One Stop Shop

I love being able to get everything for my home at one place. But let's be honest here... the quality of home stuff at Walmart isn't necessarily what I want to outfit my entire home in.

Insert Home Depot where you can everything decor-like for your home, including furniture!!!


In their recent Dream Book they featured a ton of beautiful bathrooms:

This "asian-influence" bathroom is simple. Using paint has the biggest effect in this room. They also used Corian to build a surround for the tub.

A clean-lined vanity in dark wood, ties into all the dark wood accents throughout the room. Keeping accessories sparse is a big part of the appeal.

To me, this bathroom is the epitome of glamour! Something about cramy white/grey marble that's so clean and perfect.

Keeping the color palette limited is what works in this room. Love the vanity!!!

A powder room is the perfect place to really go all out with something vibrant, since it's such a small space and really packs a punch. This retro glam bathroom surely doesn't disappoint!

Best Upgrades

In making the decision to build our new house. Cory and I have been very conciously making design decisions that will affect us in the long run: in terms of Re-sale.

We certainly don't intend on being in our house forever, so we have to take into consideration what would be appealing to other people when purchasing a home.

#1. Flooring - It was a non-negotiable for me to go with carpet and lino for our main floor. This area is just too high-traffic to have carpet, and lino looks cheap (cause it is!) Plus, knowing that we have animals, and are intending on adding a couple more to our family, it only makes sense to forgo as much carpet as possible. So, while we haven't made our flooring selection yet, you can bet that we've written into our mortgage an allowance for flooring. Ideally, a combination of hardwood and tile would do the trick, but alternatively, we'll settle for some laminate.

2. Electrical Wiring -If there is anything you are planning to add down the road, that would require making holes in the walls/ceiling or floors, is best done in advance. We've made sure that our house is able to do the following: pre-wired for air conditioning, roughed-in Central Vac, wired for both alarm system and sound system. We plan on doing all of that down the road, so doing it before the drywall, saves time and money. **As well, take a good look at where your outlets are placed in your rooms - are there adequate outlets?? Are they in locations that make logical sense? Having a brief idea of where you will place furniture and appliances, is a good idea.

3. Future Development Mapping - Does your house have a basement that you plan on finishing down the road?? Ours does - so we took a look at floorplan ideas on how to best finish the space (courtesy of our builder). Glad I did, cause we made sure the rough-in for the 3 piece bath would be in the right spot. Same thing for our laundry room. ** I also took into consideration that since we have a walk-out basement, I moved the location of the French doors to the outside, so they'd make sense. I also added stairs down from the deck and a concrete pad outisde the doors.**

Here are some options we had, that we chose to forgo:

4. Specialty Painting - yup, there's a premium charge if we want to paint in more than one color, or if we want to have a feature wall color. Why on earth would I pay someone to paint?? Plus, doing it yourself allows you to choose paint from any supplier

5. Fixture & Hardware Upgrade - Everything from the light switch plates, towel bars and cabinet pulls can be upgraded. Seriously?? This stuff is so small. If your builder standard stuff is REALLY that ugly. Save yourself some moola and head over to your local hardware store. You'll have to do it yourself, but it takes no time. ***p.s. The light fixture in our dining area is a ceiling fan - uh... NO!!! I'll be switching that out at the design center. If I can't find anything pretty, I'll take the cheapest fixture and a cash credit to source my own option.

6. Decorative Touches - Did you know that a lot of builders do not include tile backsplash or tub surround?? If yours doesn't (ours does), do it yourself. Your local Building Supply store probably has a DIY Workshop. Your tiling options will be limit-less and you'll feel so proud when you're done. **Down the road, we'll probably add a stone wall feature to our fireplace wall.**

**Photo courtesy of Style At Home

A House Says A Lot....

It's true that you can tell a lot about a person by looking inside their home. But what about when the house speaks for them??

I love the idea of word art for walls, or canvases even. So you can imagine how excited I was to find this site .

With beautiful ideas to personalize your home, there's a variety of stuff to please every style.

With vinyl wall quotes, monogrammed canvases, and lucite letters, you can really personalize your home.

In our new house, one thing that was a non-negotiable with me, is that we had to upgrade the floors!! There was no way I was gonna shell out a ton of money, for Builder-grade carpet and linoleum for the main floor. So we've written in a flooring allowance and will make the decisions in the next couple months, as we start visiting the design centre. But we're pretty sure we're going to do a collaboration of some sort of tile and hardwood or laminate, depending on the cost.

Anyhow, while I love the idea of not having carpet to worry about from a cleanliness perspective ( this is especially good, since we have animals). I am a little worried about adjusting to not being as able to pad around barefoot without slippers. I have decided though, that I'd love to do a nice area rug for the carpet, just to cozy-things up!

I've been looking into the idea of using carpet tiles, because I like to price point, as well - we are spillers and I like that I wouldn't have to worry about ruining a whole rug... if something gets stained, I can just throw it away and replace it! :)

Here are some of the FLOR options I am liking:

My favorite so far has to be this Botanical pattern in blue. Each box has tiles with the botanical in three different sized patterns.

I am liking the colors in this Lane Change Stripe as well, but think it might be a little too moderny-popish for us.

This beautiful blue is my accent color throughout the house, and with 4 shades of the same tone, mixes it up a bit. But might be a bit too blue for Cory.

I like that this one has more than one color in it, to give a really textural appearance to it. Plus, we can see it looks really nice with couches similar to our color! :)


The perfect combination. This Seagrass style has our three colors: cream, turquoise and chocolate!! Plus it's a Martha Stewart Design... so can't go wrong!

Lastly, we are both surprisingly attracted to cowhide rugs. Unfortunately, our kitties seem to have a disliking to any real hides: leather couches, rabbit fur moccassin boots - they sense a need to destroy the prey. So I am not sure I want to take my chances in shelling out all that money for a real hide, when I could get a similar look with Stampede:

Thoughts???

Dream = Reality

Our Mortgage paperwork for the new house is being completed today!! Needless to say, I am beyond excited. I faxed off the final paperwork this morning and that's all the file needed to be completed. My biggest dream is finally becoming a reality.

Knowing that we'll be in there in the summer, I know we're gonna want to hold off on buying so much new furniture right away, and maybe put all the money we have, into the landscaping.....

Anyhow, I'll be loading today with posts full of fun finds for our new place!!! Enjoy!!

De-cluttering...

Well, conincidentally, the New Year is also falling at the same time as my current obsession: Cleaning, De-culuttering and Purging.

I've been feeling pretty stiffled lately by the amount of "stuff" in our house, and with thinking about the new house a lot lately, I've realized that we will be moving into something a bit smaller, and with a different layout, that will require us to be very organized.

So operation - Clean Sweep is in effect.

For the next couple weeks, I will be squeezing in an area here and there and completely emptying, sorting, purging, cleaning and re-organizing. Tonight, I will be tackling the main bathroom, upstairs coat closet and the broom closet. As I go along, I'll post pictures of my befores and afters ( I'm relatively neat so there might not be such a transformation, but hopefully my purging will add extra space ).

But for the meantime, here are some beautiful organized spaces, care of Martha Stewart.

This pretty hall closet makes good sense. I love the idea of having the baskets and stuff below the rod, which makes it much easier to reach!! I'm gonna make a switch tonight and assess what new things I need to buy!

I am loving the idea of having tools mounted to the inside of the door. Right now, we just have a small tool kit, but this is very accessible. Definetly an option for the new house!

Oh WOW!! Talk about staging! I don't know about you, but MY medicine cabinet does not look this pretty, and I have half the stuff in mine. I guess that's because I don't only have travel sized, monochromatic bottles of stuff in mine. Also, this one is incredibly deep-looking. Mine is not. We recently got on board with using magnets inside ours as well!

This is a great idea. I have my own version, in the form of a collapsible plastic crate. works wonders, especially for transporting things into the house. I don't carry a lot in the car, but I can see this being perfect for someone with kids!

Gimme Some Frosting!

Don't you just love the effect glass doors have? They divide a space, but still let so much light in!! Only problem: Privacy!! Who wants to have everyone able to see everything going on, on the other side of the door?

Samantha Pynn recently featured a simple solution to this on her show Pure Design and I think it is a super easy, non-permanent solution that I will be tempted to try it in our new house, on our sliding patio doors in lieu of (eeeeeeww) vertical blinds!

Here's how to do it.

Frosting Glass Doors

Supplies:

~frosting (available at your hardware store)

~ painter's tape

~cutting knife

~smoothing tool

How To:

1. Clean glass exeptionally well with vinegar and water making sure to get rid of any sticky bits.

2. Apply a 1 1/2" border of painter's tape to the glass, inside the frame and use it as a guideline as to where to trim your frosting. You do not want it the be right to the frame, as over time, and the different seasons, the frosting will stretch.

3. Use blade to cut your frosting to size. A good tip is to cutthe "outside" of your straight-edge so as not to ruin your piece if you make a cutting mistake.

4. Mist the glass door with a solution of water and dish soap and apply vinyl. This solution will allow you a little bit of wiggle to correctly place your frosting.

5. Starting from the middle, use your Smoothing tool to flatten out the frosting. Working out any bubbles, and excess water.

6. Remove the painter's tape!