Master Bedroom Re-do

We've been working on this little master bedroom re-do for a while and I finally decided to get a few pictures taken to share with you! It's been done (this far) until mid-January when our new furniture was delivered but we've been working on it since November.

Here's something crazy about having a big loss in your life that no one will ever tell you...you will probably go out and make a big purchase you wouldn't have otherwise. I think you do it because you feel like it will make you feel better. It doesn't, really. I'm really happy with the pieces we picked and I know they are high quality ones that we will have forever. I was reading in this little book my grandma had written in when I was home for her funeral and it was like little questions she wrote the answers to. There was a section on her home and one of the questions was what her favorite piece of furniture was and she said her bedroom set. I was surprised to see this because I feel like buying a bedroom set is a big deal and I remember hers so well! It was a big, oak sleigh bed and I wanted a sleigh bed so badly because I loved hers so much.

This re-do was badly needed because our bedroom was hands down the ugliest room in our house. Here's some proof:

White walls, no furniture, no curtains, no nothing. It was time for a change.

And....here is the after:



Our master suite is not huge so with a big new bed and two dressers, it seems a lot cozier. But I like it. I love the way the dark wall colors changes the feeling in there. The bed is big and I hope Michael has lots of good memories of climbing in with us to snuggle in the mornings because that is our favorite thing to do.

This also marks the second room (!) in our house in which we have hung curtains. After living here for 5 years....I think we better get on that with the rest of the house! It makes such a difference.

We ordered the tallest dresser they had and then we brought up Scott's grandparent's dresser that we had in the basement. It is actually a pretty good match and it is in really good shape so I'm glad we could put it to use. There is a matching chest that we have in Michael's room. We still need to hang something on the wall here besides our TV (which I love having in here....for nap-time trash tv watching).

We ordered the furniture from an Amish company who custom builds your pieces. As a result we got to pick out the wood (cherry), stain, and pulls for the drawers. It was a really easy process and I'm glad we picked something that seems at home in our house and with our style. Funny story- it took so long to deliver because the Amish people have to bring it to the shipping warehouse with a horse and wagon. Yes, we are talking *real* Amish people. Pretty cool, huh? I think so.

I think the paint made the biggest difference in the bathroom. We chose a slightly different color than the bedroom so we could bring out the caramel color in our accent mosaic tiles. I think it really makes the maple trim pop and I wish I would have gone with darker colors in the rest of my house in the first place. We love it!

We hung these two beautiful prints from our awesome photographers that they gave us for displaying at Trace's funeral. It is so bittersweet because they are so precious yet so sad. We had a hard time deciding where to hang these because they are fairly large and we didn't want them to just be anywhere. I think having them in our bedroom is nice and private, personal, and just perfect. :o)

DIY Shelf

For those of you who have known me before I had kids-I used to have lots more time to dedicate to DIY and home decor. These days, most of my time is spent just trying to rein in my little toddler tornado from too much destruction.

However, I did get the spark to whip up a cool ledge shelf that I kept seeing numerous times on pinterest.

Specifically, it was this image caught my attention:



I have a ton of beautiful prints in nice frames that I wanted to showcase somehow in our dining room. I didn't want to put a lot of holes in the walls because those of you who have been in my dining room know there are already lots of holes in the walls from failed previous attempts to hang something. I also wanted something that would be a more flexible gallery than just frames on a wall.

So I headed over to anawhite.com and checked out the plan. It seemed easy enough, and plus we have loads of extra wood in our basement. I initially started the project with some leftover maple trim that we had leftover and was already stained. The only problem was that maple is hard to work with and we broke several screws trying to get the pieces together! So we scrapped my free version of the project and headed to Menards where we bought some really nice pine boards to use. These shelves are called "$10 Ledges" because that is how much one 8 foot long shelf is supposed to cost BUT we spent about $10 on each board so our shelf was much more. The reason why our boards cost more is because they were already sanded and were just a lot better looking than the $3 boards so we just went with it. Anyway, working with the pine was much easier and long story short, here is the finished product:







I really love how it turned out and the way it showcases our large prints. The only problem is what do we do when we have another photo session and more prints to hang? Scott and I already brainstorming where we can install more shelves in our house because after it was all said and done, it wasn't too bad of a project to tackle.

Genius!!

How come I have never learned how to do this?? My life and linen closet will forever be changed!

Basement Update

Our carpenter has been here several nights this week and we have lots of improvements down in the basement!

All the doors are hung and some are trimmed. Scott is getting ready to stain a new batch of trim this weekend in one of the bedrooms.

Also, we have upper cabinets in the kitchen area! :o) They are much bigger than we expected, and a little different than our upstairs ones. I can't wait until we get the glass doors put on!

The wine rack is the middle part up above and we will have a small flat panel tv mounted in the blank space. Either that or a large picture of mirror of some sort! :o)

The progress has gotten me so excited I have begun to think about decor for the nursery! I know, weird huh? I think I like this as a theme:
I added this crib bumper and crib skirt to my registry as well as some sheets that match. So it will be brown, cream, maybe some green and yellow also for colors.

Now the real question is...should I paint??