Category Archives: Windows
A Little Getaway at a Gorgeous Victorian B&B
We recently were given an amazingly generous gift package from our son and daughter-in-law to a B&B in Stillwater, MN at The Rivertown Inn.
(This is the ‘wallpaper’ in the dining room… They had an artist somehow photocopy or reproduce a painting onto large canvases and then hung that canvas on the wall like wallpaper, and then embellish it by hand with paint. It looks amazing in person, like a huge oil painting on the walls!)
A little about the history of Stillwater, the oldest town in Minnesota, it is a picturesque town sitting on the St. Croix River across from Wisconsin and absolutely filled with Victorian homes and mansions, amazing shops with tons of choices for antiquing. It’s for sure a destination town and well worth the trip.
And the place we stayed, The Rivertown Inn, was over the top in opulence and décor! The amazing attention to detail with no expense spared for this antique B&B is remarkable. High end finishes throughout, both inside and outside… click here to read the rest of the story…
Master Bedroom, Pottery Barn Linens, Just Not a Messy Bed
I’ve been sort of delaying getting the master bedroom revealed on this blog. Mostly because I’ve really been struggling with making the pictures look as good as the room looks in real life. For some reason, I can’t get a good angle with the bed, either it looks huge, or it looks messy. And then this week I got the Pottery Barn catalogue in the mail and the bedroom pic, that by the way, looked great… of course, had bed linens that were slightly messy.
Source: Pottery Barn
Doesn’t that bed above from Pottery Barn look great? Yeah, I tried to embrace the ‘messy’ bed look. I wasn’t happy with that picture either. And the toile printed linens I have, even came from Pottery Barn. (maybe I just lack the guts to pull that messy look off, Ha! after all, what if you thought that since I posted pics of my bed messy, you thought that was how I normally kept it? Gasp!)
So instead I tried to get the same angle and closeness of the bed as Pottery Barn did… Read More of the Story…
Window Treatments in the Master Bedroom, How I Accomplished Form and Function
All of the windows in ‘Our House’ are treated according to what the privacy and light control needs (function) are for each space, as well as treated for the aesthetic quality (form). In most cases it’s difficult to accomplish all those needs with only one treatment per window. Usually, I have a treatment for the privacy and light control, and a separate treatment for the ‘look’.
In the master bedroom, the Hunter Douglas plantation shutters on the windows are on read more…
Our House: Free-Hanging Antique Window… Still More Interior Windows!
I’ve shared with you, several times, so many different ways I’ve used old, antique and vintage windows at ‘Our House’.
I bought this antique window at a garage sale for READ ON…
Our House: Pergola Gone, Hello Porch!
Yay! I’m so glad to be writing this post, it means that our ‘pergola-turned-porch’ is done! I’m so thrilled with the results, let’s just pause here and take a look at the finished product, then I’ll give you the play by play.
Yay! Isn’t it cute? I think one of the reasons I’m so happy with the end result, is because when the project started, I was really worried that it was going to ruin the character I had built into this end of the house with the pergola addition several years prior.
Let me explain: READ ON…
Our House: Pergola Transitioning to Porch… the Mushroom Effect
Last December, when I first started to blog, I introduced you to the pergola at ‘Our House’ that greets you when you pull into the driveway.
This spring I noticed how badly the house needed to be repainted on the East and South side of the house… (I’ll be telling you in a later post about selecting just the right blue for this outside project).
When I work on old houses, I always talk about the ‘mushroom effect’… you know how you start what you think is going to be a simple task, but then realize the layer under that needs updating or fixing, and the layer under that… and so on… it ‘mushrooms’ into a huge job very easily.
Well, even though ‘Our House’ isn’t an old house, it’s only 20 some years old, the ‘mushroom effect’ can happen to a newer home too. Here’s the story of the ‘mushroom effect’ on this not-so-old house:
My how things change… READ ON…
Little Brick Cottage… Leaving Out the Back Entry
Well people, this is farewell, at least for now, to the ‘Little Brick Cottage’… yes, I’m sorry, I love it too, but like I told you at the beginning when we bought this antique house, it was a project for me to fix up, breath new life into it and then either sell or rent it. For now it’s being rented by a wonderful family that loves it.
However, I still do have one last room, the back entry, to show you, from start to finish, then it’s out the door and let this family live in peace in this charming home.
When we bought this house the back entry was ‘yucky’ at best. There was no natural light in the space, there was a door closing the kitchen to the entry, yet it was completely opened to the basement and felt dangerously close to the first basement step.
I told you as we were working on this space how we needed to READ ON…
Little Brick Cottage… Kitchen Before and After, What a Change!
Whoo-Hoo, the big reveal of the kitchen at the ‘Little Brick Cottage’ is here! And what a change it is from when we bought this antique house in December of last year.
I think the best way to help you see this amazing transformation is to show you side by side before and after pictures.
One of the sweetest surprises in this reno, was finding the Read on…
