Decorating bathroom shelves

I love the recessed shelving next to our bathroom vanity (who doesn't love extra bathroom storage?) - it keeps a few essentials within easy reach and has room for some "just because" accessories too, like my DIY silver-leafed frame. The top shelf used to be empty, until one of our wedding guests gifted us with this lovely lavender (favourite scent) candle and vintage snuffer - so cute!

While I was playing around in the bathroom (that sounds weird), I also added this little guy - my bff and I bought matching birdies to remind us of each other (she lives in Virginia, I'm in Nova Scotia). Hope she doesn't mind that it's in the bathroom!

(yes, that's a zombie survival guide - you never know people)

Tweaking the living room + another gallery wall update

Decorating is an ever-evolving process. A few weeks ago, the gallery wall in our living room looked like this:

We planned to slowly keep adding frames over time, but I had officially checked it off the 'to do' list. Except, something wasn't quite right about it: the dark frames, next to the dark bookcase, weighed the room down and didn't fit with the light and airy feel we were going for. So I took all the frames down, spraypainted them white, and put them back up again.

(I also moved a few pictures around, so now we need a new piece of art to fill that big empty frame).

I'm much happier with the new look - the white frames make the art stand out and a few dark frames keep the wall from being too light and bright.

I also moved that large print on our mantle to the opposite wall. Another small change, but I feel like I've found the right 'home' for it. And since my hanging mirrors didn't work out, I still have to figure out what to put on the mantle...

Another new light

We've made a lot of progress in our dining room since we moved in...

Except for that crooked, sad little light fixture. I came across the perfect replacement on theFoundary.com: a woven wire pendant light - for just $34. Unfortunately there was no shipping to Canada, so I had it sent to my dad, who not only drove it from Wisconsin to Nova Scotia, but also installed it.

Love.

Installing a bathroom light fixture...finally!

My dad is in town for my upcoming wedding and while he was checking out our new place, he installed a new vanity light in our bathroom.

It works! I've been waiting months to have it installed (the placement of the junction box + my paranoia around all things electrical = too complicated for me). I love it, mostly because we now have a lighting option that doesn't involve a noisy overhead fan (which made quietly getting ready in the morning next to impossible).

Next steps: paint the ceiling gray and add crown moulding.

Mirrored mantle display

Hello blog friends! I took an inadvertent break from blogging to catch up on some DIY wedding projects and to enjoy some pre-wedding festivities, like my second bachelorette party and wedding shower (I'm a lucky girl, I know).

I managed to slip in a few home improvement projects, including this mantle update:

A cute start, right? I used heavy-duty double-sided tape to hang the mirrors, since I didn't want to mess with drilling or nailing into brick (to make it look like the mirrors were hanging from the ribbon, I hot-glued small nails to the ribbon and used tiny pieces of double-sided tape to attach it to the brick).

Apparently the tape wasn't heavy-duty enough, since hours later I heard a smash when one of the mirrors fell to the floor. Oops.

Fabric headboard DIY

Over at Nesting Place today, the talk is all about yard sale finds. Since we've had non-stop rain for about two months now, I haven't been to a yard sale in awhile - but I still managed to find an amazing deal last week:

After all, "free" is the most amazing deal of all. So yes, I did scrounge around in this wood pile for a few decent boards that I could transform into...a headboard for our guestroom!

As you can see in the photos, I repeated the fabric from my DIY seat cushion, which has a woven texture to it (it looks like a big swath of grey in photos, but the texture makes it more interesting in person). The chair - which you can see in more detail at the end of this post - is one of my favourite yard sale finds of all time (hence my Nesting Place link up). I found it a couple of years ago, spray-painted it black, and then it sat in the basement of our old apartment. So I'm thrilled to finally have space for it, and I love how this yard sale find works with my free find - the headboard.

Speaking of the headboard, it looks a little high right now - I'm planning to add some extra "cushion" to our futon mattress (our guest bed, until we spring for a proper one), which will bring the height of the bed up several inches.

So how did this project come together? Adam cut my free lumber to size for me, and I turned that into a frame using some simple metal brackets and screws.

When the frame felt good and sturdy, I placed it on a large piece of quilt batting and secured it with staples, making sure the batting was taut and wrinkle-free (you can find a more detailed tutorial here). I cut away the excess batting, then repeated the entire process with my fabric.

I put a couple screws and anchors in the wall to hang it and voila: headboard done!

At least I think it's done (I'm thinking about using these nickel finish upholstery tacks I have lying around to frame out the headboard)...

Old chair, new home

When we moved into our house a few months ago, I was determined to find room for this chair, which I found at a yardsale a couple of years ago and spraypainted black (there was no space for it in our apartment, so it sat in storage for months). So I did a little happy dance when I realized this guy would fit perfectly in the corner of our newly-painted guest room.

Unfortunately my homemade seat cushion was damaged in the move (rain and moving don't mix), so I sewed a new one (and a back cushion to boot).

I love how the black and white fabrics work with all the green in the room (just wait until you see the bedspread), but mostly I just love having a place for this chair. And the price was right, too - I spent about $3.75 on fabric for the back cushion, and the fabric for the seat cushion was on sale for $2.00/m (I already had the stuffing, so that part was free). I've read a few blog posts on the benefits of taking decorating risks lately, like buying and refinishing this chair, even though I didn't have use or space for it at the time. But don't take my word for it, here's Henro giving it his stamp of approval last night (before I finished sewing and de-lumpifying the cushions).

I joined the textile link party at freckled laundry:

Scalloped perfection

I spent most of last week in Toronto on business, which was awesome, mostly because Toronto was awesomely warm and sunny. And since Toronto is a lot closer to Ottawa than Halifax is, I took advantage of the opportunity to spend the weekend with a couple of girlfriends there. It involved lots of eating, shopping, chatting, and a pedicure. In other words, it was an all-around good time and a nice break from house prettying-up.

So while I haven't had time to take on any big projects lately, I did tackle a couple of small but satisfying ones (posts to come). A couple of weeks ago, I found this super-cute plate at Homesense for a few bucks and knew it would be the perfect addition to my expanding hanging plate display.

I picked up an inexpensive plate hanger at Canadian Tire and in just a few minutes, my new plate was on the wall. It's quite possibly my favourite one so far, so let's admire it shall we?

Inexpensive jewelry storage

I decided to hang my DIY'ed necklace holder above the DIY'ed dresser in our guestroom (pics to come), so it only made sense to give our guests a place to store their watches, earrings, and other shiny things. I found this glass ashtray/candy dish at Value Village for 99 cents, and I love this vintage-looking tray (another Value Village find, for less than $2), which totally suits our guestroom's green theme.

Cute, inexpensive jewelry storage - love it!

Using curtains as temporary doors

This is what our entry-way closet looked like last week. Well, technically this is what our entry-way closet looked like when I remembered to take a "before" picture, halfway through painting the shelf and trim (both were a dingy shade of white before I began).

The closet had a set of dark brown, hollow sliding doors when we moved in, but in addition to being supremely ugly, they didn't work very well, so I took them down and hung a pair of curtains (a hand-me-down from my mom) in their place as a temporary fix until we buy new doors.

After I finished painting the closet (I used the leftover paint from our bathroom vanity - Sico's Cool Grey - which fits somewhere between the curtains and the wall colour), I cut the tabs off the tops of the curtain panels, sewed a channel to fit a curtain rod, and hemmed the panels so they wouldn't drag on the floor (extra length looks great around a window, but isn't ideal in an entry-way, obviously). The curtain hangs on an adjustable shower curtain rod, which is hidden behind a piece of trim already in place to hide the old doors' metal tracking.

On the shelf, I've got my DIY chalkboard storage bins.

And for the dog in our lives, I installed a couple of inexpensive hooks on the closet's far left side to hang/hide Maddie's leash and a drying-off towel (which, I suppose, all towels are). It doesn't make for the nicest picture, but it wouldn't make much sense to use a nice towel to dry a wet and dirty dog, now would it?

Now we just need some flooring...

Bathroom update

Our bathroom finally has paint on the walls - lots of it. That's right, in the past three days I've painted it not once, but twice! Hmmm...how to make a long story short. We had some extra paint laying around, that we originally bought for the kitchen but ended up not using, and I had the bright idea to use it in the bathroom instead. Beats buying more paint, right?

So on Sunday, I painted the bathroom. And on Sunday night, I decided I hated it (not the colour so much as the colour in our bathroom). In fact, I hated it so much that I bought new paint on Monday and started over. This time I went with Sico's inkling colour and I love how it turned out (thank goodness, I don't think I would've survived a third round). So much so that I even hung our new mirror, a picture and a few hooks and holders, too. I also couldn't wait to snap a few progress photos - unfortunately my camera doesn't take the best indoors-at-night photos, so you'll have to trust me that the wall colour is sort of a pewter colour (better pictures and a full budget breakdown to come).

But first, here are a few what-we-started-with photos:

And here's how the bathroom looks now, after painting, updating hardware, and installing a new vanity top:

We still need to install our new light fixture, replace the bathroom door and bring in a few more accessories, but we're nearly there. And it feels pretty darn good.