Bathrooms

I am sure that you have all heard me complain talk about our bathroom situation before.  It is not necessarily ideal but we are making it work for now.  Technically our house has one full and two half baths.  One of the half baths is in the basement and, frankly, I am afraid to walk into it let alone to anything else.  The second half bath is upstairs and as much as I love that guests get a full house tour every time they have to use the bathroom, a downstairs guest bath would be nice.  The full bath is actually a master bath which is really nice and works well for us while the kids are young but could get a little inconvenient when the kids get a little older - not to mention that we do not have a bath tub anywhere in The House which has pushed us to get a little creative for when we will be bathing the baby:)

So I am going to ask you to cut me some slack here and let me dream a little bit....because we do plan to put an addition on The House.

Our addition will be off of the first floor of our house and I would like it to include a Master Bedroom, an additional bedroom which will be for The Boy, and a den which will also serve as a guest room when necessary.  What this will also do is give The Girls' the full run of the upstairs.  So what do bathrooms have to do with this?  When the addition goes on I would love for The Boy's room to have its own bathroom, for there to be a beautiful Master Bathroom as well as a third full bathroom which will serve as our guest bathroom.  Upstairs, I would love to knock down the wall between the bathrooms and create one big fabulous bathroom for The Girls.  Yes you heard be correctly 4 FULL BATHROOMS!!  And I want them to all have their own personalities so I have been collecting ideas as I come across them

Here are two of my favorites:

Inspiration for out Guest Bath down stairs. I love everything about it, especially the horizontal boards on the wall and the wall-mounted faucet.





Inspiration for the Master Bathroom, I love that the shower and toilet are separate from the sinks.  I would also love the the entrance to be two big ol' sliding barn doors - how much fun would that be?


For The Girls' bathroom I using IKEA as my inspiration - very sleek and clean lines but with lots of color.

For the Boy's bathroom I almost want it too feel like a public bathroom (is the weird?) with a very simple wall mounted sink and lots of subway tile.

In four years I will let you all know how it turns out:)

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HGTV Dream Home

Have any of you out there entered to win this years HGTV Dream Home?  I have to admit that a couple of years ago I did submit and entry everyday to win the Dream Home in Asheville, NC.  But, I didn't so instead I am working on creating my own Dream Home here on Main Street:)

Anyways, it is a beautiful home so if you have not had a chance to check it out, I would highly recommend you do.  When you do - check out these Houndstooth chairs in the Great Room.  I am obsessed!!!!!

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One Month From Today!

It is hard to believe but one month from today we will get to meet the newest member of our family AKA The Baby.  I had a wonderful "sprinkle" this weekend to celebrate him and am totally digging all of this Blue!  I have been buying pink dresses for way too long:)

We also finally have his room ready for him.  Everything is cleaned, washed and ready for him to use.  Although, knowing me, I am sure I will wash everything one more time.

So, here are the last of the pictures in our Nursery Series.  I know it looks like I took pictures of the same part of the room three different times and you would be correct.  But, as I have said in my previous posts, it is hard to get a picture of a room that is only 6 feet x 9 feet.  We were plesently surprised to find that all of the furniture fit but I am a little sad that we were not able to get the rocker in there.  The good news is that there is a very comfy chair right outside his door in the hall.  I am sure I will be spending many a night falling asleep in that chair:)

Enjoy the pictures!

Wall Color:  Thin Ice by Valspar

Furniture: Babies R Us (6 years ago)

Drapes: Target

Lamps: Target (6 years ago)

Rods: Lowe's

Rug: IKEA

Pictures:  Illustrations from the book "The Night You Were Born"

Baskets:  Michael's (6 years ago)

Bedding: Carter's

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Enlisting Some Help

Now that all of the demo and construction was finished it was time to do some painting.  I was pretty much banned from the entire nursery project and being eight months pregnant I was totally okay with it.  Plus, there was an unspoken agreement that even though I was not doing anything physical, I still had final say in anything decorative.

By this step, The Husband had done A LOT of work and was ready to ask for some help.  Enter two Big Sisters and we had ourselves a painting party.

My job was to make sure this little one did not fling paint all over the room.



This one is a natural, I mean look at those brush strokes!

For anybody interested we have used Valspar paint throughout the entire house.  All of the trim in this room is China White and the walls are Thin Ice.

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Carpentry Skills

So today is one of those days where I wish I was a better photographer because I don't really feel that the pictures included in this post do justice to the work completed by The Husband.

Yesterday I shared with you all of our before pictures as well as some pictures of the demo we had to do in order to get started on The Baby's room.  Now I want you to take a look at the beautiful work The Husband did on the bead board ceiling, all of the new molding, and refinishing those great wide planked wood floors.

Remember way back when when I wrote a post referring to The Husband as The Electrician?  Well now I think I will start referring to him as The Carpenter.  Calling him The Carpenter also makes me feel a little safer, I never really was confident in all The Electrician did:)

Anyways, first up is the bead board ceiling.   This is yet one more project that turned out to be much more difficult than originally predicted.  Because of the size of the room it required three separate sheets of bead board and because no room in a 200 year old house is square the job also required about double the amount of measuring.  Measure twice and cut once right?  Plus there were no actual studs in the ceiling to nail the board into (again, the house is 200 years old) so we had to utilize the help of some liquid nail and a whole lot of nails.  Thank goodness for the nail gun.

But once the nails were covered with wood filler, the molding was finished off, and the ceiling was painted - I don't think I could have imagined anything more beautiful!

Putting a bead board ceiling in The Nursery was also a test run to see how difficult it would be to put bead board ceilings in the entire upstairs.  For now, the rest of our ceilings will remain just as they are.



Next order of business was that floor.  Again, it is not a very big room so we were not hesitant to take on this project ourselves.  Ha, Ha, do you like how I keep using the word "we"?  To be honest, I had absolutely nothing to do with this part of the project.  All kudos go to The Husband.  So....door tarped, windows open in January and a brand new mask, The Husband got to work sanding.  We really liked the natural color of the wood so decided not to stain it and just put a few coats of polyurethane on it instead.  Add in some new base boards and, again, it is more beautiful than I could have imagined.





I love that you can still see how it is darker between the blanks

  For today I am going to leave you with my new favorite view in Main Street House.  This picture was taken standing in the doorway of our Master Bedroom and looking into The Kids' rooms.  I love the blue and the pink right next to each other!

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Making Room for Baby

Alright, now that the Holidays are over it is time to start to get prepared for this little bundle of joy that will be joining us in six weeks.  First order of business is to get The Kid's room ready....

But, as always, I have to fill you in on a little bit of a back story.  When we first read the listing for Main Street House is was described as a three bedroom house.  Cool - the house we were living in was three bedroom and that seemed to fit our family just fine, The Girls were even already sharing a room and they loved it so the play was just to have that third bedroom be a guest/play room.

Well, things aren't always what they seem.  While technically this is a three bedroom house - the third bedroom measures 6 feet x 9 feet.  Not necessarily big enough to be a bedroom and a guestroom.  For the first 12 month we lived in Main Street House this 3rd Bedroom housed a bookshelf, two kid sized chairs and the dresser we used as our linen closet.  The Girl's referred to this room at The Library.  Over the past few months, that bookshelf and those chairs have been moved to the basement and we are now happy to call that room The Nursery.

Now, this room may be little but it has two huge windows in it so it actually feels a lot bigger than it is.  Here is the first window.  Oh, and check out that track lighting - pretty fancy huh?

A shot of window #2 so you can see the beautiful green molding and the nice clean white carpet.

Upon moving in we ripped out that ugly white carpet in hopes of finding beautiful hardwood floors, but we found this instead:

What it the world???????

But after removing whatever kid of flooring that was, we found the wood floors!  Totally in love with the wide planking but they did need a little bit of love.

Okay, so that was the point where we initially stopped.  We found a great area rug at IKEA, threw it on the floor moved the bookshelf in and called it a day.

That was until December 26th.  This was when The Husband started really getting to work.  First things first - DEMO the molding.  After removing the carpet and the whatever flooring our baseboards ended up being about two inches off the floor so those had to go.


Look at that fancy wallpaper we found behind the molding!

He also removed the crown molding and the track lighting in preparation for the bead board ceiling.  What, you wouldn't want to cover that up??????

This is the last room in Main Street House to receive a make-over and with every room we do we learn something new.  What that means is that (usually) each room make-over is better than the one before it.  I can definitely say that that is true for this room.  But hey, it makes me feel better that the smallest room in the house is also the nicest.

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Some More Holiday Decorating

Welcome to day 2 of my Christmas Decorating posts.  Today I am linking up with the Hooked on Holiday Houses party over at Hooded on Houses.

So we don't necessarily live in the biggest of houses which means when it comes to decorating Christmas we don't have a lot of options as to where to put everything.  I guess that is the reason why The Husband likes to say that it looks like Christmas threw-up in our front room:)

But I think that is usually the case.  I mean if you put your tree in the same room your stockings are hanging, then that will probably be the most Christmassy of all the rooms right?  Actually, I love this room and it is great that we spend so much time in it as a family because then I get to look around at all my lovely decoration.

Some detail shots of the Front Room:

We did decorate in some other areas too.  The buffet has a nice clean feel to it with a bowl of my favorite snowflake ornaments.  The only new items we bought this year were the Advent Calendar (which I love because I no longer have to answer the question "How many more days until Christmas?") and we bought some garland for our staircase which I hung some more snowflake ornaments from.

Next year we are going to focus on the outside of The House.  Before we moved we used to be those obnoxious neighbors that covered our house in lights - very Clark Groswold of us - but I don't really feel like that would fit the look of The Main Street House.  I am thinking lots of garland, wreaths, and hurricane lanterns would be more like it.  I guess we will just have to wait and see what happens next year.

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Holiday Tablescapes and Mantels

So for the rest of this week I am going to be joining a few Linky Parties and showing of a bit of my Holiday Decor.  I hope you enjoy it!

First up is a sneak peek at our Christmas Tablescape.  Having two younger children, our dining table sees A LOT of action so it is usually clear of any sort of decor but since we will be hosting a very small Christmas Brunch at our house I thought I would try out a table setting and share it with you all.

I love my Christmas dishes and spent the better part of last week unpacking the dishes, washing the dishes, and putting them up on our kitchen shelves.  Even though we only use these dishes for a month a think we my have more Christmas dishes then we do Everyday dishes.

Since it is a smaller table I wanted to keep the centerpiece small but i thought the candlelight and natural elements would add a touch of warmth to the table.

Now, moving onto my Christmas Mantel.  The best part about this mantel is that The Husband just got finished building it for me.  Because we have two built-in shelves on either side, which are also decorated for Christmas, I like to keep our mantel pretty simple.  Just some greens and sparkly pine cones give this mantle all it needs.  Add some candlelight and our family stockings and we are in business.

Thanks so much for stopping by.  Please check back tomorrow for more Holiday decorating.

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Decorating for Christmas

This week will be dedicated to getting The House ready for Christmas.  We will end on Friday when I join up with Hooked on Houses "Hooked on the Holidays" Show us How You Decorate Linky Party!

What I can tell you is that the house is decorated and I am so happy with it.  So much better than last year when we had only lived in the house for three weeks and were still trying to arrange furniture as well as decorate for Christmas.  Hopefully all of this rain will let up so that I can get some nice natural light for my house photos.  As most of you know, I am not the best photographer so any help I can get is well worth it.

Okay, so here how decorating begins in our house.  First, I put The Husband to work bringing up all of the bins from the basement (there are 11 total).

Then it is time to break out the Christmas Song Playlist.


Guess who's getting a new iphone for Christmas?  And maybe a heavy duty cast to protect it from all of it's falls


This year I also had a handy-helper.  The plan was to wait until she went to school (not dressed like that) but we were so excited we decided to start early.  Boy am I happy I did because it ended up taking me most of the day.

Finally, it it time to start unpacking all of those Christmas Decorations.  Here is where I always run into a big of trouble because I can manage to cram all of our decoration onto the table but then I never think about all of the "everyday" decoration that I have to take down to make room for the Christmas decorations.  This year they all went onto the couch before packing them away in the basement.

By 5:00pm all Christmas Decorations were in place and all Everyday Decorations were packed away in boxes - just in time for The Husband to take the 11 tubs back down to the basement.  Well, actually it was only 9 tubs because the other two were filled with tree decorations which will be discussed tomorrow:)

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Best Husband Ever!

Ahh, so we are back to the normal routines of life and I am finding that I am happy about that.  We had a wonderful Thanksgiving weekend but even-though we stayed in-town I feel like it just flew by and that I was exhausted the entire time.  We went out with friends Wednesday night, celebrated Thanksgiving at my dad's on Thursday, ran errands and cared for a sick kid on Friday, I worked on Saturday and then we enjoyed a rainy football game on Sunday.  Busy, busy, busy.

So you may have noticed that I said that I worked on Saturday but what did The Husband do?  Only the best thing ever!  He made-over the fireplace!  I am sure by now you are sick of hearing be talk about this darn fireplace but I may just dedicate the entire week to how much I love my fireplace.

This unhealthy relationship I have with our fireplace dates all the way back to July 28, 2010 when I took a screwdriver to those awful hearts and pried them off.  After that there was some sanding and some painting but I still wasn't in love.

Here is a picture of what the fireplace looked like up until Saturday morning:

Here is the fireplace that I am obsessed with and talk about all the time:

And here is my NEW FIREPLACE!!!!!

Oh my Gosh!  Don't you just love it????  I can't wait until Thursday when I plan to decorate it for Christmas!  It is going to be so great!

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Festival Update

Tonight marks the beginning of our three day Christmas Festival Extravaganza!  As of 9:00am the street has officially been shut down and the food buggies are moving in.

I feel a little weird walking down the street and taking pictures of the people working so hard to get set up so  you are just going to have to be happy with the one that I took out of my front window.  Jack Daniel's Chicken anyone?????

If you are wondering what the rest of my weekend will be like you can check out last years post here.

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Getting into the Spirit

Let me start this post by letting you know that I think that Thanksgiving gets the shaft when it comes to retailers.  I am just as annoyed as most of you that Target puts their Christmas decoration up the day after Halloween.  I get it, Thanksgiving isn't really a retailers ideal holiday but can't you at least give us a week of November before you start putting the pressure on us to start buying Christmas presents.

Now that I have gotten that out of the way I want to let you all know that It's Beginning to Look a lot Like Christmas here on Main Street and our House is brimming with The Christmas Spirit.

This week business owners and private owners have been breaking out the boxes of Christmas decorations and we are right there with them.  Wreaths have been hung in the windows with care in hope that local residents will soon be there:)

Why?  Because this weekend is the annual Christmas in The Historic District Festival.  Starting Friday evening Main Street will be closed down and filled with all sort of fun stuff like food vendors, craft tents, horse drawn carriage rides, and bouncy slides.  There will be a Christmas Tree lighting Friday night M.C.ed by Abe Lincoln (don't ask me why, I think it has something to do with the towns history with the Underground Railroad) followed by a parade Saturday at noon and three full days worth of eating any sort of festival food you can get your hands on.

All right outside our front door!!!

The festival is great exposure for local business so it is no wonder they are working so hard to stand out from the crowd!

They have even started closing down the side streets to start putting up the vendor tents.  So Exciting!!

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In the Works

After a very busy summer, it may seem to all of you that we have had a pretty chill September - and you would be right.  With both girls starting school and with the time we spent away from home June-August, we decided to just take it easy this month and it has been great! 

As great as it has been, I think we are all ready to get back into the swing of things.  So.....have no fear, there are all sorts of projects in the works here at Main Street House.

1)  Finally, we are going to get started on our Fireplace Makeover.  It is really kind of funny because, as you can see from some of our pictures, our television sits right next to our fireplace and last night were were watching T.V - okay so I was watching T.V and do you know what The Husband was doing????  Just staring at the fireplace dreaming up what he is going to build to make it all better:)  Can't wait to see how it turns out.

2)  We are taking a short drive this weekend to pick-up two dressers I found on Craigslist to put in the upstairs hallway.  In hopes that we will have a little more storage up there.  The dressers are not pretty but they are cheap and I am really excited to see what we can to to fix them up.  I love the look of painted furniture right now but can't bring myself to paint anything we already have so I am looking forward to trying my hand on these babies.

3)  So this will eventually be the biggest and the best house project we have done yet but I am going to be a little secretive about it for a while.  You see, there is a room in this house that I have not shared with any of you out in blog land but that is all about to change here in the next couple of months.  Stay tuned;)

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Brown

So if you happen to be one of the people who stopped by when I did my house tour (or if you are even more lucky and you have actually been to Main Street House in person) then you will know that our house is very Brown.  It seems to be that our neutral color of choice in Chocolate.  Most of the wood in our house is very dark and we are also the proud owners of the biggest and brownest couch ever.  Seen here:

Now, normally the browness of our house doesn't bother me at all, I mean I basically picked it all out so I better like it right??  However, what I have found is that now that the house is decorated for fall there is even more brown than ever.  Fine for now but I have a feeling it may get quite depressing once all of the leaves are off the trees and everything outside in brown too.

So I was so happy to see and so inspired by the Pillow Addict feature run over at Classic, Casual, Home.  I struggle with accessories and I struggle even more to put things together that look nice but aren't actually matchy-matchy.  The tips given by Abby over at Delightful Design were even more helpful.

So I headed over to my favorite site - Etsy - and did a search for "Pillows".  Here is a fun little board of my favorites that I think would do just the trick to add a bit of color to that big brown couch of mine.  What do you think?

 Blue and Natural Chevron Pillow Cover  Citrine Trellis Pillow Cover

 Decorative Throw Pillow  Orange Lumbar Pillow Cover

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Decorating for Fall

So, today it is warm and sunny but in the few days leading up to today it has been a bit overcast, rainy, and cool.  Perfect weather to inspire some Fall redecoration.  Now I don't want you to get too excited because all this really means is that I moved some home accessories around in two key display places in our home.

The first area I tackled was our hutch/buffet or whatever you want to call the cabinet in our Dining Room.  This is the first thing you see when you walk into our house so it is fun to mix it up a little.


Here is the BEFORE picture all decorated for Summer:

Here is the AFTER picture all decorated for Fall.

And now we are moving onto the wall of double built-in shelves in our Front Room.  These are kind of fun to redecorate and (to let my little secret out) the change of the seasons-hence the change of the decorations are the only 4 times a year that theses shelves get a really good dusting:)

Again, here is the BEFORE picture all decorated for Summer:

And the AFTER picture decorated for Fall:

As you can see, not everything gets taken down and somethings just get moved around but it was still fun to do.

I would like to direct your eye to the lower left hand corner of the picture below where you will see the new yarn wreath that I whipped together.  Okay, maybe not whipped, more like obsessed over and neglected my children because of.  This wreath was easy to make but took FOREVER to wrap.  Am I admitting to being out of shape if I tell you my left shoulder muscle is sore from all the wrapping:)

There is a great tutorial over at The Lettered Cottage that I followed almost exactly.  I wasn't sure what I wanted to use for the embellishments until I came across another great tutorial over at Pepper Design Blog where she explains how to make these great accordion paper flowers.

Are you doing anything fun to get your house ready for cooler weather???

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