My thoughts about the nursery…

We’re switching it up in here. What used to be our guest bedroom will become our nursery, and what used to be our to-be-exercise-room will be our guest bedroom.

That means… two new rooms to design! Yay!

Today, when taking things out of the ex-guest-bedroom-turned-to-be-nursery, I decided to doodle and play around with possible room arrangements.

Although we’re moving our guest bedroom downstairs, our planned color scheme (orange and gray) will remain in this room. I fell in love with this fabric that I spotted at Effortless Style, so we’ll be adding in navy blue and some greens and yellows in the mix.

I think this would be really great as curtains, maybe. Or a headboard for our sofa (more on that later).

We really want to work with what we have as much as possible to save money so we can buy all the baby stuff! There are so many things to buy!! Aghhh… but we’re not focusing on that right now.

Here’s a very, very rough moodboard:

The chair, orange shag rug, side table, and the ceiling light are all things we already have. The “sofa” you see in my sketch is actually a twin bed mattress that my mom gifted to us. We’ll be turning that into a sofa, inspired by Aubrey + Lindsay’s cute couch in their nursery.

What we need to buy: a white crib, a long dresser to serve as a catch-all and changing table (Craig’s List or thrift store), and pillows and accessories (West Elm has lots of cute navy pillows I’m digging right now). I would love to add a pouf that I’ve been coveting for a long time – the cute gray knit pouf from CB2. I still want nine RIBBA frames for art, but $20 x 9 = $180. Hmm. Hey, my birthday’s coming up. (hint)

Not bad, but still far from a finished vision. We’re getting there, though!

A change of plans.

I grabbed a paint brush to test out the paint stripes in our bathroom. To decide once and for all whether we would go with horizontal or vertical stripes.

The result:

Meh.

source

First of all, the yellow color is absolutely horrid. It’s the same color that’s in our dining room, but it looked completely different in the tiny bathroom. It makes sense, because there’s no natural light going in there.

And it just looked like a kid’s bathroom. A circus-themed kid’s bathroom. We weren’t feeling the stripes at all. So… we started allll over again!

The color will be the same dark gray as in our dining room, Sherwin Williams’ Web Gray. It will look great (I hope) next to all the white marble in the bathroom and the white shower curtain (1). Do you know how HARD it is to find a decent-looking shower curtain? I bet if I go into the shower curtain design business, I’d be a millionaire. Hmm… And then a fun piece of art (2) that will help things get moving. For the floor, this fab rug (3) will add charm and a touch of yellow gold to the room. We’ll also paint the vanity black (we think) and add glass knobs (4).

We still need to find the perfect mirror (the black mirror we originally got for this bathroom will be used in the upstairs bathroom instead) and great lighting.

This room will be satisfying to do! We’ll order everything in a few days. Can’t wait to get started in there!

The Colors of Halloween

Halloween is one of my favorite holidays, but we haven’t accumulated enough Halloween decor yet. Besides, they would only last a few weeks. How about getting some things in black and orange that you can enjoy all year long?

DALFRED Bar Stool, IKEA. Octagon Jacquard Duvet and Shams, West Elm. Coil Side Table, Urban Outfitters. Parker Chair, Urban Outfitters. Kate Kilim Rug, West Elm. SVEJE Rug, IKEA.

St. Thomas Pillow, Furbish. Knoll Bertoria Chair, Austin Craig’s List. Bolivar Table Lamp, Crate and Barrell. Knitted Pouf, CB2. Loft Chandelier, Z Gallerie. Chutni Collection Wool Rug, Overstock.

I didn’t see any orange artwork that I really liked, but I adore these black prints.

The Travelogue, 20×20. The Constellation of the Elephant, 20×200. Spiral Stairs, Etsy.

And the scariest home decor item you could ever own…

Scary Shower Curtain, Urban Outfitters.

Please, don’t buy me this shower curtain. It would freak me out!

The best laid plans…

Thanks to my beautiful sister in law Alexa and my beautiful mom Kathi – we have a clear plan for our kitchen! They sent me this picture of a sweet kitchen…

[via Maggy Moon Interiors]

…and gave us the inspiration that we needed for our kitchen.

Our current kitchen:

Yeah. We’ll paint the cabinets white, the walls a light gray, and add the other things on this moodboard (along with a wood floor, which will come next year)…

I fell in love with this tile(1) when I stumbled into this great blog, Knight Moves. Her blog header has this tile design and I really liked it until she mentioned where she found that tile and I thought, I MUST HAVE THAT SOMEWHERE IN MY HOUSE.

The yellow pendant light (2) is actually a DIY plan I have – first, buy a pendant light from CB2 for $40 and then wrap it with a fun yellow/gray fabric, like this one from an etsy seller.

Then the hardware. I’m getting sick of digging my fingers underneath drawers and cabinet doors just to pry them open and getting afraid I’ll scratch the wood. Cool Lugarno pulls and knobs (3) will solve this problem with style. They will look dashing with our soon-to-be newly painted white cabinets and black countertops (which will result in something like 4).

On the top of our future wood flooring, we’d like to have a fun and bright rug – and Flor tiles in gold and cream(5) would work beautifully in this space. Bonus: we can decide any kind of rug arrangement, thanks to the flexibility of rug tiles. I think that would incorporate enough yellow in the kitchen, but if needed, we can always throw in some accessories like this tray from West Elm (6).

We have glass sliding doors in the kitchen (not pictured in our photo above) that we love because of the light shining through from our backyard all day long, but we don’t love the style of it. So, we will be bringing in french doors (7) and painting them black (just like we will for all of our interior doors).

But we’re definitely not adding these:

[zgallerie – constructive eating set]

Makin’ the Office Pretty

The office’s bones are up, but now it needs to get some makeup.

Some ideas:

1. The colors. The walls are already teal, so we’ll be bringing in lots of white and yellow accesories with some gray to tie in with the rest of the house. 2. Cool art. On sale. But I am not sure if it would look good with our window treatments…? Otherwise, we would snatch it up RIGHT AWAY. 3. Pillow. For the loveseat that we plan to put in the room. 4. Another pillow. 5. We just want the wastebasket. 6. We already have this. 7. White boxes to organize our junk. 8. Cute yellow lamp. But this is a bit expensive so we will be on the lookout for a lamp with similar lines and just paint it yellow! 9. Flor gray rug tiles. 10. A magnetic frame for our magnetic boards. 11. Cool hexapods. Nick’s a math teacher, so this would be perfect.

Is it obvious that I love CB2 and their prices? Yeah, but we haven’t ordered anything from them yet. We almost ordered everything from CB2 from this moodboard an hour ago, but we decided to wait a bit and be sure of our decisions before making any purchases. After all, January just started. We have a house budget for every month, so we have to make good choices.

I’m finding it really hard to decide what to buy each month. Like, for this month, should we focus on buying bigger items such as a loveseat (probably from Craig’s List for now), shelves for the closet (we decided to go with Billy bookcases and hack them a bit to fit our closet), and boring stuff like filing cabinets and a side table, or should we buy decorative accessories and smile as the office smiles back at us?

I just can’t wait to actually bring a moodboard to life. I think this one will be the first one to be completed!

I Wanna Play Wii in Style

For some reason, it took me a while to do a moodboard for our game room. I’m STILL not satisfied but here’s what we like… this is definitely not the final version. If you could give us some suggestions, that’d be great!

1. We want a fun and playful space for this room. That’s the perfect description of this pendant light. (Found this via one of YoungHouseLove’s moodboards)

2. There’s a large wall on the left side of the game room. We have two ideas for that wall – this bookcase is one of them. We love the idea of putting art inside the glass doors! Similar to this combination, but only with glass doors.

3. A splash of orange!

4. This simple end table will go well with our table that we already have.

5. Our color scheme for the room. We won’t be rigid with these colors – we might throw in some teal and maybe gold here and there. Our inspiration for the color scheme and the feel of the room was from the art you’ll see in the second moodboard below (8).

6. It seems that we’re drawn to art that’s either modern or nature. This is definitely a beautiful picture of one of my favorite plants. I’m thinking about putting that plant in our front yard.. but that’s another topic for another time. (also from this moodboard)

7. I originally planned on a green chair but I thought that would be overkill – this cool and laidback gray chair is more neutral yet striking! LOVE this one.

8. Our inspiration! Union Station definitely holds a special place in our heart since we went to Gallaudet University in Washington DC. Yes, this art is actually of the Union Station in NYC but close enough since there’s also a Union Station in DC..

9. Another pendant light. I think this one is simpler but is it too simple? It’s more industrial looking than the first one (1)… I’m not sure which one would fit our game room better.

10. This one depends on what we decide on for that large wall. If we go with number 2 (in the first moodboard), then we won’t need this green shelving. But if we go with number 11, then this would go above it for some extra storage and a pop of green.

11. Another option for the large wall. This would be used for games, entertaining (notice the bar storage), or correcting homework while watching football (not me).

12. Rugs are always hard for me. I think this one is cute.. but I’m not sure if it’s exactly right. It seems a bit too dark… It looks really cute in the CB2 catalog, though. There’s always the orange shag rug that I could grab from the guest bedroom…

13. We already have this leather sofa – it’s in our living room right now. As soon as we buy our sectional for the living room, we’ll be bringing this sofa up to the game room. To brighten it up, we’ll be adding pillows like this and this.

14. Isn’t this adorable? A tiny bean bag! It’s designed for iPhones but it would be perfect for making sure we don’t lose our remotes.

And of course, the most important part of the game room – the media center! We already have the tv set (17) so we’ll work with what we have.

15. A simple black floating shelf to add some more storage and to display more pops of green and orange.

16. Two simple bookcases will flank the tv set. Nick has a huge DVD collection, so these would be perfect (better than the blue bookcase we currently use from Nick’s college days). But to make everything look more streamlined, we want to add glass doors like this. The pattern on these glass doors are a bit eh so we will figure something out.

17. The tv set that we already have. Brought over from my old apartment.

Now it’s all coming together… Still a lot more editing and finetuning before we actually commit to a design, but this is the general idea. Now we’ve just gotta plant our money tree.

Because Purple Was Our Wedding Color…

We just had to do another purple room.

This time, it’ll be in our master bathroom. It’ll go well with our purple bedroom.

1. Color scheme: Dark purple and gray, along with all the marble whiteness that’s already in our bathroom. (Go to the House Tour to see what our master bathroom looks like right now) We want to paint the walls dark purple since there’s already so much white in the room and a lot of light comes through the window.

2. Dark gray slate tile for the floor. We STILL haven’t found the perfect tile!

3. Diamond faux chandelier, Urban Outfitters. Perfect for above the tub. Got the idea from this photo:

from younghouselove.com

4. West Elm. We don’t have enough hooks to hang up our towels – this will be perfect and geometric (Nick’s favorite subject).

5. Cabinet knobs from Anthropologie. These will jazz up our brown cabinets… Yes, they are $14.00 each but we would only need four.

6. Bath mat from West Elm.

7. Towels from Anthropologie. Not too sure about this one.

What do you think?

The Color Purple

Our wedding was awesome. Our theme was PURPLE, white, DIAMONDS, coolness. Naturally, we want to remember the day we became one and put these colors in our most romantic room of the house: the master bedroom.

Hence, this moodboard….

1. Our color scheme for the room and design plans for the accent wall (one wall purple with the design, other walls gray); 2. Ashley Furniture, purchased; 3. ZGallerie; 4. Gift from MOM! This chandelier is a close replica of what I have; 5. West Elm. 6. IKEA, purchased; 7. IKEA, purchased; 8. Engagement picture; 9. Urban Outfitters; 10. ZGallerie; 11. IKEA, purchased.

Wow. We have seven out of 11 items on this moodboard! Very cool.

I Dream of Orangeness

I am totally new to photoshopping.

Frustrated with the lack of progress on our living room due to homecoming week at the school we teach and then now with the hubby being sick for two days…

If I couldn’t paint in reality, I wanted to at least paint virtually.

I know, that looks so amateurish.

Well, I still gotta a lot to learn but this moodboard is at least a start… Will show it again when I’m good and done with that. Still a lot to add… I know, I’m like a kid in a candy store (Nick’s favorite words to describe me whenever we go to a home decor store).

For now, here’s the BEFORE photos of the guest bedroom! Can’t wait to make over that room, it’ll be the most fun room in the house… but as per my contract (signed in blood) with Nick, we have to finish the living room first. Sigh…

see the orange rug? that needs to be cleaned.

the other side of the guest bedroom

That settles it.

WE ARE GOING TO FINISH THE LIVING ROOM THIS WEEKEND: paint, hang tv, install light chandelier.

(guttural growl)

UPDATE: Nick just vetoed the orange chair. Oh no. Do you agree with him or do you think it’s oh-so-cute like I do?? Support, please, people.