Nursery Planning

I started following baby blogs long before I was pregnant (I'm sure I'm not the only one...). I figured once I officially knew I would need a nursery I'd be way ahead on things and know exactly what I wanted. Yeah right. I should have known myself better than that!

Anyway - Pinterest has helped quite a bit and I've found some great inspiration nurseries that have helped in my decision making :) Here are a few (of many) examples.

Love this one - a new one from Apartment Therapy....

So serene. From Project Nursery.

So cute for a small space. I need to go a bit more gender neutral with not so much pink but love it still. From Ohdeedoh.

Simple, clean lines. From Ohdeedoh. I have considered buying this crib too....it's from WalMart - can you believe it?

Great one. From Ohdeedoh.

Some things I noticed when I was pinning...

- Most of the walls were gray (or another light color)
- All cribs were white and had simple clean lines
- Most had a fairly neutral rug
- Color was brought in through accents like fabric and art

I decided to paint the walls gray - picking a shade of gray will take another post. I'm still trying to make a final decision. I have also done hours of research on white cribs that aren't outrageously expensive...again another post!

Now I do realize the baby isn't going to appreciate this nursery and could care less what its room looks like. This is all for me (and Matt and other visitors who might appreciate it). I can't help but want it to look perfect...maybe that's a negative aspect to baby blog reading and Pinterest. At any rate - it's getting closer!

xo!

The Blue Room

Ah. The blue room. Let me take you back. At our second showing I took some pics of the house so here it is in all its former glory. I'll let you guess why we named the room the way we did.

Ceiling - wish I could say a lot has changed but that would require more funds than we have at this point.

Don't forget the wallpaper.

Then we moved in and started renovations. The blue room was all we had (plus our bedroom, but we had to walk through construction to get upstairs so spent most time down in the blue room). The blue room is also the connection between the garage (where construction equipment lived) and the main floor. SO - it served as a walk-through area as well as a den and kitchen.

It was a blessing to have a "second den" of sorts, but it sure wasn't fun living down there.

The fridge never had the chance to call the blue room home, but it was close enough to count for a long while.

We got to the point when so many things had gone down on that carpet that we didn't even care about the carpet anymore (did we ever?) and just stopped trying to clean it.

It was such a happy day when we finally moved out to the lake (although I still had to wade through water for a few days to reach the house due to the record spring floods). The blue room remained in use, but when we moved back in we had to use the furniture upstairs so it was empty for a while.

We got our new sofa upstairs (hooray!) finally and it was time to tackle the blue room. The first step was to remove wallpaper and re-paint. Our poor painter tackled the job and got more than he bargained for.

He stripped wallpaper and then had to use drywall mud on top of our plaster in an attempt to make the walls even and smooth. He did a pretty good job!

It was a messy process.

Oh yea - we put in hardwood steps to match the rest of the stairs leading up to the landing during our active construction phase.

Then we picked out some new carpet (this wasn't actually the one we went with but it was similar).

Matt took these after painting was completed...the day the carpet guys came.

AND FINALLY - the after photos. We still have a long way to go as far as hanging things but we're moving slowly in that direction.

We think it's much improved :) It's so nice to walk through the room into the house now that it is done! I will post some updated pics once we hang a few more things...

xoxo!

Check this out

Last week I was in Lowes - one of my least favorite places - headed to look at this....

*story to come on where that is going to go and thankfully it isn't coming from Lowes

But first....I had to walk by this display close to the entrance....

WHAT happened to Fall...or even Thanksgiving?! Seriously. I want to yell - slow down people - the time for those fake trees will come soon enough!

The really sad part (because I do love Christmas) came when I saw the lawnmowers were replaced by these.

Even the little baby on the end costs $300 but when you're out in the dark at 6am and it's -20 degrees while you're shoveling your way out of the driveway (OK maybe not me...but Matt is out there), a snowblower sure would be nice. Luckily for Matt I found an electric one at a yard sale this summer I bought for $20. I think it will be the answer to our snow shoveling woes.

Shrooms

Hi there blog friends! Hope you had a nice weekend. Ours was great - the weather here was perfect and we had a nice mix of time outside at the lake, time with friends, relaxation, and time spent getting stuff done around the house. I'm still trying to get used to this working full-time + school work thing again so my posting will probably be sporadic for a while. Poor me, I know.

Anyway. If you've talked to me in the past two weeks, you probably already know what I'm going to say in this post so feel free to skip reading it :)

Shrooms. You read that title right. I'm going to talk about my new enemy - the lawn mushroom.

After all the rain we've had, they are EVERYWHERE! Our backyard has become a mushroom kingdom. I guess I should classify this as a "keeping it real" post because these things are a real pain in my ass.

I think all the rain we've had lately plus a lack of grass in the backyard makes it a prime breeding ground. If we didn't have a dog, I wouldn't worry about them, but I'm terrified that Willow is going to eat one of these guys :(

We have all shapes, sizes, and colors.

All my online research has said there's no good way to get rid of them, so for now we're doing this....

(Just FYI in case they're poisionous I wear gloves and encourage Matt to do the same but you see where that gets me.)

My aunt has a lot of knowledge about natural methods to rid yards of pesky things and she sent me some suggestions for fertilizing so I'll let you know how that goes once we get around to it.

They grow right back after a few days so I'm getting a bit resentful of their invasion on my free time.

Plus, Will just loves to be in the backyard.

How could I leave her back there alone with these lurking around?

I find it ironic we just invested in a fence so she could be in the yard alone, yet we can't leave her back there unattended.

Ug.

Gallery Wall

While Cynde was here we worked on another one of my Pinterest-inspired ideas - a gallery wall.

Here are the inspiration pics...

This one...

These...

This Black and White Wall

I already had a few framed black and white photos so I decided to go with a black and white gallery wall. I had a coupon for Michaels that I used to buy some more black frames.

Cynde helped me arrange the frames on the floor first...

We started putting them up...

Then kept going...

Until we had this!

You can see I had a few frames left over that didn't quite fit. I still need to fill in a few holes on the left side and the bottom.

I ordered some of my photos in black and white to fill the frames. Here is how it looks as of now!

Now for a peek at the rest of the foyer. I need to add something above the desk and I'm still debating whether I want to leave it open or closed.

A peek into the den and a view of the basket lamp :)

xo!

Junk and Disorderly

On our way back from my cousin's swim in the islands, we passed an "antique" store named "Junk and Disorderly." We had to stop.

I came out with these beauties :)

I was looking for something a bit more contemporary, but at $12 each these beat the price of any others I liked by over $100. It's hard to find an affordable bar stool that has a back AND swivels (Matt's must-have list). I haven't decided how to fix them up yet. I'm contemplating painting them a bright color or staining them either with a dark stain or weathered one. Any suggestions?

I also found this for the hallway! Paint and new fabric on the seat to come!

Hope you had a great Labor Day Weekend! We attended a fabulous wedding down in Maryland so I have lots of catching up to do but more posts will come eventually :)

xo!