decorating

A Mirror, Rug and a Debunking

January 26th, 2012 at 8:45 am / Amy Bennett / 5 Comments »

OK, so I’ve had a few small changes around the house. Nothing outstanding but they make me happy and I’m all about sharing the happy.

The mirror

First up, my mom found this mirror from Celebrating Home.

The mirror is a perfect fit with our new curtains and I love that it brings some green into the room. The plan is to find a dresser of some sort to go under it but clearly this decorating the bedroom thing is going to be a drawn-out process.

The Rug

I peeked in HomeGoods the other day after I hit up Old Navy and no lie, I saw this rug for my bathroom and was taking off to the check-out counter in no less than 25 seconds. If you know me and my indecisive nature, you know that’s a flat out miracle.

The Debunking

And finally, the other weekend Scott and I were bored and I said, “I feel like rearranging some furniture.” Well, that started 24 hours of drama with the girls’ room. Lexi wanted to keep it and Emma wanted them separate. I actually like the look of the bunk beds but they were serving absolutely no purpose. Neither girl wanted to sleep on top and it was clearly being used as storage.

After a trial night, both girls decided they really like having separate beds. Can you believe they happily spent 9 months sharing a twin bed?

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Updated Chair and Hall Bathroom

January 13th, 2012 at 1:29 pm / Amy Bennett / 8 Comments »

OK, so here are a few small updates that we’ve made around the house that I haven’t taken the time to tell you about. The first is another Christmas present from Mom. I picked out the fabric and she recovered it for me.

Isn’t that fabric fun? It is totally me and makes me so happy!

When we were in Maryland, I scored a new shower curtain and rugs for SIX dollars each at Ollie’s. Not a bad transformation for less than $20! You can see older pictures here and here.

Amazing how a little color and pattern changes things, huh?

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Master Bedroom Silk Panels

January 6th, 2012 at 11:53 am / Amy Bennett / 4 Comments »

Belated Merry Christmas to me! My mom had my curtains made for my Christmas presents but we had so many issues with the fabric they didn’t get done quite in time. They were well worth the wait though! My bedroom is really feeling like a bedroom!

Lots more to do in the room to make it all come together…pillows, bedding, pictures, furniture but I’m loving it so far!

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The Nightstands of my Pinterest Dreams

September 28th, 2011 at 4:00 pm / Amy Bennett / 7 Comments »

In case you missed it, a few months ago we finished our master suite addition we completed in preparation for our adoption. Here’s the picture of our bedroom just after we got the carpet. Basically, it was our bed and nightstands. It’s still just our bed and nightstands. But today? We got NEW nightstands.

We’ve had our nightstands for all of our 13 years of marriage. Actually, we’ve had that ONE nightstand for 13 years. Scott has either not had one or used that $10 metal one we got at a discount furniture store. Since putting on the addition I have been dying for mirrored nightstands but I thought they were all out of my price range. Please check my Pinterest Bedroom Idea board and you’ll see mirrored nightstands galore (and a good idea of what I want this room to look like). My mom lucked up on a set at a local place and while they were pricey, they were EXACTLY what I wanted and since we keep furniture around for a long time, I just knew I had to have them. I was expecting them to take up to 6 weeks to be delivered so I was pleasantly surprised when it’s not even been 2 weeks and they called today to say they were in.

Look what a difference! Go ahead, scroll up, down, up, down, up down.

They

are

gorgeous.

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Top Ten Tuesday: Bedroom Designs

March 15th, 2011 at 7:00 am / Amy Bennett / 12 Comments »

OK so I could keep a lot of the same decorations in our new bedroom and most likely I will. But it’s time to step it up just a notch. As I mentioned, I’m not a fan of the uber popular coastal look going around. I mean, it’s GORGEOUS but it’s just not my style. Pretty sure I will forever be a fan of reds, oranges, browns and greens. I love dark woods. I love for it to feel WARM, COZY and INVITING.

So given that, here are my Top 10 Dream Bedrooms.

#10 What I love about this? DARK. I love the feeling that I’m sleeping in a library with all of that dark wood. Just wrap me up and put me to bed! Not a fan of the lamps, rug or picture necessarily. Just like that it’s so dark.

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#9 I don’t think I could handle such light walls, furniture AND carpet but I love all the green pillows and love the interesting light and bench.

#8 Blue is not usually my thing but I do love all the shimmer. The chandelier is outstanding and I just like the overall chic look.

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#7 I don’t love everything about this room (please cover those chairs!) but I do love the mirror, I love the mixture of red, orange and brown. I like the black and white artwork. The lighting just makes it feel cozy.

#6 These white walls usually would be a turn off but I think the tile is interesting. Again, I love the red, orange and brown. I particularly like that the headboard and bed are both dark, similar to ours.

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#5 I love the orangey/peachy colors in this room. I think this is less the cozy feel but still a nice, bright room I would be happy to walk into.

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#4 OK, now we’re getting to my favorites. I love, love, love the green floor to ceiling curtains. I Love the shimmery rug and art. I love the dark furniture and dark floors. I’m surprised I love it given the walls are ivory.

#3 I just LOVE this room. Again, floor to ceiling curtains. We have the brown and orange with some great pattern in the blanket. I love the rug. Love the geometric design in the lamp and side table.

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#2 Now, this is just a pipe dream but this room was built as a college thesis and I am just IN LOVE with all the cozy lighting and the green on the bed and curtains. Love the mirror on the bottom of the bed. Love all the wood accents. This is so not happening but I love it.

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#1 And this might surprise you, but this was my favorite out of the bunch. It’s not perfect but there’s a lot to love. I love the floor to ceiling green curtains (those are green right?). I love the dark furniture. I love the pattern in the rug. I love the mirror to the left. I love the black and white photography. I am very surprised I like the light blue walls and blue accents in the pillows. I’m not a huge fan of the bed and chest but overall, I think this room evokes the right mix of modern, traditional, light and dark, cozy, livable space.

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I think I’m going to pull some of my favorite things from all of these to make our new master bedroom a cozy retreat. I think we’re really going to need a nice place to escape to in the coming years!

Which of these are your favorites?

For more Top Ten, visit ohAmanda.com

Pictures were taken from Elle or Rate My Space

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And So It Begins

March 7th, 2011 at 8:08 am / Amy Bennett / 3 Comments »

Today is the day, pending a permit, we’re breaking ground. I’m so excited to get started!

This weekend I spent time clearing out Scott and the girls’ closets as they will be GONE in just a few weeks! My understanding is the foundation, framing and roof will be done within 2 weeks and that’s when they’ll “blast through our wall” to make way for the hall.

So I put the girls clothes in empty racks in the playroom closet and boxed the rest of the stuff up. As for Scott’s, I stuffed as much as I could in my closet which happened to be less than full since I consigned a whole bunch of stuff as month. But he still has quite a bit of clothing. So we’re planning to get a free-standing clothes rack and park it right in the middle of our bedroom until the new closet is ready. Oh joy!

I thought I’d show a few before pictures.

Here is the girls’ room (please ignore the half-made bed and messy dresser. I did clean that this weekend too. The new closet will be right where the headboard is. The window will be taken out and dry-walled in.

And from this view. The closet will be GONE as that whole wall is the other side of the new hallway!

Right on the other side of that wall is what will be the other side of the hallway in our bedroom. Just imagine this whole section you see being the new hallway headed straight out of the house. The window will be dry-walled in as well:

A new wall will be built about 3” inside the room to make sure we meet code for the width of the hallway. Pretty soon our TV will have to come down and the dresser moved. And as I mentioned, all those clothes are going to have to find a temporary home.

And here is outside before we do any digging. The hallway I mentioned is right in between those two windows on the side of the house.

Man, I can not wait!

And in case you need to catch up or need a reminder, here is the floorplan. A few things have changed but it’s pretty close.

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A Little Hardwoods Miracle

February 7th, 2011 at 12:30 pm / Amy Bennett / 8 Comments »

Do you ever just feel like God is on your side? Sort of a heavy/prideful thing to say but I feel like God is on our side with this whole addition thing. He’s just GOOD. I don’t know if it will always be smooth sailing but this morning it was.

Where to start?

Well, the plan for our currently carpeted hallway and the new hallway is to replace all that with the hardwood that is in the living room, kitchen, etc. That way, we can put carpet in the new bedroom and not have to re-carpet the existing bedrooms. I like carpets in bedrooms, what can I say?

Scott and I went to Home Depot last weekend to cross our fingers and hope that they still had our floors. Well, only 2 lone boxes sat there, one of which had been opened and was poorly re-packaged. We needed 5. We talked to customer service and apparently it was a discontinued item and no one in our surrounding area had anymore. Collective sigh.

I didn’t want mismatched hardwoods so we were going to go the carpet route but then we’d have to carpet all the bedrooms too so we didn’t have mis-matched carpet between the hall and the rooms. Yeah, I know we could, but I’d rather do it right while we have the money.

So this morning we decided to do a nationwide hunt for this hardwood. I did a nationwide Craigslist search and two came up! There were 30 boxes of 3/8” in Atlanta! Ours was 5/8” but we could supplement with wood and make it work. Things were looking up!

I called Home Depot to see if they could widen their search. It was out of stock online. I called locally they showed nothing in their system. I mentioned that we just saw it last weekend and sure enough after taking a look, those 2 boxes were there. I started asking him how else we could find it as we were pretty desperate. He seemed helpful and put me on hold to make some calls. Well. Turns out there was some confusion and he was looking at their 3/8”. He DID have SEVEN boxes of the 5/8” although we were sure we only saw 2 boxes last weekend. I sent Scott right over and sure enough, he said, the seven boxes were stacked right where we had looked. Plus, they were in fact discontinued so the sales lady let us have the seventh box we really didn’t need for half price. Not to mention they were ALREADY 40% off from being discontinued.

In short, we got MORE than what we needed locally for 43% off the original price. Can I get an amen??

Also, this is our first official purchase for the addition! Yay!

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Addition: The Floor Plan and Tile

January 29th, 2011 at 9:09 pm / Amy Bennett / 8 Comments »

The Floor Plan

Alrighty, folks, I think we have a winner! Ding, ding, ding! We have a floor plan! I’d like to give a big thanks to New Old Homes & Design for helping with the plans. We worked with their designer and she was a pleasure to work with and provided several floor plans that far exceeded our expectations. If you’re in the area, definitely check them out. I’m not really sure whether I can blog their plans or not but we ended up tweaking one of theirs just a tad so I’ll share that (even though it’s not nearly as pretty)! Once again, major thanks to Mary at New Old Homes!

In case you’re interested, here is the post that had our first swags at it.

So what I love about this one is that the opening for the bathroom is on the end of the wall so we have almost that whole interior wall to use in the bedroom. I also love that the shower and vanity are opposite one another. I love that we have HUGE, SEPARATE closets. I love the window placement. I love that we have plenty of storage. There’s not too much I don’t love about this plan. Can you see any possible gotchas or things to consider we’re missing? I should also mention that she suggested putting the door to the bedroom 3’ into the hallway so the bedroom door is not an issue there at the opening of the bedroom.

The Tile

Today we went to The Tile Collection in Pineville. I have to tell you, this week I really thought we might have a meltdown about the tile. Scott and I were wanting completely opposite things and we were really at a standstill. Actually, there was nothing still about it, it was turning into a raging war about the color of the tile. I’m not lying when I say we had to pray over our bathroom. But today, our meeting at the tile place was so peaceful and enjoyable. We actually agreed on almost everything and Theresa was so good at helping us negotiate a compromise and finding alternates.

So first thing, you might remember the vanity from this post that I really liked. That was our inspiration for the whole bathroom. If you notice in the floor plan, that vanity niche is perfect for it. So first thing, we picked out the glass tile and Scott and I right away picked out the same thing which was a small miracle. After that, most of the time was spent on picking out a shower tile. Scott really wanted dark and I didn’t want it to feel so dark nothing popped and it was like a cave. We compromised on that and then went with light floors and countertops to go with our dark espresso cabinets. OK, so here are the choices:

Going clockwise:

The dark brown is the shower. We’re doing 12 x 24 on the walls. They’ll be vertical and in alternating rows. Like this but not stacked in rows straight across. They’ll be laid more like hardwood floors:

The shower floor will be 2×1 squares of the same brown tile. NOT this river rock.

The smaller, multi-color glass will be what is on each side of the vanity and the ceiling.

The light color actually has a linen stripe in it that is nice and light. We’ll be doing this in 24×24 squares on the floor, laid in a hatched design. I think that’s the name anyway. It’s where the stripes go vertical and horizontal in alternating pattern.

The dark wood is the cabinets.

The countertop is not pictured but is going to be some type of hard surface similar to the color of the floor. We’re hoping to find a remnant of something at their warehouse.

It is SO pretty in person. Can’t you just imagine being the shower and looking across the room to that pretty glass tile or standing at the vanity and seeing that pretty shower? I am SO excited about it.

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Children’s Painted Table Project

September 20th, 2010 at 11:00 am / Amy Bennett / 16 Comments »

Our play room seems to evolve often, sometimes weekly. It’s been in my office, my living room, Lexi’s old nursery. It’s been in Lexi’s old nursery, now called the playroom for quite some time. Scott threw together a few tables for them to play on but we never got around to painting them, With two kids armed with crayons, markers, stamps, juice and chocolate, it’s nearly worthless to put much effort into it. But, at 5 and 7 I think they are well passed the point where not everything will be written or spilled on.

But clearly in the past that was not the case. I found this old picture of the tables:

As you can see, it looked more like their latest art creation than their play table. So we pealed off stickers and Scott sanded the rest.

Then I gave it a good coat of Kilz.

I decided leaving a white top was brave even now so I decided to tie in the purple. I painted the top the same purple from the walls. And then I decided to put a scalloped edge around the top sides. I made a stencil out of construction paper. I simple drew a circle from the outline of a drinking cup, cut it out and then marked two dots on it where it would align on the top of the table so it would be the same each time. Actually, I ended up folding the circle at the dots so all I had to do was lay the stencil on the top of the table. Sometimes it takes me awhile.

I did that all the way down the table, ignoring the break in the wood.

And then I took a smaller brush and filled it in by hand with purple.

Then I couldn’t leave it like that, wanting to tie some white into the purple. So I got one of the girls’ paint brushes and did an outline of dots around the scallops.

Then I couldn’t leave it like that, wanting to tie some pink into the table. So I got some regular acrylic craft paint I had and using the same small brush, drew petals in pink and then did one more dot in the Kilz white in the middle to finish off the flower.

And then, I was happy.

The tables went into the playroom yesterday. Please excuse the very non-matching, huge STOP sign and traffic light. This is what happens when your dad is a police officer.

Perfect? No. But better? YES!

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New Chairs. For real this time.

August 14th, 2010 at 9:09 pm / Amy Bennett / 3 Comments »

So about a year ago Sally told us we needed red chairs in our living room.

It looked like this

and Sally said it should look more like this

I agreed and I’ve been searching and searching for the right red chairs. Some I have found but the price wasn’t right or others were the right price and wrong color. But alas, I believe today we found just the right one. Baby Bear would be happy.

Thank you, T.J. Maxx! And here it is in the room:

And yes, true to form, Scott is playing Call of Duty while I blog.

I’m really happy with them.

However.

Lexi is NOT.

We took out the glider and chair. We put the chair at Scott’s desk and then was going to sell the glider. Lexi started to have a breakdown similar to our recliner breakdown. So we decided we’d just take our much-less used white rocker out of their bedroom and put the glider in there and sell the rocker. I thought it was all solved but nooo….Lexi DID have a recliner breakdown and nearly cried herself to sleep because she wanted to keep both the glider and rocker.

We do a lot of things right as parents but apparently teaching separation of emotions and chairs is not one of them.