Guest Room Reveal

So we finished with the guest room...I think.

This room has been a work in process for quite some time now, and with so many other projects on the go, I think its pretty much done...for now.

With the baby arriving in September, we wanted to ensure that any work-in-progress rooms we had started, were finished and scratched off our to-do-list, so we didn't need to worry about them.

So we're leaving this room as is for now. We're fairly happy with how the white-washed shutters turned out and still plan on making some changes to the side tables and lamps, but for now they'll have to do as they are!

We incorporated this sewing table that used to belong to my grandmother, and seemed to fit in with the feel of the room:

Other than that, we finished off the curtains, and added a bunch of fun coloured pillows:

We still love how the walls add just a bit of interest, but keep the room nice and neutral at the same time:

 

So there you have it, the finished space.

 

 

 

We've compiled a source list, but please feel free to message us if there's anything we might have missed:

 

Wall Shutters: Kijiji

Bedframe: Kijiji

Bed linens: HomeSense

Side Tables: Ikea

Side Table Lamps: HomeSense

Suitcases (blue): Kijiji, brown suitcase- HomeSense

Laundry Hamper: HomeSense

Ceiling Light: HomeSense (clearance)

Pillow Fabric: Tonic Living

Curtain Fabric: Tonic Living

Sewing Table: My grandmother's antique

Small desk clock: HomeSense

Painted Vases: DIY Project

 

 

Paint Colours:

 

Wall Colours (stripes):
Light Colour- "Fence Post"- Behr (Home Depot)
Dark Colour- "Natural Choice"- Sherwin Williams
Trim Colour: Simply White - Benjamin Moore

 

So that's all for the guest room for now!

 

Melissa and Ian 

TGIF Sneak Peek

TGIF! Friday is my favorite day of the week. Not Saturday, Friday. Why? Its like the week leading up to a vacation...all the anticipation and excitment to come...I love it.

I also have fond memories of Friday nights as a child. Did you ever watch the Friday night family tv line-up?  Family Matters, Boy Meets World, Full House, Dinosaurs, Step by Step?! Ya. Best night ever! Not only did my younger brother and I get to watch those shows and stay up wayyyy past our 8:00pm bedtime, but got to pop homemade popcorn (in the popcorn maker of course), and drink pop...Wink used to be my favorite ;)

So ya I love Friday's. This weekend I am in a wedding for a very good friend of mine, so we wont have much time to work on projects however, I wanted to show you a sneak peek of our guest room headboard I just finished this week....

I wanted to touch it up a bit and I'd like to even out the paint, but Ian seems to like the patchy look. We'll see. So there you have it- a sneak peek for a Friday.

Happy weekend everyone!

p.s Readers Choice results from our last poll are in! You wanted us to pain the sidetables in this room. So guess what? We're gonna do it! Check out our Facebook Page to get your vote in for the colour we paint them ;)

Readers Choice

So on our Facebook page a few weeks ago, we put up a poll asking you what you thought we should change about our guest room. We wanted to change it up...it just didn't feel finished and we weren't totally happy with it, so we thought we'd ask you, our lovely readers what YOU thought we should change!

30% of you who voted, wanted us to paint our shutter headboard....so we did!

I decided I would test out my choice paint method (white washing) on a sample first. Thankfully, when we cut the shutters down to put up on the wall, I kept the scrap pieces and those worked perfectly as testers.

I grabbed my paint, water and a brush and went to town.

After about 20 minutes I had this:





I put it up against a wall in the guest room to see how the paint finish looked with the walls, and was pretty happy. Then I put the sample up on the bed to see how it looked with the bed fabrics and pillows, etc:





While I loved the look of the shutters with the blue, white and cream pillows, and my curtains, I wasn't crazy about the red. Soooo...goodbye red pillows (maybe I'll use them elsewhere, but they're not jamming with the room vibe anymore). I took away the red pillows to see what it would look like with the blues and whites:





Much better. Now I just need more blue tones in any additional pillows and accessories. Honestly, I've determined those are just my colours. Every time I try to decorate with colours other than my favorites (whites, blues, greens, grey's) I really struggle with a room. I read in a magazine once, a story about a decorator who did her whole house in black and white. Every time friends or family came over they would try and tell her to inject colour or change it up, and when she did she was never happy. So she finally did every room just the way she wanted and she absolutely loves her home. She said something like "to others it may feel cold, but to me I LOVE it". That has really stayed with me. To anyone who has seen our home, every room we have done, has been in white, blues or greys, with touches of turquoise and green, and we LOVE those rooms. So stick with what you love, and what makes YOU happy. You the one living there so YOU need to like it!

So I ripped the room apart,and while Ian worked on painting our pool house (eeee....another room to decorate! Sort of...if you count a 10x6 sized space a room? I've decided on a navy/white nautical theme...for the inside. Really there's not going to be much decorating-I think Ian just wanted to humour me when he said yes, but he's agreed to let me add navy accents to the inside where-ever we can), I worked on painting the shutters.

This is how far 3 hours got me:




Yes, that is all. It was hot on Sunday people! That, and white washing shutters that soak up paint like a dry sponge, takes forever. My plan is to finish them this week and then get started on the next project for this room. I'll be blogging about how I painted the shutters once they're done.

So, we need your help again! What do you think we should do next? The poll below is open for 1 week, so let us know what you think! He're another quick shot of the guest room to remind you of the before!






Vote and let us know! Can't wait to see what you all think!

Let there be Light!

We've got light in our guest room! Finally!

For a while, it was getting difficult to determine which fabrics would work well in that room, by flashlight :S

So we finally found the perfect fixture. Best part? We got it on clearance for $32.00! BAM! It was originally $120, marked down to $80, then $60, then $32.00! It must have been fate, as it was late one evening when I poped into HomeSense to return a throw we had bought, and based on a super long line at the cash, decided to walk around the store (just once) before heading up to the cash.

I saw this beauty sitting in the lighting section.

It had obviously been returned (as the box was pretty ripped up) and there was just one sitting there. I grabbed it (and good thing I did, as 2 people in line asked me where I found it and the cashier told me she had actually thought of buying it earlier that day!).

We were looking for a very specific style (something rustic, cottage-y and that added a natural element to the room).

We had already bought 2 lights: this one from Rona (we loved the design and size, but it was just a bit too dark for the space):

and this one from Urban Barn (loved the colour, but it was too big for the space):

strike two. So we brought this one home and took a chance- perfect! Perfect size, perfect colour and best of all, perfect price!

Guest room is coming along nicely! (Sorry for the fuzzy photo and lack of colour- a better photo will come once we get some fabric into this room!)

Stripes

A while back, I blogged about us starting our guest room makeover. We had gotten tons of inspiration on what to do with the space, but the one idea that kept coming back to us, was to do stripes on the walls.

Although we love the idea of paneling a room (which we actually did in our master ensuite), most of the walls in our house not straight...at all. Which makes paneling very difficult in our home! So we decided to add interest to this room through stripes and paint.

We decided on a bit of a rustic/cottage feel to the room inspired by the fact that this room would be occupied by out of town-guests and visitors. The idea of a "homey" feeling space seemed to be the right fit.

We wanted the colours in the room to be natural and a bit rustic, and to incorporate light colours, creams and turquoises. We searched for tutorials online of how to do the stripes, and were hugely inspired by Layla and Kevin at The Lettered Cottage and their striped reading room:

Source: The Lettered Cottage

Love that room! They've actually modified the room since doing their stripes and it now looks like this:

 Source: The Lettered Cottage

I absolutely love both versions, but still wanted to try the stripes in our space.

So, we got our paint, bought a laser level, and thought we would just figure things out as we went. Once piece of advice if you plan on doing stripes, pick a SMALL room. The room we chose to do is not huge, but it is a decent size and taping the stripes took FOREVER. My main concern was making those stripes level!

We bought 2 containers of frog tape last summer, and figured this was the perfect place to try them out.

Honestly, I was a bit nervous that it wasn't going to work. In the past I had usually purchased cheap tape, and we have always had issues with bleeding, blotchy lines, etc. But we decided to give it a go, and started taping the room:

The taping took us about 2 evenings to complete. In the end, we had figured out a system, and it worked quite well. We started with using a laser line- one person holding the laser to cast a line on the wall, and the other taping below or above the line. That worked for about 20 minutes- its not easy holding that thing straight!

So we tried another tactic- one person holding the level and the other taping just above it. That didn't last long either. In the end we decided that one person holding the level and making small marks on the wall, and the other taping below the marks was the best way to go.

We started at the ceiling and marked 12 inches down. Ian then used the level to go around the room and mark every few inches a small line that we could use as a guide for taping. The challenge we faced was that not only were our walls not straight (they bow in the middle), but the tops of the casings on the doors, did not match the tops of the window casings.

Once we used the tape and placed a line, we levelled each line of tape before moving on. Sometimes we had to fix the tape, but most of the time it worked quite well:

We finished taping and left the tape for one day before painting. We started painting the next day, and let the paint dry for 1 day. Then we took the tape off. At this point we figured if the lines weren't straight and looked terrible, we could just paint over the entire room....sigh.

However....we peeled off the first line....and yea!!! The frog tape worked awesome!! I totally recommend it. We didn't have any bleeding, lines were crisp and straight (phew!) and it turned out exactly the way we hoped!

More about this room to come as we finish it! Thanks again Layla and Kevin for the inspiration! :)

Linking up to:

Guest Room Project- Take 2

After making my first sunburst mirror a while back, Ive been thinking of ways to modify the mirror I created previously. I just found there were a few things I could have done better, plus I wanted to make another one that I could use for our guest room (once we begin to decorate it).

So here is what I started with:

- approx 24 small wood dowlings (2 different widths)

- acrylic paint (I used 3 different colours)

- saw (to cut dowlings)

- glue (glue gun worked well for me)

- wood filler

- embroidery ring

- 1 craft ring (you only need the smaller one)

Step 1: Paint your dowlings. I used 3 paint colours: gold, silver and a pearl white. I mixed different ratios of the paint colours to get a variety of different colours.

Step 2: Arrange your dowlings onto the craft rings to see how you want your mirror to look (I tried to space out the dowlings well according to colour and width).

Step 3: Glue your dowlings to the craft ring and then place the mirror on top. Glue your mirror onto the dowlings.

Step 4: Pull the metal pieces off your embroidery ring. This left holes in mine, so I had to fill them with wood filler. Once the filler was dry, I sanded it and painted the embriodery ring.

Step 5: Once the paint is dry, glue your embroidery ring around the mirror. This should be your last step!

The hardest part of this project was figuring out how long I wanted to wood dowlings to be. In my last sunburst I didn't like the ratio of wooden shims with the size of my mirror (I found the mirror to be a bit small/ shims to be a bit long), however I didn't have anything to cut the shims with.

This time, I was able to use a handsaw to cut the dowlings, since they are much smaller than the shims. Regardless, I spent hours cutting them, since I couldn't decide on a length and had to keep re-cutting them, which took forever.

And here is my finished project (still drying):

Im actually really happy with how this one turned out :)

Next time you see it, it'll be hanging on the wall in our guest room!

Guest Room

I am so looking forward to our next project. After our bathrooms are completed (sigh....HOPEFULLY by the end of August), and the colder weather hits, we are planning to tackle our next project. This will be much smaller project- -painting and decorating our guest room.

Im am REALLY looking forward to this project, since we have the paint, colours picked, furniture for the room, and pretty much most of the things we need- so its definitely something we can do on our own timeline and agenda.

We want to have this room ready, so we can have family and friends visit without having to offer them a mattress on the floor somewhere...currently we dont even have floor space for a mattress!

So let me give you a peak as to how the guest room looks now:

However, keep in mind that none of this furniture is in there (it was the previous owners) and all the decor is off the walls. So basically we are working with a blank slate!

In this photo the wall colour actually looks sort of a tan, but it is actually a mustard yellow colour.

Here are some of the ideas we have for this room (mostly courtesy of Layla and Kevin at The Lettered Cottage for these inpsiration pics!):

Wall ideas:

 via

via

Headboard Inspiration and Colour Inspiration:

via

Furniture (Ikea) we already have (only in a light brown colour):

Accent Ideas:

via

via

I can't wait to share how it all looks put together! Can't wait to start this project- and special thanks to Layla and Kevin for all the inspiration on this one! ;)

Linking up to: