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home decor

Room Tours

Our Living Room Reveal

Here we go, here we go, here we GOOOOOOOOO. This room has been a long freaking time coming. I have been dreaming of this space for years on end, but really was low priority while we did other projects.

Let’s start from the very beginning (a very good place to start). This is what the room looked like when we first moved in, almost seven years ago. The carpet and upholstered walls were soaked with cat urine, the layers of flooring over the original pine were disgusting, but protected the original floors well.

I cannot even believe we bought this house in this condition. I hardly can even remember what poor condition it was in!

The first months we owned the house were a mad dash to get it livable. We cleaned everything out of here, drywalled, refinished the floors, and painted everything white. I didn’t have time to make decisions, we just rushed to get it to a baseline living condition. Once we were in that baseline living condition, we had various projects we had to get done in a very specific order.

This white room was really on the backburner for the longest time. It was FINE, but completely uninspiring. We did have rugs and some other furniture in here, but I took these photos mid-prep, so they are slightly more bare than what we’d been living in these past few years.

And now, ladies and gentlemen, feast your eyes, because this living room is FINALLY finished!

The biggest undertaking was planning a whole wall of built in shelves. We’d never done anything like this before, but I’m delusional enough to believe we could pull it off, and thankfully Ethan went along with it. With a whole lot of Youtube and a lot of trial and error, we (mostly Ethan) built this whole wall that’s now the focal point of the room.

All of the furniture was existing in the room, but it looks completely transformed in the space. It was mostly thrifted over time, a mixture of antique and modern pieces. Previously things looked like a random collection of pieces, now it truly feels cohesive, like it all fits together.

I knew moment I saw it I wanted this light fixture. No other light fixture compared. It was a little out of my budget, but I stalked sales until I finally found it at a price I was comfortable with and I went for it. And I was absolutely not wrong, it is my favorite light fixture we own, and totally makes the space.

One thing I really wanted to plan strategically was how the living room flowed into the smaller passthrough space adjacent to it. Because our home has a back addition that was added about 60 years after it was first built, there are some areas where the floors and cased openings give clues that it did not used to be one space. This particular space next to our living room is wider than a hallway, and feels like it’s part of the living room, but feels separate at the same time. The ceiling height is different, and it had some pretty textured wallpaper I wasn’t interested in taking down. A friend of mine said to treat the two spaces as sisters and not twins, which really stuck with me. I used a grasscloth wallpaper on the ceiling of the main living room, and carried it through on the walls in the secondary space. Sisters, not twins. The wall color in the main living room is Sherwin Williams Debonair, and all of the trim is Sherwin Williams Stargazer.

The sconces on the bookshelf wall were a last minute addition. I had intended to use some antique sconces we had in our garage when we moved in, but they ended up being smaller than a modern standard size, and we had already had electrical run, so we purchased these instead. I dressed up the shades with some velvet ribbon to add an extra oomph, but I’m super happy with them.

After envisioning what this room could be for so long, it feels surreal to actually be living in it. Home takes time, and although we are a little slower than most, I’m so pleased to finally be living in a space that feels like a reflection of our family and our taste.

Although most of the items in our space were collected secondhand over time, below are the sources for items still available. Anything not linked is custom, or vintage.

coffee table | curtains (these are customizable, ours are the green color) | Frame TV (ours is the 55″, the perfect not too bug size, in my opinion) | throw pillow covers (ours are the powder blue color)

Thank you, for those that have followed along with this project over on Instagram, as I’ve been sharing things. Your excitement has meant the world. That’s all for today, friends. Have a fabulous day!

April 9, 2025 by
DIY Projects

DIY Abstract Art

Last week I shared a post with several ideas for free and low cost art (you can read that here). This week, I’ve been super bored around the house with no big projects that I’ve been working on, and so I was itching to do something. I had been inspired by some abstract paintings I’d seen online, and figured I could make something similar with items I had in my garage. File this under: free projects. (If you don’t have a garage full of leftover renovation junk, this might not be free for you. But still super low cost! So, let’s get started!

The first thing I did was grab some plywood from the garage. Mine is smooth, but pressed wood would work as well. I used a board that was 24×36 inches, but any size will work! I also grabbed some drywall mud, a drywall mud pan, and a putty knife.

These photos are screenshots from a video I filmed at 8 pm while starting this project, so probably not the best quality. But bear with me. I started out scooping the drywall mud slowly onto the board, but quickly realized it would be easier to just pour a bunch on the board directly and move it around with my (gloved) hands.

Then, using both a putty knife, and my hand, I just gobbed it all around until the whole board was covered, and there was textured look to the entire thing. The goal was to make it look like super textured. I let it dry overnight, and when I woke up the next morning, it looked like this:

Exactly what I was going for! Then, I poured white paint over the entire thing and brushed it over the mud texture.

This step isn’t technically necessary, but I wanted it to be a brighter white. I used Behr Ultra Pure White, which is just what the color is with no tint in the paint can. You could also choose to do a different color here completely, depending on what you wanted your background to be.

After the white was dry, I did the final step. Unfortunately, I didn’t get any pictures of this step, because I was being climbed on by my toddler and forgot to take any photos! However, this is the fun/easy part. I just took a small craft brush, some blue paint I had on hand (Glidden America’s Cup Navy) and painted on some loopy squiggly lines. I didn’t really have a plan, I just went for it. You could do this in any color with any shape/line.

Some of the paint ended up dripping down, which I actually love. The messier the better with this!

You can see in some areas I went a little thicker with the paint, and in others I let the texture show through.

Overall, excluding dry time, this project took probably 45 minutes of active work. And now I have a larger piece of “art” that I didn’t have to pay for. And I absolutely love the way it turned out! You know that blue is totally my color, and so I think it works perfectly in the dining room where I have lots of blue and white going on.

What do you think? Would you try this? Let me know if you do! Well, that’s all for today, friends. Have a fabulous day!

*This post may contain affiliate links.

August 7, 2020 by
House Progress

The Power of Paint (A Phase One Bathroom Makeover)

Hi there! Thanks so much for stopping by today! Boy oh boy, do I have a before and after for you today! First, let’s get the backstory. We bought our home from a realtor who had purchased the house at auction following a foreclosure. That realtor listed it for sale, but went back and forth about whether he wanted to flip it himself. When we bought it, there were a few random half hearted attempts at restoration work. One random door frame stripped of paint, carpeting partially pulled up, wallpaper torn off in just a small section of a room. That was the case in the room I’m going to show you guys today.

So the upstairs of our house has three bedrooms and a full bathroom. When we did our first big amount of work in the months before we moved in, the only room we touched upstairs was the first bedroom for our son, leaving the bathroom and two bedrooms untouched. The house was built in 1895 with no indoor plumbing, and therefore no bathrooms. I’m not sure at what point it was added, but at sometime, a bathroom was poorly shoved into what would have once been a spacious hallway between the three upstairs bedrooms. This leaves us a bit perplexed as to what to even do with the bathroom, because the floorplan of the second story is a bit wonky. I’d love to someday see that turned back into a hallway, but alas, we need more than the outhouse that was originally here. Knowing that this bathroom was going to involve some structural changes, and that our needs in the house/bedrooms may change as we have more kids etc., the upstairs bathroom was literally at the bottom of the priority list. Out of sight, out of mind.

Until, that is, we moved the master bedroom upstairs. Then all of a sudden this upstairs bathroom was a little more on the forefront of my mind. I lovingly nicknamed this room “the dungeon bathroom,” because I was so scared to use it. Everything was fully functional, but the carpet (yep, this thing had carpet) that had been in there had been waterlogged and soaked through the subfloor. My brother actually pulled up the carpet and old subfloor and laid down new plywood. And that’s the extent of work we had done in the dungeon bathroom. But now our bedroom was right next to it, and it was a pain to go all the way down the creaky stairs right outside of our son’s room in the event that I needed to go to the restroom in the middle of the night. So I knew I needed to do something. But again, of all the “big projects” we have planned for the next couple years, this one is quite literally the last one on the list. So I decided to give it a little cosmetic facelift, a Phase One makeover to tide us over until we would eventually remodel this bathroom. So, without further ado, here is the dungeon bathroom.

For days, I worked during naptime and after my son went to bed to scrape wallpaper. Most of the wall had two layers of paper, but in some areas, I found four different papers laid on top of each other. It was grueling. I used a handheld steamer and a wallpaper scraper and would work in tiny six inch square sections. It took a long time, and my arms arched.

As I scraped the wallpaper, I found that some of the drywall had been damaged, and had simply been disguised by the paper. That meant we had to do some patch work on the walls. I had to sand it all down to get the gunky wallpaper paste completely gone. All of this was before I ever started painting!

I originally planned on only using products that I had on hand to do this bathroom, but I ended up purchasing the wall color because I didn’t have as much paint in the garage as I thought I did. The color is Behr French Colony, and I think it’s a lovely blue-grey.

A shower curtain over the shower stall helps disguise that whole lotta ugly.

I also painted the plywood subfloor using some paint I had on hand. The floor is painted with Behr Tanglewood.

As you can see, I didn’t change any of the fixtures, the only thing I changed was paint. Isn’t that crazy?! Paint is so powerful!

Because this room is directly next to our bedroom that’s painted such a bold color, I was really concerned about how these two colors would look when coming up the stairs and they were both visible. I think they go complement each other nicely. (Bedroom is Behr Thermal.)

The 1920’s light fixtures stayed, and I think they look so much more elegant now without the dated wallpaper.

All of this to say this: just don’t wait. I would have loathed this bathroom another two to three years until it finally was time to gut it. Instead, I can enjoy the space, and it doesn’t give me the heebee-jeebees every time I go in there! I think there is power in a can of paint, and so much power in doing a “Phase One” project, something that is just enough to tide you over while you’re waiting for the big project.

Before we go, here’s one more before and after from the same angle. I can’t even believe the only difference is paint.

Alright guys, that’s all for today. Have a fabulous day!

January 5, 2020 by