Nursery Decor Ideas

It certainly has been a very busy couple of months! Along with all the busyness that comes with expecting a baby, we have traveled to Nashville, Chicago and have been working on fixing more things up in the house. It's been a good couple of months!
Doing all that other stuff didn't leave much time for the nursery though. The nursery is already painted the color we want ...... but that's about it! But just because we haven't actually done much in there yet doesn't mean I haven't been thinking about it an awful lot!
We do have a 'theme' (I have never really liked that term).... sort of. I always knew I didn't want too much going on in the nursery. No decals or major 'theme' overload. In the beginning when people asked me how we would decorate I just kept saying Animals. And then the next question would be, 'Well, what kind? Jungle? Forest? Farm?'    And I wouldn't really have an answer. Because the only real idea I had in my head was that I wanted to incorporate illustrations from my Little Golden Book collection in the room.
And then one day it hit me. DUH! Your 'theme' is Little Golden Books! So now we sound a little more put together when anyone asks!

So hear are some ideas I have been collecting over on Pinterest. Some inspiration for our little guy's room.

Love this fabric! But unfortunately I can't seem to find it on the interwebs ANYWHERE! :( Just pictures of it then the sad realization that it is sold out and/or no longer being made.

I plan on making a few banners and bunting like below. I'll use images from some of my favorite Golden Books and we plan to hang them over or near his crib. 

Here

I couldn't ignore this room! The images are from some of my favorite books and I was having trouble finding any other Golden Book inspired nurseries! 

Here

I just love the image below. The room is simple with great colors and is a room a kid can really grow into without having to make much change. 

Here

Same with this room. I LOVE the banner and clouds above the crib but it is all so easy to change out when you and/or baby outgrow it! The color on the well looks a lot like the one we are using too!

Here

And of COURSE we need some book shelves to hold all his new books and my Little Golden Book collection! I like these shelves because it sort of turns the books into art work themselves!

Here

Now, of course Jon was on board with the Golden Book Nursery Idea. But, as with most guys I think, he was really ok with any idea I came up with just so long as it wasn't too girly :) But once Jon and I really started shopping around for baby items and registering, we noticed that there is a lot of cute Fox stuff out there right now. Jon seemed to really like a lot of it. I thought it was great that he seemed particularly interested in them so we decided to try and incorporate some foxes into the room as well. Which goes along pretty well with Golden Books because I have been able to find some cute fox illustrations in some of the books that we will definitely be using. I have also been trolling Etsy for some other Fox stuff... especially a mobile.

This crocheted Fox mobile is super cute

So is this felt one!

This Fox nightlight will be super helpful and cute!

And who could resist this adorable fox 

 SOOOO the official decor of the room will be Little Golden Book with a side of Fox. LOL. Sounds a little crazy but I know it will look super cute and I can't wait to share the finished room photos with you!! Hopefully that will be sooner rather than later! We're running low on time!!  ;)

Baby on Board!...and what we've been up to lately.

So I've been MIA since my last post in April. BUT I have a good reason! Jon and I are expecting our first child in October!! So needless to say we've been a little busy handling this new, exciting chapter in our lives! We found out on May 30th that our little one will be a boy :) He is looking healthy and I have been feeling pretty good the past few weeks so now it is time to get back to it! We have a lot of stuff we want to get done in preparation for his arrival near the end of October!
I had a garage sale in the hopes of selling off a large chunk of my vintage stuff to make room for baby and because I know I won't have as much time to devote to selling for awhile.

My mom and Jon helped me for several weeks ahead of time preparing everything and getting it set up nice. I advertised what I thought was a decent amount and really emphasized the fact that most of it was vintage. I thought for sure the garage sale would be a hit! .... Not so much, unfortunately.

I did ok on Friday. A decent amount of people come through. I was certain that Saturday would be 10 times better... but it wasn't. Barely had any customers. And the weather was really crappy. I was pretty disappointed. BUT that's the chance you take with yard sales I guess! The worst thing though, is packing away (again!) all the stuff you thought for sure you were going to sell. I did end up giving away a decent amount to a great local second hand shop whose profits all go to local families in need. I also ended up finding a local woman interested in buying my whole lot of vintage women's clothing...so not all was disappointing!

Jon and I will be leaving to go on our 'Babymoon' to Nashville in a week and we are really excited. Jon has been working hard on projects around the house (which I will share soon!) and deserves this little break before he has to start class again on the 24th.
I am hoping one of the next posts I'll share will be our front entrance makeover! We have painted and Jon has put down a new floor. And we are just about finished with turning the hall coat closet into a mini mudroom! I will also probably be sharing some of favorite Pinterest ideas for the babies nursery soon. Storing some of my favorite ideas here while we try to decide how to decorate :)

And now I will leave you with our first official photo as a family of '3' :)

Main Bathroom Makeover

The biggest and most time consuming project in the house was the bathroom renovation. It was a complete gutting and redo. That hadn't always been the plan when we first decided to put an offer in on the house but the more we thought about it the more we thought it might be best to knock this project out right away.
The picture below seems to be the only 'Before' photo that I took of the bathroom. It was in usable(ish) condition but outdated. There was no storage and some tiles in the shower were pretty lose.

We toyed around with the idea of hiring someone to do the job but we had faith that Jon was capable of handling it. So Jon got to work on it pretty quickly. Home improvements were a fairly new thing to him so I am so proud of him for sticking with it (things got very frustrating in several steps of the process) and doing such an amazing job! I won't be going in to a lot of detail about everything that was done mostly because I didn't do any of it ;) and it would be an extremely lengthy post.

The bathtub was really small, shallow (the old tub is shown below) and really dingy looking so he removed it. It was ceramic (with cast iron base??) so it was extremely heavy. He had to bust it apart with a sledge hammer to be able to get it out of the bathroom. The tile floor had to go to and that was a process chiseling that away. 

Jon ended up learning A LOT about plumbing, since it turned out that pipes and things needed to be moved around and replaced. I think that was probably the most frustrating and time consuming part. 

But alas! The room was finally gutted and the bathtub in place and plumbed correctly (this all took a LOT longer than we both expected.... A LOT LONGER...). Now Jon was ready to tackle tiling for the first time. He tiled the shower walls and the floor. Cutest handyman you've ever seen?? :)

And, as I said in the beginning I won't go into all the 'how-to's' of it all. I will just show you the beautiful, finished product!

Darn! I guess I completely missed that an outlet cover was still missing when I took these photos. We actually had to have an electrician come and put in an outlet in the bathroom (and a exhaust fan) because there was none. There aren't any in any of the bathrooms! How did a lady do her hair back in the day!? :)

We chose this 'open' bottom sink because, as you can see in the picture below, the air vent is sort of in an inconvenient place. I was a little worried about losing storage space when we first decided to go this route but it has worked out well and I love the way it looks.

Well, there you have it! One of the smallest rooms in the house and the one that required the most time and attention. I can't say enough how proud I am of my hubby for taking on this big project. He did an amazing job and we both love the result.  

Awesome Craigslist find and makeover

Moving from a 2 bedroom townhouse (where the second bedroom was used as an office/junk room) to a 3 bedroom house, we knew we would have to buy some furniture...specifically bedroom furniture. So being the thrifty, vintage lover that I am (wink), I began to search Craigslist for dressers and nightstands. I sort of planned on finding something that would probably need some TLC, like a fresh coat of paint or new hardware. I was hoping for something sort of unique. 

After a few weeks of searching, a new listing popped up with just what I was looking for (don't you love when that happens?)! a set of 4 vintage pieces that definitely seemed unique. They have a 'faux' bamboo look and are super sturdy.  

The only problem was their color. They were an ivory/yellowish color that just wouldn't do. I was excited to try my hand at painting them. But also a little nervous because they are a fairly sought after vintage name that I was worried I might totally ruin. BUT by a lot of vintage lovers standards, changing the color, no matter how amazing the paint job is, is a crime worthy of death. I had actually told the person I bought them from that I was thinking about painting them and he looked at me like I was crazy. OH WELL! I painted them :)

I thought a high gloss black would look great and stand the test of time. I had never used a high gloss paint before but had read it is a lot trickier to use than a normal paint. So I did some reading and some research. I went with high gloss paint and primer from Sherwin Williams.

From my online research it mostly seemed everyone just mentioned that it took more coats and you had to be careful of your brush strokes because high gloss paint shows off more imperfections. I mostly found this all to be true. 

Painting 3 of the 4 pieces took WAAAYY longer than I had ever anticipated. With the sanding, primer, paint, and 4 hour dry time in between coats, this project definitely ended up taking up several weekends. The picture below shows what only one coat of paint looks like. It's obvious it doesn't cover nicely in one coat. 

This vanity will most likely live in our guest room and be used as a desk or possibly a nightstand. 

The dressers BEFORE. We are using them in our room. 

The dressers AFTER. Kitty approved. 

We are pretty happy with how they turned out. The black looks WAY better in our light pink room then the yellowish/ivory did. When they were still the original color I believe one family member said our bedroom looked like an 80s Miami hotel room. LOL. And we CAN'T have that! :)

I still think the drawers on the dressers might need another coat of paint but we'll see. I'm not in a hurry to work with high gloss paint again any time soon! 

Entry Way Ideas

I am not sure why the entryway wasn't one of the first things we knocked out when we first moved in. It IS the first thing people see...and right now it isn't much to look at. 

As you can see from the photos, the flooring is old and outdated (and missing chunks around the stairs), the walls could use a fresh coat of paint, and the closet has no doors.

                                                                                      

I would also love to get a new light fixture. And add some photos or art to the wall pictured above. 

Painting and new flooring are a fairly easy fix. But the biggest change we would like to make is to turn the closet into a mini mud room of sorts. Below are some photos I pinned on Pinterest of great closet/mudroom makeovers.  

   

Hollie's pin on Pinterest.

                               Hollie's pin on Pinterest.

        Hollie's pin on Pinterest.

Jon and I have started to talk about this project and might make a trip to the home improvement store this weekend to take a look at some flooring, fixtures, etc...

Here's hoping this will be a finished project to share on the blog soon! 

LIVING ROOM

So I thought it would be easiest to start with the living room. It was one of the rooms that needed little to no 'fixing up' other than paint. It was also one of the only rooms I really had any sort of idea of what I wanted it to look like. 

This photo was taken on one of the first walk throughs we did of the house. We both loved the cut-outs in the wall that is shared with the dining room. Of course I have plenty of trinkets to fill those spaces :) It is a nice size room with two windows that let in great natural light. 

Over Thanksgiving break, my sister and brother-in-law came over for a day to help paint and do some repairs. Wheezy also kept us company as you can see. She loves to sit right where you need to paint. I believe she walked away with a little gray paint on her fur this day. This little photo shows where the room meets the entryway. When you walk in the door the living room is to your left and the family room is on your right (with the stairway and little hall space to the kitchen in between). 

These first few photos aren't great quality. Sorry about that. But the IPhone is just so much more convenient to carry around most of the time! Below is another view of the room closest to the entryway. When we moved in all the walls were an off white color. They mostly looked slightly dirty and the paint seemed to be a flat finish so it all looked pretty dull and lifeless. We decided to paint all the walls (except one) a light gray. It is Modest Silver by Valspar. 

I had known from the beginning that I wanted to have an accent wall. I really wanted a cool patterned wall paper or stencil. Jon was fine with the idea and I started to look up different removable wallpapers. I found a lot of beautiful patterns but was a little thrown off by how expensive they all were. I ordered a sample piece from a seller on Etsy but decided we just weren't willing to spend that kind of money. So, my mom suggested we make our own stencil from the pattern we liked. Great idea! That is where this teal color comes in to play. The design we ended up liking had teal, gray and white in it. So we painted the wall teal and planned to stencil over it with gray and white. The teal is called Teal Zeal by Olympic.

Well, as you can see from the 'finished' photo below, we still have yet to stencil. We knew it would be a time consuming task so decided to wait until after the holidays. But the more we looked at the teal wall, the more we liked it just as it was. I found that awesome artwork at a thrift store (more on that below) and it just works for now. I am still flirting with the idea of stenciling a pattern but have no immediate plans.

The couch is from Macy's. It has a great MCM feel to it and is the perfect shade of gray. Having a living room AND family room was new to us so we had known we would need to at least buy a new sofa. We had found the one we wanted a few months before closing. Waiting to purchase it was hard :) But it was fun to be able to finally buy it once the house was officially ours.  We had the black chairs in our previous place. I found them at an estate sales several years ago. The beautiful silver branch side table was a gift from Jon for Christmas. I had seen it in Home Goods a few weeks before Christmas and really loved it.

I just love this embroidered cat pillow. I found a pair of them at an estate sale (the other is on the matching black chair).

The bookcase was also in our old place. The good old Expedit from IKEA. I have already filled most of the shelves....but working on making it look not so cluttered.

I had seen this painting in a thrift shop sometime in late October right before we closed on the house. I had thought it was pretty cool at the time but hadn't bought it because it was big, I wasn't sure where I would put it and in my opinion it was priced a little too high.
I must have liked it more than I realized though because it crossed my mind several times in the next month and a half and once we decided not to stencil the wall right away, I realized it would be a perfect place to hang it. It had been almost two months though and I was afraid someone would have snatched it up already. But one Saturday morning I went back to find out and I was so excited to see it still hanging there! The woman almost didn't sell it to me because she said she thought the guy in charge just meant it for display. I almost freaked out on her (lol) but then she saw a price tag on it and went and asked and was told it was for sale. Perfect!
It has the right colors and look for the room. I especially love that it hangs like a vintage school room map. That was Jon's least favorite part :)

So there you have it! the first room 'tour'. There is still a little left to do in the room though. I still want to hang some more art and pictures on the other walls and we are still searching for the right curtains. Will give a little update once we finish those things. :)