I know I'm slow to post pics of my new house renovation, but I'm catching up a room at a time. If you come visit me, you'll probably sleep here......
This is the room that the Golden Child occupies at least once a week, but if you follow his simple rules, he'll be happy to share it with you. (I'll share those rules at the end of this post, just in case you are considering a stay.)
Doing a bedroom that makes a 6 year old boy happy and at the same time is elegant enough for guests was kind of a challenge. Jacob wanted the walls to be red. It was one of the few times in his life I had to say "no". I just couldn't do it. The bed is queen-size and sucks up a lot of space, so I wanted white walls to help make it look a little roomier. The walls are a solid white and it took a lot of work to make them smooth and pretty, but when I turn on the light, this happens.....
I love the shadows that the ceiling fan lights cast in this room.
I tried to swipe those globes for my living room, but Jacob said, "NO WAY"! He loves them too.
You may remember this fleur-de-lis tile I made when we lived in the old house. It found a perfect home in this room.
Also, you'll notice in the top picture, we had to add this little plaque to scare away any ghosties, because sleeping in a new room can be a little scary when you're 6. Sam's grandmother had an embroidered frame with this saying on it....
Don't you love it??! I read it to him before he goes to bed and he giggles.
My bedspread and shams came from Overstock.com. I bought them for myself for my birthday, and then didn't want to put them on my bed until we moved. Then Sam decided he had to have a king-sized bed, so the queen sized bed moved into the guest room and the color scheme of black and white was driven by that. Which is better than the hot pink color that was in this room when we bought it.....
This little table and step stool have some special meaning to me.
The table top is a piece from the mantel at our first house in Montana, which was our first renovation project ever...demoing a fireplace wall was a serious first project. The step stool on top of it has 3 little drawers in it. I picked it up at a little shop in the French Quarter of St. Charles, Missouri when I went on an overnight shopping extravaganza with my good friend Ciree. It was 4 degrees that day and we had the town to ourselves. A word about that lamp....I'm workin on it. I've had 2 craft fails with it and barely got it presentable for use as of right now. After 2 fails, I'm taking a break from it. *sigh*
The little sign above the lamp is one of my all-time favorite quotes...
Jacob needed a place to hang his important stuff, like his favorite denim jacket, his whistle, his sunglasses, his headlamp (for night time trips to the loo) and his favorite PEZ ball cap.
He won't let me tell you what he keeps in the little drawers, but I'll just say that one of them holds a magic key.
And of course, he has to have a place to put his "Big Stuff"....
This cube shelf from Target worked perfectly to hold all of those toys you can't play with (see rules - think Legos) as well as his books, crayons and games. He put the things on the top shelf himself....
His polar bear, that he doesn't sleep with because "the wormie and the polar bear don't like each other", the boxes in the middle, well again, secret boy stuff, and of course his boxing gloves. He's a serious boxer....
All of those treasures on the top shelf are crowned by a picture of his daddy, my son William.
Well that's a pretty good tour of the guest bedroom and if you are thinking you might want to come visit, please review Jacobs rules for sleeping in his room. (He made these up for Suzan from Simply Vintageous.... by Suzan, because SHE is his girlfriend.)
As for the wormie.....be gentle if you choose it because he's been in Jacobs life since he was born. (It's way softer than the squiddy.)
So I realize I have been living in this house for over 2 months and haven't posted a single finished room. I still have things I want to make for every room, but a couple of them are mostly finished....for now. This is my family room and I'm very happy with the way it turned out.
It started out looking like this.....
Since it was the room we planned on doing the least renovating in, it very quickly turned into the "catch-all" room and everything got thrown in there and it looked like this for months.....
However, if you'll remember, about a week after buying this house last November, I found this sofa and fell in love with it. I told myself for years, that someday I would have a white sofa and someday was now.
I took that picture in the store and went back the next week and bought it. It sat in my garage with a blanket over it for 6 months. Sometimes I just went out there and uncovered it and stared at it. I planned this whole room around that sofa and while I was painting gallons of primer and paint in that room, I daydreamed about how I wanted it to look. I wanted a Danish Modern look, but you can see that didn't exactly happen. My plan changed when sometime back in late March, we took an overnight trip to Grove, Oklahoma and I stumbled on a pair of orange shutters. I agonized over what color to paint them because I thought the orange was a bit garish. When my friend Judy came to visit in April, she convinced me to leave them orange and hang them on the ends of the two windows. Suddenly, orange and white became the colors of my new family room.
That little television is situated perfectly across from my kitchen pass through and I can watch it from the kitchen. Those windows are so small and so low, I decided not to put any coverings on them. The room was an add-on at some point and it's kind of funky with it's slanted ceiling and little windows. We did put replacement windows in, and sadly, replacement windows are even smaller. The little cabinet on the far left is serving as Sam's bar until I can make something more awesome.
You may recognize the chippy, old armoire in the corner in this picture...
That armoire has a ton of storage in it and is now full of games. We're big gamers here. You may remember this armoire from when my friend Karen from Somewhat Quirky Designs came to visit me last year. I swear I posted about it, but I can't find it. Nor can I find any other picture of it than this before and after. Karen did a fabulous job painting it with milk paint and I think of her every time I walk into the family room. Karen also did a wonderful post about painting it and you can check it out HERE. Thank you Karen! (Who knew back last June that it would end up being a game cabinet in a family room in a house I had never seen before?!)
We also have a little game table in the family room, thanks to a shipping error by Wayfair. (I ordered a dining table and they sent me this little table by mistake and told me to just keep it.)
See that little bird mobile above the game table? Judy made those birds out of fabric and we made them into a mobile when she visited last spring. They add a splash of bright color and whimsy in an otherwise dull corner. Thank you Judy!
I think one of the things I enjoy most about this room is the dart board. We haven't had a dart board since we lived in Montana and I've missed it.
Our favorite dart games are "301-Double-in, Double-out" and "Minnesota Cricket". Come on over, I'll teach you how.
A word about the floor in this room....
This is the only floor we did not replace in the entire house. Partly because it didn't look horrible and partly because I knew that some darts would be sticking in that floor occasionally. It's single-roll vinyl in a faux wood plank-ish look. Single roll vinyl means it's just one piece laid out on top of the sub-floor (in this case, concrete). I don't love it. Because it's not really fastened down by anything other than the trim, my vacuum cleaner wants to suck it up and it's a pain in the butt.
Those two pictures to the right of the dart board were made for me by Judy. I love them! They tie right in with the orange and silver happening in the room. I'll do a post on those kind of pictures when I get around to it. They were fun and quick!
I have another room to share with you later this week as well as an awesome recipe. I think I mentioned that I took on a part-time job again and of course, the work around here never ends. Right now we are tearing up the back yard and getting ready to put in a patio. That project keeps changing quicker than a cat can wink an eye. First it was going to be a hugely intimidating paver patio. Then we decided on making half of it a covered deck and half of it a patio. Today we are getting some bids on putting a roof and making it a covered concrete patio, because I like the idea of maybe screening it all in at a later date. We are still planning on putting in a paver patio just off of it, but maybe a much less intimidating one. Right now, we're cutting trees and pulling stumps. AND...because we are terrified that there may come a day when we don't have a project on the horizon...we started tearing up the landscaping in the front...
It's probably going to sit like this until at least next weekend. Yeah...our neighbors probably hate us. We have so many projects going on at once and neither the front nor the back look very pretty right now. It will get worse before it gets better! LOL!
Oh...and one more thing...I was driving down the street in my neighborhood the other day and this was out in someones driveway. I stopped and asked if it was for sale. Why yes it was...for $10. Seriously. Mel, from Mellywood's Mansion sent me her Thrifting Fairy and next thing I knew, this was in my garage. Thanks Mel!
I have no idea what it was, but it's a solid piece and it's on wheels. It needs a roof, but I'm thinking this looks like either a fun bar for the new patio or something awesome for the Golden Child. It's sitting in my garage, waiting for inspiration to strike. I'm open to suggestions, in the meantime, it's holding a couple of flower pots and a watering can and waiting for me to make it all "cuted up" as my sister Amber would say. (One of my other sisters calls me a "craft whore" so really...it could go either way!)
Linking up here:
First, I want to take a quick moment to thank Di from Cook the TV and Cheryl in Wisconsin for their wonderful guest posts while I have been so crazy busy finishing up the renovation of the house we bought. You ladies are so kind with your offers of guest posts and I am so thankful! (Cheryl...get a blog!!!)
Second, I want to say that my good friend Judy was here for the last 10 days and gave me a hand with some decorating, which of course involved shopping and a whole lot of fun. My other dear friend Ciree even came over Saturday and helped assemble some shelves for my craft room and picked an accent color for my grey and white kitchen. (She's bossy like that!) How lucky am I to have my two best friends helping at the same time?? Life is good!
That is Judy on the left and Ciree on the right! I always tease them and tell them I love them because they are both shorter than I am, but the truth is I love them because they are wonderfully talented people who put up with me and all of my quirkiness and they make me laugh until my belly hurts. They are sitting on my sofa in my newly renovated/partially finished family room,which they have deemed the party room. Here's a sneak-peek.
Totally went outside my comfort zone in this room. For those of you who thought I should put shutters on that pass through...I found a pair, tried them out and didn't like them. I threw them in the garage. Then Judy came in and said they needed to go downstairs and I made my "face of disappointment" because I was sure they needed to stay in the garage. We put them up and of course she was right and I loved them. Judy is a genius! Then I wanted to paint them, but she said they needed to stay orange, so orange became the accent color in my family/party room. We also did a couple of really fun craft projects for this room and I will share them with you a little later.
Sorry for the fuzzy picture. When I have time that cabinet will become a bar. ( Bliss from Bliss Ranch, I will take any advice you have on converting that cabinet into a bar! You are the queen of bar cabinets!) A dart board and game cabinet will also be in this room. (Karen at Somewhat Quirky, can you guess what I'll be using as a game cabinet down there?)
Third....we sold our little farm house last week, so the clock is ticking now on the move. Shouldn't be a problem as the reno is finished and I'm on clean-up duty for the next couple of days.
Fourth...because I was crazy enough to think that my life would finally begin to calm down a little and I could enjoy having some new space and some spring fun landscaping the outside of this house..... we bought another house. Yes, we did. It will be a flipper and we start work on it the second week of May. It is true...there is no rest for the wicked!
So, I will be crazy-busy for the next month or so and will be sporadic on my blog. I'll have very little time for reading and catching up with my friends here in the blog world. I know you'll be understanding, but I will miss you all and have visions of catching up while relaxing on that white sofa in my family/party room....maybe in June? Unless I just completely lose my mind, which at this point seems like a very serious possibility. Suzan, you won't be alone in the asylum! LOL!
Finally...I want to thank Mel, from Mellywoods Mansion, because when I find myself awake at 3a.m. and totally freaking out about all of this, she is there on the other side of my computer screen, halfway around the world in Australia, keeping me from losing it and giving me some invaluable advice! Mel, you are awesome!
I'll be back soon with some posts of the reno and I'm starting with the kitchen.
