Our New Living and Dining Rooms

Hello friends!  (If you're still my friend after all this time!)

I will start by saying that we've been busy since our move to Cincinnati last June.  Busy with the house, busy with school (kindergarten for Nina, pre-school for Henry), busy with jobs (Brent works from home and the move has been great for him.  I am still working as a mama-at-home.)  My immediate family mostly lives in Ohio so we've been busy with them too.  We are happy and feeling so very thankful for what we have in life.

But occasionally one of my friends or long-distance family will say to me "Seriously?  With Nina and Henry's rooms on your blog?  Still?  Can't you post something new?"  :)  I admit, my heart has been more into doing the projects than posting about the projects, but after my long absence, we've managed to get quite a bit done.  I thought you might like to see!

Here is a before shot of our living room/front room/whatever you want to call it.  This and the dining room (which you can see connects on the left side of the photo) were the only rooms on the main floor that hadn't been converted to hardwood floors...

...so the first thing we did was convert them!  The house can breath a bit easier now, I think.  We also attacked all of that dark, dated wood trim.  (Although most of the time it felt like it was attacking me, not the other way around!  That stuff from the 70s can really soak up the paint!)  I love how much brighter the whole room feels.

Another angle of the room gives you a sense of how large it is.  I struggle with placing the furniture in such a way that it doesn't achieve the "spin cycle effect," where everything looks like it's just smashed against the walls.  Placing my desk at a right angle from the wall seemed to help a bit.

This room gets a ton of light and I love to sit here and read sometimes.  The armoire in the background is great storage for all my junk that no one wants to see!

Here is a before shot of the dining room.  When we got into the redecorating, we realized there had been wallpaper in this room that the previous owner had painted over with a sponge technique.  We had no choice but to just paint over it: that stuff wasn't coming down!  Still crossing my fingers that it holds up with all those layers on the walls!

Here is the dining room now.  Lots of fresh paint, new curtains, new chandelier, new hardwood floors.  My husband augmented the chair rail that was already in the room with some vertical boards to make it look like board and batten.  We just painted the entire lower half of the wall, including trim, the same color, and it turned out great!

Here's a view of the room as you're standing in the living room.  You can see my kids' silhouettes and my collection of pretty dishes hanging on the walls.  The gorgeous fabric on the pillows that flank the hutch is called Bosporus Toile, and I got it at this website.

We've done a lot more so I hope to have the time in the coming weeks to share it.  I've listed my paint colors below for you, in case it might help.  I hope you all are doing well too!  :)

Living/Dining Room Trim Color: Sherwin Williams "Roman Column"
Living/Dining Room Wall Color: Sherwin Williams "Sea Salt" (mixed at 60% strength)

Henry's Room

It was pretty important to us to get the kids' rooms done first, mostly because we wanted them to have a place to call their own.  But, I must admit, I was also really psyched to give Henry a little boy room!  The family who lived here before us had two girls, and we thought it was a good time to inject some boyishness into the place!

Just as with Nina's room, we stripped the wallpaper and replaced the pink carpets.

Henry's room got a board and batten wall treatment too, and a fresh coat of paint.  This color is called Sepia Tan by Benjamin Moore.

We removed the old vertical blinds, which lightened up the room considerably.  Henry's buffalo check curtains from Pottery Barn Kids are so cute in here!

I love Henry's bedding.  It's a quilt from Pottery Barn Kids with a camel colored duvet from Woolrich.  The "H" pillow, red ticking stripe pillow and brown corduroy pillow are all made by me, when I was sitting in California, trying to keep busy until we could make our move back to the Midwest!

I always try to use an area rug in rooms that have wall-to-wall carpet.  It just seems to cozy it up and define the space a little bit.  I picked up Henry's rug at Tuesday Morning and the colors are perfect in here!

He still has plenty of room for his toys and books and other little boy goodies!

I love how warm and welcoming the room feels.  When I go in to check on Henry at night, half the time I want to crawl into bed with him and take a nap.  (Plus, he still has that sweet little three-year-old boy smell that I can only get when he's asleep and actually holding still.  I'm going to soak it in as long as I can!)

I hope he loves his room as much as I do!

Nina's Room

As promised, here is the first of many stops along our renovation path.  You may not want to hold your breath between posts, though, because these room-by-room changes are taking a LONG time!  

Out of respect for the previous owners of the home, the "before" photos are going to be rather limited.  So you'll have to forgive me if the angles of the before and after photos don't match up!

That being said, here is a photo of my daughter (age 5) Nina's room, from the day we had our home inspection.  Yep, that's my husband, who had Achilles tendon surgery in the spring and was on crutches for weeks!  

A few things I will point out about the room.  The carpet was pink.  There was lots of wallpaper.  There was pink crown molding.  In short, this is a room I would have rocked in the 1980s.  I wish I had something this cool when I was a kid.  Alas, decorating times have changed, and this room needed a change too!

I get lots of inspiration from all over the web, and this pin board was the kick start of the whole room.  It came from the amazing Holly Mathis:

I also loved the colors of this gorgeous room from a furniture store in California called Art For Kids:

And...here is how Nina's room looks today!

We went with a gorgeous seafoam green for the walls. (That is, after days upon days of removing wallpaper!)  It's called "Pale Vista" by Olympic.  My talented husband even indulged me and created a board and batten treatment for the lower half of the walls.  (We relied a lot on this tutorial from Just a Girl for the board and batten.)  I love it!!

You'll notice we also changed out the pink carpet and painted the crown molding a crisp white.  Here's another shot, a little closer up, of the wall treatment.

I would lay awake for hours in the months before we moved to Ohio, counting the days until the house would be ours.  All those sleepless nights translated into lots of ideas for projects to keep myself busy, and these Euro pillows and striped accent pillows are one of the many results!

The kids' rooms both have these adorable window recesses.  I can just imagine them hiding away in there with the curtains closed, reading a book or daydreaming.

I am so glad we decided to complete the kids' rooms first.  I think it helps for them to be excited about their new house, and it gives them a place to hang out where I don't have to tell them "Don't touch that!"  So many other parts of the house feel like a crazy jungle gym of boxes and piles and paint cans.

Now all Nina needs are a few little pals and she'll be ready for her first sleepover!

Coming Out of Hibernation?

Wow.

So, here I am.  It's been awhile!  I know I've been gone a long time.  Does anyone know how long bees hibernate anyway?  Could my absence still be called a hibernation after all these months?

We've had some big changes.  Some I can talk about, and some, as I'm sure you'll understand, are best left to a personal chat over a glass of wine on the back patio.  I will say that it's been an incredibly rough few years, starting with our move to California in the summer of 2010.  In some ways I feel like an entirely different person, but I guess hard things will do that to you.

In the good news department, though, it turns out I am still the Queen Bee!  In June, we were able to finally move back to Cincinnati, Ohio!  Here's a photo of us that we took mere minutes after crossing the Ohio River.  It's not the most flattering picture of any of us, considering we had just completed a LONG cross-country drive from northern California, but I will always treasure it because I know what emotions I felt when we drove across the bridge and saw my hometown again, knowing that this time I was here to stay.

My husband's job has taken us from Cincinnati (where we met, got married, and had Nina), to Colorado (where Henry was born), and then to California.  We've been gone for over five years.  I didn't always know that I wanted to return to Cincinnati, but as time wore on, it became obvious to us that we wanted to be back in the Midwest, close to family and friends.

Within a few days of moving back, we found ourselves at the Fourth of July parade in downtown Madeira, which is a small Cincinnati suburb.  This is where I grew up and where I always hoped to live again.  People call it Mayberry, and for good reason!

As you might have guessed, I am back on my blog because we are homeowners again!  It's been so fun after being home renters in California. We bought a fabulous family home in Madeira on a cul-de-sac, one that had been owned by the same family for over 30 years.  It's showing it's decorating age a bit, but that only makes the before-and-after photos more exciting, right?

I am so happy to be home, and I am slowly feeling more like myself again.  I'll be around periodically to share our home renovation projects with you.  That is, if there's anyone left out there to see them! :)

Postcard from Hibernation #6

Happy December to you all!

I have found a new favorite project and wanted to share. I just made this adorable sign for my kids' bathroom. What do you think? (Nevermind that neither of my kids can read!)

My husband bought some barn/fence wood from a guy off Craig's List. I love that about him! (My husband, not Craig.) He just cut some of the boards and attached them to each other in the back with some metal strips, then added a hook for hanging.

I printed some letters off the computer, then just traced them (pushing very hard) onto the surface. The wood was soft enough that it made an indentation where I had traced, and I simply went back with my paintbrush and filled in the letters. After that, I sanded to rough up the letters a bit, and slapped on a coat of polyurethane.

If you or your husband don't feel like buying old wood off Craig's List, you can just as easily go to Lowe's and have them cut you a piece of new wood. That's what I did with this Grocery sign that I made for our kitchen! I brought it home and banged on it with a hammer and nails and whatever else I could find in the garage. (Added bonus: aggression release.)

Then I stained the wood (which brought out all the bangs and dents I had just added), and traced some letters onto the wood, sanded, and polyurethaned, same as I did with the bathroom sign above. See? Looks old, but it's straight from the hardware store.

Instant vintage...I love it!

Postcard from Hibernation #5

These days, it's a big deal for me to post more that one thing per...six months. You know I'm psyched if it's two in the same month! I must be responding to the sweet comments you've left on my last blog post. Seriously, thank you so much for taking the time to say nice things to me...I tried to email you back if your address was attached to your comment, but if it wasn't, please know that I am thankful for your words!

I went to a local charity tag sale last Saturday. That's less than two weeks ago, girls! I am on some kind of hot streak. I picked up this red chair with cute-but dated-fabric for $15. (Nina and Henry discovered that Mama had the camera out and insisted on helping.)

We have crazy warm weather in northern California (this Midwestern girl is not used to 60 degrees in November, I can tell you). So I headed outside, whipped out the paint stripper and went to work.

After stripping, I added some color with Minwax's Dark Walnut stain, followed by two coats of satin polyurethane. Then I dug in the fabric bin for this yellow plaid that I bought a few years ago on clearance. Thanks to my husband's muscle and the staple gun, the "reupholstery" was a cinch.
It's a perfect spot for my Thanksgiving turkey pillow, and I love walking by it and knowing that I rescued this baby from ugly, all for $15. Happy Thanksgiving!

Postcard from Hibernation #4

Happy November! I truly can't believe it's been over four months since I've sent you all a "postcard." I think about you, and blogging, frequently. I still sit on the couch after the kids have gone to bed and read about all the wonderful things you are doing. But I am still very much smack dab in a season of life that takes all my attention. Blogging continues to take a back seat to Nina (who is loving kindergarten!), Henry (who still attends "mama school," as he calls it!), supporting Brent, and building a life here in California. I admit that I often daydream of living in my forever house, close to my family and back in my Ohio hometown, but for the time being...I am here. So.

That doesn't mean I haven't been busy! Just that my teeny tiny California ranch house is bursting at the seams, filled with projects that I do in hopes of giving them a more permanent home someday. Here are a few examples!

I found this ship at a local resale shop for $5. Though Henry is enchanted with pirate ships right now, I didn't so much fancy having one in my living room.

I took off the metal sails, covered the red bottom with a dark walnut stain, and stitched up some simple blue ticking stripe panels for some new sails. Cute!

Next, I searched for this table for about six months, biding my time on Craig's List. I wanted an antique that I could refinish to match my current dining room furniture, which I inherited from my grandmother years ago. Here it is (before), covered in at least three layers of brown paint. Pretty.

After many...many...many hours of stripping paint, I finally got it down to bare wood.

A few coats of dark walnut stain, a few coats of polyurethane, and I finally have a sideboard that is worthy of the rest of my grandmother's furniture!

Of course, the California ranch doesn't have a dining room to put it in, but a girl can dream!

Lastly, here is a lesson for all your husbands. We were out one Saturday afternoon and passed by a garage sale. Just that morning, my husband had said to me "We are not buying any more furniture while we live here!"

Um. You can see where this is going.

We spotted this huge, sturdy bookshelf for $11.

Let's pause a moment to take in it's ugliness, combined with layers of blue goo.

I cleaned. He sanded. I painted. He added new beadboard backing. It was a joint effort!

But Nina now has a home for her growing collection of books. And I just love the beadboard and cream paint combination!

Just remember this story when your husband tells you to stop acquiring projects. :)

Well, that's about it from around here. I'm sorry it's been so long! Here's hoping you're all doing well...I miss you!