Spring Mantel in the Sitting Room

Inspired by this mantle series by The Lettered Cottage I finally got a vision for our sitting room mantle. I took the first step by completely removing everything on the mantle except for the AK painting that you may remember back from this post.
Everything else came from stuff that I already had and after playing a while and mixing it up until it was just right, I came up with this!

Being Spring and Easter time, I knew I wanted to work my robin's eggs in there somewhere.

My honeysuckle bush is blooming out in our yard which has added to more than one bouqets around the house. I love bring it's scent inside.

One thing I learned from the mantle series is that you can never go wrong with papers and/or books. I had an old childhood Bible that was pretty tattered and another old yet New ;) Testament I had found in the attic here. So I put those in a tarnished silver bowl I picked up at Goodwill the other day along with a book Adam's grandfather wrote, Darkness is Light, and ta da! I'm done until summer when I get to re-decorate my mantle all over again.

Wow. That was rude.

Man. I am so sorry about that. So, apparently when you don't have the internet for 2 weeks you aren't able to use the internet to tell people you don't have the internet. Well, at least you get things done around the house when you don't have a blog to keep up with. Here's a pictoral update of what we've been up to.

I'm also not to proud to post my "not so pretty" areas. There's a garage sale pile in the corner of the sitting room, the hallway in all it's glory and let's not even mention the dresser in the bedroom. Yes, I've heard of photoshop, but this is real life people! :)

In answering a few questions of some commenters:

1. Our living room color is Croissant by Sherwin Williams. Love it and we get a lot of compliments on it.

2. Lady in Arkansas renovating a house- we did in fact go over some existing flooring with the concrete, but we pulled up some vinyl parquet tiles before that and laid down some plywood and some metal screen before the concrete was poured. I'll be in touch. :)

Sitting Room Paint

In this room, I painted last night with a color called "Hazel" by Sherwin Williams.

I can't wait for that tan-nish mauve-y fireplace to be painted a crisp white!

I love putting Adam on Daddy duty for the night so I can contribute to the house in some way.

Updated Picture Tour

It's been a while. We're busy with two babies and a house renovation. I'm sure you can understand. :) I forget what you've seen and what you haven't so let me just pull some pics out to show you what's been going on.
The new paint color, "vintage yellow" by Glidden, that will go in the pink guest room upstairs.

The "Filtered Shade" gray color by Valspar that will go in the kids room upstairs.

Proud of my priming skills upstairs now that both rooms are done. Just primed...not painted.

The fireplace cleaned and ready to be sealed. Remember, the stove is going to hide that patch of new brick. I know, it still looks dirty, but that is the best it's going to get. We call it "rustic." :)

Updated staircase with the wall gone and new pine stair treads. We're trying to come up with a cool idea for a custom banister now...staircase post to come...

Vaulted ceiling in dining room with sheetrock and brand new windows that Adam replaced!

Old doorway leading from former living room to former dining room. Now that it's a master bedroom, we needed to wall it up.

House on an early Saturday morning waiting for work to be done.

Through those beams is my new laundry room that Adam and his dad framed up. Doorway entrance is from the hall. We're looking at it from the dining room.

And the sheetrock work that still needs to be done in the sitting room over the boards and on both sides of the doors.

We've Got Hang-Ups

Doors that is....They're all hung up! This was the "before" picture.

And this is the "after"! I love the stark contrast against the white. Some of you have mentioned the lovely putting green on the front porch and that is a hole in one straight to the dumpster. The white curved railings we hope to sandblast the paint off of that and repaint them black probably. I'm taking suggestions of what to paint the shutters and the cement color of the floor now (the part that is currently red). I'm thinking a grayish blue for the floor and maybe a navy for the shutters? I also like a yellow too for shutters so like I said, I'm totally open to any ideas you have!

The door at night in the dark. We decided to ditch the storm door for 2 reasons. 1. The porch is deep enough we don't feel like we need it. 2. The new door looks cooler when it's not hiding behind glass.

Close up

The hardware is an antique pewter we ordered online. We didn't want to do black and we didn't want shiny silver either so we felt this was a good compromise and are VERY happy with it.

We decided to do regular tempered glass for around $60.00 as opposed to $300.00 worth of custom glass with iron work. That's something I want to learn down the road and I think once I could figure out how to do the iron work I might be able to create the lattice look that I want right on top of our current panes. I plan to hang up cute little farm-y curtains though so people can't see right inside.

It even looks good with watermelons casually leaning up against it.

Our next hang-up is this lovely window covered by the sheer curtain. This window seperated the sitting room to the sunroom. The only way to access the sunroom was to go out the front door and through the entrance on the front porch.

Well, that window has since been replaced by this lovely set of french doors!

We found this set of doors on Craigslist and couldn't be happier with them. Apparently Will feels the same. :) They're a little bit taller and a little bit more narrow than the norm and fit perfectly in the room.

With the fireplace on the left and the french doors on the right, I have a feeling this will be one of my favorite rooms in the house. Both doors open and I can just imagine the lovely breeze coming through the open sunroom windows as I lie on my chaise reading my books (aka-blogs) :). Actually, I don't have a chaise but I did find some SA-weet velvety seafoamy pair of side chairs the other day at Habitat. I hope they can go in this room.

And since we're on the topic of decorating, the color on the top is the one we chose to paint with. It's called Hazel by Sherwin Williams. I'm not normally a fancy paint brand kind of girl, but the Labor Day special was 25% off so we splurged on this color and our main color for the downstairs. As for the wood on the walls around the house, this wall had some termite damage as you can see by the discoloration. Being an exterior wall (or at least used to be before they added the sunroom) we were not too surprised. We've had the house inspected and although we don't have a current problem with termites, we can pay a little bit for a treatment and prevent them in the future. All to say is, we love the look of exposed wood on the walls, but this one might get covered back up with sheetrock.