A Living Room Refresh

I have been on a bit of a painting spree around here and one of my favorite projects has been lightening and brightening our living room. That chocolate brown was fine but it was quite dark especially as this room is North/North-East orientation and it made an already fairly tight space feel more tight.

 I have been in love with that cow painting since the moment I spotted it and she has become my colour inspiration. We also want our house to reflect who we are and some words we would use for that would be fun, comfortable, colorful, eclectic and sentimental.

So, here we go...

Before  

Christmas Home Tour

I am linked up at The Nesting Place 2013 Christmas Tour of Homes so for anyone joining me from there, Welcome!

It's that time of year again, Christmas home tour time!

I'll be honest and say this is not a Perfect home tour in fact its anything but, (moving six people into a smaller house takes awhile to get things Perfect ) Good thing I'm not striving for perfection! And like one of my favorite bloggers, the Nester, always says, It doesn't have to be perfect to be beautiful.

So without further adieu, here is the tour!

Our tree was incredibly easy to find this year, we actually found it in our back yard! It is set up right in the middle of our great room so it can be seen from the kitchen, living room and dining room.

Do you scrapbook? Do you need some new ideas?

Hi!
I love scrapbooking but lately I've felt a serious lack of creativity, so I've been searching for ways to get new ideas. Well today I signed up for the this...



It's free, looks fun and it will hopeful help me jump start my creativity :) Join me if you want, should be a blast...

Back to school organizing

So, while we still have two more weeks of summer, (kids don't go back till Sept. 3) there has been lots of school talk around here and a bunch of back to school shopping!

Creative Crop 2013

Did you know last Saturday was (Inter)National Scrapbook day? No? Well me neither ;) until I got a nice email from the people at Big Picture Classes informing me of this special day and inviting me to participate in their annual Creative Crop.


                                                                       {source}

Basically we were given 10 different "challenges" of different techniques to scrapbook and with each layout you submit a picture of, completing this challenge, you had a chance to win some pretty awesome prizes (well, pretty awesome if you are a scrapbooker ;) So, since my scrapbooking has been pretty non-existent lately, I decided to attempt a couple of the challenges, and you know what? It was great! I ended up finishing three pages, two are a double layout and one by itself. The double layout is a bunch of pictures I've been wanting to scrapbook for awhile, they are about Gabe's first solo ski attempts.  (the challenge with this one was, we were given a sketch of the layout we were supposed to use and then use our own pictures and stories within that layout)

A Frame Wall Update

A couple months ago, just before Christmas in fact, I shared with you my little house update which was essentially making a gallery wall of frames seen here,

But that update included quite a few Christmassy photos and decorations so I wanted to change it up a bit for the other 11 months of the year :) So here we go, a frame wall update...

Ooooh aaaaah  :)  

                      

Those three keys I found at a local store and I was trying to figure out what to do with them for the longest time and then I just decided to hang them up as a symbol of the three keys to our heart (their names are Nyla, Cadence and Gabriel ;)

See that frame with the map at the bottom? It was a picture of a Christmas street scene that I changed out for a neat map I found on eBay (for $3!) It's a map of the "Dominion" of Canada (we are Canadians if you didn't know) and it shows the railways, the steamer routes and the telegraph cables ;) I thought it was pretty neat.

These two little pictures are pretty special to us as they were both done by artists in our family. The one on the left was done by our nephew and the one on the right is a water colour done by my husbands step-mom. They're pretty special to us so of course I had to include them on our wall. :)

Here's a trio of fun, a little canvas painted by my sister(and there are two more near the bottom of the collage), a favorite picture of my three little imps, and a print by Vicki Wade that I really enjoy. You can check out her etsy shop here.

The other two changes are that little barn star near the middle and the picture on the far bottom right corner which is a photo of myself and my sister( who lives with us) when we were babies. it used to have an old Christmas picture of myself and my siblings.

So there we go, a few little tweaks and adjustments and this wall is even more fun and personalized (and less Christmassy!).
Have a great week!

Disclaimer: I haven't been paid or perked by anyone mentioned in this post, all opinions are my own. 

Master Bedroom Update

Do you remember this room? *Shudder* Yikes! That awful paint job? That apres move in look? Well, I've been working hard to change that "look" and today I'm gonna share what I've done.
                                                                        Before

A little organization goes a long way...

towards saving my sanity!

Hi everyone! I hope you had a wonderful weekend! I have to say I was quite flabbergasted at the amount of people who popped in to check out my little piece of blog land here (Hello and welcome to any and all new readers who decided to come back today :). On Friday I had linked up to the Young House Love blog for their thrift shop challenge and after a couple hours, I was curious to see if anyone had peeked in. Well imagine my shock and amazement that I had over 300 new page views (I normally get about 20 a day!) So thank you again for your interest!

OK, back to saving my (and my husband's!) sanity. For the last week or so, I had kind of let go of doing a lot of housework while I got our master bedroom painted (more on that later this week!) but I have to say, this was the worst corner,

YIKES! That was the disaster in the corner of our dining room. Now, I have to say, I love this little cupboard and it is in the perfect spot for keeping all our kids craft supplies and puzzles and table toys organized, but as you can see, that just wasn't happening.

Our Kitchen Update

This post has been a long time coming, I know, but I finally went ahead and took some "after" pictures of the little reno we did in our kitchen. You can check out the original post HERE.
So without further ado, here's our kitchen:

Before




After

Before




After

Before









After

Before





After

I am so happy with the way everything turned out! It is so much brighter and happier in our kitchen now :) I was originally thinking of painting either the island or the stools a different colour like maybe a barn red or black or green, but after living with it like this for awhile (and because of the fact we were selling the house) I decided to leave them. I figured it was nice to have the wood tones there to tie in with the rest of the house still (which is log remember) and the ceiling as well. I wanted to add more pops of the red as I like to do that all around the house, it's kind of a continuity factor (and I just love the colour red!) but since we're now moving I guess that won't be happening:) I can't wait to find out what our new kitchen is going to look like!
So, I hope you have enjoyed the tour. If you have any questions, I'll try and answer them to the best of my memory :) Stay tuned and I'll tell you the adventure we are going to have this summer and our plans on where we're going to be living! 

Are we sick of this yet?

Hi! I know I've been really deck heavy with the posts lately, but I promise I'll share something non deck related tomorrow. I will say it has been a little challenging posting on the ol blog and will be for the next week or so as we go through the last stages of selling our house and moving (as well as last week of school/gymnastics/soccer kerfuffle around here) so please bear with me as we go through these changes. Hopefully I'll be back to blogging normally (is there such a thing? :) the first week of July :)

So, onto deck updates!

Last week I shared how we got our cement wall all ready to go (you can check out part one here and part two here )

The next step was to get the wood materials delivered to start on the framing and joisting (is that a word? oh well, I'm just going to go with it)

Anyways, my little man sure enjoyed watching the delivery from his perch in the window :)

And then after a few hours of hammering, sawing etc we had this....

Woohoo this baby is finally taking shape!! Now, if only the weather would cooperate we could finish this project :)

Anyone else waiting for weather to cooperate to finish an outdoor project?

More Deck Updates

So, Friday morning, just as we were getting ready for our whirlwind trip, this truck pulls up...

and we were on our way to finally rebuilding our deck! 

Go concrete go! See that deck above the conveyor in the picture above? We all stood up there and watched the cement zip by below us :) And I gotta admit, I found it pretty interesting myself :)

Pretty fun watching it all from above even though it did set us back awhile from our original leaving time. Then, on Monday morning the guys came back and took all the forms off and we were left with a nice solid concrete wall ! :)

It's exciting watching how fast this is all coming together! And while the guys are working on our deck, I'm pack, pack, packing away as time keeps ticking down to moving day. 

If you want to see the beginning of this project, you can check out demolition day here and you can check out part one of the work done HERE.

A Deck Update

      So, when we last left off on our deck remodelling saga a few weeks ago, we had just completed our demolition and were awaiting permit approval. Well the permit took a little longer than expected to come through, but it finally did and now we are on our way to rebuilding.
      Here is what it looks like today as we wait for cement to be poured (hopefully today or tomorrow)

All the forms and re bar ready for concrete. See on the right, the way it steps down? That's the proper way to build a cement retaining wall (or so I'm told by the experts)

  I am so looking forward to having this deck back! We've all really missed it the last few weeks with the weather so nice. It's funny how sometimes you don't realize how much you use something until it's gone.
  Hopefully it will be all done before we need to move and I can enjoy at least one morning coffee out there on the swing :) Those french doors, below, go out from our kitchen, so it is really handy for barbecuing and summer suppers outside.

All ready for cement! See all that metal in there? It'll make the wall nice and solid because they actually tied in the new wall to the old footing by ramming re bar in there. Our deck is already looking more solid :)

Remember this old thing?

Well we are all super excited to see how this whole thing turns out. I will keep you updated on our progress (whether you want it or not :)

Any new decks,porches, outdoor living spaces going on in your life? Have you done a reno of somewhere that you didn't realize how much you used it until it was gone/unusable? Feel free to comment, I love to hear feedback :)