Sprucing up the Laundry Room

I haven't posted projects in forever so my goal is to get up-to-date over the next few days, that's the warning- project overload coming up! For now... the laundry room. Simple updates that make a world of difference. It's still not complete but I smile when I go in and out of there a million times a day. 

Here it was when we moved in- then add in our 1970's non-matching washer and dryer set that always smelled like smoke and combine it with the wire rack exposing every laundry product we owned- NOT a good combination.

 

  We bought unfinished stock cabinets- painted them white- finally made like the biggest splurge of our marriage and got front loaders, painted the doors, simple accessories I pulled from around the house- done!

 

Crown Molding Turned Mirrors

We got a killer price on crown molding so we did our Family Room, Kitchen and Master. We had a few scraps left over so I decided to attempt making my own mirrors to go above our thrift store dresser! I could just buy one big mirror, but I wanted two identical mirrors to give us each our own little vanity type landing spot. So I picked up a cheap unfinished frame, a square craft mirror, and some L brackets. Paul cut the wood to fit around the unfinished frame.

 

I attached the L brackets on the back to hold everything in place. Filled all the gaps with wood puddy and tiny dowels. Final touch was spray paint left over from doing THESE chairs. 

Hang em' up!

Perfect! I love how its on the wall opposite our windows too because it helps the light bounce and brighten up the space! (have i mentioned how bad i want a nice camera!? ugh... i could decorate 3 rooms with the cost of one of those babies, one day, one day)

Sunburst Mirror for the Master

Sunburst mirrors have been all the craze for the last year and then some... so I never wanted to do one, I usually wanna stray from things that are too trendy and these mirrors are EVERYWHERE. For example...

Addicted to decorating...

 The Lettered Cottage

 Centsational Girl

But when I started doing our bedroom, there was really just the perfect empty spot over one of our dressers so I thought- heck with it, I'll do it anyway. But... everywhere I looked were mirrors that were missing something or not necessarily the way I would want to do it. The ones above were some of my favorites/inspiration. I like the shims idea, I like the paint sticks but I always feel like the mirrors look unfinished or off proportion. So I just ventured to a few craft stores to see what I could come up with to get it just the right way for me!

Shims... about $1.50 @ Home Depot

 I found a bamboo roller shade at a thrift store for $4.00

 Round clock face, unfinished craft mirror, 10" embroidery hoop

 Laying it all out

 Hanging it up!

 

Still need to accessorize the dresser- but for now, I love it! 

I HATE picking paint colors!

I am pretty sure that my least favorite part of decorating is picking the perfect paint color! I always have the idea in mind of what the perfect color will look like, but it is so dang hard to translate that into paint colors that actually exist. So with our bedroom I knew I wanted gray- blue (shocker, i know!) with a little more touch of blue than green since we have blue/gray/green in the rest of the house. Luckily... in my search I found THIS awesome blog- Favorite Paint Colors- it is nothing but the "perfect" paint color in any color scheme you might want! 6 paint samples later... I went with Dolphin Gray by Martha Stewart, thanks to this photo!

 

Doesn't it look especially beautiful will all my junk everywhere? Hey... I guess that's the glory of a work in progress! Crown molding- check! Paint- check! Maybe one day it will be as beautiful as that nursery above it!

Angie's House

I have a cute friend Angie in the neighborhood that has said several times that she wants help with her family room. So after making a little storyboard for my bedroom, I thought maybe I could do something similar for her! So I called her up, checked out her space, and spent a little time putting something together for her. Here are the pics of her space...

We were able to pin down a few things

-color scheme: red, yellow, green

-style: traditional

-wood: definitely like dark wood

-struggle with the long narrow space

-touches of rod iron throughout the space that could be incorporated here too

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So here was my attempt- I did a story board, and then wrote out a detailed description on every item in the room- where to get it, how much she could expect to pay, why it made sense etc!

This was SUCH a fun project, I loved every single minute of it. Even if they don't use any of the info- it was so fun for me that I'd do it again in a heartbeat. Thanks Angie!!

Master Bed Before and Storyboard Plan!

Since we have almost conquered the entire main floor in less than a year.. of course I just start moving on up. Sheesh, sometimes I think I need to just give myself like a year off of decorating but I just can't seem to do it. So anyway--- our Master Bedroom is next on the list! I hate having a room that I walk into and just think- UGH. No paint, no plan, no nothing. Here's what it looked like a few months ago- a hodge podge of furniture, hand-me-downs, stuff that worked in our last place but not so much here etc. etc.
 

 

 

So the very first thing I did was make a little mini-storyboard of ideas I like and just tried to create a whole scheme for what I want my room to ultimately look like! It was so fun to put together... I think I just might have to do this every time!

Pulling this all together totally inspired me... so I've been busy trying to get this "feel" of course w/out spending a fortune! I will be posting each project step-by-step so stay tuned!!

Thinking outside the box with photo displays

Several people have asked about my different photo displays lately so I thought I'd break it down a little. The one thing I always told myself was worth spending money on in life is good photos! So thanks to a lot of family/friends over the years (Jill, Val, Emmie, Jamie) we've gotten a lot of awesome pics of us and the kids so I wanna see them! There is no better way to make my home feel like mine than personal photos everywhere. But I think the standard just hanging posed pics on the wall is way too boring so I try to think outside the box and have fun with some photo displays. It's tricky to display tons of photos but still make things feel un-cluttered and streamline. But here's what I've done!

I always get questions about the photos above our TV. Our great friend Jill is an amazing photographer and we were lucky enough to get her to do our last family photos!! You can check her out here! I wanted to use some pics from the shoot to make a big statement in the room. I love, love, love canvas but it can get so pricey. I did a DIY canvas project in our last boys room here. With these pics I wanted them really big so I opted for foam board.

I got one piece of foam board at Joanns for like 3 dollars. Then I took the CD from our photo shoot to Kinkos, had them pull up the photos I wanted and blow them up to a 20x20 size. Then I had them printed on regular paper. At that size they have to use their really big machine so it got pricey. It was 20 dollars a piece. So I spent about 65.00 dollars for everything for all 3- when I looked online-- ONE mounted print this size can run you up to 500.00!! Craziness. Obviously the quality isn't the same, but for a similar effect, I'm totally happy. Seeing my little guys face BEAM when he walked down in the morning and saw a life-size photo of him on the wall was worth everything and then some!

Next up is this photo collage! I got the center picture for Christmas and was so excited about it until I hung it up and realized how small it was in the space, I knew I had to come up with something. I could do your standard framed photo collage like you see in all the magazines but when I started looking through all our pictures from over the years I realized there are sooo many fun pictures, memories etc. that I want to SEE. I don't want them just sitting in a box or stored on the computer somewhere. So I went through every photo CD we've had from when the boys were newborns until now. I had soo much fun looking through pictures of the boys as babies, or fun family vacations we took. It was hard to narrow it down- even to this many pics! But I picked ones that had special meaning or brought back certain memories. I got them all printed at Costco and varied the borders- some without any border, some with a thin white border, some thick.

I laid everything on the floor and Paul and I decided together which photos would make it on the wall. Again- so fun to look through and re-live all the memories together. I also thought it would be fun and add visual interest to include all our names in the collage. So I just bought letters at a craft store and adhered coordinating scrapbooking paper to them. For the names I used left over foam-board and stickers in a font I liked-simple, but love that it makes it personal.

I put all the photos on the wall with just that blue sticky-tac you can get at any office supply store. I love this too because it is soo easy to switch out or rearrange pictures as time passes without putting different holes all over. I added a few little frames I've had forever from the target dollar bins (and i've finally gotten them to hang straight :) Overall I probably spent 20 bucks for this- to print the pics, sticky tac, letters, scrapbooking paper etc. I love that we are all CENTERED ON CHRIST! It's probably one of my very favorite projects ever and it is a great conversation piece!

By now we all know about the life of this family tree and I did a post about it here

And this magnet board was a lot of fun back in the day- I did a post about it here -so nice to put all those random letters to use. This is where I put pics of friends and family- after I get everyones Christmas cards, I cut out their pictures and put them here and then they get updated every year with new Christmas cards! Love it!

**Linkin up at the DIY Showoff! (button on the left margin)
** Linkin up at The Inspired Rooms Gallery Wall Party!

Country drab to flowery fab!

We got our kitchen table and chairs free off of KSL like 5 years ago- and the table has held up but the chairs are HORRIBLE. Standard Windsor chairs but the paint was all coming off, spindles missing, etc. So it has been time for new chairs for a long time! But new chairs can be a fortune! So after showing Paul a quick KSL ad one day- he came home from work with four chairs in his trunk to surprise me. If you ask me- that's way more romantic than roses, any day! :) I haven't been super motivated to work on them though so they've been sitting there forever. I finally tackled the project and lets just say..... you win some, you lose some. They turned out fine- and its definitely an upgrade but it took FOREVER. Sanding, priming, painting, glossing, stapling, stapling, stapling, stapling. Next time- I am just getting the super duper expensive, round pedestal table of my dreams with a set of 8 chairs- but until I get filthy rich to afford that--- this will have to do :)

Saw this chair on KSL--- $12.50- good bones, well built, padded, definitely an upgrade
I think I liked it because the shape of it totally reminded me of this Pottery Barn chair--- The Napolean --- $179.00! I will take 12.50 thank-you, even if it has an ugly heart :)
Thanks to these babies- I got the job done. That two dollar black sprayer is the best investment EVER

So these...
Became these...
Before...
After!

I ordered a different fabric online, but when it arrived I HATED it. Darn it! I didn't want to pay for another fabric so I had to dig through my stuff and use something I already had. This fabric is Pink Zinnia by Alexander Henry. It's a bit juvenile for our kitchen chairs, (would be totally cute in a craft room, kids room, office) but whatever. Just gonna have to make it work! Oh and then I covered them in vinyl because kids and fabric- not a good fit.

Just glad they're DONE!

DIY vinyl family tree! (nat)

In our last place I tried to come up with a fun way to display all the recent family pictures we'd done with each of our families--so after walking through Ikea and getting "inspired" I decided to do a vinyl-like family tree. I had it in our old place here and then later here. Well when we got to our new place-- I decided this was the one thing I wanted to incorporate here too. BUT I thought the tree itself needed a major re-vamp. Good good bye Ikea decals, hello vinyl by-the-foot thanks to Roberts! Roberts now carries vinyl in about 10 colors and it costs 1.99 a foot! Yahoo!

Very first I just jumped online and googled vinyl tree images. TONS pop up. But if you buy one online it can cost 75-hundred+ dollars- who wants to pay that much!? NOT ME. Soooo I found a pic I liked...

....then I sketched out the image of the "inspiration tree" the best I could on a huge piece of butcher paper- made to the scale of where I ultimately wanted it to be hung. Really no science behind it, just eye-balled and sketched, there was a lot of erasing and tweaking but it got the job done. Then I bought a huge piece of brown vinyl- I believe I got 6 feet (12 bucks) I took the butcher paper drawing that I had cut out and traced it onto the vinyl, and had to piece a few branch pieces together but managed to get them all on there.

Then I got about one foot of red and green and used some scrapbooking paper I already had for a bit of yellow and black. It only took about 30 min to get it all actually up on the wall and voila!

A re-vamped and totally cute way to display our family! I love that every time I walk down the stairs with our 18 mo. old he points and says- mommy, daddy! (Even though I desperately need to switch out almost all the pics, totally out-dated!)

Total cost- without the frames, about $16.00!!! Ahhhh

Linkin up to thrifty decor chick!