Anniversary Month!

This August, Dave and I celebrate both our wedding and our home anniversary!  Hoorah!  It's pretty amazing how fast 1 year goes by, and how long we've come since moving into our home with only about three pieces of furniture.  In the future, I hope to get a little bit more blog time (work willing) so that I can really pinpoint all the changes we make from year to year. I took a lazy day off of work today though, so I could do a real life walk through tour of our home at our 1 year mark.

Here it goes:

Here's our front door from the inside. I recently added the scroll-ish rug, bought from HomeGoods.

Here's a shot of our bare living room. This year, Dave and I did some crazy stenciling on that back wall. I'm still contemplating if I should paint the other walls, as well as furniture pieces that I could add that would still flow with our dining room.



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Here's our dining room. The curtains are actually tableclothes from Crate & Barrel (I blogged about it previously).  We painted the walls and the box frames when we first moved in.  The box framing was crazy difficult to paint!

Here's the view when you first come in through that front door, I bought this cabinet from Crate & Barrel to house all of my precious moments figurines.  Not sure if it'll stay in this spot or not, but it works for now.

 

Here's the guest bathroom downstairs, it's pretty plain jane, but we did add a nice scenic frame from Ikea above the towel rack and extra towel hooks on the opposite wall.



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Mister Master Part Dos

I don't really know why I started calling my Master bedroom posts 'Mister Master'.. I might have subconsciously stole that from Sarah Richardson.. oh well!

Anyways, here's a long overdue post about our master bedroom progress. I have some smaller touches left to do, like finish up sewing the pillows, make (or buy) curtains, and put up some artwork to fill the empty walls, but here are our 'almost there' shots:

I'm really loving our West Elm extra wide (aka King size) quilt. It's perfect for the warmer weather and there's  definitely not as many blanket wars going on.  I moved the bright yellow flowers from downstairs (where it was just kinda sitting around, not really doing much for the space down there) and machine sewed the throw pillows with fabric I bought from JoAnn's. 

We also painted the inside of our tray ceiling an olivey gray color.. it really defines the feature in our ceiling and makes the whole space feel a little bit more polished..

I also swapped out the dark brown shades to lighter, more natural colored ones, and moved the gray couch up from our living room.

We also did a few more changes that I'll post up soon, like hanging up Miss. Liata the Chandelier (it's such a big deal that it really deserves it's own post.. at least I think it does) More pictures to come soon!

Door Appeal

Lately I've been thinking a lot about how our front door appeals to strangers. Not that I necessarily want it to be super inviting, but at least give an indication that there are people living in the house and we have some taste (albeit we're still trying to define our tastes).

A few things I have in mind:

1. Get an all-weather door mat (it lends some homey-ness and also wipes the bottom of shoes = dual plus)
2. Some urns with perennial (yes, I did say perennial) flowers that will at LEAST last through the season. My spring flowers were gorgeous when they first bloomed and I'm guessing that they started their winter hibernation plans wayyy early)
3. Get a summer wreath (we've got the fall and winter ones down)
4. Give the side door lanterns a good wipe down cleaning. I don't know if we are really supposed to do this, but they look down right dingy right now.

So I'm on the hunt for cheap and functional pretty front door stuff. Wish me luck!

Here are some pictures to get my creative juices flowing.. (and maybe yours if you are reading this):

poshy and elegant:

modest and neat:

festive:

 I'm loving the wreath in this last picture... and it's totally DIY worthy..

All of the pictures are courtesy of pinterest.. and if you don't know what pinterest is.. boy you are missing out!

Liata

Liata would be a pretty, unique name for a girl right??

Don't worry, I'm not preggo. But I am just as excited for our new bedroom ceiling addition that is supposed to arrive on our doorstep tomorrow morning!

Isn't it awesome? I chose a more rugged, deconstructed pendant to balance out all the furniture pieces we already have that sport finer, more sophisticated lines.. in the hopes of trying to inject a little sophisticated but not too elegant design to the room. Hopefully it works out. There's always a little bit of risk when you order a piece like this online that you haven't seen in person. I'm hoping that the colors stay true to the description. I did read from the happy 4-5 star reviews that said this pendant is a LOT bigger than you think it is. Which is perfectly okay with me, because I didn't want something dinky in our master bedroom anyways.

Besides that, I've been spending my time perfecting pillow covers. I chose a few fabrics from JoAnn (yup, special ordered it) that will also match nicely with this pendant. I've got a few more pillows to sew, but I think I'll have things in order within a few days to post update pictures. Then I'll move on to the next task of updating our window treatments (I did switch out the dark brown roman shades to lighter tan shades, but I still need some curtains) and wall decor.

Pics to come soon! I promise!

Mister Master

Wow, it's been nearly a month since my last post! What can I say? I have no excuses really.. we've had a flurry of wedding activities this past month and nothing was all too exciting on the home front. Our flowers were wilting, and our grass is getting yellower as the days get hotter.  But we just started kicking ourselves into gear with a new redo in progress for our Master Bedroom! See, the ole' hubs wanted a change from the girly spa blue and I was ready for a change myself since I hit a dead end on inspiration for a bedroom with one blue accent wall. (my husband flat out refused to paint the rest of the walls blue).  It was a horrible match since we had a tray ceiling that didn't look like such a great feature since it was painted in the original builder's beige.

Here's our before picture:

okay, okay. it's not truly a 'before' picture I know.  We DID actually have a comforter on our beds.  This was taken right before we were going to start our painting activities. I came to a screeching halt just to run and get my camera for these shots.  See how dedicated I am to this blog? Anyways, I thought I'd also add a few "painting mess" pictures too:

I know. what was I thinking with the dark blue curtains and dark brown roman shades? I was desperate for some window privacy I guess.

And there's that hallway closet shot.  These walls are marked for painting too.

So after what seemed like 2 week span of painting (it doesn't really take that long to paint this room, but there was a lot of furniture moving, tarp covering, run out and buy more paint, oh, but this store ran out of the paint we use.. craziness).  Today though, I'm finally happy to report that we are done painting!

Here's a tiny sneak peek of the outcome:

More details to come soon! ;)

True to my word!

Here's my (err.. monthly?) post on how our lawn is making out after shelling out 3 big ones ($300 ish) for TruGreen lawn spray service.  Basically they make our lawn healthier and kill out our massive amount of weeds in the process.

Here's what it looks like today:

Pretty good, huh?  Our grass actually looks consistent throughout the entire front yard!  No more super green patch on the left hand side anymore. (and yes, we still haven't mulched that other side of the landscaping, we'll get to it eventually).

There's the view to the right.. pretty well blended in too.

Here's the backyard:

It's still a little patchy, but there's definite improvement going on:

Isn't that amazing? wow wow wow. i don't think I would've realized how much of a difference there was if I didn't take those "before" shots (go back to the April blog posts on the right hand side of this blog entry).  We still have a gross amount of weeds to get rid of (not to mention a city complaint about how we don't chop our weeds down and that they grow taller than 8" inches), but we'll get er' done! or at least TruGreen will!

Spring-ish Flowers

This Spring, we had really strange weather. At first, our days were bright and sunny, and our Fall bulbs started to bloom:

You can't tell from the picture above, but we cut our Hyacinth flower line a little short (probably just due to laziness).  We had some bulbs planted in planter pots around the house, these grew, but they didn't grow nearly as fast as the ones we planted straight in the ground:

There's my Hyacinth line cut short: 

Within a few weeks, the Hyacinths died off and in came our late Spring bulbs (I don't remember what these flowers are actually called, they're really pretty, bright yellow, full blooms):

Then, we had a bout of rainy, stormy weather that killed them and left us with nothing but shriveled up stems and some dying bushes.

So out to home depot we went to go get some potting soil, new perennials that will last us till summer (hopefully) and some black mulch to make things really stand out. (and to kill the weeds of course).

After some digging and sweating, here's where we are today:

We severly underestimated the amount of mulch we needed. We'll probably have to get another 9 bags sometime soon to cover the other side of the landscaping.  We removed one completely dead bush (I thought it would feel like a big gaping hole, but you really can't tell), half of a dead low growing shrub, and cut all the dead flowers completely.  I also took some of the bulbs out of the planter pots and the hubs helped me plant them to continue our line of flowers to the green gutter thing (I'm not sure what it's actually called). I'm not sure why we didn't do this in the first place! I also read in an article AFTER we did all this, that you aren't supposed to completely cut out all the leaves from the dead flowers, just the shriveled flower stem itself. Oops. oh well, at least we'll know what to do next year! ;)