After Christmas Trimming

Anyone else make a huge "Christmas Break To-Do" list? All of those things you've been putting off pre-holidays, hoping you'll find time to be productive after the reindeer stampede passes and the tinsel settles?

We sure did, and boy was it over ambitious. HA! 

After finishing Eleanor's Nursery, we hadn't made any additional progress on our goal of replacing the trim throughout the house. So we decided THAT would be our project; update the trim in our bedroom, the toy room, and maybe get started on the dining room. 

Once we returned home from the holidays (with a week until either of us went back to work) we cleared our schedules, sent the kids to daycare for a few days, and got down to business! 

Fast forward to Friday, and we found ourselves about 85% complete...with one room...and that's it. 

Overall, I was still pretty impressed by how much we got done with only two kid-less days. Was it everything we set out to accomplish? No. Did we still feel pretty great since most of the time was spent juggling a caulking gun in one hand and an 11-month-old in the other? You betcha. 

The entire process went decently smooth too. We used a crowbar to pry off the old trim, picked up all of the new from Home Depot, prepped, painted, then cut each piece down to size. Mr. Harrison even got to help. 

Eric used his swanky new nail gun hooked up to the air compressor to make quick work of tacking the pieces into place. Then my job was to follow with putty filling in the nail holes and sweeping...lots and lots of sweeping. 

Next, we sanded, caulked around everything to fill the gaps, and lastly touched up any white or purple paint that needed love. We used caulk in Eleanor's room too, it created a nice seamless finish, so we wanted to do the same here. 

I'm obsessed with the high contrast between the dark walls and the white trim, plus the thicker size and colonial detail around the doors brings in so much extra character. 

It's taken a little over a year, but this room is finally shaping up! For some reason our home improvement and decorating pace has slowed the more offspring we add. Figures. 

The last big update I'd like to make in this space is painting all the doors. I'm toying with the idea of black for the interiors, and then white for the closets and bathroom. Or maybe just white for everything, I haven't quite made up my mind yet. 

How our room is coming together brings me so much joy. The dark and moody Plum Brown color is such a change from anything we've done in the past. I can't wait to bring in more art, plants, some furniture, and soon hang two more curtains on those bare windows. Of course, that will just give Harrison another prime hiding spot for his new favorite game; hide-and-go-seek. 

Your bedroom should give you all the good feels, and considering every time I walk into ours I look at the trim and do a little happy dance, I'd say we're succeeding. 

Check out all of our home improvements, by visiting the OUR NEST page.

Guest Bedroom Upgrade

So you may recall a while back, me hopefully rambling (with stars and hearts in my eyes) about everything we would accomplish during the Summer of 2015. And in true this-is-real-life-why-do-I-even-make-a-plan fashion, Summer 2016 is weeks away and I think we accomplished 1 thing on that list? Maybe? 

I don't know. 

Either way, this post isn't about our horrible track record with lists, it's about the guest bedroom! In the aforementioned Summer 2015 post, I talked about my plan to paint that room dark navy, and pull in lots of jewel tones. I also wanted to take the new color only up to the point where the sloping ceiling and wall met, to try and disguise the awkwardness of that area. 

So after finally being blessed with a weekend at home, I grabbed some paint, cleared the room out, and got busy! 

Since I wanted the sloped wall to blend in, I took the same white paint we've used on all the ceilings to give this room a fresh coat, and brought the color down onto the walls.

After two coats, I was ready to mark off where the colors would meet. 

This was the part I was most nervous about. I envisioned having to measure, re-measure, checking with a level, taping, re-taping, all in the name of creating the perfect line. 

Overall, it was pretty painless. It took me a bit in the beginning to find the exact line-height I wanted. But once I marked around the whole room, the tape helped a lot with keeping a straight line. There was just one wall where Eric assisted, because it went slightly crooked, and he said it was instantly where his eye went to when he walked in. 

After taping around the windows, doors, and trim...that's when I called it a night. 

Another week went by, and I had all intentions of getting the blue knocked out this weekend. But to my SURPRISE, Eric had the first coat on when I got home from work Monday!
Seriously, he is the best. 

Or he was just bored, and the rain kept him from going outside. 
Either way he earned a LOT of brownie points. 

Two coats later, and our once beige bedroom is now Nautica Navy! 

YAAAAAS!!! It turned out SO GOOD!
There's a few places that need touched up, but overall the tape worked wonders and made a nice crisp line.

Phase 1: Get Color on the Walls = COMPLETE! 

Next comes the fun part; DECORATING! I have big plans to bring in a headboard of some sort, hand curtains, replace the side tables, and fill the blank walls with shelves, art, or both! There's also that mustard yellow thrift chair I've been hoarding with dreams of reupholstery. Although, I must confess, it doesn't look too too shabby paired with the navy. 

Looking back to how the room started, I think cutting the walls in half with the paint turned out to be a very successful decision. It keeps your focus down, and IN the room, as opposed to wandering up the sloped wall and to the ceiling.  

So satisfied with how this is coming together, I can't wait to keep working on it, as well as everything else we have planned this summer. And now when you plan to stay with us, you can rest easy knowing a beautiful room awaits! 

Bargains and Buyouts and Beds, OH MY!

Last weekend, my friend Maria and I took a little adventure to Bargains and Buyouts on the West side of Cincinnati. Neither of us had been there before, and we really didn't know what to expect walking in.

If you enjoy a warehouse packed full of discounted furniture and home goods, then this is the place for you! Bargains and Buyouts is a liquidation company with their products mainly consisting of overstocked items that their suppliers sold to them for low rates, which in turn means low price for us! Woop!

Maria was on the hunt for a rug, and I was really impressed with their amount of selections. These huge area rugs started as low as $99! 

How absolutely perfect would this pink one be in a young girl's room? And I LOVE the color combination in the one on the right. 

Along with the rugs they had a huge selection of couches, desks, lamps, head boards, chairs, bar stools, art, you name it. These two pieces in particular were my favorite. Can't go wrong with a gold end table, and that white chandelier has the perfect amount of whimsy without being too excessive. 

If we hadn't driven in a super small car, this orange rug would've come straight home with me. It would look PERFECT in our bedroom. 

Speaking of our bedroom, THIS happened Saturday morning...

Good morning mover men! 

We got ourselves a brand new CALIFORNIA KING MATTRESS!!! This was our gift to each other, last year we bought furniture, so this year it's a big kid bed! 

We're still on the hunt for a bed frame, I'm thinking one of those with the drawers underneath would be SUPER convenient. 

Our former queen is now in the guest bedroom, which has gone under a mini makeover and looks about 400% better than before. 

So let it be known that from this day forward, if you stay at the Wellman household, you will have an ACTUAL BED to sleep in and not our air mattress.

Snaps for progress! 

My design plan for this room involves dark blue walls (like in the pic below), a killer headboard/accent wall, and of course lots of beautiful pillows and decor. 

Who knows when operation Guest Bedroom Transformation will actually happen, but having all of our "junk" condensed from two rooms to one is still extremely satisfying. 

Change makes me so giddy! I keep opening the door to snag a peek, just because it FINALLY looks different than it has for the past two years!

2015 is already turning out to be pretty fabulous.