Progress made.. I found a rug

 The final touches of the home renovation (ie decorating) are taking forever.

But we finally found a rug that we liked, could afford and was available!

So yay!

I LOVE Style By Katy

As a creative artsy person it isn't easy to say this.. but I hate home decorating. I love the results of a nice home design, I just roll my eyes at the work. I just am not patient and and don't enjoy the process of picking out the stuff to make a room look nice. 

This stems from the fact that I never like the results and it seems like I always end up buying the wrong color, style, or whatever 15 times before I get to the right thing. So I don't. I end up with a room that isn't finished or is "finished" badly and live with it.

On the flip side, my sister Katy LOVES home decorating. She designed the decor of my old house and the results were stunning. But she has been uber busy with her children and life and work so I didn't want to bother her with my pathetic decorating needs.

But those days are OVER! Katy is now staying home with her young children and has started a home based business using her love of decorating and her savvy shopping skills. YES!!!

The process was amazingly easy. 

Here are some pictures of our first project together.

Take pictures of the space. I started with our hall bathroom. It is an eyesore with good bones.

I gave her my parameters. The fixtures couldn't be changed, the flooring is going to be changed in a couple of months to a dark ash grey color and I really wanted to keep the canvas that I liked so the colors needed to work with that.

After asking my preference on a few items, she sent me a design board along with all of the links to purchase the items from Etsy, Target and Lowe's. It was soo easy!

And so I began. Almost immediately I could see the paint was going to transform the room.

When I got to the new little shelves, I wasn't sure where to put them, so I sent Katy the picture with the options and she replied.

Done.

And while I loved the print that she suggested in the first place, I ended up getting another one that she picked out as an alternate because a different Etsy store was having a 20% off sale!

And there you have my hall bath makeover. 

Here is my spending summary:

Painting supplies for the walls, the cabinets (I went ahead and did a refresher of them since I was painting..) and the mirror: $55.

Soft Goods (including towels, bath mat, shower curtain, liner: $100

Hardware (shower rod, shelves) $40

Window shade: $20 

Accessories: $30

Total: $245 plus the $100 design board

Would I do it again if she wasn't my sister? YES!! I already have.

I can't wait to show you Lexi's bedroom. It is AMAZING!!

And here is my take-away... while it's hard to spend $100 on a design board that you can't actually use in your decorating. It is totally worth it! I have spent way more money on mistake decorating purchases over the years! A decent quality shower curtain is easily $40 and it doesn't matter the quality if it looks bad in the room!

So yeah, I'm sold.

Katy,I am so proud of you and what you are doing!

You can contact her at info.stylebykaty@gmail.com to start your own home decorating project.

Kid Created Artwork and Curtains

Yesterday the little girls and I worked on making custom curtains for Lexi's room. This in turn opened the door for artwork. The girls had a great time and it was really easy, fun and not too messy!

If you need kid created custom curtains, you can see my guide for that... here. You use the same supplies, just trade out the canvas for curtains!

So, here is what we did...

We started with 3 shades of pink, plus glitter paint that we added to each of the colors. I like using 3 shades of the same color for projects like this... when they end of mixing colors, which they will, you don't end up with sludge, you end up with pretty variations of the same color!

 Plus you need plastic bottles of different sizes.

Pour some paint on a paper plate. This makes clean up soo much easier!

Then take a bottle and press it into the paint and stamp it onto the canvas.

 It's that easy!

Just for clarification, Kylie is using a mounted canvas and Lexi is using a canvas panel. Use the mounted canvas as it has natural give. The panel was harder to make an impression on!

We used a cork to make the centers and polka dots.

And of course, a paintbrush. Cause as Kylie explained, it's not painting unless you have a paintbrush!

Kylie's masterpiece!

After Lexi finished her curtains, she completed her painting as well.

I have to say, I love two projects completed with one set of supplies and very little cleanup!
Here is the guide for the curtains should you need it!

How to customize curtains by emilymclemore

Perfectly Repurposed and a little Decorating on the side.

I am deep in the redecorating the house part of my summer. That means nothing is sacred and that anything can be moved or changed or REPURPOSED!! :) Truly, that's what my family is best at!

So, remember my fabric wall tree? If not.. go see this post.

Well, it's now...

How cool is that! I love how it looks on Lexi's wall! I love how the 3d pink mirror flowers that we got from Walmart totally change this tree. It looks so much better on the white wall. I love the contrast!!

Lexi's room is moving and grooving.. but Kylie is a little frustrated in the lack of stuff happening in her room, so I guess I'll be working on her room tomorrow!

In other decorating news, I took the dresser that was in Kylie's room and we made it an entertainment/media center for the tv. The one that we purchased with the couches was nice, but too short!! I love how we were able to repurpose the dresser into the perfect height media center! Doug took the top drawers out and cut a piece of Masonite to fit inside the drawer. We are saving the drawer should we want to return it to dresser use in the future. Isn't this great! And now that the tv is higher, we don't have this cavernous wall behind the tv that looks funny. And a side benefit is that we don't have a family furniture piece sitting in a storage building!

So where did the too short media center go? The bottom of my closet!! Heck ya! It is perfectly repurposed there!! I needed storage for my running clothes and a place to put my shoes, so this works great. And should we need to use it as a media center in the future, it hasn't been sitting in the storage building becoming icky!

But let's go back to the tree business..below is a tutorial for what I did should you want to make your own fabric tree! Enjoy.

How to make an easily removable tree mural by emilymclemore

Redoing the Girls Rooms... day one.

I hate to show you the before pictures. Oh my!!  But for you to get the full effect, I think you need to see them!

Here we are cleaning out Kylie's room. It will become Lexi's room.

Cleaned out and ready!

And this is Lexi's room. You can not imagine the nastiness in this room. I was constantly horrified! We have only lived in this house for going on 7 months. Lexi even had a full lunch box hidden in her closet!

With the room trade, Lexi needed a new bed. We had discussed repurposing an old metal headboard from Doug's grandparents, but it doesn't attach to anything and Doug is super busy these days, so I went another direction. I asked my dad to build Lexi a loft bed!!

It was really pretty exciting as he built my sisters and me loft beds in this house years and years ago and now another generation of loft beds has begun in the same house! cool!

Thanks Papa!!!

Being silly. Dad loves silly pictures!

After Dad was finished I covered the bed in a couple of layers of fleece. I repurposed purple fleece from old curtains. I love reuisng things. You don't have to spend any money and you don't have to store the old stuff!

Last weekend I purchased the cherry blossom fabric as Lexi had seen a cherry blossom art project that she wanted to do and we used that as the starting place for the room. After I finished covering the bed, Doug went out and found the old ladder from the bunkbed. It worked GREAT turned upside down and attached to the wall!

Yes, Lexi is rather excited about her new bed and new room.

And just incase you thought we left out the small one.. no.  We got her bed set up and she is going to help me redo the bed in "her" style. Oh my!

So, at the end of day one.. I am EXHAUSTED! But looking at these girls makes it all worth it.

So what am I working on today? Well... all that crap that I took out of their room has to go back. ugh.