Our Nursery (about 90% finished!)

 

I am really excited to finally share our nursery with everyone! We've been working on this room for months - we took it from an oversized room with a huge closet to two smaller rooms - one is now a mudroom/laundry room with an entry from our garage, and the other is our new nursery!

It's a bit hard to show true before and afters, because the room is so different, and angles that existed in the room before don't exist anymore. For an idea of what the room looked like when we moved in, here is what we began with:

 and this is it from today, from roughly the same angle:

The room is shorter now, and the closets are gone, space which we used to make our mudroom/laundry room. My husband also added in a little hallway on the left side, and added a door to the hallway.

This was standing from near the entryway - it was a really large room. When the house was built, it was originally two bedrooms, which is why it has two ceiling fans, two windows, etc.

 Today, it looks like this - it's much narrower, about 2-3 feet was cut off for the hallway on the left side of the wall, but beyond this, it opens up into the full sized room (this is sort of a "nook" area now.)

From the far end of the room (near the closets) the room before looked like this:

And now, it's our wallpaper wall!

So with that all out of the way, here's a full tour of our nursery!

This is the view from the doorway, when you first enter the room:

         

My husband made the honeycomb lights, which is actually one of my favorite parts of the entire room. He just sort of brainstormed them one night, and a few days later, we had this beautifully constructed honeycomb light in the room. He took some pictures while he worked and put together a little tutorial, which I'll post soon hopefully!

To the left when you enter is our clothing hanger. We made this using an old branch we found after a windstorm. We have all of our outfits hanging from 0-6 months, which is more than enough.

               

In our little nook is my change station. This beautiful mid-century modern dresser was given to me by my mother in law. It's just so perfect!

The horizontal paneling is an idea we found on Vintage Revivals. It only cost us about 20 dollars for the materials to do it!

    

Then we have our toy shelf, then back to the crib!

            

One of the things I'm most proud of in the room, and which took me longer than anything else, was the quilt I made for our girl. It's the first quilt I've ever made, and while it's not perfect (not even close!) I am so so happy that I got it finished before she comes.

On the topic of quilts, my best friend made me an incredible quilt which she gave to me at my baby shower. I just love it so much!

We are so in love with the room. It's not completely finished, but it's very, very close. The only things left on the agenda are:

• Installing lights on the wallpaper wall
• Putting up artwork (we have about 7 frames with photos, waiting to go up!)
• Some kind of window treatment

And that may be it! I haven't taken a full tally of how much everything cost, but I would say everything, from construction of the wall, to wall treatments, to lighting, to furniture, cost around $800.

A LONG break comes to an end!

It's been so long since I've updated! I've been having a busy, fun summer and just have not taken the time to log on. Here are some updates:

• Summer camp was a huge success. I did 4 straight weeks, and it was great. I will definitely do it again! I still have a few projects that I didn't get around to sharing - pictures to come soon!

• On the house front, we are in the middle of a pretty big renovation - we've added a door where the spare bedroom meets the garage, and we'll soon be adding a wall to make a laundry room/separate entrance. Pictures to come soon as well!
  
• Our school year starts in 3 weeks. I am pretty excited, but overwhelmed with all that I need to get done before then! It's daunting to plan for a new grade (in a new division) but I am definitely up for the task.

Updates on art/house/everything with pictures to come soon!

$350 family room update (painted fireplace, board and batten walls, pallet light, etc!)

With the kitchen finished, we've knocked out one of our bigger house projects. That being said, we are constantly working on other little projects around the house. It's been about 6 months since we moved in, but I am finally confident in saying that we are (pretty much) finished our second room - the family room.



Our family room was an addition to the original house, which was added probably about 30 years ago. It's a nice big room, with doors to our porch and a fireplace (which shares a chimney with an outdoor fireplace - one of the best features of this house!)

When we first moved in, our family room looked like this:

It was perfectly nice, but just not us.

The first thing I did, maybe a day or two after we got the keys, was to paint the fireplace white and the walls a purpley grey. At this point, I had no idea where my camera was, so I only took a couple of quick, terribly lit photos of what I was doing.

I was pleasantly surprised to find these two beautiful air return vents that had previously been hidden behind old photos!I couldn't cover these up again, and luckily, I had a mirror that fit perfectly between them. 

Here's a photo during the painting process. We had a LOT of cream to get rid of (all baseboards, vents, etc.) and with the fireplace and walls, it was a huge job. Luckily, I had a friend to help me out (you can see her shadow on the right!)

I'm not sure if you've ever painted brick before but there was absolutely no trick to it - I used cheap white paint and a regular brush and it's held up perfectly.

Here's a photo from Christmas comparing the two - at this point, I had painted the walls and fireplace, but hadn't yet gotten to that gold colored insert.

By February, I was getting ready to call this room finished - we had sprayed the gold insert black, added a homemade coffee table, and done just about everything I could think of (with the exception of fixing the lighting, which I'll get to in a bit.)

One day, though, I was sitting watching TV and staring at the blank walls when I decided... I should do more board and batten. I had just had great success with adding it in my front hallway, and I was sure that it would look amazing in my living room.

Once I get an idea, it's hard for me to sit on it. Within a few hours, I had gone to Home Depot and purchased all of the wood I needed to board-and-batten up the entire family room.

(I'm going to say that there's really no excuse for the poor quality of these pictures, except that I think my camera was at work that weekend.)

Once I had board-and-battened the entire room, we finally decided to address the lighting issue. The biggest issue is that there wasn't any. When we moved into the house, there was a weird, completely off centered medallion on the ceiling. It may look somewhat centered in this photo, but believe me, that's a trick of the wide angle lens.

In a pinch, my husband wired a bulb from the medallion, so that we could have some semblance of light. This was supposed to be a temporary fix, but it ended up being our main source of light in the family room for almost 5 months. The reason for that wasn't laziness (because if nothing else, Joel and I are always up for a project.) It was more just that we couldn't figure out what to do. The ceilings are popcorned, and underneath the medallion was not popcorned. This means that when we removed the medallion, there would be a huge circle of non-popcorned ceiling. The worst part is that it wasn't centered, so we couldn't put something over it to cover it up.

Anyway, Joel finally came up with an idea for a 5 foot by 5 foot box that would cover the ceiling and center out the lighting. He covered the box with pallet wood in a herringbone style and added 5 potlights, giving us gloooorious light!

Here's a picture from the hanging up phase - you can see here how completely off centered the light was.

(If anyone is interested in the directions for how to build this light fixture, please let me know and I can post them.)

With the lighting coming together, I realized I was uninspired by the current purpley-grey color I had painted the room. As my final piece, I repainted the walls, using a Sherwin Williams color that had been color matched to Martha Stewart's Plumage.

First off, here's a couple of photos where you can see the light Joel made:

And now, the finished room!

This room really didn't cost too much to update. Among the things we did:

• painting the fireplace ($10 for a 5 gallon "mistint" of off white - the fireplace required maybe 1% of the amount of paint!)
• painting the room grey (another $10 5 gallon mistint)
• board and batten ($60 for supplies)
• pallet light (our biggest expense - $200 including the LED lights)
• blue paint ($1!! The paint store near me was clearing out cans of white for a buck a piece, which they will tint at any time for me.. I bought all 24 cans.)
• white paint for the board and batten (another $1 score)
• plus I'd factor in another $50 or so for all of the painting supplies, wood filler, etc. that was used along the way

So in total, under $350 for all of the updates we made. That's not including furniture (all of which we either owned already or made, or found second hand) and all of the decorations (as those aren't room specific, and will travel with us if and when we move.) I am, as always, very pleased!

What do you guys think - was the darker color a good choice? Or did you prefer the light?

Have you ever had a difficult design challenge (such as an off centered light) that you've had to overcome?

The big kitchen reveal - Our $2300 entire kitchen renovation!

I am so, so excited to share with everyone our kitchen reveal!I have been posting for weeks about the little updates that we have been doing since we moved in, but we are now finally at the point where everything in the kitchen is finished (for the most part - there will always be little updates!)

I'll start with a few before and afters, as I love to see the difference! My favorite parts - the floors, and the white cabinets (previously cream and black..ugh!)

This is my favorite view in the whole room,  the view I get every time I walk into the kitchen from the main hallway. It's where I see the most of my floors, plus our beloved picnic dining table (passed down to me by my parents - my dad even had it shipped here from cross country from Edmonton!)
 

You also get a great view of the light fixture Joel made using reclaimed wood and mason jars.

 

Isn't that little ladder cute? My neighbor was throwing it out last week and I grabbed it! I want to find something to put on top of it, but can't decide what, yet.

Here's a better view of the floors. I still can't get over them! I'm so relieved that Joel loves them as much as he does, because I sort of dumped the idea of doing herringbone floors on him, and they ended up being a LOT of work.

Here's what we see when entering the kitchen from the living room. This is around where the picnic table is:

Here's the floating shelves that we made. They've held up really well so far, and are so much more convenient than closed shelves!

 And finally, one more shot of the sink area.  The apron front sink has been one of the best changes that we've made in the kitchen. It's huge and lovely and it cleans up so easily. 

I am so happy to be finished our kitchen. This was a long project. We worked for months on almost all aspects of our kitchen, including:

• building wood counters from doors ($100)
• installing an apron front sink ($250 on kijiji)
• changing our cabinet orientation (free!)
• painting the cabinets ($150)
• installing new hardware ($70)
• building floating shelves (sponsored by Lowe's)
• ripping up our ceramic floors (free, but annoying!)
• installing hexagonal backsplash (about $150 including tiles, grout, and tile nipper tool)
• installing herringbone hardwood floors part 1, part 2, part 3 coming soon! ($750 for the flooring from Seaway Cabinets and Flooring, plus another $400 or so in equipment rental, stain, verathane, and other random expenses, for a total of $1150)

and many other things that never even made the blog (painting all of the baseboards, painting the door frame, installing potlights, buying a new faucet, etc.), the expenses of which totaled about $400.

I'm really proud of us for doing this all for $2300. With the amount of things we want to do in our house, it just isn't reasonable for us to spend a lot of money on renos. Doing our kitchen so cheaply meant we had to work slowly, using what we had, or waiting for sales (or kijiji deals.) Things like buying flooring took us weeks, as we scoured for deals and worked out every possible way for them to be the least expensive possible. But in the end, the patience was so worth it!


And now, we are on to the next projects! Joel's busy working on a huge, beautiful new lighting project for our TV room. He came up with this one all by himself, and I am so excited to see it finished! I'll make sure to post pictures when he's done.

Have a great week!