DIY Entertainment Center-Bookcase Styling

Hello!  I hope everyone is having a good day today.  So far so good here!  I've been itching to post about the bookshelves on the entertainment center I built, for a while now.  I was going to save it for when the doors were on, but I'm up early this morning, and the lighting in the room is so beautiful that I was inspired to do this post today.  I've always loved the look of a styled bookshelf, but I've also loved shelves styled without any books on it at all.  More of a display shelf, if you will.  Over the past few months, I acquired quite the collection of random items from mini shopping trips to HomeGoods, TJ Maxx, Marshall's, and Target.  You know, that, "I'm not sure what I'm going to do with this, but I have to have it!", kind of shopping?  Well, it all worked out, because after a few different versions, I've settled on this setup.  I'd say it falls into the "coastal eclectic" category, which pretty much sums up my aesthetic this summer.  I don't have plans to change it up with the seasons either.  I feel like coastal décor can work year round, and honestly, since the beach is my favorite place to be, it gives me a nice claiming vibe when I see it.  Lord knows I need that most days. I'm only sharing the left bookcase today.  I haven't completed the right side just yet.  So here we go!

Here is the bottom shelf.  I chose to display the only books you will see throughout the bookcase, on this shelf.  They are all photo books of Rordan, and I can easily say they are my favorite books ever.  I chose to stack some decorative bowls on top of a beautiful storage box.  In the picture frame you can see a tiny bit of yellow.  It's just some DIY abstract digital art.  I wanted to add more color to the shelves, and I didn't want to spend anymore money, so I chose to go that rout.  

 

Moving on up to the second shelf.  The ball on the left is made up of tiny shells.  I had my eye on that one for a long time. Finally, one day it was on sale and I snatched it up before anyone else saw it.  I picked the vase up because of its color.  I knew I wanted this room to have a pop of coral.  It's actually almost red, but just coral enough for me.  The large shell on the left is either from Ross, or another HomeGoods find.  They have the best selection out of the three stores, so most of this stuff came from their.

 

I played with these three items for a while to come up with this look.  It looks simple enough, but as anyone that's styled a bookshelf knows, it's not.  I liked the irony of the large sculptural sphere on top of the small little box, so I kept it that way.

The top shelf houses a display of blue, green, and aqua vases.  I couldn't pass any of these up and in the end I'm glad I didn't.  They look great together!  

 

And here is the whole thing!  I chose to use the triangle/zig zag method of styling.  You can see, if you follow the tallest objects on the shelf and move to the next, you will follow it in a triangle/ zig zag pattern.  It was a helpful tip I picked up from Pinterest!  

In the end, it was a lot of fun to play around with, and I'm pretty satisfied with the outcome.  I hope you have found some helpful tips in this post!  Thanks for stopping by! 

DIY Entertainment Center Doors

The doors have been ordered!  Why it took so long to do it?  Who knows!  Life gets in the way of such things, but it's done now.  I'll have to paint them once they get here, so I think I'm about a month away from this project being complete.  Finally!  We have moved just about everything into place at this point, and I can see how much clutter these doors are coking to cover up.  That's my newest life goal.  DECLUTTERING!  I haven't ever been diagnosed with anything, but my brain can't function properly when I see too much clutter.  For example, if I'm at a bookstore, it's very hard for me to focus, because I'm visually overly stimulated.  Most times I have to have John find what we are looking for because I can't focus in on the actual titles of the books.  Eep!  Hopefully that isn't some terrible thing, but so far the only other side effect has been anxiety, so in order to get rid of it, I'm doing my best to get rid of the visual clutter.  Thanks for stopping by!  Talk to you soon!

Kitchen Cabinet Update

They finally came!  Okay, the guy that comes and takes measurements came, but now I'm three weeks away from not having a huge eyesore in my kitchen.  Whew!  We also talked about adding a few other little details to the kitchen, so depending on the total estimate we may or may not end up with all of them.  No worries for me though, because my main concern has always been the cabinets over the fridge.  We just wanted to take advantage of the time we had with the guy, because they were pretty hard to get ahold of.  Ah!  Clean, uncluttered to the eye kitchen, here we come!

Playroom Reveal!

 

Rordan's playroom is done!  I actually hadn't planned on changing up the house layout, but once I created my first playroom mood board, I think I was hooked.  I ended up making three different mood boards (MB2 & MB3).  I drew inspiration from each to come up with the final product.  We wanted this room to double as a playroom, and a guest room, since the existing guest room is now the catch all room/exercise room.  We searched for a couch that would fold out into a bed, and luckily the one we found is not only awesome looking, but very comfortable. We don't get many guests, so the fact that it's only a twin shouldn't be a problem.  If anything, someone can sleep on the couch.  Sorry future guests!

We hit up Ikea, and Target for many of the items you see in the room, as well as our own items.  I'll probably source the items if anyone is interested in knowing what they are or where they are from, or if I find the time this weekend.  LOL!  Ultimately, I think we ended up with a nice looking, functional, and fun playroom.  My main goal was to keep in mind Rordan's interests, and have all the things he loves up here in this room.  So far, he seems to be having a blast playing in it.  It's not usually this tidy, but thankfully, it's actually very easy to clean up, thanks to all the storage!  Oh, I didn't mention it, but the couch bottom lifts up to hold items as well.  Very clever, and functional!  Oh, and I almost forgot to mention that I made all the artwork in the room.  I drew inspiration from quotes I've seen on the internet, and one Land of Nod picture in particular. I bet you can spot it!  I ended up creating the image on Photoshop, and having it blow up into a poster at our local office supplies store.  I think I saved about $80 doing it this way.  I love graphic art, so this was a fun little project for me. Okay, well here are the pictures of the room.  This room was so hard to photograph, by the way!  The lighting is wonderful, but I just couldn't find the "perfect" setting on my camera to capture things as clearly as I needed.  I hate when that happens to me.  Guess I should brush up on my camera setting skills.  :)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

So I hope y'all enjoyed the reveal!  Rordan is our first child, and we waited so long to actually have a child so we could do things just like this for him.  I thank the good Lord that we are fortunate enough to be able to do this sort of thing for him.

 

 

 

Corpus Christi-Texas State Aquarium

 

Hello!  A few weeks ago John was wonderful enough to agree to take a "workcation" to help finish up some home projects we had going on.  We got a lot accomplished during that time!  Yay!  In order to bring some fun to those days we decided to end the vacation with a mini trip to Corpus Christi to visit the Texas State Aquarium.  It was Rordan's first time, and we had so much fun!  Luckily when we arrived at the aquarium, we found that it wasn't so packed that Rordan wouldn't be able to see the exhibits, which for a parent, is exciting.  I mean who wants to take their kid somewhere they can enjoy themselves?

We took sooooo many pictures that day.  Mostly of Rordan, but we got some nice ones of the exhibits too.  One of my favorite pictures is of the turtle exhibit.  It looks like he swam up to say hello to us.  Unfortunately we didn't spend a whole lot of time looking at them, because they were outside, and by the time we made it to them, it was way too hot to stand around.  

Rordan had a lot of fun playing in the splash pad.  He was so kind to other little kids.  If they took over a station he was playing with/on, he would just move to the next one.  My Momma heart swells with pride.  He's a such an amazing little boy.

As I mentioned, we took a bunch of pictures, but many of them are being held hostage on John's cell phone.  Here are a few from the DSLR that turned out really nice.  I'll see what I can do about getting the others up soon.  They are too cute to bot share.  Have a nice day!

 

 

Busy Days

I feel like I've abandoned this blog, but I haven't really.  I have been waiting to upload pictures from our mini vacation, the week before last.  Hopefully we won't have as many storms here tomorrow, and I'll be able to actually do that.  Other than that, I have to take pictures of the newly done playroom.  Rordan is already having fun every day in it.  I'm so happy he likes it!  I'm also very thankful that John was so helpful, and saved me from more back pain by painting all the walls in that room, as well as two more in the Entertainment Room, and the stair wall.  Thank you John!!!  I love you! 

I have to say, the house is really starting to come together.  It's amazing to see room design ideas realized, and it's been so much fun to see how some things morphed into what they did.  I'm proud of us, putting so much time into our home.  Even if Pinterest images, and other blogger's remodel images sometimes make me want to turn this place into a construction zone, I can actually say that our home is where I choose to be, because it's ours, and we've made it to fit our needs.  We are experiencing our lives here, and what a wonderful blessing it is to be able to have such a lovely home.  The images can only serve as inspiration, and aspirations for the future.  I'm excited to share the updates on this blog.  I know very few actually read this, but that's not the point I guess.  The point all along has been to keep focused on my goal of recording our lives as it happens.  I'll continue to do my best!  Hopefully one day I can look back and feel thankful that I did.  Scratch that!  I already do, and am!  Okay, enough sentimental stuff.  Till next time!  

Kitchen Cabinets Drama

If you've had a chance to build a new home, either independently, or a tract home, have you ever felt like you made a mistake with some of your choices?  Looking back at some of our decisions, I know we made them based on keeping the overall price in check, but today I think we should have thought about a bit harder.  For some reason, we opted to not have cabinets installed over the refrigerator when planning the kitchen.  Neither John nor I can remember why, other than just cutting costs.  What a mistake!  It's been this blank space just begging to be filled, and I've yet to fill it in a way that doesn't make the room seem over styled and cluttered.

I'm not sure if it's obvious or not, but I'm going through a phase of simplicity.  I just can't stand clutter!  Okay I know, if you've been to our home that's a laughable statement, but that's exactly why I can't stand it.  It's everywhere!  I'm ready to get this house organized and more functional.  We are working on it currently, sending items to be sold at garage sales, and baby stuff to be stored, "just in case".  Ugh!  I wish I could  say that Rordan is going to be our only child, but it's just too hard to predict the future, and we don't really want to have to purchase everything again if we do find ourselves expecting again.  Of course if we do and it's a girl, well, it will all go up for sale ASAP.  Haha!  As it is though, John and I have agreed that we love being a family of three, and don't have any plans for another.  

Okay, back to the cabinets.  We recently had the bright idea to contact the builder's design center to see if they could point us in the direction of the maker of our cabinets.  After a day they called us back and gladly provided the information to us.  I called the cabinet maker, and they took our information.  The lady said someone would call back the next day to set up an appointment, since the person that handles that wasn't in the office at the time.  Well that was supposed to happen yesterday. Guess what.  No call!  I decided to call again this morning, and a different person answered.  He said he would pass the info along to the rep in our area, but warned that they normally don't sell to the public.  Hmm.  So I'm guessing the first person I talked to was new.  Otherwise I wouldn't have gotten my hopes up.  I asked this guy if he had any suggestions for me, if they wouldn't sell to us.  He suggested contacting a public custom cabinet maker.  I'm hoping that they make an exception, but if not I hope that we can find a reputable company that won't take us for a ride, and have us end up with mismatched cabinets.  

My biggest worry isn't really the shape of the cabinet.  I feel like they should be able to replicate them fairly easily.  My biggest concern is matching the stain of the wood.  I've read that it can be pretty hard to match stain, but maybe we will get lucky.  If not, we might have to either nix this and learn to live with the eyesore above the fridge, or choose to paint the cabinets a complimenting color to the bottom cabinets and island.  That seems extreme, but it's an option, cost permitting.  I can't say I hate that idea so much, since it would "update" our cabinets, but I really don't mind our kitchen now that we have the new backspash.  I could have done without the original tile backspash.  Again, another building decision mistake.  Maybe I'll cover that story in another post.  

So now you can see why not getting them originally was a mistake.  I can't imagine they will cost as little to get now, as they would have before.  As with everything else on our plans list, it's up in the air, so we will see what happens.  I hope someone at least gives me a call from the cabinet company to say yes or no.  

Anyone have any suggestions for us if they don't agree to sell to us?  Also, I'd love to know if you have been in this situation yourself.  Please leave a comment if so.  Thanks for stopping by!