Living room paint update

Okay, I'm pretty late posting this update. Way back in August we picked out a living room paint colour then Matt, my sister Susan and her boyfriend Marty spent a week painting while I was on vacation. And then I never posted any pictures. So here goes.

We painted the living room with Benjamin Moore's Balboa Mist colour matched in Olympic's Low VOC paint. The colour is very similar to the Silver Screen we used in the hallway (they're from the same paint chip) without being the exact same.

I won't lie - when we picked the colour I thought it was going to be a moody grey colour based on the tester. It's the third paint swatch from the right.

But when I got back from vacation I was surprised to see that it's more of a grey-blue. The picture below doesn't do it justice, but it was hard to get a good shot with the light coming in the doors. The dining room pictures are a much better representation of what the colour actually looks like.

It's hard to explain but the colour works really well with our hall colour. It's like the blue-grey counterpart to the green-grey in the hall. The two go really well together without being the exact same.

Once the walls were painted, Matt replaced all the living room trim to match the hall and upstairs and gave it all a coat of white paint. It's amazing what a difference the white trim makes compared to the cream that was there before. Take a look at the basement door, which has yet to be painted white, compared to the new white trim.

Next the curtains went back up, but this time I hung them wider to make the door seem larger. See the difference?

And then we spent forever trying to rearrange the sofas to make the living room more open to the dining room. See how spacious everything seems when the love seat isn't blocking the dining room?

Unfortunately, there's nowhere else for the love seat to go, so we're stuck with the same layout as before. Maybe someday I'll have a sofa that fits this space a little better.

Last but not least, we hung the photos and the dining room mirror and called it a day.

We didn't rehang the gallery wall above the sofa yet. The mixture of frames doesn't work with the new wall colour so we're debating either spraying them white or replacing them with a larger piece of art that's more sized to the space. We'll have to wait and see what we decide on.

And there you have it. A long overdue update on the living room progress.

Lily Rose

Happy 2013!! I've been slack on the postings lately, but I have good reason. Lily Rose arrived on October 28th and she's been keeping me crazy busy ever since.

There haven't been many any decorating updates in the house since Lily's arrival, but there have been changes. Like the addition of all the baby gear in the living room and the basement.

We're working on getting back to everyday life and hopefully will have some time to spend on hobbies soon. In the meantime I'll try to catch you up on the projects we finished before Lily arrived but didn't get to share.  Like the living room paint and Lily' nursery reveal. We're also hoping to tackle our basement disaster zone this year, which will bring us lots of new projects. Seriously, lots. Cause right now it looks like this:

See what I mean about lots of projects??

Entryway upgrade: Front door curtains

After taking down the outdated lacy curtain on our front door months ago, I finally got around to replacing it with something more our style.

The old curtain wasn't our cup of tea stylewise, but it also didn't keep people from looking in the window. And it was held in place with a strange arrangement of nails and string.

So down it came.

We planned to replace it with peel and stick frosted glass sheet like this one from Home Depot because we couldn't figure out how to hang a curtain rod without damaging the metal door. Luckily we never got around to applying the frosted sheeting, even though we bought it last year!

A few months ago I found the perfect curtain rod for the front door - it's magnetic. No holes in our door. Yippeee.

But without a curtain to hang, the door sat like this for a few more months.

One night I was shopping for fabrics for the baby room when I spotted the perfect material for the hall curtain. The colours work perfectly with our newly painted hall and the pattern isn't too feminine. So I bought a yard for $20 and my sister whipped up a quick flat panel curtain.

I wanted the curtain to be easy to open and close so we could let light in during the day but keep people from seeing in at night. We thought about a roman shade but, honestly, it was too much work. A simple pocket curtain would have worked too but I was worried that all the fabric at the top would make it hard to push the curtain to the side. In the end I bought a pack of curtain rings that let us slide the curtain back and forth easily.

With new paint, storage and shelves, the hallway is slowly coming together. Only a few more minor projects and we'll call the entry complete!

Baby room - furniture

With our rocking chair looking much better (there's a post of that coming soon!), I figured it was time to go over the other furniture we have in place for Baby Feetbell. We're very lucky that we didn't have to spend much on furnishing the baby room. The rocking chair was a Kijiji steal at $25. It cost us around $150-$200 for the materials to fix it up, but that's still cheaper than paying up to $800 for a new rocker from the baby store.

To save on space and cash, we decided to use a dresser and a change pad instead of a change table. A dresser makes way more sense for us because Baby can use it long after she's out of diapers. And because we happened to have the perfect one already!

Yup, we're reusing the dining room hutch turned dresser that I refinished last summer.

The super big drawers are perfect for storing lots of baby clothes and the cabinet has lots of space for extra diaper supplies.

And the most important piece of baby furniture - the crib- is definitely my favourite. We're super lucky that my parents bought the crib for us, saving us some major cash. We picked the Mercer crib by Davinci because the two tone finished matches our dresser perfectly, it's a smaller crib that most so it fits our tiny room better and it has a storage drawer built in, which is a major perk for us.

The drawer is perfect for Baby's bedding and bath supplies and frees up a lot of room in her dresser. We're working on a crib skirt to hide the drawer contents, so keep an eye out for that post soon.

Which is great cause girl's got a lot of clothes.

We also picked up a nightstand at Winner's for a mere $40. I think it will the perfect place for a magazine and a glass of water during late night rocking sessions.

Here are a few more shots of the whole room.

I still have a few finishing touches to add, like more art and a mobile but for the most part this room is done!

Entryway upgrade: Adding coat hooks

I've mentioned it a few times in the past few weeks, but I'm on a mission to make our entrance more functional. Step one was adding storage for loose ends that always ended up on the floor.

Step two was spray painting the almond doorbell gloss white so it would blend in with the white smoke detector and trim.

Step three is adding more storage for the coats and bags that always end up hanging from the stair railing.

It all started with these inspiration pictures from Pinterest (originally from here).

And it got me thinking.... we totally have the room to add a shelf and some hooks for storage. All we needed to do was move the cabinet storing all our fancy dishes.

Ideally the cabinet would be in the dining room, since it does have the dishes in it, but we're pretty low on space in there.

So it was off to the next best thing - the living room. There was a little nook next to the patio door where the cabinet fit perfectly.

But back to the entry. With the cabinet gone, we had a whole lot of wall pace to work with. Matt took this opportunity to replace the old floor trim with taller stuff to match the trim we have upstairs. Then we built ourselve a handy shelf and coat rack out of MDF. We picked up some 1x4 primed MDF and cut it into three pieces the width of the small wall so the racks would go from the edge of the wall right to the corner.

Then we used L brackets to secure two pieces together, making the shelf. Of course, there were no white L brackets at the hardware store, so I picked up a silver pack and spray painted them before we put them on.

We primed the shelf and sprayed the whole thing with white gloss paint. We used super heavy duty screws to secure the shelf to the wall (better safe than sorry!) and then added the coat hooks. We picked up 5 hooks at the hardware store for $4 each. We put 3 on the shelf and 2 on the second shelf. We staggered the hook placement so we can get at the lower hooks without having to move all the stuff on the top ones.

The shelf gives Matt a place to empty out his pockets each night when he gets home instead of leaving all his stuff on the dining room table. And the hooks are already getting good use with coats and other odds and ends finally off the floor.

I threw an extra shoe mat under the shelves and now we have a functional entryway with lots of places to store coats, bags and shoes that are overflowing from the closet. And we even had room to move Zeus's bed out of the living room. He's spending a lot more time in his bed now. I think because it's in the middle of the house, so he knows whenever someone comes or goes in the door, the kitchen or up the stairs.

I'm thinking about adding a full length mirror on the wall to the left of the light switch too. The space feels very empty right now and it would be nice to be able to give yourself a once over before heading out the door. Now I just have to find the right mirror.