Our Brilliant Idea for TV Storage!

Good morning!

I'm taking a break from "before and after" to show you our new TV armoire, because I think this is a brilliant idea!  We had a rather shallow/narrow space in our family room to put a TV, and I didn't really want to mount it on the wall (mostly because I didn't have the mental energy to decorate around a TV on the wall...it seemed easier to stick it in something...but what?).  A typical entertainment unit or armoire would have been way too deep for the space, and it would have cut into the primary walkway through the room (refer to the photos below to see what I mean).  

So we scoured Craig's List and found an old china cabinet for $50.  You can see it below in all it's glory.  I think the people we bought it from were...um...surprised that anyone wanted it!

My husband removed the glass doors and reworked some of the wood trim, and I painted the whole thing (Annie Sloan Chalk Paint in Chateau Grey with dark wax on top, in case you're curious!).  We added some new hardware too.  It ended up being only 18 inches deep, perfect for a flat screen TV, and gives us extra storage in the bargain! 

I don't know why I never thought of it before!  With TVs being so skinny these days, why buy a big old piece of furniture to hold them?  For us, this was the perfect solution!

Next up is our master bedroom renovation...see you soon!  :)

My Family Room & Kitchen

Hi everyone!  I'm back to share some photos of our family room renovation, with a little kitchen thrown in too.  These areas are connected, and definitely contain the majority of our "living" in this house.  When we're awake anyway.  :)

The feel of the house when we bought it last summer was cozy, but I knew I wanted to make some changes to reflect our taste.  Here is a "before" of the family room:

And here is the "after," from basically the same angle.  I stepped backward a few more paces but you get the idea!

I actually painted this room a warm green/beige at first, but within 24 hours I knew it was the wrong color!  The room doesn't get a ton of direct sunlight and the color felt cold.  My husband, who is ridiculously patient with me, agreed to add this board and batten wall treatment to give the room some interest.  Then I painted the upper portion of the wall "Echelon Ecru" by Sherwin Williams.

Here's a "before" of the fireplace, which is wood burning and was one of the main things I loved about the house.  I think I cried the first time we used this...on a chilly day...in September.  A little eager?  :)

The "after."  We painted the whole fireplace white ("Roman Column" by Sherwin Williams) and it updated the look instantly.

This next photo gives you an idea of the kitchen, which is adjacent to the family room.  I am standing near the fireplace to take the photo, if that makes any sense!

I'm not showing you too much of the kitchen, because, other than paint over the plum color on the walls, we haven't done a lot.  We know that in the long-term, we hope to give the kitchen a major overhaul but that takes lots of cash, as we all know!  We'd rather save up and do it right in a few years. In the meantime, it's functional, and I can dream!

 This last photo is my favorite, because it gives you a sense of how the room "feels" when you walk in now.  I love the textures and colors together.  The seagrass rug was a $50 Craig's List find and the antique Persian rug on top was something I found at an antique shop in Ohio's Amish country...all balled up and forlorn, filthy, just waiting for me to come and rescue it!  (And on a related note, I now know how to hand-wash antique rugs in my driveway, in case you ever need to know.)

We're almost done with our home renovation tour...I'll be back soon with some more details!

Entryway, Powder Room and Laundry Room Reveal!

Hello friends!  I'm finally getting around to showing you all some more of the renovations we've been up to in the year since we bought our new house!  I like to call this section "Wallpaper. Wallpaper.  Wallpaper." 

We'll start with the entryway.  I've always wanted a little entryway to welcome people into our home, and it's so fun to decorate because it's so small and cute...totally manageable!  Here is the before:

And here is the after!

We removed two layers of wallpaper, replaced the lighting fixture, and painted out all the trim white ("Roman Column" by Sherwin Williams).

The above shows a view of the front door from another angle, with more dated wood trim.  The below is after we replaced the front door and side light with something a little more up-to-date. (I'll show you some exterior shots soon!)

Next we have the powder room, which, if you're keeping track, is off the hallway that I briefly showed you in the "before" shot above.  It's a huge bathroom, and I love that!  But it was pink, and didn't really go with any of our decor.

Strangely, after all the wallpaper we removed throughout the house, the powder room was the one room we ended up adding wallpaper.  However, have you checked out the price of wallpaper lately?  Phew!  I didn't want to spring for the whole room, so my husband added a chair rail about halfway up the wall.  It cut way back on how much wallpaper I needed, and I like that the lower painted portion keeps it from getting too "busy" in there.  :)

Another angle, this one of my favorite new mirror from Ballard Designs!  And a little corner of the chandelier (from Home Depot) that I got to put in the bathroom...never done that before!

Lastly, we have the laundry room.  This was tricky.  The laundry room is the only direct access point to the backyard patio (door on the right in the photo below), so I couldn't just close the door and forget about it.  However, it's also the entry point from the garage (I'm standing in the garage entry door for the photo below) so it needed to be functional, too.  Here is the before:

And here's what we did!  Painted all the wood, removed the wallpaper, and added a cute lighting fixture.  We also removed that waist-height cabinet on the left.

My gifted husband was able to build me this wall, with some simple boards and hooks and paint, which I love to use as a dumping ground for all our coats and backpacks when we walk in the door.

Eventually we'd love to build a wooden counter to go over top of the washer and dryer (basically so I have more room to put junk when we walk in through the garage!) but for now this is doing the job.  And it looks pretty when we walk through there on the way to the backyard!

Thanks for hanging in there with me!  I've got a few more renovations to show you, if you're still around!  :)

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!  I think the house is happy to have her floors all shiny and new throughout the first floor.  We also attacked all of that dark wood trim.  (Although most of the time it felt like it was attacking me, not the other way around!  That stuff 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.  (Have you girls discovered her yet?  Unbelievable!!)

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.  I'm so happy to know we're coming into a place with such wonderful memories within its walls.

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! :)