Happy Halloooooooweeeeeeen! Spooky Stuff

Hello Everyone,

I have a few things that always remind me of my childhood and Halloween is one of them. My mom to this day decorates her entire house in the most creative and fun ways which brings back those memories of being young with my imagination running wild.

I love Halloween and I love to decorate and create a creepy spooky scene. I love to party, I love scary movies, I love painting pumpkins and I LOVE me a good haunted house. Sadly now that I live in Florida I only have memories of the cold Utah nights when the weather would chill and the leaves would turn their autumn colors of yellow, red and brown.

The weather here in Florida is warmer and balmy (not to mention pretty bright and blue and filled with palm trees), but that doesn't change having the Halloween spirit. Sadly with all the changes we've gone through this year we haven't decorated and it hasn't felt as festive for us. There's always next year, but until then........


                                                     Happy Haunting...Muah ha ha!

Small Bathroom Vanity Solutions

Good morning,

As we move forward with our garage addition/master en-suite I am faced with the challenge of trying to put as much function as possible in a space challenged room.

With that I have been looking for bathroom vanities that can fit our space needs around 65" and also give us enough counter space and storage space to be functional.

Robert (my husband) is planning to build a concrete waterfall counter top over the cabinet base and we are having the same polished concrete floors in the bathroom as the rest of the garage that I previously posted about here  and here, along with marble wall tiles and venetian styled mirrors we hope to have a mix of modern and elegance that will make this a true spa like bathroom.

For the vanity I have found some pretty amazing ones shown below with mostly or all drawers. The idea is to maximize the usable space and give create organization and storage instead of the messy cabinets and their hard to reach spaces. In addition we plan to add some kind of modern vessel sink instead of a drop in or under mount sink so that we don't take up as much space underneath.

As you can see there are options available, and as any woman knows we need a place to put our "stuff" which is why I keep explaining to my husband that I can't have a modern minimal floating cabinet (sorry). I will keep you posted as we  go along and find more solutions for our space challenged bathroom addition~

Mirror Mirror On The Wall

Good morning,

As anyone who follows this blog knows, I LOVE MIRRORS! You will find me constantly DIYing them and putting them all over our house (remember DIY drift wood mirror and DIY modern painted mirrors?). Well, over the weekend my husband and I did it again. We've been slowly but surely taking our house in to the direction of black and white and simply working around the amazing pieces and colors that Color Splash brought in here for the make over. It is such an elegant and over the top glamorous scheme that David Bromstad mixed so well with organic elements, and is exactly the sort of thing that holds a soft spot in my heart.  

**We will be showing pictures of the house and the makeover soon which I know so many of you are dieing to see, but we have to help keep the reveal an exciting secret so we will wait until after it airs on Nov 5**

With that we wanted to share with you a one day DIY project that we did over the weekend that you can mimic with any framed mirror. All it takes is a mirror, some spray paint, some metallic paint and a sponge for your detailing and you can transform grandma's old tired mirror into a fresh modern updated version of its former self. 

Ours started with a REALLY big REALLY amazing mirror. The finish on the frame is spectacular and the way it sits in front of our dining table and reflects the rest of our house as well as our massive chandelier is perfect, we just wanted to glam it up a bit.

We started by giving it a flat white coat of spray paint, and then gave it another 2-3 coats to make sure it was good and covered shown below.

Then we gave it some detailing using something from our home girl Martha Stewart

We applied the metallic glaze using a sponge and a wet rag for wiping. We found this silver to be light and almost perfect, however If I had this to do over again I may have given it some black detailing first and then applied the metallic glaze so that the details stood out a bit more and it looked more aged. This could still happen one day but we are learning as we go, and for right now we think it looks pretty amazing. Take a look below.

It's kind of hard to see with the lighting so here are a couple of close views:

After:

As you can see, the detailing is very subtle which is what we were aiming for. When you see it in person you see the detailing much more. In this case the silver paint gave it a finished look and gave it just enough dimension. If you are looking for something more dramatic then I suggest you play with the silver paint options until you find the "just right" one for yourself.

This is the part where I queue the song "Isn't she lovely.......isn't she beautiful?" Well my friends, Yes She Is!

Kid's Room Feature Wall

Good morning,

I love my daughter's and they have been so great about going through all of the ups and downs with the move and the remodel after remodel that this weekend my husband and I decided to work on their rooms. I thought I would share with you a great way to decorate for kids rooms using the things that you have around, some paint, and some creativity.

It started with a framed cork board that I bought at HomeGoods for $30. We tacked up all my daughter's necklaces and pictures and buttons and stickers to make the cutest little collage seen below.

Then we started taking mirrors and things we had around the house already and hung them up in a grid type fashion. The key is that these things don't have to match, and in fact the less they match the more character and "life" your wall will take on as shown again, below.

Once I had everything hung just so, I stood back and realized that I wanted it to have a little more uniformity with the room aka spray paint baby!

So I took the chalk board with frame that I bought at HomeGoods on clearance for $6.50 and a picture collage in a black frame and bought myself a handy can of this:

And....we simply took those frames outside and gave them two coats of paint shown below.

Here is our finished product! She loves it and even left a cute little message on her chalk board~

Making A House Our Home

Good morning! It has been a loooong time since I've been able to post. Things became so busy for me with work for a good period of time and I was immersed in some design projects that left me without a drop of time. Also, in the interim of all the work chaos I lost my father after a long battle with cancer which has been the hardest thing I've ever gone through. Needless to say, it put everything else in our lives on hold.

Now that I'm back and trying to "come back" to my life I've had a change of perspective. Because of everything that was happening our poor house and all its projects were put on the back burner. I was working non-stop, dealing with a ton of stress, not finding time for my family and overall was having some pretty hard times. My new goal is to work in moderation, finish our home so that I have some peace for the upcoming holidays, spend more time with my family and our friends and get back to the grass roots of what I love about design and why I started doing it in the first place. Oh, and I am going to have my blog re-done so that it is more user friendly. PHEW!

In the process of going through our home remodel and then afterwards having a makeover done on our home I have been making minor changes here and there. I'm not talking major changes here because it's hard to top or fix what is already A-MAZ-ING, but there are small changes that I am making so that our home feels more like me i.e. family photos, pillows, paint etc.

One of the things that I love most in our home right now is our HUGE dining table. It is around 10' long and is handcrafted and custom made. It comfortably seats 10 and has an additional leaf that allows seating for 12. For an entertainer like myself, it's a dream come true! While recently working on a design project for a client  I am refinishing a mid-century modern table, and true to form it sparked an obsession in me. I'm talking about the Hans Wegner Wishbone Chairs.

My dining room is amazing with acrylic chairs and it has a really cool modern vibe to it. Though I love and appreciate it, my obsession with the Wishbone chairs is going no where and I've decided that these organic icons with their light wood and hemp woven seats are exactly what my table needs. Luckily, I have so many organic elements in here that they will work perrrrrrrfect.

Here's a picture of our chairs currently (queue the envy drool):

And here is what it will feel like after I get my hands on these chairs:

You feel me???