Speechless

I love my state.

Living room progress

Now that I have shared our stair and wall progress, I wanted to share the current state of our living room. Actually, the current state of our living room included a ton of toys that made their way from the playroom. Magically.

I still need to add a ton more wall art (mirrors most likely) and fill the frames with actual photos or prints. I'm looking everywhere for a table of some sort to go on one side of the couch (and an end table on the other),so we can trash the ugly tall lamp and add table lamps We also need to buy and install trim to the wall. I'm looking at you husband.

Basically this room is about 13% finished.

I also am looking everywhere for a fabric that will compliment the accent chair we purchased. I would love to stay in the plum/grey/white color family which is causing the issues. It's a really tough pattern to decorate with but I love my chair.

Chair is the Hudson upholstered accent chair in Lavender Floral from here

Paint color is Benjamin Moore Thunder AF-685

Down the road, we want to have the floors refinished and stained much darker.

Call me crazy but I'm not feeling the orange stain.

Stairs part two

Like I mentioned in this cliff hanger of a post, the addition of the new (to code!) stairs meant we had to make some changes to the upstairs.

When we purchased the house it was open concept. VERY open concept. Like if you stand in the kitchen you can see the whole house, open concept.


Listing photo
my cats would have eaten those plants

 The staircase was even open to the basement (hello heating bill!). We knew when we changed the stairs it was going to change the layout of the house.

To this:

We lived with the unfinsihed walls for longer than I care to admit, but we set Christmas as a deadline to have the walls painted.

Unfortunately my husband wont let me paint the whole house gray we couldn't decide on a kitchen color yet so we just went with white for now.

We have added a 6X6 beam to that lovely paint line to separate the dining and living room.

We also took down the Christmas tree. (December 26th baby!)

Stairs part one

When we bought our house there was one very large problem we knew we would have to address right away. You see, even though we had a baby that was learning to crawl (at the time), we decided to purchase a house with this:



listing photo

 Hello 1980’s? Do you want your dangerous stair case back?

Like the idiotic first time parents we were, we thought “oh we will just teach him to not go near the stairs!” or, “we will put a gate up! That’ll work!”

Um no. These things were scary! I almost fell down them a few times. The previous owner put anti-slip strips on each stair but the poly’d wood just made each steep step slippery. Lets not even talk about bringing laundry up!

Family members didn't want to let their kids run around the house for fear of falling (we did install a baby gate at the top, which worked very well)

They had to go. And so, one fateful weekend away they went!
 

The addition of these stairs also changed the way the upstairs looks. I'll be back later to share. :)

Thumbtack pumpkins

(I'm suuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuper late posting these. Like almost 4 months late. That has got to be some kind of blogger record. anywho, sorry 'bout that)

I have seen thumbtack decorated pumpkins online and thought I would try my hand at some. I purchased some fake pumpkins at Michael's so I could use these over and over again. I also didn't feel like poking holes in our real ones for fear of them rotting quicker.

I printed out a number and our initial in a font I liked. Stuck thumbtacks all around the outside. Then I removed the tacks, pulled the paper off and reinserted the tacks, overlapping them to fill in the middle.



you can see the faint marks from the first round of tacks

I got many compliments on these when we had them on our porch during Halloween. We kept them with our inside decor until trick or treating night. That way the tacks don't rust in the rain. I'm excited use them again next year.

Have you ever used office supplies to decorate?

Faux glass etching

Long ago, we were young and childless. We bought a nice looking entertainment center made with dark wood (I have all the time in the world to dust!) and glass doors (always fingerprint free) to store nice looking things inside.

Here she blows:

source

Fast forward to today. It's a dust and cat hair magnet and we store toys inside. We still love the thing but the glass fronts are always covered in smudges. I also wanted a little change.

I found this tutorial to create faux etched glass using contact paper. I followed the instructions the same so I'm not going to write them done here (I'm lazy). I just traced each shape using a cardboard template and cut them all out one night after the baby went to bed. It was easy and sort of fun (I'm strange remember?)

Here is the final result:

One tip. I looked forever for "frosted" clear contact paper. I finally just got regular clear contract paper at the grocery store and found it looks frosted on glass. I don't even think they make frosted clear contact paper.

So, whadya think? Have you ever used contact paper around the house besides for lining shelves?



Linked up here:

Catching up

Ok, I have a tooooooon of posts and projects to share. I just get distracted easily and never take the time to watermark photos and write the posts. This stops today.

I want to share the progress we have made in the 6 short months we have lived at our house. I want to share some arts and crafts projects I have done with L. I want to create a house tour page soon but I feel like I can't talk about "the playroom" when I haven't even shown the walls we put up to create it.

I also wouldn't mind getting alot of these construction photos off of my phone.

So if you see a few Halloween posts coming next please don't think I have lost my mind. I'm not that sleep deprived (yes I am).