dream nursery:

I love everything about that nursery! Although I would want a nice comfy chair like this one to fall asleep nurse those sweet babies in.

And of course a nice soft rug for me to sleep on
 play with the baby on.

Maybe a nice stenciled wall with this light would look good in there too.

 Maybe put some fun letters on the wall:

and maybe this print too:

Don’t forget the storage for toys and books:

And you need a window seat to sit and read the books on:

Most importantly, you just need a place where you can do this and it won’t matter what color the room was, if you had a white crib or a maple crib, what brand of diapers were in the changing table, or how much you spent on their nursery.  All that will matter was your baby was loved! 

Source: google.com via Lauren on Pinterest

Source: google.com via Lynn on Pinterest

By 5 Comments Filed Under: roomspiration

Roomspiration Kids Rooms

September 26, 2011

Good Monday Morning!  I hope you had a great weekend and maybe enjoyed some beautiful weather too.  Today we are joining Aubrey over at All Things Bright & Beautiful for the kid’s bedrooms portion of Roomspiration!

I am re-posting my little boy’s room that I did back in April before we sold our house and moved this summer.  Here is what the room originally looked like, it was really a lovely sea glass green. Let’s just call it a bad paint color choice made while pregnant.

I only have two pictures of this room, I thought I had more but I can’t find them. I think I say that for every room reveal. I really need to organize my photos but that’s another project for another day or maybe another year.  Does anyone else throw their photos in a bin and quick shut the lid before they throw up all over the floor?  I know Jen at I Heart Organizing just did a photo organizing challenge a few months ago so if you are looking to organize your photos, head over and see her blog, it’s full of great stuff! Back to the room, I get easily sidetracked.  Maybe that’s why I have a hard time finishing projects.
Anyways, on to the finished project!

Here’s the before and after:

I didn’t want to spend a lot of cash on this room and I think I did a decent job of that. The lattice strips were $7.38 for a bundle and I didn’t even use them all for this room. The lamp I redid with some jute for $2, the pictures are flight maps that someone gifted to us, the frames for the flight maps were $1 each and are old black walnut door fronts from a store. The picture frames with his name were from the dollar section at Target and I made the letters on our printer, so total for that was $4. I made the flag pennant/bunting thing with some material that cost about $6 total and then strung them on the leftover jute from the lamp. I made the pillow for the bed for about $6, the rug was $17 on clearance at Target and the quilt was from TJ Maxx for $29. The dresser was gifted to us, the cubeicle I purchased for $50 and the fabric bins for that were $18. I purchased two gallons of paint for a total of $52 and the valances were $11 each.

Grand total for this room: $199.00 Woo Hoo!

Now that we are in the new house, I am not sure how I will do his room.   I might keep it very similar to this room seeing as we only used it this way for about two months before we ended up moving.
So that’s the tour for today!  I’m heading over to visit Aubrey and see what fun stuff everyone is linking up today.  I hope you will join me and if you missed the other rooms, just click on the links below for previous Roomspiration link ups!

Entryways – Abode Love
Living Rooms – View Along the Way
Bathrooms – Homemaker on a Dime
Guest Bedrooms – DIY by Design
Craft Rooms -  Family Brings Joy
Dining Rooms – Involving Color

By 5 Comments Filed Under: roomspiration

The Dining Room

September 23, 2011

Alright tonight is a bittersweet post for me.  The dining room is done but we won’t get to enjoy it much.  I wish I could take my house with me but we will leave it behind and let someone else enjoy all our hard work!  I am so excited to be moving and having a new house to  decorate/diy/tear up and redo!
So here is what the dining room has looked like pretty much since right after we moved in.  I posted the before and after pictures all together so enjoy the show!

At one point we were going to add in these great corner cabinets that our neighbor had removed from his house. We decided against them eventually because it was going to be a bit of work to get them installed and painted.


Here’s a reminder of the buffet before:

So that’s the dining room!  I would have added a few more elements if we were staying in our house but seeing as we aren’t, this is how it will stay.
The weekend of May 21st/22nd 2011 we will be house hunting and I will take my camera along and let you join me in the search, so look forward to that posting next week!  I’m sorry I haven’t blogged much but we’ve been busy knocking projects off our list.  I hope to have some good news to post soon so stay tuned!!  I really miss everyone and feel like a big blogging slacker right now but please don’t go anywhere, I promise I’ll be back soon!!!!
I’m linking up here:

My Uncommon Slice of Suburbia


Thrifty Decor Chick
http://cottageandvine.blogspot.com/

By 53 Comments Filed Under: dining room, roomspiration

Roomspiration Craft Rooms

September 21, 2011

Good Morning everyone! Fall is in the air and I couldn’t be happier! I LOVE fall, I love it, I love it, I love it!

Anyways, now that I’ve scared half of you off with my Molly Shannon SNL Joyologist flashback , let’s move on to the real purpose of today, Roomspiration!

Today is Craft Rooms with Shannon at Family Brings Joy. I wish I had a craft room to link up but alas I do not. Well unless you count the man cave area where i have shoved stored my supplies. Here’s a little peak into the mess.

Here is what my dream craft rooms would look like, thank you pinterest!

I love the bright spaces with lots of light, I’m a big fan of windows and letting the sunshine in.  I also love the large work areas with no clutter, obviously if this was real life, they wouldn’t look like that. Who actually finished what they are crafting and cleans up? I would have like 7 projects all spread out on the area because I have a hard time focusing on one project at a time. Plus I’m sure my kids would be in there trying to create things as well.  Do you have a craft room?  If so, hurry over to Shannon at Family Brings Joy and link up your room! Also don’t forget you can link up until Oct. 14th so make sure to visit these other blogs for more Roomspiration!

Entryways – Abode Love
Living Rooms – View Along the Way
Bathrooms – Homemaker on a Dime

Guest Bedrooms – DIY by Design

Also come back on Friday for Dining Rooms with Jena at Involving Color!

By 6 Comments Filed Under: roomspiration

Boob Light Reduction

September 20, 2011

Good morning! Do you like the title?  Nice and classy, I know.  What can I say?  That’s how I roll.  I even found this definition at the Urban Dictionary.

 BOOB LIGHT:

A dome light mounted on a ceiling that resembles a female breast with a decorative erect nipple. They are often found in pairs in 1980 style homes.

Does every home built after 1979 have the dreaded boob lights?  Our home was built in 2000 and we have a multitude of them in our house and it’s my personal mission to rid our house of them.  I think they might  multiply and I may have the mother of all boob lights living in my dining room.  While I was finishing up the entryway last week, I was scouring Craiglist, Goodwill and Home Depot’s 70% off lighting sale trying to find replacement light fixtures for uber cheap.  I was hoping to find something like the two pictured below but hubby thought they might hang too low in our entryway and I didn’t find any lights anyways.

While blog surfing the other day, I came across this great blog, HOUSEography and this post reagarding a boob fan light combo.  Thanks for the awesome idea Melissa!  I didn’t even finish reading the post, I raced downstairs and grabbed two of lampshades that I found on clearance at Target a month or two ago, for the grand price of $4.98 a piece.  They are the large size shade and worked perfectly in the entryway!

I went from this

To this:

Here’s a view from underneath:

I simply unscrewed that little “nipple” and put the shade on upside down with the ring fitting over the nipple area and then screwed the nipple back on and voila!  Please don’t re-read that sentence too many times, it sounds dirtier every time I read it.  But I just don’t know how else to explain the process to you.  So my apologies.
The shades even soften the light a bit making it feel more warm and welcoming instead of the bright interrogation style boob lights. My hubby just informed me that the lights now have bras on.  Oh man!
Now I just need to get rid of the Mother of all boob lights in my dining room and replace it with something less ginormous!   Also I think that it looks like it could double as a small boat for cats or the Wonder Pets.  I’m not even sure I could sell this thing on Craigslist, who buys boob lights?  Wait, maybe don’t answer that question, I don’t want to know!

Do you have the dreaded boob lights in your home?  Have you replaced them?  Do tell!

***I ended up using the first set of lamp shades for my $15 thrift store lamps  but I replaced the entryway ones with another pair of clearance lamp shades from Target that were only $3.24 each.   You can see it in the picture below.

Don’t forget tomorrow is another round of Roomspiration with Shannon at Family Brings Joy and she’s hosting craft rooms!  This is one that I am super excited about because I always think craft rooms look like so much fun to go play in, kind of like an adult version of a playroom.  Get your minds out of the gutter, you know what I mean!  Anyways, make sure to head over and check it out!
Shannon is a great blogger friend with wonderful ideas, thoughts and an awesome craft room!

I’m linking up here:


By 10 Comments Filed Under: Before and After, front entryway NP, projects

Guest Bedrooms

September 19, 2011

Today is the start of another great week of Roomspiration!

Are you having as much fun as I am checking out all the cool rooms being linked up and also, even better, meeting new bloggers? If you missed last week’s Roomspiration link ups, no worries! The blog links are open until October 14th so there is plenty of time to link up and also check out all the awesomeness being posted. Today head on over to Judy’s blog at DIY by Design to link up your Guest Bedrooms and below are the blog link ups from last week
Entryways – Abode Love
Living Rooms – View Along the Way
Bathrooms – Homemaker on a Dime

We technically don’t have a guest bedroom in our home because having enough bedrooms for each child along with an office for my husband proved hard enough to find, so adding an extra room might have put us in a cardboard box down by the river. Which really wouldn’t be suitable for guests either, unless you are part Otter.  .
The solution to our dilemma was to give our oldest daughter a queen size bed and to kick her out of her bedroom whenever guests come to visit us. She has a bedroom in the basement along with our second oldest daughter. So in the second’s room we have two twin beds which also can be used for guests. If I had a real guest room, this is what it would look like, thank you pinterest!

More importanly than what the guest room looks like, is how your guest room makes your guests feel. Here is a list of some things to consider having available to your guests:

- Comfortable bedding
- Extra blankets
- Pillows
- Kleenex
- Magazines or books for reading
- Towels
- Shampoo, soap, toothpaste, contact solution and case
- Bottled water and snacks
- Fresh flowers

My friend Jenny who is the hostess with the mostess, likes to have bottled waters and whatever your favorite treat is, waiting in the guest room for you.  Which makes me want to never leave her guest room, I would love to  just lay around, eat chocolate and read Country Living all day.  Ok, well that’s not true because I love Jenny and want to hang out with her but I think eating chocolate and reading Country Living all day isn’t a bad alternative. 

So do you have a guest bedroom?  Anything I forgot to mention on my list of items to have available for guests?    Also, if you stay at my house, please don’t reference this post as applying to you and your visit.  We don’t provide most of those amenities.  ;)  

By 5 Comments Filed Under: pinterest, roomspiration

Powder Room Gone Wild

September 17, 2011
I am so excited for another round of Roomspiration!!!!   SJ at Homemaker on a Dime is featuring bathrooms today and I’m finally going to join even!  It’s technically Saturday morning but I like to be fashionably late and the link party is open until Oct. 14th so I’m actually on time, right?


The hubby just asked me if I’m going to do a room in our home for every day of Roomspiration and I promised him I wouldn’t.  But I did want to do our powder room, entryway and of course my cloffice.
Here is our main bathroom /powder room a few weeks ago, nothing horrible here like mold or scary toilets, just the standard oak vanity and trim.

After completing the entryway on Monday, I thought I could quickly paint the powder room for Friday.  I found a can of white paint in the basement from the previous owner’s that I would use to paint the walls with, the can was rusted shut but the paint inside was fine so that was a SCORE for me! I didn’t really have a set idea for the bathroom but I was kicking around a few thoughts, like stripes.

But then I thought maybe a stencil could be fun, I love this one:

And maybe do some board and batten underneath like this:

So the two choices were black and white stripes or a stencil with board and batten underneath. Now all I had to do was convince my hubby! Not really but I did ask which one he would rather do seeing as I wasn’t going to draw the lines on the walls for stripes and he would be putting up the board and batten which he’s done before in the bub’s room.  He wanted to do the B&B with a stencil.  The only problem was I didn’t have a stencil.  Then I had a wild idea, a crazy thought. What if we did zebra on the wall? I found a zebra stencil online at Hobby Lobby and His reaction was skeptical but he went with it. Off to Hobby Lobby I went to purchase the zebra stencil. It was $16.99 and I had a 40% off coupon, perfect! If I had only known the pain and agony that awaited me, I might not have skipped out of HL swinging my stencil and whistling a joyous tune.  (Did I ever mention how wonderful it is to live 2 miles from Hobby Lobby?) 

I started stenciling happily at 7:30 pm Thursday evening and quit for the night at 1:30 am after a wine cooler and some bad words.  I thought maybe if I had some sleep it would help.  HA!  I started stenciling again at 7:30 am and I worked on this thing all day while the bubs watched PBS kids for a good portion of the morning.  You know you are desperate when you actually allow your child to watch Barney!  I did play with him for a while and he also took a nap so that helped me not feel so horrible about watching tv while mommy was stenciling zebra on the bathroom walls.  I finally finished touching up the wall at about 5:30 pm tonight.  The bathroom is 5×5 so we are not talking about a ginormous space and maybe I just suck at stenciling.  Let’s hope not because I am stenciling the cloffice this weekend.  At least I didn’t spend a lot of money for the stencil, just time.  Which is worth more?  Don’t answer that one!
Here is the total for the finished project :
$10 for the stencil, $9 for some black paint, $4 for a can of gold spray paint, $3 for a new hand towel and $40 for the board and batten.
Grand Total = $66

Most of the items I used in this room I already had on hand.   The flower pictures are from my old dining room and I spray painted some frames I had already gold.  The shelf was in my collection of “stuff” in the basement, the letter N I purchased from Hobby Lobby a few weeks ago and the flowers in the little vase I already had as well.  Enough babbling from me, let’s get to the good stuff!

 Without further ado, the powder room! (It’s hard to take photos of a 5×5 room let alone night photos but I couldn’t wait until tomorrow morning which is quite busy with me sleeping in.)

Here’s one more look at before and after:

Ah, so much better!  If you haven’t had a chance to check out the other days of Roomspiration you can head over to Abode Love for Entryways, View Along the Way for Living Rooms and today is Bathrooms with Homemaker on a Dime.  Monday we start another week of Roomspiration with Guest Bedrooms at DIY by Design. 
I’m also linking up to these great places:

The Shabby Nest
Furniture Feature Fridays
Chic on a Shoestring Decorating


By 26 Comments Filed Under: bathroom, Before and After, newplace, Our Home, painting, projects

How I Painted our Oak Trim White

September 15, 2011

UPDATE:  It has been almost a year and half since I painted the trim on our main floor and banister, the rest of the house has been at least a year as well.  It is holding up extremely well considering we have 4 kids and 2 dogs.

 

I have also painted our kitchen cabinets with the same method after a failure using the Rustoleum Cabinet Transformations kit, you can check out more on the kitchen here.

So I’ve received a few questions on how I painted my trim, what paint did I use, etc. and thought I’d type up a blog post on it for you to reference.

First off I purchased some Fast Prime 2 by Zinsser from our Menards store. It says you can paint over glossy wood trim surfaces etc. without sanding. For some reason I can’t find it on the Zinsser website but here is what my can looks like and I just purchased this in June of 2011.  Don’t judge my painting skills by the looks of my cans, I am messy but I get the job done and I have never figured out a good trick to pouring paint out of the can without getting the can all covered.
When painting, one of the most important tools is your paintbrush.  I used the Wooster Shortcut which was really helpful for getting into the corners, hard to reach spaces and stair spindles.   My other brush is a Purdy paintbrush and I can’t remember the name of mine at the moment but there are a variety to choose from and the paint professional at your paint store should be able to help  you select the proper brush.

I primed the trim and did two coats, letting it dry for at least 24 hours between coats even though I think it said you could re-coat in less time. I then found this blog post while looking up painting oak trim,  Jenny inspired me to try the Ace Cabinet and Trim paint.

I painted two coats of the Ace paint over the primer, making sure they had at least 24 hours in between coats.  So far so good, I have four children and two dogs and the trim hasn’t been nicked or scratched, yet.
I also used the Ace paint on my banisters in black and that so far is holding up well.  I did sand the top of the banister and the ball on the post a bit because I knew they would take a beating.  If I’m roughing up a piece for painting I use 100 grit or what would be considered a medium grit.  I also sanded between coats of primer on the banister handrail area because it felt kind of rough and yucky.  When sanding between coats I usually use a fine grit paper, usually 220 or higher.  This time I used a foam sanding block by 3M and it was great for sanding around the spindles on the stairs.  The trim I did not sand and it felt fine.
So there you have it, my trim painting process.  I think that Jenny at Anything Pretty does a great job explaining this process as well.  If you have any more questions, I’d be happy to answer them for you.   If you do paint your trim white, I’d love to see it, so send me a link or pictures!

Disclaimer:  This is the process and also the products I used, I am not a professional painter and you may not achieve the same results using the method that I used.  I also was not paid or compensated in any way by ACE, Zinsser, Purdy or 3M for mentioning their products in my post.

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By 5 Comments Filed Under: painting
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