Key Player

Remember when I blogged about this a few months back? Well, I did it!

These two pictures here are sadly not mine, but the ones I used from Restoration Hardware as inspiration. Let's stop and admire those corbels again......okay, that's enough. Let's get back to the keys.

Here are mine! They're the first thing you see when you walk in the house sandwiched between the hallway and the sitting room and next to our "Welcome To The Farm" sign we got at a craft fair this past summer.
We found five old keys in various places around the house during the renovation. Some are legit and some look like a dollar store diary key, but hey it's a key and so I framed it. :) This one above says "Master" and it was one of my favorite ones. Another says "Mister Mint" with a little guy on it and another one says a company name on it from New York.

The giant one is the key to my Honda.

:)

Actually, my friend Dena found this key door knocker at Hobby Lobby for 2 bucks and I thought it was perfect to complete my collection. Thanks Dena!

Shameless

I "borrowed" an idea from The Lettered Cottage yesterday. I love their decorating styles and a couple weeks ago she posted a specific post about her wall grouping of photos in their guest bedroom here. I've had a bunch of photos that I've been waiting for Adam to make me ledges for to look like this PB inspiration below in the living room, but after reading TLC, I realized I had a few photos to spare to do a grouping in our bedroom and still have a lot left over for the ledges in the living room later.

Unfortunately, the photo ledge has to take a back seat while snooty guest bathroom and bannister get the drivers side and passenger seat. So a couple days ago, I got busy shamelessly copying Layla and Kevin creating my own original idea and doing a dry run layout of the photos on the floor.

And using this wall in our bedroom to the left of the door. Pay no attention to the bajillion loads of laundry peeking out from the corner of the bed. I have priorities people! (Don't worry Mom, I folded them during American Idol)

Layla says if all else fails, start from the middle and work your way out. Well, I liked my practice run enough to take a couple pictures and just referred to that a lot of times so I knew exactly what picture went where. I still worked from the middle though.

Ta Da!

I'm really happy with the final product. Now, I just need to add and update some photos...

Ummm, yes please.

I love this for our kitchen faucet, but it's $300.00 even on Ebay and Overstock. :(

Succulent

After I mentioned possibly putting a wallpaper above the beadboard, I started looking around online to see what I could find. Don't you just love this? It's called Succulent by MakeLike and it goes for $200.00 a roll. If they could just knock a zero off, it would be in my price range. Keep your eyes out for me!

Although I love both, I think I like the coral more. Either one though would be fab to tie in the gray and yellow room upstairs.

Sue Whitney

Back in August, I had the opportunity to go to a home show here in Charlotte. I was so looking forward to hearing everyone speak on home renovations, kitchen remodels and more specifically, junking. Author, speaker, notable junker and creator of Junkmarket Style, Sue Whitney spoke on repurposing trash to treasure. I'm always interested in saving a buck, so she was inspiring in encouraging us to look at everything as possibility. At first, when she asked who in the crowd admitted to being a junker, I wasn't sure what she meant by that. I was thinking more of the A&E show, Hoarders where people can't get rid of old, used make-up sponges or plastic 7-11 cups because they think they might need them again someday. I was hesitant to raise my hand, but then she described junkers as the kind of people who make their husband slow down past the neighbors trash pile to see what kind of goodies they migt be getting rid of. I raised my hand.

During Sue's presentation at the home show, she went through a powerpoint slideshow of pictures from her own home. A couple of pictures caught my eye and I hadn't been able to find them until yesterday. I had done a lot of google searches in the past couple months to find Sue's staircase and chandelier that she had created for her home. Yesterday, during yet another search for these pictures, it led me to a great blog, Harmony and Home, who had done an interview with Sue back in August. I was so happy to discover these pictures that were in her first book Decorating Junkmarket Style . I had bought the book above, Junk Beautiful, in search for them and although it does not include pictues of her own home, it has plenty of great ideas for every room of the house.

without further ado...

The stairs. Yes, the hallway itself is awesome with those old theater signs, but we are in staircase mode at the farmhouse and I can finally show Adam a visual that I've been trying to describe the past few months. A metal grate on the stairs? Have you gone nuts? Unfortunately, this is the only view we get of it, but I'll take it because even from this view, it looks fab. Luckily for us, Adam purchases sheet metal all the time at work so now we have a contact of who to get this from and have got the feelers out already.


Hopefully, we can turn this into that! That support beam you see will be repeated a few more times as you make your way up the stairs, but there will be a handrail that just goes up halfway.

And lastly, here is the barbed wire chandelier. We have a bunch of barbed wire in the backyard and I'd love to see a little bit of it turn into something like this, even if we just hung it outside on a patio one day (Sue's idea).

When we were filling up our dumpsters in the beginning of the demo process, I shouted, "Darn you Sue Whitney!" I can hardly throw anything away without staring at it for 5 minutes and wondering if we can use termite ridden wood or soggy sheetrock somewhere. Okay, so I'm not that bad, but I bet Sue Whitney has a self-portrait somewhere in her house made of those exact materials. :)

Boy Meets Girl

I'm working up the courage of putting my 2 year old daughter in the same room as my 11 month old son. Since our house is a 3 bedroom house, right away I assigned one upstairs to my daughter and the other one to my son. However, the more I thought about wanting to accommodate guests and having an area to work on crafts, I just decided to buck up and put them in the same room. So, without further ado, here are the pictures I've collected as inspiration for this shared gender neutral space.

These are the pictures of the room that they will be in in order as if you were walking through the room.
These windows are the first thing you see on the far wall.

Turn the corner (picture an J shape and now you're at the bottom of the J)

Arriving to the closet (at the end of the J...you have no idea what I'm talking about do you? ha! My husband tells me all the time, things that make sense to me don't necessarily mean that they make sense to others). It's a fairly big closet but we'll definitely need to add some shelves to maximize the space. All of this junk you see in the pictures are from the previous owner.

Next, I wanted to remember exactly what I had in storage (it's been almost a year!!) so I pulled up some archived pictures of the kids rooms.

This is Will's nursery from our previous home in Raleigh. My intent was to transplant the entire scheme since he only slept in here ONE DAY by the time we moved. That curtain was my first sewing project and I was so proud of it that I didn't even care I made it too small. Oh my. I see it now!

Close up of his Dwell Studio bedding I bought off of Craigslist.

Greta's room. I can't find a close up online of the quilt, but it is a patchwork pattern with a various degree of pale pinks, reds, blues and greens and cream.

These next ones are pictures I found from Oh Dee Doh.

I love a rainy Saturday morning to surf through fun pictures like these!

I was so inspired by the color palette in this room. I never thought I would agree with gray in a kids room, but I'm a total believer now!I love how the main furniture elements are wooden with neutral walls and the splashes of color are found in the objects decorating the room. This will work well to bring in the combination of my kids stuff to decorate with such as Gretas' pink latern with Will's red latern.

I love all the browns and wood use in this room. I think I'll do the gray on the walls and do chocolate as accents (which you already see with the dresser in Will's room that I hope to squeeze in this room somehow...) We already have the hardwood floors so we've got that going for us. Then, add in all the fun colorful stuff and call it good!

This next room, although a baby girls room, just shows the eclectic, vintage look that I love and am will try to accomplish in the room. From the funky frames, repurposed furniture, and that ladder...yes please.

But the one thing I absolutely love in here is that pallet bed used as a reading nook with the old door headboard. I showed it to Adam this morning and he's not totally sold on the caster wheels, but I suggested table legs instead and he thought it might work. I totally think I could do this for Greta's bed since the walls are so low where they start to slant upwards. She wouldn't need a headboard as it'd be more a sideboard to give the look of a bed and not just a bunch of pallets in their room. Then again, when she's older and starts telling people she sleeps on pallets, it may not work after all. :) I love it anyhow.

I'm pretty sure I don't have the wall space for this, but I love the collection of letters I found at Project Nursery used with all different fonts and colors to pull all the other colors in the room together. I love that button for the O and for a lot of the other letters, the mom mod podged scrapbook paper on some that she had collected over time. She did a great job.