Next…Master Bedroom

One area of the house I haven’t focused on much at all since we moved last June is our master bedroom.  Since we don’t spend much time in there apart from sleeping, it gets rather neglected in the beauty area.  On the flip side, it doesn’t usually get very messy either, which is always a welcome change for this mom who is constantly trying to keep the rest of the house from looking like a tornado went through it.  : )

I really would like to eventually get some curtains and something on the walls, so the room feels a little more homey and lived-in.  Plus, I just think it will be a fun room to decorate.  : )

Here is where we started, before we moved our bed and stuff in:

I realize that picture doesn’t tell you much about the room, but it does scream “90’s!” so you can get the vibe of the whole area.  Picture this, but continuing all around the room.  I’m really not a fan of maroon so I knew this would be one of the first things in the house to get painted, and thankfully it was.  My sister helped me paint it when my husband was out of town last fall, and I also took those curtains down ASAP.  They looked like big bushy eyebrows to me!! 

Here is the room today…keep in mind I have not done anything except paint in here!!!  This is the starting point, my friends.

Also, I realized that we still have the wreaths on our windows in this picture .  I did take them down yesterday, yay for me!!!!!  (Sarcastically patting myself on the back right now…)  Also, I’m just a little embarrassed because we normally have a nicer comforter on our bed, but I had spilled red wine while reading on it the night before so it was in the wash!  Baby blue spare blankets to the rescue!! 

We painted the room Worldly Gray by Benjamin Moore (color-matched in Olympic paint).  I think they may have made a little mistake in the tinting department as it didn’t seem quite the same color as the same Worldly Gray I painted in the dining room of our previous house, but I still really like it.  It bridges gray and tan and is a very calming neutral.  Which is exactly what I want this room to be…calming!!  I want it to be our quiet and calming refuge from the sea of noise our three rowdy (but very loved!) children bring to our lives. 

Ok, enough talking.  More pictures:

You can see from the picture above that it has a vaulted ceiling which I wasn’t sure of at first, but have since decided that I really like (especially because it has a skylight…see below).

It is a fairly large room, so much larger than our old bedroom.  The bed is king-sized so it takes up a lot of space, but there is still plenty of room around it.  One nice thing is that we don’t have to keep our dressers in our room as we have a pretty large closet-room attached too. 

Ok, here goes.  I have a lot of plans for this room!  See that little indented area in the wall? 

When we moved it in had a couple of shelves made of particle-board on a very unattractive metal shelving system (think metal strips with brackets on either side of the opening).  It looked like something college kids would have in their dorm room. 

I would like to make real wood shelves and trim them out to look something more like this inspiration photo:

(via Thrifty and Chic)

Wouldn’t that be pretty?  (I’m not sure my bibliophile husband would agree however… ; )

Next up, we need some curtains!

I really have no ideas for curtains yet, except I know they will be cheap.  : )  Stay tuned for that. 

Since I love lists, here’s a list of my ideas for this room:

• Install shelves in inset area (and paint the wall behind navy)
• Cheap curtains, most likely DIY
• Headboard (DIY…I’ve had all the materials for this for months and months and just haven’t done it yet!)
• Re-make bedskirt (since our bed is a Cali King I’d rather spend a little time sewing than a lot of money on a new one)
• Do something about the golden oak trim and doors (I’m mulling over this one, any suggestions?  My husband likes the wood-grain look while I would prefer to just paint it)
• Thrift a different side table for his side of the bed, something industrial strength to hold all the books he normally has stacked there.  : )
• Possibly install a different ceiling fan, perhaps the much nicer one from the kitchen area that we don’t really use?
• ART!!
• Maybe maybe if I get a wild hair (and lots of energy), put in faux beams on the vaulted ceiling.

I’ll leave you with that overload today and come back another day with some pictures that are inspiring me for this bedroom!

Hopefully in the meantime our littlest guy will get the tooth he has been cutting with a vengeance for the past couple of weeks and return to his former happy self and let me get some sleep (and more time to blog!). 

A New Rug

I am just a leeeetle bit excited today!!  This morning my husband showed me a tall rounded package leaning up against the sidelight on our door (basically covering it).  Not only was I glad that the UPS man arrived and left without getting stuck in our driveway (we have a good sheet of ice and snow on our sloping driveway!) but also because that package was our NEW RUG!!!!!
(Just indulge me for a moment.  I have never bought a big huge new rug before!!)

I got it in one of the Black Friday sales that was happening around the internet.  It is from RugsUSA and though I am a little leery of them due to some sketchy pricing practices (Sheena alerted me to this and yep, it is true!!  I checked and rechecked for a few months on the prices for this very rug just to see!) it was the best deal I could find on a rug like this.  I looked in brick and mortar stores and around the web and it was definitely a good deal.  Most of the rugs were way out of our budget or too small for the space I want to put it in.  It came with no problems at all and I reeeaaaallly really like it so we’ll see how it holds up to three little kids!! 
This little guy was only too happy to try the rug out…

It is BIG.  At least to me…it is 8’X10.5’ I think.  The natural jute is gorgeous and it is actually soft!  I was pretty worried that it would be rough and scratchy but it isn’t at all.  I anticipate some shedding both on clothes and on the floor but to me it is no biggie.  I’m excited to add this to our living room!

(Speaking of which, I’d better get cleaning in there so I can put the rug down!)  : )

Picking a Good Gray

If you look around the internet you’ll find loads of blog posts about picking the perfect gray.  I know, I’ve been scouring the internet for the “perfect gray” for the past couple of months!  I’m finally nearing the stage of painting the big room that houses our kitchen and dining area…plus the hallway that goes into our laundry/garage entry door.  I knew I wanted something different than the pastel purple that it was painted when we bought the house:

This color may have gone great with the grape vine curtains, but a huge area painted this color is just overwhelming!!  The color does nothing for the cabinets and floor either. 
The past couple of weeks now I’ve been looking at paint samples and a within the last week I’ve been painting samples all over the walls in here.  After painting a foam board in Benjamin Moore’s Moonshine, I quickly learned that the lighting in here tends to make that particular gray look very blueish.  And while I like the color, it just made the floor and cabinets look even more orange/red than they are. 
I didn’t want white as I’d like some white shelves and my white hutch to “pop” in here, and I didn’t want anything too dark as this side of the house doesn’t get a huge amount of sunlight. 
So, I went and got some paint chips and then samples in these Benjamin Moore colors:  Balboa Mist, Collingwood, and Silver Satin. 
Here they are on the wall:

They all look veeerrrry similar in this picture, but in real life Balboa Mist and Collingwood are pretty similar and Silver Satin is a lot lighter/whiter than the others. 
Here they are on another wall (the lighting here is terrible…but then again these colors will have to look good in any lighting situation so I suppose this is a good test!):

Again, in real life Silver Satin is much lighter than the others, but you get the idea.  Oh, and you can probably see what I’m talking about when it comes to Moonshine…a pretty color but in here much too blue-ish.   
I was going to show one more wall but they just looked all the same in that picture…I guess that’s what happens when the colors you choose are so similar! 
And the winner is…
Collingwood!!  It is a nice soft gray-meets-white-meets-a tiny bit of beige (notice I’m not calling it greige here!!!  for some reason that word gives me the heeby-jeebies…I’m weird I know :).  I felt the white of the frame just blended right into Silver Satin and Balboa Mist wasn’t much of a contrast either. 
I guess the moral of the story is…always always buy tester sizes for your paint, especially gray colors!!  It can read so very differently in each particular lighting situation.  I thought that Balboa Mist would be the winner…and I really love the pictures I’ve seen of it…but in this room I really felt Collingwood was more ‘right’. 
Now off to the paint store…
:)

And the curtains come down…

While there are many aspects of our new home that I like, the curtains are not one of them.

Exhibit A:

The 90’s called and they want their curtains back!

B:

C:

  Grape curtains and golden oak.  The new bread and butter?

D:

And E:

Now, I realize this could be much, much worse.  I could be dealing with pom-pom curtains and looots of old-lady lace ones like in our last house.  These are fine.  I think I actually made some similar to this when I was a kid.

But I don’t like them.  They aren’t me at all.  I am not a kid in the 90s anymore!

They have to come down.  They are actually already coming down, yay!  I promised my husband that we would not be undertaking any  projects for the first few months of owning our new home so we could have a bit of a break from home chaos…but curtains aren’t a project now are they!  They’re an essential part of home decorating.  :)

New curtains coming up!

Meet our new house!

Here is house number two for our family:

 

I finally went out and got better pictures of the front.  There are many beautiful oaks that surround the house so that makes it more difficult to get a good picture, but we love them for their shade and greenery!

See, hard to get a good picture with all the trees in front!  They’re great for privacy though!

Our front door.  I’m not sure if you can see it or not, but there’s a big lion statue on our front steps.  It came with the house and my husband is quite taken with it.  :)  There is also a lion door knocker.  I actually like those.  I think with some other type of house it would look silly, but being that our home is a more traditional style, they don’t look so out of place. 

I’m not going to show much of the inside today.  We’re slowly getting things where they belong, though it will be a long road.  It doesn’t look quite this bad anymore, but there is still a lot of unpacking to be done. 

Instead, let’s look around the outside!!  Which is what really drew us to this house in the first place. 

Huge yard from the vantage point of the deck/sunroom:

And then looking toward the deck/sunroom from the borders of our property:

Lots of space for kids (and adults!) to play, plus 3 more acres of woods (with trails that have Lord of the Rings names!  Posted on signs! ???)

Chicken coop (in need of inhabitants to eat the weeds in the chicken run):

 

Secret garden which has already been claimed by our 5 year old:

Wild black raspberries:

And mulberry trees:

We’re really enjoying our new home!  Especially in the heat of summer…we moved from our old home just in time!  (We didn’t have AC there!)  Since we’re a little ways from the city it is much cooler here with the breezes and lack of hot parking lots to warm things up.  We do have AC now which we haven’t had to use much so far, though I’m sure there are many hot days ahead this summer. 

I look forward to showing you more as this house evolves!

Our (prospective) new house

We’ve been holding our breaths on this one, hoping and praying that all would work out…and it appears to be!  We are getting close to the closing (moving all our stuff this weekend!).  It is going to be busier than normal around here for a while as we move and settle in. 

We’re very excited!  I have to say that once we found this place, a lot of my sadness at leaving our current much-loved home was mediated.  I think a lot of that was just that leaving felt so much like an ending, and now it feels like a beginning too which makes it much easier to embrace.  I don’t know if that makes sense, but it does in my head.  :)

The lot is 4.5 acres, mostly wooded, but with one huge grassy area close to the house (for kids to play/garden!)  Lots of mature trees, lots of flower gardens to potter about in, a couple of small outbuildings, and a chicken coop!!  Yay!

The house itself was built in the 1990s, so considerably newer than our existing house.  The outside of the house is a colonial style which I’m really happy about (we looked at sooo many homes that were simply hideous on the outside!).  It looks very similar to this (though the colors are different):

The house hits all of our “must haves”…4+ bedrooms, finished basement, not requiring a lot of work, 2+ acres, and a floorplan with good flow.  It will need some updating (still stuck in the 90s/early 2000s) but as far as we know that will all be cosmetic.  After doing lots of extensive remodeling on our current home, it is really nice to know we won’t be remodeling constantly for the next 10 years to get the house the way we want it! 

Now, that’s not to say I/we don’t have plans to turn this builder grade home into something a little more special.  :)

See?  Very orange…ugly vinyl floor…and those lights on the vanity have.to.go!!  But, everything is in great shape, and has the space we are looking for.  It will be rather strange to go from 1500 square feet to 2700 square feet!  But nice to not have to juggle the 9 mos old from room to room for naps/bedtime.  This will be the nursery:

Again, not my style (yet)…and the floor looks really dark and just bad here—it is actually brand new carpeting and not that dark IRL.  It is a small room but is next to the master bedroom so is a perfect nursery. 

This is the kitchen.  I love how open it is to the dining area (this picture was taken from the dining area).  And, dining area below:

I was trying to take these pictures really fast as we were walking through showing my in-laws the house last Sunday.  Hence the crooked, dark photos.  :)

Right off the kitchen/dining area is something that I just love.   It is a sunroom/4 season porch.  I’m really excited about it!  It has a gas fireplace out there and lots of screened windows and doors.  I can just imagine sitting out there on summer evenings when the mosquitoes are bad outside with the breeze blowing in through the windows and doors.  Eventually I would like to extend the deck area outside to make it even more usable. 

Another favorite thing about this house (upstairs):

The master bedroom closet.  Seriously, it is bigger than our largest bathroom at our current house.  I feel actually a little embarrassed about this as we certainly weren’t setting out to find a “luxury” master bedroom by any means.  I would have been happy to find something the size of our modest current bedroom and closet.  However, now we have both a big closet (with a window…how interesting!) and a big bathroom attached.  It’s not what sold us the house (um, that would be the backyard!) but it is a nice perk!

I’m planning to take more pictures as we move, but I think this is enough for today.  It may be kind of like vacation pictures…the vacation-goer loves to show their pictures, but to the viewees, it can get kind of old!