Blog Archives
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…
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…
Ever Thought About Dressing Up Your House with Shutters?
As I’ve been working on painting the exterior of ‘Our House’, it’s brought me to do some homework, because I am considering adding shutters to some of the windows on it, but if I do, I’ve seen plenty of beautiful shutters on houses in towns we’ve been to in Maine and the East Coast to know that most of the ones I’ve seen around here in the Midwest are not properly installed… and unfortunately can look rather awkward. READ ON…
Someone Else’s House… Kitchen Valance Window Treatment
I’ve been able to share with you some of my friend’s beautiful home,
like her sun-filled sunroom that started with a very unique sofa for the inspirational piece, her entry with the great DIY painted wood floors, her dining room with the mixed seating at her wonderful old plank topped harvest table, and the repurposed window treatments from the living room at ‘Our House’ to her office windows…
there are many more wonderful things to share from her gorgeous home…
Here’s a peek into the kitchen, by way of the window treatments I made for her. 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… Bathroom total Revamp, Rehaul, Re-Do, you mention it, we RE-did it!
Do you remember what the bathroom in the ‘Little Brick Cottage’ was when we first bought this charming home a few short months ago?
Well, we have completely gutted, overhauled, re-plumbed, rewired and revamped it since then! Now, you actually want to enter into the bathroom, before… not so much.
Here’s a quick snapshot of the before and after.
Even though the window was replaced with a new double pane window, it’s in the exact spot in the after pic as in the before pic. Just about everything else in the bathroom was moved to create a new floor plan though. Read on…
Someone Else’s House… Antique Window Repurposed into Very Special Shadowbox
Happy May Day! I can’t send you all baskets of flowers, so I thought I’d share a story with you about some flowers and how my lovely daughter-in-law found a way to preserve them.
My daughter-in-law, before she was my daughter-in-law, preserved many flowers, but this isn’t about the drying process, I think she just hung them upside down and they dried. This is a story about some of those flowers, as they represent a lot. These flowers have very emotional remembrances tied to them. Here are a few of those memories… Read on…
Our House… Dining Room Table… Finally!
This has been a long time coming. I started to show you a tour of our “garage turned dining room” in January, but then I was delayed in showing this corner because it’s where I had tons of stuff stored for renovations on the “Little Brick Cottage”, but finally, it’s ready to be seen by blogland!
Finally you can get the Read on…
Little Brick Cottage…Through the Looking Glass
Well at least ‘through the glass’ at ‘The Little Brick Cottage’, yes, we’re talking windows.
I told you how when we removed the 1970 plywood cornices we had found a sad surprise…
And then when we decided we would have to replace all the windows we also had to replace all the window trim….
But then I told you how the sacrifice of working windows that didn’t have cracked panes of glass was worth the sacrifice of the old trim…
How about if I give you the quick run-down of just what we started with, and what we did?
Here we go, let’s start with a before and after at the top:
On the left you see the living room window with the icky gold drapes, the dusty sheers, (covering the cracked glass panes) and the brown top plywood cornice.
On the right you see the finished window how it looks today. Let me tell you what we had to do to get it to this point. Read on..
Little Brick Cottage, Window Treatment Removal Reveals Sad Surprise
In the process of removing the wallpaper in the living and dining rooms at “The Little Brick Cottage”, I also removed the very ugly, dusty and dated window treatments. Excited to get them down to let in the light and behold the beautiful tall antique windows, I was quickly dismayed at the sight. It wasn’t the condition of the windows that was so frustrating, I already knew they were in horrible condition and we’re planning on replacing them, it was way worse.
Let me show you, this is what the ones in the living room looked like:
And without the draperies and hideous box valance this is what we found: Read on…
