One Room Challenge: Fall 2014 - Week Six

 

The Reveal....

 

 

Week Six is finally here! The library (aka living room) in our house is finished. It's been a long journey to get to a space where everything is in its place. If you would like to look back on the past six weeks, check out the links below:

 

Week One - Where I share my room inspiration

 

Week Two - Where my husband does all the work installing hardwood floors

 

Week Three - Where I rant about painting window trim

 

Week Four - Where I share my tutorial for covering a bench with fabric

 

Week Five - Where I give my tips for styling a bookcase

 

 I think Linda is on to something with the One Room Challenge. Six weeks is just the right amount of time to complete a room...long enough to get things done...but short enough to light a fire under you to work hard to finish. Thanks Linda for doing the ORC. I am so glad I was able to participate in the link up.

 

Here is my newly completed library....

 

 

 

 

We moved into this house a few months ago, and I can officially say that this is the first room that is completely finished. It is satisfying to look at a room that doesn't have any moving boxes in it!

 

I will be moving on to the other spaces, so be sure to check back if you want to see how I finish the other rooms in our house. (The sidebar has ways you can sign up to continue to follow.) Next week will be a tutorial on making rolled fabric curtains for our bathroom windows.

 

Also, I have enjoyed so much getting to discover new blogs and the people behind them through the ORC. I will be starting a new weekly series in January, where I feature small improvements that other bloggers have made such as adding flowers to an office desk, to getting a calendar organized, to redoing a whole room like here. So if you are a fellow blogger and would like to share and be featured on Improvement List, send me an email - improvementlist at gmail dot com. (You can find out more information by clicking the Get Featured link at the top of the screen).

 

Now I am going on over to Calling It Home to check out the finished rooms of my other fellow linking participants. So excited...I have waited six weeks to see the newly created spaces. I am always just so blown away from all the talent!

 

 

My other One Room Challenge Rooms: Laundry Room and Mud Room

 

 

Linking up with:

Remodelaholic

One Room Challenge: Fall 2014 - Week 1

 

 I'm back....

A lot has happened over the last several months while I took a break from blogging.. The big thing is we moved into a bigger house! Yippee! A second thing is I became a writer for Tipsaholic, a great blog that shares tips on all kinds of subjects. When you have a moment, check out some of my featured tips on moving, camping, starting conversation's with kids, flower arranging and laundry.

While there is a lot on my plate right now, I couldn't pass up the opportunity to once again participate in Calling It Home's One Room Challenge. For those of you who don't know, this is a six weeks event with the Linking Participants sharing their progress of decorating a room each Thursday. In the end, a whole room is redone. This will be my third time joining in. In the past, I redid my laundry room with a Greenbrier/Dorothy Draper theme and the kid's mud room in bright primary colors with a big dash of organization thrown in.

And this time the room in my home I am going to do for the ORC is.....

Find a Way to Keep a White Couch Clean

 

 

 

 

 

When we originally purchased the furniture in our living room, we were in a different house with a different space configuration. We had it in a formal living room that we turned into a library. It was separate from the rest of the rooms and was for the most part only used by my husband and I for quiet moments to read the newspaper or do some work. The white couch seemed like a good idea for that type of room. Now we are in a house with more of an open concept and the couch is used all the time by the kids and especially our dog. Apparently the sun shines on this spot in the afternoon at just the right angle...perfect place for a doggy nap. It took just a few months until, frankly, it was filthy. We had it professionally cleaned, which helped, but I can't do that every month. The long term plan is to get slip covers for the couch, so I can "clean" the couch more often by just throwing the slip cover into the wash. But until that happens, I needed something to protect the couch.


Enter a blanket from Ikea.

 

 

The colors went great with the pillows and other décor in the room. I arranged it over the couch, and put a dowel rod in-between the cushions to keep it from sliding around when someone sat down on it. If the blanket gets dirty I can simply throw it in the washing machine and the couch stays nice and clean. It's such an improvement to the space.

 

 

 

 

 

Link Up with A Bowl Full of Lemons, Remodelaholic,



Check Out Other People's Books

Anne over at the wonderful and very thought provoking blog Modern Mrs Darcy is doing a great link up today.

You get to check out other people's bookshelves...and there are no worries that you will look nosey when doing it!

I'll be honest. I always like to see what other people liked reading enough that they put it on their bookshelf. I often get some great suggestions on what I should pick up as my next book. Plus you learn a lot about the other person!

Be sure to check out the other participants by clicking here.

I am sharing this post...an oldy but goody.


I needed to organize my bookshelves.

I do not have a before picture to show you, but let's just say it looked something like this...

 

Via

 



And here is the after...

These bookshelves have been around through four moves and three paint jobs. A couple of the shelves have footprints in the paint from where my then toddler son ran across them, while they were drying on the floor, during one of the repaints. Needless to say these bookshelves and I have been through a lot together, and I love that now the shelves are cleared and organized. It really shows my books off to their best advantages. I also now have the room to add a few extra decorative items to the shelves.

First thing I did was pare down the books to only the ones I truly could not part with. This was so hard to do! It was a bit like having to say good bye to old, dear friends. I kept stopping to read them.

I looked something like this....

The Bookworm by Carl Spitzweg

 

Finally, I had two boxes full of books, and I carted them off to donate to the local Friends of the Library Book Sale.

 

I decided to organize the books roughly by subject. This has really helped me be able to quickly find what I am looking for.

 

 

 

I placed some of the books at different angles to add interest to the shelves.

 

 

My mother gave me this pillow, and it is one of my favorite things.  The glass vase was hand blown at a glass factory near my hometown.

 

 

The organized bookshelves were such an improvement to my living room, that I went to work on the bookshelf in my children's room. 

 

 

 

We mainly group the books here by subject, author or reading level.

 

 

 

Now that our bookshelves look so great, I declared a ban in our house...no more buying books just to be buying books. As a result, I have to really like the book for me to purchase it and put it on my bookshelf. We almost exclusively get all of our books from the public library now. I would love to see the data of which family checks out the most books at our library. I think we would win.

How do you organize your books, and how do you decide which make the cut to put on the shelves?

Make Unique Fall Vases

Fall has definitely come to my neck of the woods. Now that the weather is getting chilly, it was time to add a little bit of inspiration from the season to my home. Recently, I highlighted my fall decorating in a post here.

One of my favorite things I made this year was my fall table decoration. It was so easy, yet so unique looking.

First I started with a trip to the grocery store, and purchased the following items.

Then it was over to my favorite place to get affordable flowers, the floral department of the grocery store. (I talked about decorating with grocery store flowers here.) At first, I started to pick out several different combinations of flowers that were being sold in three stem bunches. Then, I saw a "fall floral bouquet" for only $8 dollars. Someone with a little more decorating style than me had already put together complementing flowers, and all I had to do was take apart the bouquet and group them the way I wanted for my project. Score!

I hollowed out the golden acorn squash and the butternut squash pretty easily, but the spaghetti squash was solid inside. It took a fair amount of digging with a spoon to make a hollowed out space.

I put the flower stems, from the grocery store bouquet, into floral water picks, and arranged them as I liked into my fall food vases.

I added a piece of burlap, that I had left over from a Thanksgiving project many years ago, to the table, to ground the arrangement. The golden acorn and spaghetti squash were a little wobbly on the table, so I cut off the bottom of each to make more of a flat surface. I put a small square of plastic wrap over the now exposed insides to try to prevent drying out. 

The acorns I came across while watching my son's soccer game. I placed them in a small bowl I normally use for dipping sauce.

Here are a couple more angles...

 

 

I love this floral arrangement and think it is a great improvement to my dining room.

Check out the link up with The Lettered Cottage, Serenity Now, and Centsational Girl

Decorate for Fall

Fall is in the air. I love the crispy weather and the beautiful clear blue skies. Watching the leaves change to their bright, brilliant hues is one of my favorite things all year.

It's time to decorate the house with a few fall themed items.

I decorated the table with gourds and squash that I hollowed out to use as vases for flowers. Click here for the tutorial.

The vase on the end table normally holds fresh flowers from our garden through the spring and summer months. Now that the weather has turned, wheat  is more fitting for the season.

I added the same thing to a vase on our bookcases in the living room. The painting is by one of my favorite artist...my older son.

Finally, I few items were added to the front porch. I will add more in a few weeks as the Halloween season approaches, so I kept it fairly simple for now.

Stay tuned for tutorials of how I made the decorations.

Check out the link up on The Inspired Room and Savvy Southern Style

Revel the After Photos: Bookshelves

In yesterday's post, I talked about the large amount of books I had and my need for organized bookshelves.

I do not have a before picture to show you, but let's just say it looked something like this...

 

Via

 



And here is the after...

These bookshelves have been around through four moves and three paint jobs. I couple of the shelves have footprints in the paint from where my then toddler son ran across them while they were drying on the floor during one of the repaints. Needless to say these bookshelves and I have been through a lot together, and I love that now the shelves are cleared and organized. It really shows my books off to their best advantages. I also now have the room to add a few extra decorative items to the shelves.

First thing I did was pare down the books to only the ones I truly could not part with. This was so hard to do! It was a bit like having to say good bye to old, dear friends. I kept stopping to read them.

I looked something like this....

The Bookworm by Carl Spitzweg

 

Finally, I had two boxes full of books, and I carted them off to donate to the local Friends of the Library Book Sale.

 

I decided to organize the books roughly by subject. This has really helped me be able to quickly find what I am looking for.

 

 

 

I placed some of the books at different angles to add interest to the shelves.

 

 

My mother gave me this pillow, and it is one of my favorite things.  The glass vase was hand blown at a glass factory near my hometown.

 

 

The organized bookshelves were such an improvement to my living room, that I went to work on the bookshelf in my children's room. 

 

 

 

We mainly group the books here by subject, author or reading level.

 

 

 

Now that our bookshelves look so great, I declared a ban in our house...no more buying books. We almost exclusively get all of our books from the public library now. I would love to see the data of which family checks out the most books at our library. I think we would win.

Check out the link up at Serenity Now,  Calling It Home, I Heart Organizing, Tatertots and Jello,  Not Just a Housewife, The Pink Pagoda, Remodelaholic, A Bowl Full of Lemons
 



Decorate with flowers

When I look at pictures in home design magazines, I always notice the fresh flowers used to beautify a room.

 HGTV

 

HGTV

 

I thought about decorating with flowers in my home, but I worried that it would be wasteful since flowers do not last long and can be expensive.

Then I discovered grocery store flowers...

Enrolauto

I can pick up a bouquet with a few flowers for normally between $5-$10. That's a reasonable expense to me.

I love the orchids that my local grocery store is carrying lately. This was just the dash of color my living room needed to look finished.

I now have a few small vases around the house that I fill with flowers every week or so. Does my home look like the magazine pictures now? Hardly! But it is a nice small improvement.