For the Love of Fall

This is my favourite time of the year! I love the weather changing where you can be comfortable in pants and a sweatshirt, the leaves turn beautiful colours and are crunchy under your feet, but most of all I love to decorate for Fall!

Here is our mantel down in our family room this year. You will notice we have changed around furniture, gotten rid of some, and got some new pieces.

(Nevermind the fact there are no knobs on our dresser - as you can see I'm still trying to decide on them)

(Home office area without a chair - still on the hunt for one!)

Love this owl garland that spells out "Autum"! Got it at the Supertore of all places for $4! What a steal!

More to come.

Progress.

Yes Derek, you made it onto the blog again :) (he asked me while I was taking this picture if I was going to publish it on the blog lol)

Privacy fence is up and done.

Patio stones are gone thanks to Derek's parents (thank you!) and once the deck is done we will be putting in some sod. There are a couple patio stones that we left to go under the boat so it doesn't wreck the grass and if we ever decide to have fire one nice we can switch out the boat for the fire pit.

Just need to get that gate up. Check out our ghetto wood stopper thingy so the pooch doesn't escape on us!

I know I'm not doing much of this manual labour - but I can't wait for this to be done! I don't do well with construction and the mess gives me anxiety lol!

You're NOT Welcome.

Dear Mr.Groundhog; you ARE not welcome in my backyard. You are not allowed to eat or munch on my new bleeding heart plant, and I do not enjoy you. Please LEAVE!

Consider this your eviction notice!

So Close.

New Bed ... New Bedding.

Since getting Ed the Bed we obviously had to get some new bedding - using the Queen size sheets just wasn't going to happen haha! So here's what the old love shack room looks like now ...

Can I just say that I love this pattern ... I would have it all over my house if I could!

P.S. - Don't mind the wrinkles ... that's just how we roll here ...

It's Here.

Our new bed arrived today. Once the crew left that put it together for us, and Lexi and I ventured upstairs to see what they had left us - I have to admit ... it's a whole 'lotta bed! It's enormous. But we told ourselves, that when the time came to get a new bed (which has been a long time coming seeing as we were sleeping on a bed that Derek's parents had bought a long long time ago) we would get a king size one. It only makes sense. We have the room, and we imagined down the line in the future, two little squirts in there with us. So naturally getting the biggest one we could only made sense. Anyways, so I just wanted to throw these pictures up here, and as soon as I'm done washing the sheets and protectors I will take a picture of it all spruced up!

What Comes After Christmas?

So when you've taken down all your beautiful Christmas decorations because that time of the year has come and gone, what comes next?


I have tucked all the garland, balls, and glittery picks away till next year, and now I'm left with a naked mantel. I immediately went down to my shelf (this is the shelf that houses all of my knick knacky/decorating "things") and grabbed some things that I could throw up there. For now she's got some stuff on her, but what do I do from now until Spring?

So sad!

and sorry for the terrible lighting in these last couple pictures ...

Wall-rific!

So I don't think I showed what Derek and I did to our living room right  after Christmas? We've actually wanted to do it for some time but just never had the time to  I guess.  With Alexis growing we found that little finger marks were appearing on our flat screen t.v. ... something that just wouldn't do for Derek. So we decided that we would place the t.v. on the wall instead.

We headed to Wally Mart and found a wall bracket that claimed to allow the t.v. to hang from the wall just inches away. No cords hanging, no back of the t.v. showing ... I was super excited.

So we bought it and happily took it hope and Derek set it all up. It was actually quite easy to install onto the wall and once we got the t.v. up there we were kind of scared to let go of the sucker. I mean its an expensive t.v. and could you just imagine if it fell? Oh gawd ... the horror.

But to our surprise it's on there ... believe me, and it looks amazing! I'm loving the space between the sideboard and the t.v. and not to mention that now I'm able to put a few decorative pieces there to jazz the area up there (hello Mr.Hooter we meet again! and you already have read about my obsession with the flower tea-light holders. Oh and do you see my gorgeous new picture frame? My friend Robyn picked that baby up for me at the dolla dolla store ... she saw "me" when she saw it at the store - I plan to put a picture of some ridiculously cute girls in it ... and no not me and Robyn lol!).

If you're wondering we did add the legs that came with the sideboard, but we HATE this sideboard! I mean HATE it! It's cheaply made and not very attractive anymore! I've been searching kijiji for a sideboard/dresser that I can paint a bright and bold colour - no luck so far, but I'll keep looking!

So what do you think?

Atttttttt Laaaaasssstttttt ....

My love has come along .... Isn't that how the song goes? Please meet Dyson. She's new here. Since our old crappy vacuum finally waved the old white flag and called her quits, I finally decided to invest in a better vacuum. We did our research and felt that for what we were looking for Dyson would be the way to go. We talked to some people, read reviews and checked out some sites. It had mixed reviews (as did all the other ones we looked at) but we felt that it would be a good investment, and believe me it IS an investment. These vacuums aren't cheap and we knew that, but we figured we could invest in another cheap $200 one that will eventually break down because I have a vacuuming problem and compulsion due to use or we could invest a little money in one and have it for awhile. So the search began and I knew the boxing day flyer's would bring me joy. We searched through tons of flyer's to check out each and every store that sold them to find out how much we could save. Finally found a couple stores but to our luck they had none in stock. We finally ended up at Sears and they were happy (well I don't know if they were happy) to price match them for us. I say them too because my parents took the plunge with us and bought one too. So here she is. Isn't she a beauty. I haven't used her yet, but I because this sort of thing excites me I will probably post pictures of before and after. Of course if this whole vacuuming thing isn't your thing just skip on over them :)

So without further adieu ... here she is ...

and after a qucik swipe around our living room with her, proved to us just how powerful she really is ...

For the Time Being.

We have Derek's birthday party this weekend so naturally we have people coming over to help us celebrate. Since I haven't been able to select the pictures yet that I want to put in the picture frames in the living room, I knew I needed to come up with a quick solution. In comes - wallpaper.


I've had these wallpaper samples in my basement on my "decorating" shelf and figured its a good time to use them.


I have to admit, I kind of like it! At least it's a solution for now and so that I don't have to answer the question .... "so what pictures are going in there?" or "where are your pictures?"

Hangin' In There.

Only took one picture of our new photo wall, as you can see we still need to get some pictures in them. I'm in the process of picking and choosing pictures. This was quite the task to do with a busy toddler running around trying to help! I had to do a lot of measuring and used painters tape to make the marks and level everything out. I think they turned out pretty good!

Hang In There.

So we went to IKEA with a mission. I felt as though our living room was lacking a little something ... so I thought a display with photos might spunk the place up. But before I went hammering nails in, I figured I should figure out the placement of all the frames (since I was using a fair number of them). Here is what I came up with.

Here is a before picture of the wall .... zzzzz boring!

Now with a little help from painters tape - I took the measurements of the frames I was going to use and started to mark them out.

Yea those sporadic pieces of tape were thanks to Alexis - she wanted to get in on the action too!

and here is where we are at as of this moment...

What do you all think? Of course now I have to figure out what pictures are going in the frames! And please note that I know the tape frames are not level - it's more just so that I can move them around until I'm happy!

Hang in there for the final result!

Frame Your Face.

and I don't mean like this ...

I mean using intricate frames in different ways to display art and photos. I love finding new ways people are displaying their beloved photos and art work, so when I come across some I like, I usually save them. Here are some I am loving right now!

(Some pictures were googled and some were personal pictures I've taken)

Taking Out My Frustrations?

Who knew that small home reno's were a good way to relieve tension? I decided that it was time to repaint the small half bath that is off of our family room.

 

I really do think these pictures show you how ugly this colour really is. To be quite frank, it was down right embarrassing, and I was not digging it at all! Since I had some living room paint left over (and I love the colour ) I thought it would be nice in the small space - perhaps make it feel a bit bigger - maybe like this?

No? Not possible? Okay maybe I'm just dreaming of a bathroom like that. Anyways - back to reality. First thing we knew we wanted to do was to get rid of the tacky old towel bar. With a little exacto-knife and a hammer I just popped that sucker right off. If left two gaping holes but whatever ... nothing a little spackling couldn't handle.

Hello fresh coat of paint!

... and now with some accessories!

We still have some stuff to do in here. I need to find some artwork or something for the walls, and really accessorize it to the way I like. Anyways, this whole little makeover took me about a day and a half and only cost me the glass shelf and new towel ring, since I already had the paint - woot woot to cheap makeovers!