Master Bedroom

Our Master Bedroom is still a major work in progress.

I love the big space that we have but I hate that since we are renting I can not paint it at all.... makes me want to shed a few tears.

Of course since we can't paint I have to figure out fabulous ways to decorate without paint.

I have a bunch of ideas that I want to do in this space. 

I really want to use these two color palettes for the colors in the space.

I love the gold and bronze with the tan walls.

I think the soft blue/grays give a subtle pop of color that I am wanting.

I also think that the dark brown will pull a couple of the pieces of furniture from the room together.

We had a really bright Master bedroom for years. I wanted pink somewhere in my house, so of course it went into the Master. I really loved it but I have been drawn to the much softer neutral tones recently and really wanted to bring those colors into this space.

So out with the old and in with the new..

You can go here to see the Home Tour of our last house with the bright Master.

This is what our Master bedroom looks like right now.

I have taken out all of the bright colors and started to bring in softer, more neutral tones.

Here are all the before pictures of our space, I will follow up later this week with a post on my plans for the room, but for now you can enjoy all the glorious "before" pictures.

I need to get some new lamps in here. The one that Noah had has been relocated to the downstairs and mine will join it as soon as we have replacements.

We are in need of a head board. We sold our bed when we moved and now I need to get to work on making the new head board. Its on my "2015 to do list".

We want a tufted headboard and I have some art work to go above the bed once the headboard is in place.

Noah added some Christmas stuff to our bed to make it more festive... What a sweet guy,  I kind of am crazy about him.

This is my side of the bed and my Armoire. I am in the process of changing out the handles and can't wait till that's done.

I redid the barrel chair a few years ago. It was a really ugly brown and nasty 70's fabric. 

Ill have to find my before and after of that one.

Everything that was on top of the Armoire has been moved to other places in the house and the picture has been moved to our daughters room.

Noah side of the bed and his night stand... Oh his night stand. Its a bit of a mess ALWAYS and I ALWAYS ask him to take care of it.... lets just say that my plea falls on deaf ears.

Does he not know who he is married too? AHHH it causes me anxiety... okay moving on.

I have an old European Vanity that I bought in Alabama that I am refinishing and it will go over in this space. I am so excited. Its a beautiful dream come true and just needs a little TLC so that it can be restored to its original charm and fabulousness.

I am not sure if I want to finish this wall by adding more mirrors or not... I may want to do a bit of a collage of vintage things on there... still debating on that.

I redid Noah's dresser. 

I found the matching sets for $150 at Habitat for Humanity and fell in love with them.

They were a nasty 70's style brown so I redid them and now I need to finish sanding them and making them all "chippy" and distressed.

I love the hardware and I can't wait to get more of it to finish the furniture.

I redid this Armoire and Noah's dresser.

Ive got two frames filled, now I need to get the pictures of Noah and me that we had done this summer to add to the empty frame.

This piece is a beauty.

Its a gentleman's cabinet and I can't wait to finish fixing it up. 

Ill do a post about it later, for now it hold my jewelry in all its little drawers down on the bottom.

I love this corner, not much to do over here besides put a picture in the frame.

(see the little tiny fingers peeking out? I had a helper taking pictures.)

Stay tuned for the pictures of all of the ideas I have for this room.

Our Master bedroom always gets put on the back burner so I am super excited to finally be doing something with this space. Our Master should be our retreat and because its on the same level as the living space of our house it really has become that, now its time to decorate it as such.

Family room

We just recently moved across country from Alabama to Las Vegas and decided that since we did not know where we wanted to live exactly or how long we would be here, that we would rent a house. 

I am not in love with the house, but I love the area and the school that we are zoned for is a 9 out of 10, which as a friend of mine says, "Is like finding a unicorn in Vegas." So we went ahead and rented this house. It works for us and is a great space for Braddoc and his sensory troubles. 

I hate renting. I want to redo paint colors, tear down walls, put up new blinds, do bead boarding and chair rails and all the stuff that makes my heart happy... but for now I will have to be happy with just decorating our builder basic rental and dream of the day we own again.

Downstairs we have a giant open space. Its about 20x18 and because its such a beast of a room I decided that I wanted to split it in half and do a family room area and a kids play area. 

I broke one of my cardinal rules of decorating when we moved in and did not wait patiently for the right decor. I just wanted to have it done because the Holidays were coming up (we moved in the middle of October) and so I put whatever we had left over from upstairs, up on the walls in this space. 

I HATED it. 

I never went to down there.

 I ignored how messy it got and took no pride in the space at all.

 It did not make me happy, or make my heart pitter patter when I went down there. 

I actually got to the point where I avoided the space as much as I possibly could. All of the furniture was just haphazardly spaced down there and there really was no "zones" or organization at all. 

The decor that I did put down there had no consistency and it was just plain old BLAH!!

And of course the space is my kids, upstairs is mine (decorated wonderfully) and downstairs is theirs (not decorated wonderfully). I don't like it down there and neither do they, so of course they come hang out upstairs and bring all their toys and messes into the living space.

I realized pretty quickly that something needed to change down there.

 So right after Christmas (the first time we had time) hubby and I moved the furniture around so that we could create two spaces.

A TV/Family room space and a play area.

Once that was done I had to sit down and decide on what I wanted to do to decorate the space. This is of course the funnest part, but it can also be super stressful. I love seeing so many ideas and gathering up different pictures of things I love, in an effort to decide on what I'm really looking for in a space.

It can be hard to make the final decision on what you want in your space.

I wanted to make the space cozy and homey and I NEEDED it to be a place where the kids would want to be. But I also need it to be a space that functions well as a play area.

I started looking through pictures of curtains and color palettes trying to get an idea of what kind of color scheme I wanted in this space. I knew that I wanted some soft white colors as well as natural wood colors because our piano is a medium natural wood stain. Our couch is a light green and so I wanted something that would work with the couch color as well.

I didn't find any curtains that jumped out at me and even though I found color palettes that I liked nothing was really falling into place, so I decided to take a break and clear my head and come back later with a fresh start.

I had to make something for my daughters room so I went and dug through my fabric bucket and gasped when I ran across several yards of duck cloth in Waverly Folk damasks print.

I knew right away that this was the print I wanted to go with and so I sat down and started a board on Pinterest. 

I quickly found so many pictures that pulled my visions of the space together.

(all pictures have the links to the original source)

I fell in love with this picture and most definitely want to use that lamp (thankfully I just got one at Target).

I love the combo of the green and dark blue as well as the white and the dark and light wood tones.

Everything about this picture screams cozy and comfortable to me.

 here

There is a little skinny wall when you hit the bottom of the stairs, right before the room opens up and I have been racking my brain ever seen we moved in, trying to figure out what to do with this space. It is too awkward right there for any furniture so I really have to get creative.

I love this concept to do on the wall. Its not an area where the kids can destroy the pictures that are low down and it perfectly fills the space.

I have several dark blue, white, light blue and wooden frames to put in this area. Yeah for FREE!!!

here

Above our piano is just a big open space and I want to fill it with multiple things and of course Antique anything speaks to my soul so I am going to use as many wood, black, gold and white antique things as I can find to go up in that empty area. 

Here is where the patience is going to have to come into play because I have no idea where I am going to find all the "chippy charm" goodness in Vegas. When we were in Alabama I had my pick on just about every street corner, its definitely going to be more difficult here.

here

Our TV is sitting on an old dresser that I am going to paint white and chip up/distress and then I am going to stain the drawers a dark walnut color. But on either side of the TV is big blank space that needs to be filled so I am going to scour EBay to find some grain sacks like in this picture to put into frames and hang up in those empty spaces. I think I will need two deep on each side and then I'm going to make a big reclaimed wood sign to go above the TV.

here

I am so excited to get to work on this space and show the progress as it happens.

I made the curtains and did them double layered with another navy and white damasks print today and hung them up already. I stole the blue and green pillows and blankets I had stashed around the house and added them down there as well. The space is far from being done but its already so much cozier. I'm ready to go curl up with a good book and hang out down there.

Stay tuned for the progress updates.

Go here to see the rest of my Pinterest board ideas for this room.

Clothing rack in the laundry room

We have no space in our laundry room to put our hangers or to hang stuff to dry.

I was trying to find a simple/cheap solution to this problem.

We live in base military housing and since I could not put in a permanent fix I had to come up with a solution that could be easily removed.

I bought some heavy duty wire.

I wanted to make sure it would hold up to the weight of a lot of clothes and hangers.

I found this ladder looking this at Ikea, Im not sure what it is actually used for.

I took some spray paint and painted it red, cause it's a bright color for a small space.

I want to eventually get an old antique ladder to use but I needed something to use in the mean time.

The Ikea piece had holes running up the inside but they did not go all the way through.

I took a drill bit and drilled two holes all the way through the piece so I would have something to help me when it came time to hang it up. 

I did this 4 times. Twice on both sides of the ladder and then at the top and bottom.

I took my wall hanging wire and wrapped it in and out of both holes and wrapped it around itself to secure it tightly.

I used this hook to hang the rack and it worked for a little bit but after a few days the weight pulled it out of the wall so I had to get a hook that was meant to go into dry wall and hang heavy pieces.

(sorry the picture is so blurry. I wrapped the wire around the hook after I realized it was going lopsided under the weight.)

That did the trick and it has not fallen out of the wall yet.

It is also important to wrap your wire around your hook.

You do this to prevent the rack from becoming lopsided due too to much weight on either side.

Thankfully it has worked out perfectly.

I can't wait to find an antique ladder and try the same thing with it.

Do you have a small laundry room?

If so, what are some of your solutions?

Here are some of my favorite laundry room images from my Pinterest account.

(click here to visit my Pinterest account and click here to see my Laundry Board)

I listed the original sources under the picture if it was available.

better homes and gardens

I absolutely LOVE the idea of having a sink in my laundry room. 

I also love how bright and airy these rooms are. I spend a good deal of time in my laundry *closet* that it would be nice to have something bigger, brighter, and cheery. In my ideal world I would have a big space to sort, fold, and hang laundry. I would have a basket for each kid to take to their room (one day they will be in there folding too). I would also love to have a TV in there, something I could either catch up on shows, watch movies or listen to music with. I fold my laundry on the couch now, so it sits in our living room for long periods of time waiting to be folded and put away. 

Does anyone else dream of their perfect laundry room?