Happy Valentine's Day

Christmas!

I love this time of the year!

Things are Coming Together

After almost 2 years of living here, things are finally coming together in the very first room you see when you walk in to the house. 

I'm just going to post a bunch of pictures and you'll be able to see the updates, no explanation needed. 

The room as it was when we looked at the house

Then we used all the furniture from our apartments for awhile...

Then that furniture made it's way downstairs once we got carpet down there and the living room sat empty for months and months.  Until I found these chairs and fireplace on Craigslist and got the table as a Christmas gift. 

And then once again, Craigslist pulled through and I found the perfect couch, and now we have this:

 

It's not quite complete, I still have some ideas/changes in mind.  But, it's getting there and that makes me happy!

 

More Stripes

The hallway needs love too!

He's here!

Ryker has arrived! He will actually be 3 weeks old tomorrow. But, I've been a bit busy so that is my excuse for taking so long to post :)

He was born on August 9th and weighed 8lb 9oz and was 20.5" long.

He is just perfect and we can't imagine life without him!

(photo credit goes to SuzanneJean Photography)

Nursery Reveal

The nursery is (almost) finished!  Now we are just waiting for our little guy to arrive!

I'll let the pictures do the talking for this post...

When we first looked at the house, the room looked like this:

And then it was Dan's office for a little over a year:

And now, it is our little guy's nursery!  Once we found out we were expecting, I started to dream up nursery plans and I had originally planned on something like this if we had a boy: 

Once it was confirmed we are having a boy, I started with the gray, aqua and orange but quickly decided I wanted to add in some navy blue too.  

Here is what we ended up with:

 

The dresser now has a changing pad on top of it:

A few of the details:

Using a piece of scrap wood, I created some artwork for the wall.  The steps were simple: stain wood, paint the quote and the heart and hang on the wall.  I chose this quote because Dan's mom would say this to him as a little boy (and sometimes still as a big boy).  

 

I created this artwork in Adobe Illustrator and framed it in an Ikea frame.  

Dan and I made these book shelves, following this tutorial.

 

My mom helped me make this ottoman pouf by following this tutorial, but altering the measurements to fit our needs. 

I made the mobile that hangs over the changing table/dresser.  I also made the yard wrapped H (that you can barely see) and painted the dog silhouette because I just had to include our first baby in the nursery somehow.  The top shelf has some pictures of our adorable niece and her beautiful mama!

 The biggest DIY project I tackled (with help from my brother) for the nursery was the toy box with an abacus on the front.  I will eventually do a whole post on this project. 

And here is a complete breakdown/source list:

Crib - Target

Crib skirt - sewn by my Grandmother using leftover fabric from our bedskirt and this fabric

Quilt: sewn by my Grandma (she's so talented!)

Boppy pillow cover - Etsy

Paper lanterns: Online here

ABC artwork: created by me

Floor lamp: Ikea

Side Table: Amazon

Chair: ordered from a catalog at Becker Furniture

Curtains: sewn by my Grandmother using blackout fabric and this fabric

Rug: Urban Outfitters

Dresser: Dan's childhood dresser, but given a makeover

Shelves over dresser: Ikea

The only thing left to do is paint the doors white and put the closet door back on....oh ya, and have that baby so he can enjoy his new room! :)

More Plans

They say towards the end of pregnancy that women start to nest and want to clean everything!  I'm not feeling that sort of nesting, but I am itching to finish decorating the house!  I think that is my form of nesting - decorating.  Lately, I've been dreaming up ideas left and right for changes I want to make to the house.  I'd love nothing more than to have our upstairs living/dining area finished, but it's not in the cards for awhile. 

To cure my desire to decorate, I "window" shop online instead.  Last night I came across this couch:

It's perfect for what I've been looking for - it has simple clean lines, was the correct dimensions for our living area, it's gray and I love the detail of the nail-head trim.  After calling around, it seems the couch has recently been discontinued - boooo :(

So I continued to look online for the perfect gray couch.  I've been looking online for that perfect gray couch for the past year and either I don't like the style or I fall in love with a couch that is way out of our price range. 

But, I think I came up with the perfect solution!  The Ikea Karlstad couch - a couch I've seen plenty of times out in blog land and it seems to get good reviews!  It comes looking like this:

Not too shabby in it's original form - it is gray, affordable and has the nice clean lines that I like.  But, my plan is to spice it up a bit to make it look like this:

I'd stain the legs darker and add nail-head trim and it'd look pretty similar to the first couch pictured above!