New House: Living Room

I have a grown-up living room!  Although it doesn't start out looking very grownup, I have big plans for this space.  No more asking guests to sit in juice stains and talk over the sound of Dora the Explorer (that's what the kids' room is for!)

Here's where our grown-up living room is starting out:

The problems include (obviously) the paint, but you can see I am already working ideas for that.  Additionally, we wanted to put a television on that blank wall, but we're torn.  There's no cable outlet there, so that will take some creative wiring/wireless projects.  And we aren't sure how much we would use a separate television.  Guests don't come over to watch TV, and when Jon and I watch, we just watch from the kids' room.

Projects include:

• Paint
• Furniture placement
• Curtains
• Art and Design
• Using my mirrors - you know I love my mirror wall!
• Some great lighting (no overhead lights)
• Ceiling paint - low on the priority, but you can see the owners randomly painted a gloss patch on the ceiling - ignorant.

What are your thoughts??

New House: A Cool Kids Room

Obviously, my big complaint in all my house posts have been the fleshy beige that someone decided would make the house attractive.  It doesn't.  You've seen one of the living rooms that we are designating The Kids Room already, but here's a reminder of our starting position:

Well, fast forward a few weeks and we've done two major things: 1) Move in (please forgive the pile of toys as we figure out what stays and goes) and..drum roll....2) PAINT!

So, in addition to a bunch of furniture getting thrown in (more on that below) we got this great paint!  This color is called "Fine Silver" and I know it looks a lot like the "Thin Ice" we used in Avery's room, but what can I say?  I'm a sucker for Shades of Grey.  The colors, not the book, although feel free to read the most hilarious review of that horrible book HERE.

Now, forgive the messy room, but let me give you a quick tour of what we're dealing with.

First, you can see from the picture right above, this color is a BIG change from the beige.

The dressers are IKEA's Hemnes line and we also have two more upstairs.  Love em.  One here is for Cassidy's clothes and one is for Avery's.  We always just dress the kids down here where all the action is instead of hauling each of them BACK  upstairs periodically to get ready for the day.  So much easier.

We mounted our television up high to save room, but we still have a bit of space on the mantle for DVDs and the like.

The couch is currently a Goodwill find that Jon got in Alabama that the kids can jump/play/spill on.  I'd like to replace it with two big squishy chairs eventually to keep the room open more, but the couch is working at the moment.  Even though it's sitting directly on the floor cause we can't find the legs in all of our boxes downstairs.

The ceiling that didn't look so beige with beige walls now looks REALLY beige.  In face, the whole house has fleshy ceilings, but they are going to be a "Yeah, if we have time, it would be nice to repaint the ceilings" project.  More important things to do, so no one look up!

That slide was a $30 buy at a thrift store and has scored me Mom of the Year status.

The bench in front of the fireplace was from Home Depot that held books in our old house.  Now, we think it'll find a new home.  The plan is to block out the fireplace with wood or something that we've painted with chalkboard paint so the kids can have fun with that.  Maybe a big piece of metal painted with chalkboard paint so they can put magnets on as well, but Cassie still likes to put magnets in her mouth, so maybe just drawing is a good step.

So I hope you are all forgiving the mess.  Moving + kids is always a work in progress.  We are in the process of paring down all of those toys.

I love love love the change, although the color tends to look blue rather than grey.  Still, no complaints from me.  Wait until you see the color playing off my curtains that will frame that big window!!

New House: Kids' Room

We are BEYOND lucky that this house comes with TWO living rooms.  I can make one for the kids and one for me.  With real bookshelves and books.  And when people come over, they don't have to hold conversations over Dora or sit in juice stains!!!

But, I digress, this is about the kids.  Typical.  Here is their room (aka our second living room)

A few problems right off.  The fleshy walls I've complained about before.  There's a fireplace (which I think is very cute) that we won't use because of the kids (wish it was in the OTHER living room) and need to cover somehow.  The yucky ugly carpet.  But, it's got great light, lots of space, opens right to the kitchen, and has a cute little coat closet inside that might be a great future toy storage area OR a place to hang clothes for the week, since we tend to get dressed downstairs in the mornings.

So my list is as follows:

• Paint walls
• Paint ceiling
• Cover fireplace (maybe a book rack here?)
• Turn closet into some great toy storage/clothes prep area
• Make a chalkboard area on one of the walls (see inspiration below)
• Curtains and art
• Find a cheap but good looking rug that can be thrown away after a year

Here's some inspiration I had:

I love the idea of a chalkboard under the chair rail!  I know that there will be chalk dust all over, but this IS a playroom.  This might be perfect for one of the walls.

I'm obsessed with this craft I found on youaremyfave.com

This place will be high traffic for kids and it's where our television will be to start, so it needs a lot of attention.  Can't wait to get started!

Bay-bee Steps

Well, I finally have a slight room update to share.  Now, please be assured we have made a lot of updates to the house, but it takes a while before I can probably blog about them.  So, without further ado, here's the current state of our bay window.  As you'll recall, we started with this:

Ugly red valance

And here's where we are now:

 

So this picture was obviously taken from further back, but what I've done is take off the valance, and use a really big curtain rod (Bed Bath and Beyond) and crisp white curtains (Vivian curtains from IKEA) to border the entire bay window area instead of decorating with the valance.  You can also see (and more about this later) that we bought a sweet bench/storage unit for Avery's toys.

Now, no need to tell the husband about my next plan, since they are hiding in a bottom drawer upstairs, but I purchased these amazing curtains at IKEA last weekend:

Ka-POW!  There's some color!  A little too much for Jon Beach at the moment, so once the walls are painted a nice, neutral color that will make these curtains look good, these babies are going up.  It's going to look AMAZING.

So left to do will be to paint the walls, get new blinds for the windows, and hang up those beautiful curtains.  All in good time, but I like how it's slowly coming about.

Do you have any secret things purchased that you can't tell your significant other/roommate about yet?

Fall Decor - Part #1

We've got this big, beautiful bay window (sans curtains because I haven't picked anything out yet) and I saw a cute idea on, of course, Pinterest, for decorating using leaves, so off I went.

I bought empty glass ornaments and fake fall leaves at Michaels:

Inserted the leaves in there, and hung them up with twine:

Pay no attention to that girl in the reflection

I think it looks classy and elegant, while bringing in a little autumn to the house.  And, I can reuse the ornaments for Christmas!

Any dual-purpose decorations in your house?

Living Room Update

Check out the House Tour tab up top to see what our wood floors look like in the living room!  Sans furniture, which hides it all, of course....

From the Ground Up

Close to the top of our list of things to get done in the new house first was flooring.  We didn't want to put furniture in, then move it all out to do floors and move it BACK in.  Yuck.  So, pre-move-in was our best option.

The living room was covered in clean, but stained, carpet:

The dining room and kitchen have in-good-condition, but ugly, linoleum:

So we set out to Lowe's, Home Depot, AND Lumber Liquidators in search of the perfect wood flooring.  There are SO many choices from real hardwood (softer, but can be refinished, but more expensive) to laminate (harder, but can't be refinished, but cheaper) to cork (soft and quirky) and bamboo (love it, but pricey).  I mean, your head really just explodes trying to decide, and even taking and buying samples of the wood to look at in your house still makes it hard.

So. Many. Choices.

After collecting all of THOSE samples, we found even more stores in the DC/NOVA area to hit up.  Which, of course, led to more samples.

Avery gets into the testing phase

We narrowed it down to a few, and, viewing them in different lights and getting advice from my friend, Andrea, we decided we really liked one in particular from a store called Rick's near us.

It's the lightest of the three large samples pictures above.  We were rolling with the middle color (not too dark, not too light, just Goldilocks enough for us) but Andrea pointed out how that one looked in evening light, and it just looked a little cheaper than the nice tone it gave off in the bright light.  Since our house isn't well-lit to begin with, we didn't want to stare at cheapy looking floors all the time.  the lighter color was the same brand, and although lighter than what we originally were looking floor, didn't change much in different lights.  We also enjoyed the rustic looking vibe of the lighter color, which showed the "knots" in the "wood" off.  Home Depot has a similar (and cheaper!) style and color called Highland Hickory, but, of course, all the samples were gone at both Home Depots near us. 

In all honesty, it was exhausting and quickly became no fun when trying to decide.  But eventually, my rationale was "Something you buy a house with wood floors, and you just go with it and tailor your house around them, so just get something you like and go with it!"  After reiterating this mantra and making some eliminations, we decided to go with the Highland Hickory from Home Depot. 

Pergo makes this, and we chose it for several reasons.  Not just for color, which is how I pick my football teams.

Pros to this flooring:  Super durable and cheaper than hardwood flooring, and it looks great!

Cons to this flooring:  We can't refinish it, like you can hardwood.

So, little by little, Jon was able to start cutting and clicking in our new floor!

We didn't have the time to put the new laminate in the kitchen before move-in date, so that's still on our list.  BUT, we are SOOO happy to have the floors so close to being done in the living room.  They look amazing, really open up the space, and feel great!  With just a little bit of the trim and stuff left to go, we should be done in no time!