Empty Spaces

Now that we have finally painted and gotten the curtains hung in our bedroom, I am looking to fill a few of the "empty spaces." The main two spaces I want to fill are the little corner by our closet and above our bed.

I think that this little corner would be perfect for a little chair or a table and lamp - or something, but I just haven't found the right thing. It is going to have to be on the small side. Eventually we would like to install a collapsible door so that we can put something a little bigger here. I am keeping my eyes open for things at garage sales and on craigslist. I have some coordinating fabric that would be great for upholstering a chair. Any thoughts or suggestions?

The second area I need help with is our bed.

Right now we don't have a headboard. There wasn't one with our bedroom set when we got it (long story), and it has worked out great for us so far. My husband is 6'3" and just barely fits on our king size bed. So, we've moved the bed a little bit away from the wall and putting his pillow a little bit over the edge gives a few extra inches.

Anyway, we definitely need something here. Would a picture look funny without a headboard? Any ideas for making a headboard that would coordinate with our shiny black furniture? I am thinking of something that could be mounted on the wall so that Saul could still take advantage of a few extra inches.

I plan on making some pillows with leftover fabric from the curtains, but above the bed definitely needs some work.

I am so not a decorator, so if you have any suggestions, please let me know!!!

Kathryne

Our "New" Bedroom

At the end of last week, I posted about our bedroom decorating fail. It was pretty bad, if I do say so myself. I am so embarrassed that it stay so bad for so long, especially since we had the paint and curtains ready to go.

We finally broke up the painting into small chunks and did the two larger walls on separate days and the two smaller walls on the same day. Doing it this way made us not abhor painting by the time we were done and we didn't have to have an entire day set aside to do it. We would definitely recommend painting this way. We actually enjoyed painting. = )

My grandparents were all coming into town after my brother Christopher's wedding and were planning a visit to our place and that ended up "encouraging" us into getting it all done and put together.

One night we worked on getting the valance stapled onto the board and the other night we hung everything. We love how it turned out. What do you think??

We still aren't completely done, but we are so much closer than we were before. We love the beautiful but relaxing feel to our room. The paint still changes colors on us a bit (tan during the day and light green at night). Thankfully we like both colors. = )

I'll post later this week asking for suggestions for the "bare" spots that still occupy our room.

Kathryne 

P.S. Sorry to any of you who may have checked back yesterday for pictures. Our camera was having major issues, which is the reason for so few pictures and  the late update.

Curtain Fail

This is embarrassing to admit, but we just now decorated our bedroom after moving in back in December. It has been a long process and it is embarrassing to admit how terrible it was for so long. I had good intentions, but decorating really isn't my thing and it ended up being really bad - for a really long time.

Here's the story.

I had good intentions. It took me awhile to find fabric that I liked, but finally Saul and I found this fabric that we loved and we thought would be so "rich" looking in our bedroom. We were going to wait for a good sale at the fabric store before buying it, but figured we could paint the room in the meantime. So, we purchased the paint and painted the room right around Christmas. The paint was supposed to be this warm caramel color that would compliment our rich red comforter and black furniture. The curtains were a dark sage green color with the caramel and reds weaved in. I had it all pictured in my mind.

Like a lot of home projects, things just didn't quite go as planned. A day or two after painting the fabric went on sale. But, when I got to the store, I found out that the fabric we liked was just a left over piece from a special order. The leftovers weren't even half of what I needed. After talking with several store employees, I found out that they couldn't even find the material in their special order section. I was also told by one employee that the fabric would be too thick to make draperies out of. I was SO discouraged and frustrated, especially because we had just painted our room to coordinate with that material. I was actually successful at finding the same fabric online - only to find out that it was more than triple the price that I wanted to pay. Ugh!! We felt like we hit a dead end.

Also, the paint had thoroughly dried by this time and was looking more and more like mustard and baby diaper filling rather than a nice warm caramel. Not at all like I had pictured. I am SO not a decorator!

Thankfully, a friend's mom does a lot of designing and she came over to offer some suggestions. We had a different fabric picked out for the living room and she actually suggested that we use the living room fabric in the bedroom and just repaint the bedroom. She also suggested that we keep the same basic color scheme throughout the house so that it would make our smaller place seem bigger. So, that is what we decided to do. But, we were too far in on a few other home projects to start in on repainting the bedroom at this point.

So, my Friday Fail is that our bedroom window was covered with this for five months!! Eeeek!

 If this isn't an 80's style sheet, I don't know what is!! We were given this used set of sheets to help keep our mattress clean when moving it. The fitted corners made it work "perfectly" for a window covering. I NEVER would have though that it would stay there for five months though! Ick!

This past week we finally got the room repainted and the curtains hung (hand sewn by my sweet mom!). Stop back by the blog on Monday I'll have new pictures up then!

Kathryne

P.S. This post is linked to Myra's Friday Fail meme. Stop by her blog to read about other fails.

Bathroom Makeover

Our bathroom was the only room that had color in it when we moved in - and it was a bright yellow. Someone helping us move in said that it would definitely wake you up in the morning! The bathroom also had this strange partition right above the shower rod that blocked any light from coming into the shower. Unless you used a clear shower curtain, it was pretty dark when you took a shower. Not good for shaving - at all!

So, we decided to do a little bathroom remodeling job. First, Saul knocked down the partition. It ended up being wood, so it was a little bit of a tough job. I think he enjoyed the destruction though. = )

Next, he had to patch the ceiling and make it smooth where the partition was. Don't worry, the pink stuff turns white when it dries. (Oh, and don't mind my husband's buzz cut. He had to because of the nasty haircut he'd paid for!)

We finally decided on a paint color - a pale green, and we started the painting.

Finally, Saul installed a curved shower rod!! Every time we have stayed in hotel that has had a curved shower rod we have had a hard time not coveting! They are so nice and make the shower feel huge. So, when we saw one on sale for $10 during a Black Friday sale, we snatched it right up even though we hadn't closed on our townhome yet. We knew that this was something that we wanted in the bathroom of our new home.

We LOVE it and would definitely recommend it!

Last, but not least, we added a little bit of wall art. This is a little picture that my parents got us as part of a shower gift. We had red and brown in our bathroom before, but this little picture has the perfect shades of green in it as well. We love having Scripture verses around our home.

 We definitely enjoy our calm look of our bathroom and the extra shower room!

Kathryne

An Electrical Fail

I am branching out and linking up to a blog carnival for the first time ever. This post is linked to Friday Fails with Myra at My Blessed Life. I have had several fails that I could put up, but I'll start with our electrical fail that happened last Friday.

Since moving into our townhome in December, my husband has replaced all of the electrical outlets in our home. All of the outlets were pretty new, but the person who did them installed all two prong outlets. How dumb, huh? We were tired of looking for the one or two three prong plugs in our home in order to plug in something with three prongs. Saul replaced all of the outlets but one in the kitchen within a month of moving in. On Friday evening he decided to tackle the last remaining outlet.

It was a tricky one and it took him some time. He displayed his flexibility by working in positions like this!


After about forty-five minutes he had it all put back together and everything was looking great! I went into the kitchen to admire his work and congratulate him on a job well done. While we were standing there in the kitchen, sparks started flying from the outlet with loud popping sounds!! Just then we lost power in the entire house! Yeah, not good!

We hadn't blown any breakers inside so we went outside to try to figure out which master breaker was ours. Now, nothing is labeled outside on the electrical meters/breakers, so we had no clue which of the four was ours. So, here we were, late at night and in the rain, trying to figure out which breaker to flip and hoping that it would be ours and not our neighbors. Thankfully, people were home in the other three townhomes in our building and they were all using electricity, so we were able to figure out which one was ours. = ) We flipped the breaker and our lights came right back on. Praise the Lord.

When we went back inside, this is what we found.


Praise the Lord that we were home when this all happened and that no fire started! We are very thankful that this fail didn't cause any permanent damage. A wire was pinched and that was what caused the sparks and power outage. Thankfully we were able to get everything back up and running within a day or two.

Thankful for electricity,
Kathryne

Painting Experiment

Since buying a townhome in December we have been in the process of figuring out paint colors and beginning to decorate. Everything was white (except the bright yellow bathroom and the burnt orange kitchen cabinets!!), so we had a pretty clean slate to work with.

I think we have changed our minds a zillion times, and then some! We would think that we really liked something, but then we would bring it home and put it in natural lighting and would absolutely hate it.

We finally found some colors that we thought we liked and went to work painting our bedroom in January. We choose a nice warm caramel color that we thought would compliment our black furniture and dark red comforter set. We liked it at first, but now that it has been on the walls for about six weeks - we HATE it! Not at all the look that we were going for.

So, we are on the hunt for the perfect color for our bedroom again.

Meanwhile, we bought WAY too much of the accent wall color of paint for our living room (looong story about this!). So, we decided to experiment the other night and try mixing some nettle (from the living room) and white to see if we could come up with something that we liked.

Here's my sweet man mixing the paint.



And here are the three colors while we were still mixing. I forgot to take one of the final product.

I'll post pictures once we finally decide to paint our room so that you can see how it turns out. I'll be sure to include a before and after.

Do you have any bad paint stories to share?

Kathryne