Long time, no blog? 🙂

I figured I’d jump back on the blogging wagon with some simple seasonal decorating. I’m not really one to go big for most holidays except for Christmas, but I love a little Fall decor. We host Thanksgiving each year, so I keep things fall neutral to get a good 2 month stretch out of everything.

First up, the porch. My favorite fall wreath got ruined when our basement flooded during Hurricane Irene in 2011. I went 2 years without a replacement wreath until I spotted this one on clearance at Target about 2 weeks ago.

I added our same old doormat from Target about 3 years ago, some mums and 4 pumpkins, 2 of which Easton painted himself. Can you frame a pumpkin?

You may have noticed that we also changed out our (off center) porch light for this one from amazon.

We still need to put a clear bulb in there. We ordered another for the other porch light, but the glass was broken so we’re awaiting a replacement.

For the entryway table, I just added my usual twine pumpkins from Crate & Barrel several years ago. I mixed in some white gourds. Placement is based solely on the length of a 17 month old’s arms.

I also added some gourds to the powder room, along with some orange towels and a candle. Just call me Martha Stewart over here.

I probably could have folded those towels better. Oops.

Apparently, I lost steam once I got to the inside of the house since the family room got one lone update…

Okay, it got two updates, there’s a pillow on the other side of the couch.

Really, we’ve spent the past several months a) living it up for the summer b) working on that outdoor kitchen and c) decluttering the house and minimizing. I’ve been trying to focus on one thing at a time, which may not be a fun and bloggable thing, but that’s life.

But! The outdoor kitchen was grouted today. Once it’s all haze free and full of appliances, I will be sure to post pictures.

Happy Halloween everyone!

Roar!

Remember way back at Christmas time, when I framed some metallic wrapping paper to make our powder room all festive?

Well it stayed like that for much longer than I’d like to admit. One of my to-do list items before Easton was born was to switch out the paper in these frames. I planned to browse Target or Michael’s or something to get some brand new wrapping paper but I ran out of time and ended up using what I had around. I had a few sheets of different scrapbook paper hanging around and I dug out some gray and white damask sheets.

This time around I went with two of the same sheets of paper since I didn’t have two related patterns. But to change it up, I put one right side up and one upside down 🙂

This room is insanely, insanely hard to photograph since it’s well, a small powder room and painted nearly black. A full room shot is nearly impossible, but this gives is where we stand now…

Now that I look at that above picture, it’s quite funny that we can never get the frame and the shelves in the same picture. It looks like a drunken bathroom picture… or like our camera accidentally took that…while drunk.

We originally planned to add aqua accents to this room, but right now it’s just shades of gray and white. And I like it! I like the idea of keeping the shelves white and painting the mirror we have in there white. Then we can change out the accessories as we want and make a hand towel, pictures or little things on the shelf aqua or even red again around Christmas. Up next, I have a date with a can of white spray paint and the bathroom mirror. It’s long overdue.

2011 is over already, can you believe it? Since this year was our first full year of blogging (and living in the house), we figured we’d jump on the end of year list bandwagon! So without further adieu, here is a list of our top 5 favorite projects that we completed around the house this year…

5. Powder Room Paint Job

Though painting is nothing all that special, we took a flying leap out of our comfort zones with this near-black paint choice. I think it paid off 🙂

4. Pencil Eraser Art

This was another project that didn’t take me long, but had a big impact. I still love looking at this thing and I’m thinking of ways to use some pencil eraser art in the future.

3. Entryway Chair Rail

This was our first molding adventure and we got a serious high off of conquering those funny angles. Therefore, we loved it this year.

2. Stamped Concrete Patio

While we did not attempt this one ourselves, we definitely did not expect to have an awesome patio this year. It’s a reader favorite so our wood plank stamped patio gets the runner up position on our 2011 list!

1. Office stripes

Measure once, measure twice, okay measure 5 times then level, remeasure… 18 hours later peel off tape and have clean stripes! The amount of blood, sweat and tears that went into taping this room and the almost perfect finished product (we needed a few touch ups) make this our favorite project of 2011. Plus looking at the stripes through our french doors everyday makes it even better!

Honorable Mention:

The Baby.

Look at the little chin chin! I couldn’t resist the baby bomb 🙂

Hopefully 2012 will bring even bigger and better projects. We’re really surprised at how many things we’ve checked off our to-do list this year. We have a bunch of things to get started on for 2012 ASAP! What should we tackle first?!

Remember back when we painted our powder room? Well, we pretty much left it with our last update of just hanging a mirror and some shelves. Literally days after we painted, morning sickness kicked in and I lost all motivation to finish the room (we even still have touch ups to do). Considering I’m hosting a work Christmas party tomorrow and we’re hosting Christmas Eve on Saturday, I figured it was time to AT LEAST get a toilet paper holder.

I hoped to paint some artwork for the room this weekend, but that didn’t happen. So while in Target a few days ago I saw something red and had a revelation. I decided to use red accents in the room for Christmas. The year round plan was aqua (you can read about that inspiration here), but I figured since all of our Christmas decor is blue and green, I’d change it up with some red and silver in the powder room.

I began to pick up some things around Target and yes, it killed me that I was paying full price. I don’t think I have ever paid full price for anything Christmas related, as I usually just buy stuff as I see it marked down on like Christmas Eve or after Christmas. But in the end, it was worth it.

We decided to put the towel ring between the toilet and sink. Previously, we had a cheap towel bar all the way across the room, so you would wash your hands, then proceed to drip water all over the hardwood floors to get to a towel which was to the left of the toilet the picture above. I used some seasonal soap in a red bottle (which you can’t see in the pictures, sorry the room is small) and a candy cane scented candle.

On the shelves I put 2 red candle stick holders that I got from Target. I have the same ones from last year in silver and blue (which I of course didn’t pay full price for but these I did, grr). I didn’t put candles on them because a) I couldn’t reach b) my ankles were already swollen from buying gifts all day and c) I don’t plan to light the candles so why put them up there? I’ll save the candles for some of my other candle holders this year 🙂

Besides the standards of spare towels and t.p., you’ll notice that my pencil eraser “S” monogram has moved into the bathroom. Since our tree is in the entryway, the entryway table got moved into the living room on the side of the stairs. The monogram was teetering dangerously in a easy-for-cat-to-break zone, so I figured it was best to move it.

Okay these next elements were really hard to photograph because of the size of the room, I basically had to sit in the sink.

I hung two Ikea frames that we’ve been collecting to eventually make a gallery wall in our entryway. They are directly across from the toilet and on the wall next to the toilet.

Since I have a variety of white frames, I tried some larger ones but decided to go with this size. The larger one looked great across from the toilet, but was overwhelmingly dramatic when opening the door. Inside I put some wrapping paper, also from Target. It’s the foil-y shiny kind.

It’s very hard to capture how the metallic paper looks with the dark paint, but I love it.

I like the patterned wrapping paper so much that I’m debating whether or not to make my own prints for the room or just buy some non-holiday paper to frame for the long run. I’m loving the red also and thinking of picking up some clearance red items next week for the rest of the house next year. Since it’s going to be the baby’s first Christmas next year (a baby whose gender we now know :)), I want to go with a colorful and bright color scheme. Red, green and aqua it may be, so might as well stock up now!

A couple of weeks ago when I planned to do a post with some frequently asked questions, I wanted to include a section for all of the paint colors we’ve used in our house. Mike ended up taking over the post for me when I fell asleep, answering his own version of our FAQs. Since the #1 question I am asked is what paint colors we’ve used in various rooms, I figured it was about time the question received it’s own post!

Here are all of our current paint colors displayed together. Some observations…

1. I never realized how well all of our house colors blend together. Since I didn’t really have the whole house in mind when choosing colors, I’m surprised that they all work well! I especially thought the dark gray was bolder and less expected, but even that blends in well.

2. The two middle colors on the top and bottom rows do not look that similar in real life. Or maybe they do? Mike says they do. I think the top color is more brown based and the bottom one is more of a true gray. At least I’m consistent in my choices 🙂

Here is our color breakdown, by room.

Family Room & Kitchen:

Wedgewood Gray

Benjamin Moore HC-146

Entryway & Upstairs Hallway:

Himalayan Trek

Benjamin Moore 1542

Living Room & Dining Room:

Waynesboro Taupe

Benjamin Moore 1544

Office:

Light Stripe- Gray Ghost

Olympic D17-2

Dark Stripe- Silver Fox

Benjamin Moore 2108-50

(we color matched the dark stripe to Olympic, but it is nearly identical to Olympic’s Silver Dollar D17-3)

Powder Room:

Cracked Slate

Olympic D44-5

You’ll notice that our recent paint projects have been done with Olympic’s no VOC paint. We try to keep things as toxin free as possible around here since Macky has seizures and we don’t want any unnecessary triggers. Plus those smells just aren’t good for anyone 🙁 The Benjamin Moore paints we used were for rooms we had professionally painted before we moved in so Macky wasn’t exposed to those fumes (we couldn’t paint our two story entryway on our own so we hired it out).

I hope this post answers all of your paint questions in one spot. I plan to update it as we paint more rooms down the road. I’ll also add this post to our top navigation bar for easy access 🙂