Monday, May 5, 2014

Weekend Recap and Home Projects!

Since my last post left off on Friday afternoon, I wanted to pick up there and recap our weekend. It was a great one!

On Friday afternoon, I decided spur of the moment to paint our coffee table top. I've been planning on painting just the top for a while. The top had gotten pretty beat up, and I wanted a slightly darker color. When we moved, I found a sample size jar of Annie Sloan chalk paint in Paris Grey that still had a good bit left. So, I took the coffee table outside and slapped the paint on. After it dried, I used clear wax and dark wax to finish it off. I'm happy with the way it turned out, and I'm even happier that it was free since I already had all of the paint and wax! ;)
 
 And here's how it looks in the room... ;)
 
Friday night was really fun! A friend from church hosted a get together for the ladies at our church. We have two sweet couples at our church who are Brazilian, and they're amazing musicians. One of the couples is going to be going home to Brazil soon because the husband is graduating from seminary. Anyway, we had a night of Brazilian food and music :) We just ate and visited while they played music in the background. I ended up sitting outside with a group of friends most of the night. It was actually pretty chilly - that's rare for May in Mississippi! There was a fire outside, though, and it was a super fun night :)

We had an extremely productive day around our house on Saturday. David took the kids to the Farmer's Market and cut the grass, and then we got busy inside. There were a few things that I was hoping to accomplish on Saturday, and we got all of them done! I love it when that happens :) Our first little project was hanging pictures of the kids on our stairwell wall. This wasn't a complicated project at all, but since I wanted all of the pictures evenly spaced left to right and up and down, it did require lots of measuring and leveling. That completely overwhelms and stresses me out, but thankfully that's basically right up David's alley, and he got it perfect on the first try ;) I love that we're starting to get pictures up. Makes the house feel more like home! (By the way, we couldn't figure out if it made more sense to have Aubrey's picture at the top and then go down by birth order or if it was more logical to put hers at the bottom and have them go in birth order from left to right? Any thoughts?)
Next, we moved on to hanging chandeliers. When we put our old house on the market last year, we took several chandeliers down to take with us. They've just been hanging out in boxes ever since, so it was fun to finally get them back up. We hung this little white chandelier in the nursery:
I love this chandelier! It's pretty sentimental because I bought it for Aubrey's nursery before she was even born :)

Then we hung this crystal chandelier in Aubrey's room. Well, before we hung it, I had to literally take it apart and clean it. After sitting in a box for almost a year, it was filthy. It took quite a while to take it apart, wash it, dry it, and put it back together, but it was nice and sparkly when we finally got it hung. Aubrey was thrilled :) Oh, and you'll probably notice the blue rug in Aubrey's room. That's a temporary thing. Her room just seemed SO sparse, so I moved this blue rug into her room. The blue is off for her room, though, so that rug will move back to the playroom once I get something else for her room. In the meantime, the rug helps her room to not feel so cold and empty.
When we bought our new house, most of the windows had plantation shutters. The windows in Jude's room and Alaina's room were bare, though. Of all the rooms to have bare windows, it would be two bedrooms. So for the past two weeks, they've been sporting some lovely towels in their windows. That's still the case today, but I did remember that I had some curtain panels that might work in Alaina's room. These curtains used to be in the living room/kitchen in our old house, and I took them down a long time ago because the color no longer worked in our house. I have 12 of these panels in a pile to try to sell, so I grabbed two of them, and David hung them up in Alaina's room. At first I was thinking that this would just be a temporary thing, but I kind of like them in her room. They go with her bedding really well, and I think since we have them, we might as well use them. I still need to get some kind of blinds or something for her window so that we can remove the towel (the curtains alone don't block out enough light), but I'm excited that her room is coming along. Really all we have to do is hang stuff on the walls, and it'll be pretty much done!
By the way, I'm planning on posting more "in progress" pictures of our new house as we get things done. I feel like I'm always waiting to post pictures until a room is finished so that I have a true "Before" and "After" to show, but then what ends up happening is that I rarely post pictures of our house. Rooms are pretty much always in progress around here, and I'd like to document that more. Not because I think I'm a fabulous decorator or that our house is anything special (well, it's special to us because it's our home, but you know what I mean...), but just because decorating and doing projects around our house is kind of my "thing." So, it's fun for me to be able to look back at how it evolves. I really wish I had taken more pictures of the changes in our old house over the years. Anyway! All that to say, if house stuff isn't really your thing, I apologize! ;) And also, I desperately need to learn how to use my camera again. I haven't used it in MONTHS, no exaggeration. I exclusively use my iPhone camera these days. I thought I should try to start using my real camera again, but I couldn't get a decent picture to save my life, as you can see!

The next room that I really want to tackle is Jude's room. I still haven't completely decided what I want to do in there, but I do have at least one big project that I've decided we're doing for sure. Hopefully that will happen soon! When we were hanging the girls' chandeliers on Saturday, he kept asking if we were putting a new light in his room next. Don't want him to feel left out! :)

3 comments:

Rebecca said...

My great aunt had lots of family pictures hanging in her stairwell, and she hung them oldest at the top and youngest at the bottom. I absolutely LOVED walking down the stairs and seeing how the family changing. It felt like walking through history :)
PS: I've started back blogging!

Mary Louis Quinn said...

I LOVE looking at other people's house pictures. :) Y'all already look so settled! Looks great!

Unknown said...

Wise bit of innovation there with the towels. Touching up the windows can go any way, either make them all look uniformed or vary them in some way. Whatever serves functionality, as well as the personality of a room or a house. Do your kids want to wake up with too much sunlight in the morning, or not? I think human affect should definitely be taken into consideration in the process of designing.

Greg Arnett @ Sunburst Shutters Arizona