Dear Mom (Part 2)

Hi Mom!

Just wanted to say hello and I'm bacccckkk! I have a few posts planned for the month just to catch up on all the things that happened during the summer months. It was a wonderful summer but it went so quickly. We have been enjoying exploring our city, creating, and enjoying our home. I can't wait to share a few projects that we have been working on and that I have planned for this month. I really love the ever changing process of making a house a home and I really like documenting it as well.

So I'll give this area of the internet some attention.

Love you Momma! thanks for your help this summer :)

Thoughts on decorating a meaningful home

Something that has always been important to me is making things meaningful. I love stories/memories tied with objects. In our first apartment, I filled it with all sorts of projects and thrifted finds but later felt that it lacked the depth that I desired and it felt rushed.

So with our home I have worked to be intentional about our decorations and tried to scatter some meaningful things around the home.

Here are some of my "meaningful" staples in my home today:

1. Photos
I love having photos up around the home. I follow the quality over quantity rule with my photos. I have found that a few really meaningful, special photos in a room stand out more than an entire room filled with photos. Don't get me wrong though....a gallery wall is still one of my favorite things, but I enjoy a mix of photos in with art and other fun objects. Do you have any rules with photos? I once read that some follow rules such as: no pictures in the family room, only wedding pictures in the bedroom, etc. I think that sounds strange to me.

2. Family Heirlooms
I have a very close family and I also have felt a great deal of loss in regards to some family members. Anything and everything that was my father's or my step-father's is incredibly special to me. I also love anything from my grandparents. Carpentry to embroidery, I love it all.

made for my dad 

A jade tree from my grandmother (this reminds me so much of her home)

A tiny bike that was my dads

Made by my step-father last Christmas

3. Souvenirs

Over the past few years I have had numerous travel opportunities and have brought back some pretty special pieces. I love finding one or two meaningful/useful items that I can put in my house instead of loading down my suitcase with shirts and shot glasses. Although I am known to have a rather large collection of t-shirts :)

From Cancun, Mexico

From Russia

4. Type Art
I am always encouraged by writing my favorite quotes and Bible verses on paper...why not make it pretty? One of my favorite things to search on Pinterest (Here is my board where I collect beautiful words) are quotes and bible verses paired with beautiful type or art.

5. Real Art
My house doesn't have much of this yet, but I really desire to start investing in the art that I have around the house. Making the switch from buying my artwork in Hobby Lobby or Pier 1 to buying straight from an artist would make a huge impact. Some of my favorite artists:

Michelle Armas

Yangyang Pan

"I'm going to decorate"

This past weekend I just decided "I'm going to decorate". Maybe it was the dreaming and planning that happened the previous weekend on my shopping trip with my mom, or maybe I was just sick of looking at my moving boxes with all of my decorations in them (6 months post move). 

I find it so funny because I love decorating, but I've found that I love planning as well and sometimes I am super indecisive. For awhile I held off on adding things to our walls in anticipation that we were going to paint (that has yet to happen as well). But, after rummaging through our boxes and looking at special pictures and art from loved ones I decided it was time to get them out. I missed that stuff. 

Here are some little changes I made over the weekend and projects I completed:

 I finally hung some frames and artwork. The faux bois painting is an old one I did a few years ago, but that I love so much. And then I framed the cute Valentines Day card to Seth. This is the wall right in between our dining area and kitchen.

I finally brought in my DIY vase that I completed a few weeks ago. I took a 50 cent, glass thrift store vase and painted it white and glued a clay flower to it (inspired by Anthropolgie's beautiful vases).

More posts to come!

Update: The Master Bedroom

Slowly but surely we will get this house furnished!

I'm enjoying the ride and getting giddy about every step of the way.

Something I have been planning for many months is our master bedroom. As I mentioned in a previous post, we were gifted a king sized bed from family last month. I knew once we had the bed I would want to get that room finished...as in: paint it, make a headboard, buy bedding, add accessories, etc. So that has been my focus for the past month or so.

Here is what I've got thanks to Polyvore!

The bedding is from West Elm (I don't I have ever expressed it on here but this is one of my all time favorite stores!) and the rest of the details are all just to get the idea of the overall concept of the room. 

One of the biggest pieces that I was trying to work out was the headboard. 

I have desired to make an upholstered headboard since we were married. I actually wanted one so bad in 2009 that while my husband was at work I went and bought 2 yards of fabric, a staple gun, and batting and covered our old, inherited headboard. It was cute but whenever we would move and dissembled the bed I would laugh so hard at how funny it looked. 

Last year I started planning and looking into the details of making headboards and started discussing it with my step-dad, who loved carpentry and was very good at it. But April came and we were reminded how precious each day is and I realized that my goals of making a headboard might not be possible anymore with him gone. 

My mom shared with my grandpa the plans that I had built up with my step-dad and last month we started emailing back and forth regarding the details. I drew up a template and the measurements over Thanksgiving and after numerous detailed emails with measurements, materials, and plans I got this picture yesterday from my grandpa:

Holy Excitement!

I am so in love with it already! 

I have a beautiful slate colored fabric and nail heads on their way and I can not wait to make this thing beautiful. My grandpa did an amazing job, don't you think!? I am so incredibly thankful for him and I think he has really enjoyed the project as well.

I will definitely post updates when he delivers this to me in January and as I work on the rest of the room!

It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas!

It is really starting to look like Christmas around here! I loved creating new decorations this fall in preparation for Christmas and I think the hard (but fun!) work paid off! I continued my tradition of making paper birds and decided to add origami cranes to the mix this year.

I will let the pictures do the talking :)

(beware...photo dump of around 20 photos!)

A few glimpses

I realize that my blog is missing something. Although this blog will go many directions, I initially started it as a blog to document the buying of our first house and the process of decorating it. I'm glad I blogged along the journey of buying the house, but I am struggling to document the furnishing aspect. 

I'm a perfectionist.

It is hard to let others see my house when I don't feel it is "ready yet".

I struggled with having family over early on, because it "wasn't ready yet". I needed to snap out of it. 

I have such high hopes for this place and I really love decorating. I really love finding  those perfect pieces, thrifting, painting and sewing and I believe with time I am going to be super proud of our home. But for now we still have all of our tools and random decor laying all over our formal dining room (no dining furniture yet), boxes and random crafts all over the floor of our loft, mismatching bedding the guest rooms, the walls are a flat white paint all over the house, and our master bedroom is as plain as ever. But I need to document it all.

I need to start somewhere.

So here are some sneak peeks of our house where we are right now. I'm excited with where we are and the potential this house has. It was beautiful house empty so it would be hard to mess it up :)

thrifting and refinishing

I have always loved thrifting and looking for good deals. Our first year of marriage our budget was tight so I was forced to be creative in how I would decorate our apartment. 

Decorating a large house takes time and I'm learning to take things slowly and to buy things that speak to me. I have a list of things that I look for when I shop and in these past few weeks I have landed some amazing finds. 

First is this painting:

 

I landed this original painting for $28 at a local antique loft. I had seen it weeks prior and eyed it but couldn't get myself to pay for it with a $120 price tag without consulting my husband first. So when I saw the layers of stickers and scratched out prices I snagged it and knew it needed to be mine! I am thinking about reframing it or simply staining the current frame. 

Then, the day after I came home with the painting, I came home with this in my backseat:

This one was marked down from $48 to $24.99 at my local family thrift store. I have been looking all over for an antique vanity in my price range and I knew that this was the one. 

I also got this piece for our master bathroom for $20.00 at a garage sale

 (I didn't get a good picture before taking it apart)

 

 

So with my collection of furniture adding up in my garage I decided to make last Saturday a painting day and get these pieces refinished. I had never refinished furniture before but there are some amazing tutorials on pinterest. My good friend, Jen, came and helped me for the day while our husbands recorded and wrote music. 

Here are some of the pictures of the process:

and the final looks: