Christmas in April! : )

No, we are not just now celebrating Christmas...we did it in December just like everyone else, only I am just that far behind in blogging! Terrible I know! :) Life has been busy and seemingly full of sickness for our family. Here I am, better late than never right! Christmas was so fun in our new home this year, it really makes you get creative in a new way when you have never decorated a space before...I really enjoyed it! A dream of mine has always be to have a ginormous Christmas tree...well with our new vaulted ceilings my wish came true! It may have been the biggest tree I have ever seen, but I swear it did not look as big on the lot! :) Isn't that always the case? My husband was such a trooper, him and I could barely get the thing inside ourselves...its was 14ft tall and seemed 14 ft wide too! We laughed our heads off and made great memories together, and yes we finally got the tree inside and in place! :)

Here is our tree! We had to literally trim almost the entire back half of the tree off so it would fit up against the windows without taking up more than half our living room!

Next the daunting task of putting the lights on! My family always laughs at me and my light putting on technique...but I don't know how to do it any other way! The issue? I put over 4,000 lights on this tree...it just doesn't look right with less! Hubby got the tippy top started for me and I did the rest, :) I am a chicken when it comes to ladders!

My best little helper wanted to help too of course!

Finished!

This is just a cute picture of my favorite girl :) She didn't quite understand the concept of putting the ornaments on the tree and leaving them there, she really just wanted to play with them all!

So the other room that got some Christmas cheer this year was my blue kitchen! Decided to go with a more fun theme in there! Started with some beautiful ribbon and went from there!

Thats it! Hope you liked my very late peek at our Christmas! :) It will be here again before we know it! And yes, I think I will have another HUGE tree!!

The Kitchen

As soon as I saw the photos posted on the realtors website of our home I loved it! I absolutely loved everything about it, well almost everything! The one hangup was that I couldn't stand the look of the kitchen! I love how huge it is, I love the layout, I love the appliances, skylites, hardwoods and especially the vaulted ceilings....so what does that leave for me to despise? The cabinets. I wouldn't say they are oak- but they may have been at one time until they put some sort of a gray colored wash on them. This just left them looking dated and dirty. I decided almost immediately that if we were going to live here I would love to do something to change them. I began constantly watching HGTV looking for any tips on how to refinish cabinets where they turn out looking nice, not screaming that they were painted! Took a while but after quite a number of chats with different painters, dozens of television shows and several how-to books, I made my plan. Here is a photo of the kitchen in all its original glory. :)

Kitchen Before:

Such a great space right? I sure saw a lot of potential! And perhaps a lot of work too. :) First thing I started with were the cabinets. I refused to unload all of our clean dishes and food into them until they were cleaned up. They were so dirty, sticky and in no way ready to be used. You can see below the tacky gross blue contact paper Lola is sitting on which lined (and had to be removed) all the cabinets and also just the poor shape all the shelves were in.

So I started by removing all the doors and drawers from all of the cabinetry and then got to work! This kitchen was how Lola & I spent the entire month of August of last year... definitely took longer than I anticipated but I really wanted it to turn out nice. After removing all the cabinets I went to town sanding...let me just say how much I hate sanding- but I was told many times over sanding is the key to having the paint adhere properly and to achieve the lasting quality I wanted.

Such a big project right? During one of our million trips to Home Depot, (where I still think they should give me my own parking spot) William and I both saw a kitchen that we really liked. Do you know how expensive kitchens are? Rediculous! I was already well into the kitchen makeover when we started brainstorming about changing out some of the cabinet door fronts with glass.... being that William has easy access to glass we decided to go for it! We also replaced all the gross shelving with beautiful new glass shelves.

Our Home Depot glass cabinet inspiration:

Looks pretty right? We liked this glass as it is slightly obscured. I have plenty of pretty dishes to display behind it so why not go for it? After a good base coat of primer and two coats of paint on each side the cabinets were FINALLY finished!

Here are some of the cabinets all painted and put back together! Now it was time to choose hardware.

Hardware we liked and chose:

Next up was the painting of the walls! We decided to go with blue in the kitchen. As much as I LOVED my berry colored kitchen in our last home, you've seen this home already has a lot of pink. :) My Mom actually picked out this beautiful cheery blue color, thanks Mom!

Kitchen painted blue!

Here is William cutting the tippy top that I was just way too scared to do myself....once I get that high on a ladder my knees start shaking so bad I can no longer cut a straight line. :) Aren't the flowers gorgeous? They just looked so pretty with the blue walls!

Ready to see the final pictures of everything put back together thus far? Here they are! :)

Before:

After:

Island before:

After:

Wall of cabinetry before:

After:

We are still wanting to add the lighting in the glass cabinets! Just a future project when we run into some money :)

Before:

After:

Before:

After:

Lastly, here is a few frames I bought and hung with ribbon. I have always wanted some big black and white photos of Lola hanging and I love how they turned out! :)

Thats it for the kitchen! :) Hope you enjoyed it!

Living & Dining Rooms

Wow! Has it really been almost two months since I last posted? I have been asked a few times if I decided to stop blogging, and my answer is no! :) Early in December we found out that I am pregnant again, yay! We couldn't be happier! However, my body and pregnancy dont get along very well, it was rough being pregnant with Lola to say the least and its been tough again this time around. Just yesterday I was able to start my nausea medication and well, here I am! Now that you know why I have been MIA lets get back to the new home! Up today is the living room! This is one of my favorite rooms in the house! I have always dreamed of having a home with vaulted ceilings, they just seem to make the room feel so much more spacious. Like I have said before, when we moved in EVERYTHING was white- white walls and white carpet. (or at least what used to be white)

Here are a few before photos:

This is a picture taken from the upstairs hallway, it is a cutout that overlooks the downstairs, I love it!

At first we moved in very little of our furniture and belongings since we wanted to get the whole place painted before the carpet arrived which meant we got to live out of the garage for a month. :) Trying to choose paint colors for this room was relatively easy for me. I have always wanted a gray living room! So that part was simple enough. Choosing the accent wall color was a little more of a challenge. When you walk in our home you can see both the living room accent wall as well as our bedroom accent wall. It took a while to decide what would look nice together without being too overwhelming. We finally decided on plum. Plum and gray are so pretty together!

Painting underway:

(Please note that the hideous light fixture was changed in upcoming photos) :)

New carpet being installed:

Fresh paint and fabulous new carpet!

William & Lola brought me flowers after this very long day of work! So sweet huh! :)

Now that the carpet was in and painting completed we were finally able to move in all our furniture. :) While there is still a lot I look forward to adding to these rooms, (curtains, pictures, pillows, fancy dining chairs and such) take a peek at how different it looks now!

There you have it! :) Another room completed! Next up is the kitchen and let me tell you, it had quite the makeover! Stay tuned and I promise it wont be two months this time! :)