You spin me right Round Room, right round

After almost two months of walking by the paint swatches I had tested on the walls, I finally buckled down this past weekend and (nearly) finished the Round Room. We will come up with a better name for it at some point but for now, we'll stick with it. 

This room was beat up. There were scuff marks and weird discolorations all over. It was pretty overwhelming considering the entire room is approximately 10x10. We're honestly not sure how this room was utilized by the previous owners but it seems to have been used a lot. Please don't judge the fact that we lived with it in this state for 4 months before painting; neither of us wanted to do anything twice. 

    

I painted this room using a Sherwin Williams paint that I picked up from a mom2mom sale on Facebook for a whopping $5. It wasn't a full gallon but there was plenty to paint this size room and there is plenty left. It was very close to the color I had wanted so considering I saved about $40, I went for it. As I said above, I would consider this room nearly finished because it still needs a quick coat of white on the trim and ceiling! I didn't do that this time because I wanted it to feel settled after the weekend.

   

These are opposite angles of the same windowed wall but you can still see how much brighter the whole room looks with a cooler color. Not to mention the new windows that we had installed. WOW. What a difference a whole new house of windows makes. The old ones were 100 year old original, single pane wooden windows. They had been painted over quite a few times and they were impossible to get clean. Out with the old and in with the shiny, bright and new!!

   

The view from this room to the living room is also much nicer now. The coolness in this space and the warmer tones in the living room play well together. There are some elements that we crossed over (dark wood, modern but soft art, and patterned rugs) so that the adjoining rooms wouldn't look bizarre when pictured or viewed together. I think we accomplished the general mission! 

This is one of my favorite walls in the house. I am a sucker for succulents (pun intended) and though I am pretty decent at keeping them alive, I opted for some artificial pieces for this wall. I think the geometric shapes of the planters and the softness of the print tie in very well together. There is also a small glass urn terrarium that I put together a while back sitting on the buffet - I'll post how I did that another time. 

This is my favorite room so far. It ties in nicely with our Dining Room and when the "den" and kitchen are completed (hopefully soon) there will be a very nice flow throughout the main floor of the house! 

Expanding

Apologies for our delay in posting. Since our last post on Mother's Day we took a little break from house projects (after a whirlwind weekend of work on the Dining Room) and then found out that we were going to be parents AGAIN.

We made our official announcement on the Fourth of July which was pretty fun! Good timing and a clever announcement by Rob!

From the time we found out in late May until about a week ago, I wasn't feeling so hot. Nothing as severe as some women have had (thank God and bless those sweet mommas) but definitely enough ookiness to not want to tackle DIY projects.

Now that I'm over the first trimester hurdle and regaining some energy for more than everyday stuff, we are making lists again. Oh, how I love lists!! (where's the heart eye emoji when you need it!)

Here's what we have up our sleeves and what we hope to accomplish before this baby comes in January!!

• install new kitchen cabinets and countertops
• new flooring in kitchen
• shiplap in kitchen
• paint den/desk area
• paint "round room"
• paint foyer and stairwell
• replace staircase runner (if time allows)
• paint playroom attached to Big Brother's room
• paint new nursery

We will be busy but it will be nice to get a lot of this done before there is also a big baby belly in the game as well! 

Be Our Guest!

A house starts to feel like a home when the dining room comes together. We don't always eat in the dining room but once it's finished it makes us feel like people can come in and eat and we can spend time together!

No joke, as I was adding this gif, Be Our Guest came on Pandora!!

We changed our vision about this room when we moved into this house (see our former dining room here for a comparison). Almost everything is new (to us) and our only overlap is a rug from our old living room. We decided to host Mother's Day this year which was a great motivation to get everything finished! Other parts of the house are still in disarray or aren't in their final stage, but it feels great to have made this progress.

Painting a house is way different when you have a 1.5 year old running around. We used to be able to spend a whole day working on a project; now, we can't do that and we don't really want to. Things are taking a lot longer this time around but it's also giving us a ton of time to enjoy the new house with our family and make thoughtful decisions about what we are going to do with our new spaces.

We chose a color scheme for this house before we even moved in and for the most part it has stuck. When we chose the dining room color we knew we were heading in a whole new direction from last time. Darker walls with our lighter original wood floors seemed more modern to us and anything was going to be better than the raspberry walls we walked into. We wanted the dining room to be a bit more industrial farmhouse than its previous traditional feel.

           

One day on Facebook, I came across a table that Rob and I loved on a resale group. $100 for a farmhouse table and three metal bistro chairs? Yes please! It was such a great deal. I got the other four chairs from a resale group online as well, I am telling you it's so fun to hunt and it's awesome when a good deal comes around!

We made the decision to take the knick knack size shelves out of the cubby and use it for a larger statement piece and we are super glad we did. We didn't have anything for this new space so we had to shop (bummer, right?!) but I was pleasantly surprised that upon my first visit to TJMaxx I found this perfect mirror for under $30! The two trays in this area were also a purchase from the same trip and were 25% the cost they usually are at non-discount stores. TJMaxx (and resale groups) for the win!

     

We are super happy with the way this room has turned out. It is the front of the house so you can see it from outside and it makes the whole house look more updated in and out!

If you are reading this thinking "all they had to do was paint" let me get into the real "fun." This house is 100 years old and the "fixes" people decided to do in the past were really half-hearted and annoying. There were 12 sinkers in the walls of this one room ranging from normal to what-needed-that-much-support and more nail holes than we bothered counting. In the cubby there were another seven sinkers/shelf!! What were they putting on these shelves? They also (under an unknown number of paint layers) caulked the cubby shelves which made it super fun to repair. I think we spent more time working on smoothing the walls than we did actually painting. We are happy we spent the time to do it right though, no old nail holes makes for a much cleaner look!

We will be back with more updates soon! We made a lot of progress this weekend while the kiddo spent some time with Grandma and we had a fabulous Mother's Day with our awesome family!

Happy Mother's Day to all the mom-hearted women out there. You are all amazing!