New Chandelier

I'm sure my facebook friends have seen the great pics of the new chandelier in my bedroom - but - I wanted to post it on the blog.  SO pretty and its on a dimmer so it makes my bedroom so pretty.  If you're really going to pull off the Hollywood Glamor look - a great chandelier is KEY!

I hate the guest room color

The Guest Room use to be my grandfather's bedroom.  My grandmother loved it because - despite it being the master suite - it was on the top floor and outside the windows are all these trees and birds and squirrels....  My grandpa likes bright colors so we painted it yellow.  Well... now that its no longer his room.... I'm not ashamed to say ... I really hate this color.  Its too much and I don't really like the yellow with the purple of my bedding.  But I like my bedding better.

I'm not opposed to yellow I just hate this yellow.  The bed is stained a dark cherry wood.  My cedar chest is deep cherry and the couch is cream and brown.  The bedding I love is a plum purple.  What the hell do I do?

 

Options for Yellows I found today

The colors I like with yellow and purple is... grey... problem is my bedroom is grey and I don't want a whole grey floor.  It would look like an asylum.  Which might actually be fitting. 

Curb appeal Before and After

My parents came over this week to help me do a whole lot of work on the front yard.  The success of the "growing grass" experiment has had amazing results so I'm taking it a step further with a 50 pound bag of grass seed.... drought resistant :)  We'll see if it really works but I'm watering it like mad.

If you remember the awful part of what I was dealing with and what it looks like now you can't see a better result!

 

And after a whole lot of work and a whole lot of pain in my back/legs/arms/shoulders 

 I'm going to paint the bench black though.  And I really want to put a fountain to the right and a lamp post behind it. . . .but I'm kind of out of money for a little bit....

 Hopefully the seed I planted will grow some grass in this dead spot where I've killed off a ton of weeds.

 Think Google Street View would replace their image with this one?

 Front flower bed - I have a garden gnome I plan on putting in there somewhere.  We stole it from someone's yard when we were in high school.  I fully expect that if I put it in the garden that someone will steal it.  I embrace this and welcome it.

 Flagstone patio with bench and side flower bed.

 ooooo new grass.... ooooo ahhhhhh and its all soft too!

 New shutters!

 Awesome house numbers with one of my favorite fonts ... a little art deco a little modern a lot fabulous!

Other potential additions to the yard include:
The big foot statue from the SkyMall catalog

 

Or maybe Roswell the Alien Sculpture

Maybe a solar birdbath/fountain (my friend Jacque says I have to have a fountain not a birdbath because of mosquitoes)

There are actually a lot of options for solar outdoor fountains.  And solar lamp posts... I highly recommend this - particularly if you're too cheap to pay for the electrician to come out and install some kind of outdoor outlets.

The office

It's really hard to believe this is what this room use to look like just a few years ago.  Can you say hoarder? 

Basically what we did in this room was rip off the wall paper, patch the plaster, replace the ceiling, replace both the overhead and sconce lights, paint, rip up the carpet, sand and stain the floors, paint the wainscoting, new windows to of course.... and there you have it :)

My bedroom begins to take shape

Remember that one time I started taking wallpaper off the walls in my bedroom thinking it would be a weekend project?  Ha.. hahaha ... that's a funny one.  Turns out taking wallpaper off of sheetrock is impossible.  About two weeks later I finally got it done and painted.  The carpet was put in the next day and over that following weekend I started putting things into place.







Pulling off more wallpaper

painting book cases

I have a bed ... in my bedroom now... that I could reasonably sleep in if I really wanted to!

I'm going to put my Bette Paige painting above the bed and the blue Audry one is across the room but that area isn't clean and organized yet.  not that this one is really... but ya know... progress....

No idea how to organize this.  I have an old diner bar table and barstools from my kitchen when I lived in California.  What the hell do I do with them?  Plus this whole area is kinda difficult to navigate...

ideas?

Process of he Dinning Room Floors

Last week I began the adventure of the dinning room floors.  You guessed it... more paint all over them.  My guess is that during the 90's when my grandpa sent the house on fire (bless his heart) everything was painted, new carpet, etc... and in the process the people who were hired decided... they don't care they're going to put carpet over these floors so we'll just paint them.  So they did.  And now I want them to die. 











The next adventure was that I refuse to go to Lowe's to get the sander again.... ever...  So I went to Home Depot and got a drum sander.  Oh my god... best decision ever.  That thing sanded the hell outa the floor.  So this pic is the "let the games begin" pic.

Results!


















Paint ain't got nothin on me :)

being stained

Stained floors!!

2 layers of poly so far - but my friend Mark tells me I need like... six...  But OMG it looks so beautiful!!!

Looks like an actual dinning room now :)

Design Dilemma Need Your Advice

I've got a design dilemma that I'm asking your advice on. I want a marble counter top. White with the gray veins. Consistent with the age of the house. When it comes to the cabinet underneath my mother and I are disagreeing on color. She thinks I should do a really dark cabinet to highlight the color of the marble. I want to do a white cabinet because all of the wood in the house is white - molding, baseboards, doors, plus I wanted to put white wainscoting on the walls.

So... questions:

1. Which color cabinet in the bathroom (see image options below)
2. If you go with a darker wood cabinet do you nix the wainscoting?
3. What color do you then paint the bathroom (see options below)

Vote at the poll to the right after viewing the photo examples below:

extra facts - the bathroom is the master bath that connects to the Tiffany's bedroom that is below.



Cabinet options
marble with white


Marble Counter with dark cabinets