Master Bedroom Update

Its amazing to me how fast that feeling of "I never want to mask and paint another wall again" goes away. After painting our living room, guest bathroom and kitchen I never wanted to see another paint tray again. It wasnt too long, however, until those feelings were replaced by that desire to drastically change our room, and add our own personality to it. 

I knew I wanted it to be a bright yet soft blue. I loved the look I had seen in so many magazines, with the dusty blue walls and contrasting white furniture. So I started looking at paint colors and even bought a few samples. I painted the samples on cardboard like they told me and put it up against the white trim in the bedroom to see how it would look with the lighting we have etc.  

My camera doesn't take the best pictures so you may not even be able to see much of a difference. So ill try and explain (with my limited color lingo) what they looked like. The top color was called Ice Flower and was a really pretty blue but it definitely had shades of aqua in it which wasn't what I was wanting for our room. The bottom color was Lovely Blue. It ended up being a little more "washed out" I guess than what I wanted. So I ended up choosing the middle color called "Serene Sky." (You would think that I would have learned by now, that blue paint can be very deceiving. It can look very subtle and calm in a sample, but when you paint a whole room blue, it can very easily become overwhelming. But we will get to that later.)

So the BIL and I decided we would split up, he would paint the guest room, and I would paint my room. So off to Home Depot we went. We had decided weeks ago that we would paint the guest room the same grey as our kitchen so that was a piece of cake. And I, now sweating profusely, sick to my stomach and breathing out of what felt like a straw, asked the helpful lady to give my two gallons of a paint I wasn't totally confident in. That should have been my red flag right there. But I chalked it up to the fact that I would have a mini heart attack buying that much paint of even my favorite color.

So we got home and I started pushing everything to the center of the room. My wonderful BIL came in and masked everything, without me even asking! So I got to work.

Again another awful quality picture, but you get the gist of the progress. Oh, and I promise that is clean laundry in those baskets, but come on people, priorities! :) The whole time I was painting the room I had this internal struggle going on. Part of me was totally freaked out that it wasn't turning out the color I had pictured in my mind, the other part of me was determined to like it because I wasn't about to go out and buy two new gallons of paint. Even now, I still have that struggle. But I'm hoping that once I finish decorating it how I want it, Ill learn to love it even more. Don't get me wrong I still think it looks better than it was, its just not as "dusty" as I had planned it to be. Looking back now I see that I should have gotten a blue that had more grey undertones, but hindsight is always 20/20 right?!

So here it is today, nothing on the walls yet but that is my next project. And I'm still on the search for the perfect nightstand, but until then I'm using an old table we had sitting in the garage. So that's all for now, Ill be back soon to share with you the Sunburst mirror I made for our bedroom.

 

Old Window Decor

Recently we dug through the IL old barn to see what we could find. Boy did we score big! We found this beauty just waiting to be cleaned up and used.

 It was covered in dirt and mud nests, but I loved the symmetry of the windows so I knew it would be worth the work. I started by hosing and scrubbing it down to get all the dirt off. Let it dry for a few days in the sun. Then it was time for the fun part. I masked off all the window panes and started sanding away. (sorry no pictures, wasn't thinking). I gave it several coats of white paint and boy did she look nice! We distressed her up a little bit (oh yes only a girl could look this pretty) and hung her up on the wall.

We haven't really decided how we want to decorate around her. We happen to have these three plates that I had started collecting for a plate wall, so we have tried those. Were not sure what we want to put on the other side. More plates? maybe picture frames?

I think it looks so much better than what we had up there before, which was a tiny picture gallery with frames that were just too small for that big wall.

Any ideas for what to decorate around it?

Garage Cleanup

Well I am long overdue for a new post, and I have projects piling up just waiting to be written about. But first Ill show you the project that has helped all the other projects get done. The cleaning of our messy garage.

It all started when we moved into our new house. It was pouring down rain that day so everything got moved into the garage. Then after we moved into the house what we needed, the extra boxes of "stuff" got left out there. Then whenever we did a project in the house, the leftovers got shoved out there too, because well, it was already a mess. So this is what we ended up with...

This is the view when you first opened the door. Awful I know.

I promise were not hoarders!

ooh boy...

At first it seemed totally overwhelming. Where do you even start? Naturally, we picked a rainy day to work up the motivation, so we couldn't even start by moving stuff out into the drive way. So we started by moving all the junk stuff away from where we would be building shelving. I made a quick run to the store to get plastic tubs, hooks, and big garbage bags. The boys tore down the shelves that were there, (they weren't the best quality and not the size we wanted). They built us some new shelving and then we got to the hard stuff. We each picked a sector and got to work, filling up garbage bags and consolidating boxes that were half unpacked. We designated a section of a shelf to be for yard sale stuff too.

So here is the new shelving, and the view from the door...

We organized the painting supplies and tools to look like this...

(not a very good picture, sorry)

The BIL made a nice little coat rack for all the work coats/boots. Doesn't it look so much better!

We hung up all our bikes to save floor space, and made a little section for all our sporting goods.

And as you can see, we couldn't wait to start on some new projects now that we had all this wonderful space. Now does it still look like this today? Ahem, not quite but its no where near as bad as it was before. Its been so nice to go out there and not have to climb over a million boxes to get what you need. It was so worth spending our Saturday on.