I'm Inspired By This Room Right Now

Fresh and feminine. Pretty and sophisticated. The bright blue sconce shades are my favorite detail!

What a Sweet Husband I Have

For getting up on the roof to cut all of our trees back using a chainsaw on a big stick. Because we all know I wasn't getting up there. :)

We Have Baseboards!

Old baseboards and old hardwood floors.

Ripped out baseboards with new ebony hardwood floors.

New baseboards! You can see our new wall color in these pictures too!

One of the first things we did when we moved into our new house was rip out the old baseboards so that we could refinish the hardwood floors. We finally installed new ones today! It is amazing what a difference it makes to update the molding in an old house.

Thanks to our awesome friend and neighbor Fred for lending us the tools to do the installation!

Working Vacation

Oh my goodness, I've been gone from the blog for SO long!! I think this might be the longest I've gone without posting since I started. I took this whole week off from work as a "vacation" to work on our house. My lovely Mom and Mema Gail are spending the week with me and we are knocking stuff off the to-do list left and right. I'll have lots of good things to show you soon...just not yet because I'm too pooped! Needless to say I miss you all! Hope you've had a great week.

Shower Sneak Peak!

Design by westwillow.

I'm planning my first wedding shower ever! It's for my best friend Geneva, and I'm SO excited about all of the details. Here's a little peak into my preparation for the party next month. This custom poster design is by Sonya at westwillow designs. She's quite the talent. She also designed the invitations, which I'll be showing you soon!

Hope you all have a fantastic night.

The Pink is Gone!

The first time we walked into this bedroom Kane named it the "Victoria's Secret bag room." How do you like those cotton candy bubble gum pink tone-on-tone stripes? Lovely, right?

It took two coats of Kilz primer and two coats of paint to cover those stripes.

Here's the first coat of Benjamin Moore Gray Owl.

It's nice to have a lovely, completely blank slate to work with now! I'll post again soon with the rest of the changes!

The Prettiest Shoes in the World

Image found here.

A friend of mine emailed me these shoes this week and said "you need these for fall." I've been dreaming about them ever since. Unfortunately they're $775 and I just bought a house. Very sad. I'm missing the days when I lived in NYC and my sweet husband would go the Manolo sample sale and email me pictures while I was at work to see which ones I wanted! Those were the days... :) 

World's Longest Yardsale

I hit up the World's Longest Yardsale last weekend. It runs through Chattanooga which is a quick two-hour trip from Nashville. Just like last year, I found lots of great things which I'll be showing you soon! In the meantime, here are a few fun pictures.

Amelia J. Moore Photography

All photography in this post by Amelia J. Moore.
I've been meaning to post these photos for two months, but couldn't seem to find the time with all of our moving and unpacking and home improvement projects! Kane and I had our pictures taken by Amelia J. Moore and her awesome team back in the spring. No particular reason. Just to celebrate the fact that we've been married for a few years and we hadn't taken any decent photographs since our wedding. I was not disappointed! She has a gift for capturing personalities, and she did a fantastic job with Kane and I.

Amelia has a great package for couples called the Embrace Session, which is what we did. You can check out the details here.

We used the Nashville Farmer's Market, and various locations around Germantown as our backdrop. How about that red lipstick? It was her team's idea and I'm so glad I went along with it! Believe me I don't normally rock anything that bold but I've been thinking about doing it again ever since then. :)

I'll be posting about Amelia again soon!

It's fun to treat yourself to something special every once in a while. In fact, for any of you that are interested, you can get $50 off an Embrace session of your own if you book by September 1 and mention my blog! Your session can be scheduled anytime now through April 2012! 

Master Bedroom Rug

My rug came in for our Master Bedroom and I'm so pleased with it! It's woven seagrass with a rubberized backing and a slate binding. It's the perfect amount of contrast on the ebony stained hardwood. I purchased it through a carpet supplier that my company uses here in Nashville. For one custom size 9 x 9.5 ft rug, and an 8 ft runner for the hallway (always use the remnants!) I paid $420. Great deal and it's exactly what I wanted!

There's lots more to do but every little bit makes a difference in an empty house!

Nothing Like No Air Conditioning

90 degrees inside our house? No, thank you! Our HVAC system took it's last breath on Friday. During the very hottest week of the summer. Needless to say we got out of there in a hurry, and we won't be spending much time there until it gets replaced! We're incredibly lucky because our home warranty company is covering most of the cost to replace it, but the bad part is that we have to wait a few more days for the new unit to come in.

So, we've been forced to take a hiatus from house projects. We didn't realize exactly how absorbed we've been until we had to step back from it! Kane took me on an impromptu date yesterday afternoon to take advantage of our free time. One milkshake and one Harry Potter movie later, I felt more relaxed than I have in weeks. Even with the broken AC. Funny how things work out that way sometimes.

Oh, and we had another skunk spotting last night. :)

Have you had any house dramas lately?

Image found here.

We have a skunk living under the shed in our yard. I am not kidding. We discovered it just now when we pulled in the driveway and saw it strutting around the yard. As we parked the car it walked behind the shed. Then, it peeked around the shed to see if we were watching, decided we weren't, and sauntered under the shed. Fantastic. I'm not sure what I'm going to do about it. Suggestions?

Laundry Room Makeover

We've been without a washer and dryer for weeks!! Our shiny new Fisher & Paykel washer and dryer arrived on Saturday. Well, our washer arrived along with a loaner dryer since ours got busted up in transit. But I'm not complaining. It'll all get sorted out sooner or later, and in the meantime we can still do our laundry, haha! The laundry room needed a good cleaning and a fresh coat of paint before we moved in the washer and dryer.

Here's what it looked like originally. An icky dirty little room with a flimsy wooden shelf.

The first step was to remove the shelf. And guess what? They had painted around it at some point. The paneling showing through meant the room needed an extra coat of primer to cover the dark spots.

I painted the room with an "oops" can of warm grey paint that my Mom got at Lowes for free. I'm very happy with the color, and you can't beat free!

The last step was to add a new wire shelf for storage. Here's the final result! Neat and clean and new. I'm thinking of adding a second shelf above the one you see here, but I haven't gotten to it just yet.

So far, all of the good things that I've heard about Fisher & Paykel are true. They're quiet, the settings are awesome, and the dryer is a top loader so it's easy to transfer laundry from the washer to the dryer in one motion.

Have you taken on any renovation projects lately?

Master Bedroom - Progress?

I'm in the phase of opening boxes and seeing what I have that I can reuse in our new house. Since we got our bedroom painted first, that's the room I'm focusing on setting up. I hesitate to post these pictures because the room's so far from being done! This is my version of "throw everything that you've unpacked in there and see what happens before you decide what else to buy." Haha.

So far, we've knocked out the following:

• Refinished the hardwood floors ebony. We love it!
• Repainted the walls Benjamin Moore Kendall Charcoal.
• Repainted the ceiling Benjamin Moore Decorator's White.
• Hung temporary roller shades on the windows, so we don't become the talk of the neighborhood.
• New duvet and shams from Ikea. Thanks to my Mom for bringing them from Dallas! We really need an Ikea in Nashville.
• New-to-me desk that I'm using as the bedside table on the left, given to me by Mema G and Pepa B. 

We still have a lot to knock out:

• Install new baseboards, and get them painted.
• Paint the peeling door and window casings.
• Replace the ugly ceiling fan with a pretty new shade fixture. (It's ordered, I can't wait for it to come in!)
• Lay a seagrass rug on the floor. (It's ordered, too!)
• Hang new curtain panels on a ceiling track on three walls.
• Refinish the desk on the left of the bed and dress it up with new hardware.
• Replace my old red lampshade with a new greige linen shade.
• Repaint an old chest of drawers that my Mother and Father-in-law are giving to us and locate it to the left of the closet door.
• Hang new artwork.
• Accessorize.

This is our gifted desk. It just needs a little facelift.

The picture above is where our chest of drawers will go.

And this picture shows the great wall where I'll feature artwork.

Book Review - Bossypants

All of the time I've spent on airplanes the last couple of weeks has given me something I'd been missing: time to read! On my last trip I made an immediate beeline into the airport bookstore to buy Bossypants by Tina Fey. I was NOT disappointed. She is hilarious and quick and clever. The best thing was how quick of a read it is. I finished it in two flights. I also laughed out loud multiple times on a airplane, to the point that the guy beside me looked at me like I was crazy. Totally worth it.