Finding a New Home

Life as of late has been lived indoors, thanks to the off-and-on cold and/or rainy weather that the Midwest has been sending our way. (There's talk of snow flurries this week. Talk about a welcome home!)

But it seems fitting, this drive to the indoors, because right now we’re in the throes of house buying and are actually under contract on a house right now. It's been an exciting time, as we could see ourselves staying in this house for quite some time.

There's plenty that I'd like to do to this home (it currently is a mess of tans and decorating projects gone bad, including faux-bois on the kitchen cabinets and kids' painted handprints in the bathroom), and so I find myself researching all sorts of DIY ideas and paint colors and furniture purchases and a myriad of other things you can monitor along with me on Pinterest.

But the best thing we love is the location, which is in a part of town that's woven with walking paths and a pool just down the block and lots and lots of families littering the neighborhood. And it's not far from my husband's work (10 mins), church (5 mins), or our families (20 mins). I didn't know if it was possible, but things are starting to come together, it seems...

We are pacing ourselves in the process, trying to keep the future firmly in mind (along with the reality that life with a toddler naturally limits a lot of remodeling or redecorating) rather than get whisked away by pretty hardwoods and freshly renovated kitchenscapes. It can be quite the balance to strike!

I find myself having to remind myself to hold things loosely, that phrase that I feel as a banner over me now. I look at the stained floors and the pretty hues and I tell myself to calm. I look at the ridiculous wall paint choices or the cramped closets and I tell myself to calm. It is just a house, but I know the Lord cares about it for us all the same. I trust that he will guide us, as he did the first time around, to a house that will—in the end—suit us perfectly, as our first did for the year and a half that we lived there. And then when we needed to leave it behind, it sold without a hitch. The Lord saw us through that and I trust him to see us through this next one.

So I hold these things—the hopes, the hitches, the possibilities and the problems—loosely. I am learning this process slowly. I am being taught to practice at it constantly. But what matters, is that I am learning. And I am loosening this grip of mine.

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Making Progress on Decorating the Nursery

I've been thinking for quite some time about the room that will someday be my little girl's. I shared an inspiration-board post with some of my ideas and brainstorming for decorating this room for her:



But it's taken me quite some time to get around to actually working on the room. (Although I place a lot of that blame on my impromptu hospital stay and kidney calamity for much of October.)

Finally, though, it's coming together. It's still not finished yet, as I regroup and try to figure out how I want to tackle the artwork and wall decorations for the room. (Which I'm beginning to realize seems always to be a hang up for me when I'm decorating any given room.)

At any rate, progress is being made, so I wanted to share a progress report with you...

In my mood-board post for the nursery, I mentioned that I wanted to go anti-nursery and paint the walls cream. I have to admit that I love cream walls. (That was something I always loved about apartment living--walls were always painted neutral colors, of which cream was often a popular choice.)

But I always chickened out of painting my own walls white or cream. I am not quite sure why, if it feels like a waste painting a wall white when you could be painting a vibrant, splashy color, or if I don't trust my own instincts.

With this room, though, I finally committed to giving my love-for-white-walls life. After doing some research on paint colors, I picked the hue "Swiss Coffee" from BEHR, which they sent me to spruce up the baby's room. The name makes it sound like it would be tan, but it is actually the perfect shade of milky cream. I like it because at first glance, though it looks white, it has just enough cream in it to soften it up and keep it from being stark and sterile. In fact, "Swiss Coffee" is one of their most popular shades for cream!

And since we were DIY-ing this project, we picked their Premium Plus Self-Priming, Zero VOC and Low Odor Interior Paint, so that we wouldn't have to worry about me breathing in any pesky fumes that might hurt the baby. Plus, they offer it in an eggshell finish, which is a good finish for kids' rooms since it is easy to clean!

Here's what the room looked like before we painted it (previously it served as our home office, which I featured in this post):



Those tan walls may not look it in the photos, but they were not in great condition. There were quite a few scuff marks and holes and glow-in-the-dark-stars that had been painted over (instead of peeled off before applying the paint). Fortunately, with a little spackle and two coats of the BEHR paint, all those imperfections melted away—even the dozen or so glow-in-the-dark stars that I wasn't able to scrape off!

Then, we started moving the furniture into the room, making use of as many good-quality hand-me-downs as possible to save money.

Here's what it's looking like now:







I love how the creamy walls makes the yellow and teals of the accents pop and allows me to have more fun with those accessories.

And, don't worry; I'll share more specifics about the room in a later post and keep you updated once I make some decisions on the artwork. But so far, I am loving how this room is coming together and heralding the arrival of our little girl, waiting in the wings!

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An Easy Makeover: Updating Our Living Room with a New Area Rug

While much of my decorating energy has been funneled toward preparing the nursery (more on that soon!!), our living room also got some much-needed attention recently.

For a long time, we’ve had a blue rag rug that sat under our coffee table. It was there in our first apartment and then again in our second. So it’s no surprise that we followed tradition and put it in the same spot in our house.

But as the living room has fallen into place—with my media-cabinet overhaul and the new buffet along the wall, the rug was begging for an update. It was too small for the space and the color was quite a bit darker than anything else in the room. It simply didn’t fit.

Here’s what it looked like before:

OUR LIVING ROOM: BEFORE

So for quite some time, I’d been looking for a replacement, shopping in stores and poking around online. But if you’re looking for something that doesn’t involve dark reds or browns or an oriental pattern, most of what’s out there will leave you pretty disappointed.

I was about to give up when I came across Rugs USA, which has a huge assortment of area rugs that you can browse by category (contemporary, animal print, shag, etc.) or color. I went straight to the contemporary category and fell in love with the variety to choose from:



Plus, they’re almost always running a sale so even a rug that may originally run $250 will sometimes be marked down to $100, particularly around the holidays. (I’d recommend signing up for their email sales alerts to know when their big sales take place—I’ve seen them offer up to 75% off!)

I got the chance to review one of their rugs and ended up picking out the 5x8 size of their Homespun Moroccan Trellis Area Rug in blue:

I thought it would draw together the dusty blue hues of the couch cover and the botanical prints well. And when the rug arrived—days later—the color shown on the site was almost identical to the one I unrolled in my living room. Plus, it’s 100% wool and hand hooked, so there’s no shedding to worry about and still cushy underfoot.

I put it into place in front of my couch and, after giving the coffee table a quick makeover too with a darker stain (so that it wasn't quite as garishly orange), the living room seemed that much more pulled together:

OUR LIVING ROOM: AFTER

I love it and how it really ties the entire living room together. What do you think?!

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Making a Mirror with Spraypaint & Creating New Storage in the Process!

Is there really anyone out there who couldn't use more storage? Anyone who doesn't wish they had more places to stash the random odds-and-ends and keep them out-of-sight?

In our new house, that was surely the case for me, when I was trying to figure out where to stow stuff like board games and batteries, light bulbs and extra picture frames. On their own, they're not all that attractive so I didn't really want them out in the open. But then, since we access them fairly often, I didn't want to have to relegate all that stuff to the garage, which is where most of the other "un-pretty" household goods have ended up.

When the previous owners moved out, they offered to leave behind some of their shelving in the garage. We readily accepted, and one of the pieces of shelving they'd been using in the garage was this media cabinet. With it's squat dimensions, I thought we could surely put it and its shelves to good use in the living room.

The only problem? Those see-through glass doors. You can only rearrange board games so much and buy so many "pretty" baskets to corral your batteries and bulbs.

Instead, I wanted to try a product I'd heard of but wasn't all too familiar with: Krylon's Looking Glass Mirror-Like spray paint. Basically how it works, is that you spray it on the backside of a piece of glass and when you flip it over, looking at the front side, it will look like a mirror.

They call it a "mirror-like" paint finish because it's not as clear as a regular mirror; it has a darker, more antique-y finish. But, as long as you're not positioning it directly beside a real mirror, you can hardly tell the difference.

I really wanted those glass doors covered, so I decided even if the mirror-like finish didn't work out, I could always paint over them with a white finish or something, maybe cover them with a pretty wallpaper or fabric. So, I figured I didn't have anything to lose, gathered a couple of cans of the Looking Glass spray paint and got down to business.

It's important before you use the Looking Glass spray paint that you clean your glass well before painting it (unless you're going for an intentionally distressed look, which a lot of people do when trying to give it a mercury-glass finish). Once they were clean, I sprayed each door with light layers of the paint on the backside of the glass.

Here you can see how the paint when on, layer by layer. On the can, they recommend at least 5 light coats. I ended up doing about 6 or 7 light coats on each door, which took me 3 cans of the Looking Glass spray paint. (It comes in a smaller-sized can than your typical spray paint, so you're apt to go through it a lot faster.)


While I was painting the doors, I also decided to spruce up the door's hardware and take it from brass to silver, using my handy-dandy Krylon Premium Metallic Original Chrome (which is the same stuff I used to paint the lamps in my bedroom).

This time, when I used it, I only sprayed on a single coat and let it dry for about a week and a half before touching it to reassemble the cabinet. I haven't noticed any of the imprints that I noticed with the lamps, so I think using as few coats as possible coupled with ample drying time is the key to working with the chrome paint! (You can read more about my first project using the chrome paint, repainting some brass lamps, here.)



And here's how it looked once everything was dry and reassembled:





As you can see, from far away, the paint did an incredible job. There's no doubt that it's mirror-like! However, if you get up-close, there are a few noticeable flaws, because the paint can easily crackle or scratch off, which you can see happened in these detail shots:



You have to be very careful with anything you paint with this and plan not to handle the backside much. Because of that, I ended up gluing a backing board to the back of each door to serve as a buffer. So far, I haven't had any more problems with the paint chipping off, so just be intentionally careful with it, and you should be fine.

And, here's a wider shot of the whole living room, coming into place. I still want to paint the walls (maybe a pale blue or cream from my whole-house palette) and add some more seating, artwork, etc. But, the nuts and bolts of it are there:



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My Secret Weapon to Decorating My House

Things around my house have been unpacked for months now. Furniture is in place, dishes are organized in the cupboards, clothes placed in a row on hangers.

But then there’s that whole aspect of decorating, which takes a lot more effort than just taking something from a box and finding a home for it. Decorating takes time and thinking about arrangements and tweaking each one until you get it right. It takes effort.

And too often—when there are dishes that need to be done and laundry to be folded and shoes to be put away—the last thing I want to do is try to figure out what I want to put into frames to fill that empty hole on the wall.

Of course, no one says you have to decorate. But, for me, it’s those little touches that make a house feel like a home. So I love decorating—when it’s complete and not necessarily the long, drawn-out process it takes to get there. Sometimes that can be so overwhelming that I just ignore it, put it off until later because there are other things that need to be done.

But I’ve found that one of the surest ways to conquer the apathy toward decorating is pretty simple: Invite people over. Invite people over before everything’s done, even before everything’s out of boxes or organized or looking presentable. Invite folks over, and I’ve discovered that out of nowhere, a desire to unpack and unfurl and hang and hem pops up out of nowhere.

And in just a couple of hours or days, so much more gets accomplished.

That’s what’s happening right now around my house. In a month, we’ll have family down for a week to visit. So the paint cans—which have sat untouched for a couple of months now, since we did our last bout of painting in the bedroom—came out and curtains are getting hung and artwork being made.

It’s not that there’s an expectation that we have to impress them—no, that’s not it at all. Everyone we’ve invited over have been true-blue kindred spirits who could care less whether anything matches.

Instead, I think it has to do with what I mentioned earlier, that decorating makes a house feel like a home to me. And so when those folks come over, I want it to feel like home to them, too.

And so, here I am, painting again…

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{ photo source }

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For Me, This is Considered a Shopping Spree

When we moved into this house, I didn’t want to feel like everything had to be bought and arranged and perfectly matching from the get-go. Instead, I wanted to take my time building it up, putting my personal touches on it gradually, and slowly-but-surely turning it into a house that feels like us.

So the fact that over the past few weeks, I’ve found myself carrying home some big purchases almost seemed to fly in the face of that slow-but-steady pacing. What it really came down to, though, was some pretty good timing when I managed to find things that fit my style for a good price.

Want to see?

First up was buying our new kitchen table, which I mentioned that my husband bought me for my birthday. While our house has a formal dining room, I really wanted to have an eat-in kitchen so that I didn’t have to carry piping-hot dishes through the kitchen and around the corner at every meal. Fortunately, there’s plenty of room in this kitchen, so that’s where we’ve been eating. (As for the formal dining room, we have plans to turn it into a library!)

The table we’ve been using ever since we got married was one my parents happened to have that was compact and could come apart—perfect for us as apartment dwellers. But now as homeowners—and we plan on staying put in this house for awhile—we wanted more from our table.

So I started making a wishlist: First was that I loved having a round table; it seems to fit that nook so well. But I wanted one that came with a leaf so that when we have company over, we aren’t squished around the table, and open up the possibility that we can invite more than two people over at a time! I also wanted a white table. My first choice would be dark wood, but since our cabinets are blond and almost brand-new, I don’t think those will get changed anytime soon. So a white, painted table was my next choice.

After doing a lot of research (and discovering that round tables with leaves aren't super common!), I found this table at Pier1, which was on sale. So on my birthday celebration day, we went and ordered it and then, a week later, trotted over to the store to pick up my big-girl gift.





You can't see it in those photos, but when we got home, we discovered that there were a handful of little scratch and scuff marks on the brand-new table. (Hence the tablecloth that we use almost exclusively.) Cue the sad music. Fortunately, though, the store was super understanding and ended up giving me a 25% discount off the sale price to make up for the damage.

I talked it over with my husband and decided to take that extra money and put it toward buying a new bedspread, which I’ve been wanting for a long time now. (You can get a sneak peek of the hand-me-down floral quilted coverlet we'd been using here.) I knew Kohls was having a sale (when aren’t they having a sale, though?) and I’d received a coupon in the mail for $10 off anything $10 or more. No time like the present to see what kind of deals I could scout out, right?

Well, I came across this bed-in-a-bag set that seemed a perfect fit for our bedroom décor:



(I’d actually even bookmarked a project on Pinterest to make curtains just like these!)

I’m not usually a bed-in-a-bag person (can we say super-duper matchy-matchy?) but the price was right for the comforter alone, so everything else in the sack (pillows, shams, bedskirt) were welcomed extras!





The entire set is a soft gray, which goes well with our gray walls. I’m thinking that I’d like to make some colorful, patterned curtains to add some color into the room and tie everything together. But—you know me—there’s time for that!

And did you notice anything else in those photos? Well, as it turns out, while I was browsing the home section, I decided to hit up the clearance section. Imagine my surprise when I found this gorgeous starburst mirror, originally $159.99, marked down to $31.99! Add on my $10 discount, and it was like a steal. I had been trying to figure out what kind of art I wanted to put over our bed and when I saw this mirror, I knew it’d be the perfect solution.



For me, this is a shopping spree. I hardly ever do much shopping outside of the grocery store, so to nab three kinda big purchases in just a week’s time? Well, let’s just say that’s rare around here! But it all felt right and it’s so much fun to see this house come together, grow up, take shape little by little.

(By the way, does anyone have any tricks for getting scuff marks off of painted surfaces? I’ve tried cleaning those spots on the table to no avail, but figured I’d throw it out there because you guys always seem to have some great suggestions up your sleeves!)

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{ shopping bag photo source }

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From Brassy to Flashy: Transforming A Pair of Lamps for Our Bedroom

My husband and I are both big read-before-bedtime folks, with a stack of books on both sets of nightstands. But hoisting lamps onto the nightstands to aid that nightly routine has proved more bulky than I liked, with much of the nightstand taken up with the lamp base instead of books. To free up some space, I'd long wanted to mount some wall lamps to either side of our bed.

One day, as I was strolling a thrift store, I came across a brass, plug-in, spring-arm lamp, which reminds me of the kind you see in hotels. I knew those kinds of lamps often show up at secondhand stores, so I grabbed that one up (after testing it to make sure it worked, of course!) and trusted that I'd be able to find a second one to make a pair.

A couple of months later, I had my pair. But gold is not my decorating color of choice, so I turned to one of my tried-and-true decorating accomplices: a can of spraypaint. For this project, I used Krylon's Premium Original Chrome, which they sent me to try out for this project. I taped up the lamps' cords and light switch, stuffed the light socket and other open areas with tissues to protect them all from the paint.



Then it was time to get painting.

I know there are lots of metallic paints out there and I've tried my fair share, which often end up being disappointing imitations of silver, more gray or glittery than bright and shiny. But the chrome from Krylon was the exception; with the first coat it was a bright silver that I was going after for this project:





The paint when on smoothly, but I did find that it took it a long time to cure or else it would easily show smudges and fingerprints, ruining the finish. While the can itself recommends just a few hours to dry, I looked online and found other folks had to give their projects weeks. (Given that, I'd recommend only using it on projects that won't have to withstand much direct touching. Fortunately, we don't do much re-adjusting of the lamp arms and only have to turn the knob, so it works fine for us.)

Even with the lamps themselves painted, there was also the pesky issue of the cords. I liked that they plugged in because then we didn't have to worry about drilling into walls and hiring an electrician and all that. But those garish yellow cords did nothing for our decor. So, I decided to cover them up.

I did some research about whether you could safely paint the cords themselves and came up with conflicting information. So I decided to play it safe and wrapped them with some black electrician's tape and then painted that with the same color of paint that we used on the walls, a gray color from Mythic Paint. (You can read more about painting our bedroom walls and the exact color we used here.)

The nice thing about this safer-than-sorry solution, is that if I ever want to go back to the original color (doubtful, but you never know), all I have to do is peel the tape away and so goes the paint, no harm done!



At that point, it was time to mount them on the walls and put on some lamp shades. As it turns out, my parents had some small sconce shades in their basement, which they let me have when I was in town over Christmas. Can you believe how perfectly they match our wall color?! Oh, serendipity:



I still have yet to figure out what kind of art I want to put over our bed, but, as usual, I'm taking my time to find (or make!) the piece that's just right for this spot, which now sits squarely between these fully functional and perfectly matching lamps that are a piece of work in and of themselves. Don't you think?:







And a shot with the lights turned on:



Find out more about Krylon’s huge variety of spray paints—there’s one for nearly all your craft and DIY needs—by visiting their website. You can also like them on Facebook or follow them on Twitter. 

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Creating His-and-Hers Silhouette Art for the Bedroom

While the boxes have been unpacked for months now, there’s one notable element that has yet to find its place in this still rather new home of ours: artwork.

Though the shelves and drawers are full, the walls are still pretty bare. That’s because artwork is not something I just want to throw up on the walls simply to fill a space. But I want it to be meaningful, to be beautiful, to fill that space well.

So, I’ve been taking my time to fill those spaces while I waffle between the what and where of it all.

One of the first pieces of art that I was steadfast about, however, was a pair of his-and-hers silhouette images that I wanted to put up in our bedroom.

I’d first created these images for our wedding, which I framed and we hung up on the stone mantel of the fireplace that was in the lodge where we had our reception (and, coincidentally, also the wedding ceremony, thanks to a freak rainstorm!).

Here’s a mini step-by-step of how I created the silhouette of my picture:


I created it basically by taking a profile photo against a plain-colored wall and tracing (in Microsoft Paint, no less!) around my face and then filling the spaces in. Tedious? Sure. Overwhelming? Not really. I probably spent just a couple hours on each of them, which I think was totally worth the effort!



I originally framed them in some square record-album frames I already had and matted them with a springy green which matched my wedding colors. But after a couple of years, that green was just too bright, and so I decided to give them some new life with a little help of one of my best DIY friends: spray paint.

Krylon was kind enough to send me a couple of shades of their interior/exterior spray paint to try out for some craft projects around the house. This seemed like the perfect time to put some to good use, so I whipped out a can of Bahama Ocean Blue, which matched our shams perfectly, and spraypainted the frame’s cardboard backing for a new mat.







Oh my.

I love this color. I think peacock blue is my new favorite and this confirmed that for me. I especially like how well it complements the gray walls of the bedroom. (If you want to read more about how we repainted the bedroom, including the paint color we chose, click here.)

With my new mats dry, I simply used a tiny piece of double-stick tape to attach each silhouette (which was printed on regular computer paper) to the middle of the board. Then, sandwiched it between the glass and the frame, and they were ready to hang on the wall in our bedroom:











The fun thing about the placement I chose for them is that my husband’s face is closest to his closet and my face is closer to my closet (which is actually on the opposite side of the room). So they function kind of like directional images. (Alternatively, if I had put them over the bed, I would have had to flip them because I sleep on the left and of course I’d have to have them line up correctly!)

Up next? I still need to figure out some artwork for over the bed and a couple of other corner nooks in the bedroom. But, of course, there’s no rush!

Find out more about Krylon’s huge variety of spray paints—there’s one for nearly all your craft and DIY needs—by visiting their website. You can also like them on Facebook or follow them on Twitter.

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