A Belated Birthday Recap

The weekend after we moved in we were fortunate enough to have a few guests stay at the house.  It was also my husband's big 3-0!  Luckily for me I was able to blame all of the unorganized mess on the recent move which helped ease the pressure of hosting.  

While my husband's big day included an all day seminar I don't think he would have changed it for the world!  The seminar is held quarterly for chiropractors  Rhinos all over the nation.  The EPIC crew really puts on a good event and while it is normally hosted in San Diego they changed it up and had this past one in Minneapolis.  It was great to see everyone and catch up over a competitive game of lawn bowling at Brits (I forgot to take any pictures, boooo).  
I can't say enough good things about the EPIC community!   We are truly blessed to be working with such great leaders/mentors in chiropractic.  
The following night we were able to host Jeff's uncle from Hawaii and had a nice dinner on the lake.

Happy Belated Birthday Post, Love!!!!  I hope you had a wonderful weekend!!!

  

Welcome

Come on over!!!  

I FINALLY have a few pictures of the house to show.  I thought we would start with the obvious, the foyer!!  While we are loving our new house and the extra space there is so much I want to change to make it "our home".

A few updates that will be coming soon is paint.  While brown is a safe color and it is not the worst color, it is just not "us" and is much too dark.  If anyone wants to come join the painting party, just let me know.  I am not looking forward to paining these tall ceilings!

This is what the view is coming in from the front door.  No worries the end table will not stay there!   I am still trying to plan out the decor for this area.  Thinking a small table/sideboard an a little chair?

Plans for the long term include:

1.  Hardwood floors on the main level and up the stairs.  I am thinking of wide planks with a darker finish.  If you know me I do not like carpet. Not the look, not the cleaning, not the worrying of my kids staining it.  I am hoping new floors are in the plans for the next year or so. 

2.  New chandelier in the foyer.  I am in no rush for this, however, I have many favorites at Restoration Hardware, including this beauty.

3.  Remove the popcorn ceilings.  My family thinks I am crazy, but I  have researched this and it doesn't seem to hard,  more messy than anything.  This is a long term plan since if I start it, I will have to complete for the entire house!  

4.  Update the front door.  

5.  I also have ideas to paint the railing black like the pictures below.  I might be too scared to ever take this leap, but I am not ruling it out!

Contemporary Staircase design by Boston Architect LDa Architecture & Interiors

via

Traditional Staircase design by Newark Architect Clawson Architects, LLC

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I will post pictures of the kitchen tomorrow!  Off to keep dreaming up plans....

 

Inspiration Room

We are finally all moved into the new home!!!  A lot of organizing, decorating, and settling to be done but here none the less!  While I still haven't managed to get pictures of the entire house, I do have one room to share.
Trying to decorate a whole house at once can be overwhelming so we are taking it room by room.  Since the kitchen is already beautiful and doesn't need much work and the living spaces have what they need to be functional (i.e. couches), we decided to start with our office/library.  Its no secret my husband LOVES to read books so having a space to feel inspired was definitely a high priority.  Due to the layout of the house we dedicated one of the "open rooms" on the main level as an office/library.  
Shortly after we moved in we headed to West Elm for some much needed new bedding as we have been sporting the same bedding for the past 5 years.   While we were there we noticed the wall they had that was covered in wood from pallets.  I have also noticed several other pallet wall projects from other blogs such as here.  Jeff and I fell in love with the look and had a great idea.  I put together this rough mood board for the future look of our office.  We still need to figure out bookshelves for the library piece, but it included much of what we were looking for.  

Office by carl1194 on Polyvore

1.  A fresh clean feel.

2.  Inspiration as provided by the Rhino.  ***For all practical purposes the Rhino is our family mascot.  We bought this awesome papermache rhino head from Anthropologie last winter

3.  A pop of color with fun pillows.

So we got started...

I forgot to take a full before picture, but managed to take one while in the taping process.  Please don't  pay attention to the moving mess or my little photo bomber. 

First we painted the room a light gray color.  I didn't manage to get a picture after the painting, but it definitely lightened the room up a lot.  

Before we dive into the pellet project I want to give you a little story behind the pallet.

Rewind about 1 year ago, our wonderful neighbors at the townhouse happened to have a pallet from a shipment they received.  They didn't know what to do with it and I had great plans of using the pallet for some many of the Pinterst inspired projects.  I quickly took the chance to take this off his hands (as if there was only one pallet left in the world) and then my husband came home...  Needless to say he was less than thrilled about the pallet in our garage.  He jokingly told our neighbor that he could have his pallet back, but I needed wanted it for a project someday.  Last week when we were packing up the house and everything was loaded except for the lonely pallet sat in the garage.  My husband jokingly said "look at all of your projects you made with the pallet".  Bummer, he was right!  The potential for the pallet was there, I just never followed through. I tried to defend, but then just laughed.  Oh well!!!  Then just a few days later the pallet was needed!  We ran back to the house to pick up the pallet and brought it to the new house!
After a good wash to the pallet and proper drying time the rhinos men went to work to salvage good pieces of pallet wood. 

Now the design.  Thanks to amazing friends and lost of rearranging we came up with a "template" we liked.  

After a few calculations the first board was up. 

Final touches inspiration.

Tattoos, art work, and inspiration.

Here is an update on what the room looks like today.  There are many things that need to be brought in an moved around, but it's progress.  

What do you think?  Any ideas for book shelves?  Seating?