Saturday, January 12, 2013

House Tour: Harrison's Room

I thought we would start off our house tour with our son's room because it was his 4th birthday this week! There aren't any before pictures because it was a white room with beige carpet - not much to take pictures of. We let him pick the wall color when we first moved in. I have just slowly worked on his room and I'm finally considering it done other than needing a light fixture. Here's how it looks now...

 
 
We got Harrison's bed off Craigslist for $100! It is solid wood and we love having the drawers built in. It's a great space saver. We were able to move his dresser out and add some great toy storage. It was originally a honey oak color, so I sanded it down and painted it. It was a major pain because it took 4 coats and some of the pieces were double sided, so I worked on it for quite a while. I love the way it turned out though-it was all worth it!
 
 
We got this vinyl sticker from Simply Said and it adds so much to the room.
 

 
We got the shelf and bins at Target and it offers great toy storage. I was really surprised by how many toys it holds. I need to make some kind of picture labels on the front for easier clean up.
 
 
Harrison's room doesn't really have a theme. It's just full of stuff he loves. Mickey is one of his favorites. My mom found the print on the left and I painted a frame for it. The Cat in the Hat picture my husband traced and colored. I traced the bottom picture which is from our favorite book "The Going to Bed Book".
 
 
Next to Harrison's bed I added a reading corner. He doesn't really use it yet, but I think he will one day. The chair is actually very comfortable.
 
 
The other side of the room is the play section. My mother in law found the vintage Mickey and Minnie at an antique store. We got the World War II airplane poster at a naval museum.
 
Harrison's room fits him perfectly and he loves it!
 



Sunday, January 6, 2013

2013 Home Goals

We have another baby boy on the way! My due date is February 14th. So, while we have many things we hope to accomplish around the house this year, I also want to be flexible. It's been a while since we've had a newborn and this time we will have a 4 year old at the same time. I'm not really sure how much spare time we will have around. LOL! And my family is my first priority- always.

I still want to get down in writing all the projects we have talked about doing this year. Mainly because I like to cross off things. It is a great feeling crossing something off a to do list! I hope we can get a good deal of these done, but if not they can always go on next year's list.

In 2011 we were moving in, unpacking, and just settling into owning our first home. In 2012 I slowly worked on decorating each room and reorganizing things to what works best for us. Every room in the house is decorated now except for the kitchen (and there is a reason for that). We are ready in 2013 to take on some more major projects and make the house work even better for us.

In no particular order:

- We plan to remove the wall between our living room and eat in kitchen making one big "great room".  We still aren't sure if we are going to hire this out or DIY it. My dad has removed a load bearing wall in his house, so it is possible for us to do. I think we will get some quotes and then decided. This is the main reason we haven't done much to the kitchen yet.

- Installing hardwood floors in the hall and great room. Not only because the flooring is in bad condition but also because our floors creak something awful! So we will be adding tons of screws into the sub flooring to hopefully repair that issue. This will be a DIY project for sure!

- Paint the exterior of our house. We are thinking a grey on the siding and white shutters. We also need to repaint the railings on our front porch which are already white. I would also like to do a little sprucing to our garage door.

- Repair the gate to our backyard. This is in preparation for getting a dog. My husband and son have been begging for a while! Our gate pulls together, but it's off a little and it doesn't latch.

- Update the kitchen. I would like to paint the cabinets, get new hardware, install butcher block counter tops, get a new sink, and build a banquet to go on the wall by the laundry door.

- DIY/ Replace lighting throughout the house. We have way too many boob lights and brass lighting in our house! I have some plans for almost every room. Some lighting will be painted, some will be replaced with DIY lighting, and I'm hoping I can find some new lighting on clearance for some rooms.

I'm very excited about what's in store for our house this year! I can't wait to get that wall removed. I can just picture how much bigger and brighter everything is going to look.

Tuesday, January 1, 2013

Back to blogging

I stopped posting for a couple of reasons. The main reason is because we didn't have home Internet. It is very hard to blog without having Internet easily accessible. But, about 4 months ago we joined the current century! It is definitely a luxury we missed having.

I also wanted to be able to have better pictures. I decided to ask for a camera for Christmas and I got a pretty nice one. Lets just hope I can keep it working! We went with the Nikon Coolpix L810. It's a very good camera, but not a super expensive DSL. It seemed like a good compromise for me.

I've really missed blogging and I've been thinking about it more and more over the past few months. I love doing projects around the house and I like having an outlet to share them. I really hope that eventually this blog will become a place where I can help other people with their decorating dilemmas.

Reading over all of my old posts has been so encouraging. When you are doing one small project at a time and you have an ever-growing list of project to tackle it is easy to feel like you aren't accomplishing much. Having these old posts to look over and seeing how far our house has come in just a year and a half is amazing. I'm so proud of the projects we've tackled. I can't wait to start taking pictures of everything and sharing them here.