Gettin' Moody

Back in 2010, as SOON as I found out we were getting the house, I IMMEDIATELY GOT EXCITED AND STARTED MAKING MOOD BOARDS! Ok, maybe I'm exaggerating a tad. But anyway, I had been dreaming about the day when I could decorate my own house for what seemed like forever. What resulted was a Mood Board for each room. When we first started fixing things up, I definitely had my mood boards in mind. That might be why the living room and bedroom boards have a lot of similarities to how our rooms ended up looking. 

But after a while, I kind of forgot all about these, and just kind of went with the vision in my head. So that's why I thought it would be fun to reminisce and see what parts of these "vision boards" I actually stuck with.

First, the Living Room: 

I was really going for neutrals in this space, with a few pops of turquoise. Which is actually what I ended up with in the room:

The couch and coffee table are the same as in the board, since I already knew these would be in the living room at the time I was making it. I also knew that the paint color I wanted was Glidden's Water Chestnut which is the color we painted the room. I knew I wanted some flowy white curtains as well. The accessories just came with a little time - whenever I found things I loved and thought would work well in the room. It's funny that black and white photos actually got incorporated about two years later. We even have a similar shelf to the one in the mood board, except it's not distressed, and it's a chocolate brown instead of white.

Next up, the Bedroom:

 I had the vision of a calm, soothing space, again with a touch of turquoise and lots of layered neutrals.

I definitely think our bedroom feels a bit more "dramatic" than I had originally planned, but with a room so small, and lots of long, drape-y metallic curtains, you're bound to have some drama. The dark wood is definitely there, along with the neutral and turquoise colors. I even have a very similar blanket and homemade art in the space.

 I had a lot going on in this Kitchen mood board (lots of ideas!):

Since we haven't been able to fully renovate the kitchen yet, our current kitchen is still far from what I picture my "dream" kitchen to look like.

The appliances are less stainless steel and more "work with whatcha got" for now. But some of my dream accessories have worked their way into our kitchen, like the wine glass rack under the open cabinets, the matching canisters on the counter, the key hooks, the cute welcome mat, and even the shades have a similar feel to them. It's also light, bright, and sunny just like my dream kitchen will be. :)

I haven't shared photos of our bathroom or the office/guest bedroom yet, since those are still a work in progress, but here's what I dreamt up for our Bathroom a few years back...

Again, lots of neutral tones going on. I was obviously torn between finishes (chrome, brushed nickel, oil rubbed bronze?) and well, I still am. But I am still in love with that vanity/sink combination, and those door hooks! I will own those someday. We'll have to wait and see how our bathroom ends up, but hopefully I'll share a few pictures of our progress so far. We're kind of going more with a gray color scheme. Should be a huge project to tackle when the time comes! (Our bathroom might be one of my least favorite spaces in the house right now!)

Finally, My Office/The Guest Bedroom:

I can't wait to create this space, because I feel like this is where I can have the most freedom and play around with "my style." We have a space upstairs for my office and the guest room, and right now, my office is kind of coming together..but we have a long way to go. The whole upstairs definitely needs ripped out and started over eventually. And what was once Trent's bedroom upstairs (and what we hope will become a guest bedroom) is cluttered with things we don't have a place for yet, and storage totes galore. Still, I am loving all of the things in my mood board and definitely want to bring to life the yellow theme! Sidenote - the poster in the top left corner was something I made for one of my graphic design classes in college. I can't wait to frame it and put it on the wall someday!

So that gives you an idea of what I was envisioning for our house in the beginning. It's safe to say I still have a lot of the same ideas in mind! How's that for an eye candy post?

Young House Love's Macklemore Thrift Shop Challenge!

Woo! So excited to finally be able to take part in one of these :) 

I've always been jealous of all those bloggers getting to join in on those "link party" things and start to think..'Maybe I should start blogging again..' Well, now I can finally participate! Woot -

So I knew I HAD to do this challenge that Young House Love created, inspired by this awesomely catchy song - "Thrift Shop" by Macklemore and Ryan Lewis. Here's the music video if you have no idea what song I'm talking about:

Uh, yeah..all week long I've been singing, "I'm gonna pop some tags, only got twenty dollars in my pocket...." It's so totally one of those songs that gets stuck in your head all day!

Anyway, The rules for the challenge were as follows:

1.) Go to a thrift shop with, as the song says, "$20 in your pocket."

2.) Spend your $20 however you want. But you can't go OVER $20.

3.) Find one or more items referenced in the song and take a picture. For example, it can include: a keyboard, a knee board, shoes with velcro, a brown leather jacket, moccasins, a big a$$ coat...etc. (You know, the usual.)

So, on Saturday we decided to check out the Salvation Army. Which is always interesting. Here's me in all my squintiness and my 20 buckeroos:

Step ONE - DONE!

I wasn't really looking for anything in particular, but always like to browse thrift stores for some things for the house. And I ended up getting these two lovely items:

1. A small table lamp that I plan on using in the eventual guest room upstairs.

2. This funky black vase that I just thought was really modern and cool looking!

I'm not sure where I am going to put the vase yet..right now it's just kind of sitting in the living room. But I hope to find a nice little place for it someday :)

I'm really pleased with the two items I got. And I was soo thinking it was going to be under $20. But,  alas, observe:

See the total? Yep, I went 40 cents over!!! :( Stupid tax. I was all ready to hand her over my twenty dollar bill. Oh well! Then it turned out the lamp was missing the pull chain, so we had to pick one up from Lowe's, spending another $5.00 or so. Trent got it fixed though, and it works wonderfully now!

Pitfalls aside though, we did have a pretty good time at the thrift store..

Yep, a BIG A$$ Coat!! Haha. What a weirdo...  :)

Curb Appeal

This is our house.

That picture was taken from last summer. (When things were a little greener). It's nothing too special..But a couple of years ago, it looked like this:

Aside from the change of season, hopefully you can see a few improvements since then. If not, allow me to point them out to you. Since we started, back in 2010, here's the changes we've made to the appearance of the front:

1. We chopped down those 2 huge, overgrown bushes in front and planted two small dwarf bushes in their place. For one, they were an eyesore. They also made the house look smaller, like they were hiding behind those things!

2. We gave the shutters a nice new shiny coat of paint. They were seriously faded and dull-looking before, and with some new paint, they suddenly popped!

3. We did some landscaping. Since it was lacking any legit landscaping (dead flowers and large rocks don't count), we planted some flowers and put down some mulch out there.

4. We removed the stump you see closer to the foreground and planted new grass in its place.

5. We replaced the house numbers with some snazzier ones.

6. We replaced the porch light from a dated motion-sensor light to a new, modern one.

Even before that "before" picture above though - it was even worse. Before I even moved in, we made some improvements to the porch, including ripping out the ugly black carpet that was there, and painting the bare concrete underneath. It never had a railing, either. Just some lattice thrown up there. Ya know, the usual. So Trent actually built a new railing out of some thin boards laying around, and we painted it bright white. It turned out pretty darn good, if I do say so myself! Here are some pictures from back in 2010 when Trent was tearing the old carpet out and building the porch rail:

This was the black carpet that was on the porch:

Trent replaced a couple of the posts with brand new ones. Here it is in-progress:

And here's the porch railing being built:

Below is the bench that was already there, and we painted white:

 

Assembled - Before paint

Huge improvement, right? And the stump in front of the house? It was actually what we dubbed the "chair stump." As in, it had been carved into a chair. Let's just say..not my style. ha.

Here's Trent watching that baby burn:

Yep, we're real classy around here, burning chair stumps and all. It took a couple of years until it was finally soft enough and buried deep enough to plant grass seed over, so we finally did that last summer.

A couple of smaller improvements we made were replacing the porch light and house numbers with nicer looking ones.

Here's the Before and After of our house number makeover:

And here's the porch light Before....

While Trent was installing the new one....

And the new light:

And even though we've made some improvements over the last couple of years, there's still some work to be done. Still on our "curb appeal" to-do list is:

1. A new roof

2. A smaller, more modern chimney

3. Somehow get the power lines redirected so they don't come right down onto the porch.

4. A more appealing front door (once the foundation is fixed..right now we have trouble even opening it all the way!)

So that's our list for the front exterior of the house as it stands now. I guess you could say this is one of our least problematic areas right now. We have much worse-off spaces around this house! But that's for another time!

Meeting the Bloggers from Young House Love

I know this is a little late, but I've been wanting to write a post about this for a while. On November 10, 2012, I accomplished one of my life goals:

I met John and Sherry from the blog Young House Love!!

Unless you have been living under a rock for the past few years, you know that this blog is pretty much the best home related, diy blog EVER! Not only have I religiously followed it for probably over three years now (since I lived at college), but I make it a part of my day to read it every day. They've seriously inspired me as we've been working on making our house "ours." I just love those two!

Anyway, they released a book last fall, which I preordered of course, and they have been on their book tour since then. Here's that lovely book:

I KNEW we had to make a weekend trip to Chicago to meet them....so we did! :) Chicago is about 3 hours away from us, so it's not too bad of a drive, and it was a fun little weekend trip.

The book signing was at West Elm in Chicago (Love that store), and we got there plenty early, so we got to wait inside, unlike many of the unlucky people who had to wait in the rain outside. (Seriously, the line wrapped around the whole store I think, and was there for several hours.)

It actually didn't feel like we were waiting in line too long. We got to sit comfortably in the store, and they fed us cookies ;).

The cookies were ok, (Side note: I think that dot in the middle of the house is supposed to be a heart - fail.) but I ate the heart cookie and it turned my mouth red! Teeth and all. So I was freaking out for a little while and going to the bathroom secretly trying to get the red food coloring to fade! I mean, I couldn't meet my idols with a red mouth. Luckily, it faded in time. Sigh of relief.

The best surprise was when we found out that John and Sherry were going to do a short little presentation before the signings - at the table right in front of us! It was literally like 5 feet away from us. I was so nervous, thinking about what I was going to do and say when they were around and trying to psych myself into acting normal. It was seriously like meeting my favorite celebrity.

It was so cool when John and Sherry finally came out! The whole time I was pretty much standing in awe watching them. They took turns briefly explaining a few of the book projects. 

Then they said they couldn't wait to meet us all and headed over to the book signing table!

I had brought my book that I preordered from Amazon, and I bought another book at the signing for my sister as a Christmas present. So I got those both signed. And, because Sherry is an avid ceramic animal lover (and I have become one too), I brought this little guy too just to make Sherry excited:

It's my ceramic dog that I got from Target. I just love him. He's so regal. :)

When it was our turn to meet John and Sherry, I tried my best not to act nervous, but I don't think I succeeded. I forgot to introduce myself, and John asked if my name was Haley or Whitney, because one of the books said my sister's name and one said mine. Fail. I just kind of set everything up on the table and was like "Hiiiii....I brought my dogggg." haha. Luckily, Sherry was super nice and was like, "Oh I love signing those!!" I think that's what she was saying in the picture. :)

She even explained that the brand Threshold, who made the dog, is now what the Target Home Brand is called, which I didn't know. Just a little tidbit!

It all happened so fast, it's hard to remember it all (It was like a blur. haha). But we did get this picture with them, which looks like we are super tiny and they're normal size due to the person kneeling on the ground while taking the picture. Darn! (And we look like total dorks) All in all though, it was one of my favorite experiences yet! They really were super nice. But we already knew that from their blog :)

While we were in Chi-town, we had a chance to do a little shopping on Michigan Ave....

Eat at Harry Caray's.....

And see some of the sights - including going up in the John Hancock building, which neither of us had done before. Very cool!

It was a great weekend!! :)