I have been MIA as a blogger recently. In my regular life as a business owner of an elder law firm I am crazy busy right now. I have been spending my evenings laser focused on decorating as an escape from the legal world. I really did not plan to get on such a decor kick in this past month. My husband might run away but I seriously cannot help myself.  

WIth four years in this house and some major room renovations under our belts I am happy with the way our house is coming together. I looked around and I noticed that everything was so neutral and plain, mainly, due to the nasty colors of paint and carpeting that had previously been here and my attempt to coordinate with them while we tackled one room at a time. I decided it was time to spice this place up a little with some style.  

Ready to see what I have been up do? Here we go:  

1: 

The Downstairs Half Bath

When we bought this house it looked like this:  

We first painted it, added a chair rail, and painted the cabinet within a little less than a year of living here. Then we put in new tile: 

For the next couple of years I kept it relatively neutral while we focused on the other major projects we had to get done, namely, floors and the kitchen. Lately I have been cruising the West Elm website, Pinterest, and Crate and Barrell catalog for inspiration. I came across this amazing paint color and I knew I had to have it. 

I NEEDED it.  

I decided to upgrade our little half bath in a quick and cheap way. I have not finished our complete renovations of this bathroom yet but here is a little preview: 

Guys … I LOVE IT!  And look at that light fixture! Love!

I love this color so much! In fact, I loved it so much that I bought some throw pillows at Home Goods and picked up some coordinating pillow covers on sale from West Elm for the living room! I’ll blog about the bathroom soon, but I want to get it done first. 

On to the next project.  

2:

The Bedroom! 

I know what you’re thinking. “Girl, didn’t you just do then entire bedroom?” Yes, but I still have this issue of where to store my jewelry. I want it neat and put away. I want it to look stylish. I want it to look clean and relaxing.  

Just for a moment let’s go back to what our bedroom used to look like: 

YIKES! Here is it this week, so you can see it came a long way. 

I really liked it, but I don’t want my jewelry cluttering up the top and you can see why. 

I considered buying a jewelry armoire, but I just could not find one that I liked. They looked pretty old fashioned - and not in a good way. I was cruising through the West Elm sale and noticed some jewelry boxes. I like the way they look and the style they add to a room, but I did not want the top of my dresser cluttered. I like things to look neat and put away. 

FINALLY I got the idea to put some shelves above the dresser similar to what we put in the downstairs half bath. One DIY project led me to another! I realized that we had more mirrors than we needed and decided to take down the one above the dresser and save it for whenever we finally get around to updating our master bathroom. 

So I ordered these brackets from Home Depot. Instead of black steel like the ones downstairs, I ordered them in gold. Black would have looked too harsh in the bedroom.  We got the 10 inch brackets for the bedroom and Terry got pine boards from Home Depot. 

Here is Terry hanging them: 

And a day later freshly stained: ​

I love the way they turned out! Now I need to style them and dress them up with some color. Stay tuned.  

3:

... this one even surprised me ...

The DINING ROOM!  

I was truly perfectly happy with the dining room.   I mean, it looked good and finished. 

I was really happy with it, I liked the dark more formal style, I liked our DIY bar cart ... but I realized when hosting a party recently that we had barely any serving platters. I really never bought any since I didn’t have anywhere to store things like this.

Also - I really want to do some open shelving in the kitchen (Terry may have a stroke) and that will require me to have some closed door to put random stuff in. After all, you can’t just have random stuff hanging out on open shelves. Not pretty.  

I started shopping for a piece of furniture for this space. This was hard. There was a lot of stuff I like and I had a lot of ideas. Downside is that I did not want to spend upwards of $1000 or more. That tends to limit the selection.  

Here is a little preview of what I decided on:

Isn’t it awesome! I love that it stores my fancy glasses and has space for out of season items and serving trays! Horray! And the best part? ….

It is an IKEA HACK! That’s right! I did this for a FRACTION of the cost of the furniture pieces I was looking at! I am not quite finished with it and there is much to say about this. I will blog about it when it is complete.

I have been so inspired by the neat and clean look of white marble, gold, and copper, especially when coupled with the deep jewel tones of fall this season. I found a couple of great buys at Home Goods and Target. Check these out!

The tray above I found at Home Goods. I love the clean look of white marble. The bowl is also from Home Goods but here is one from Target. The napkin holder is Target. I love the copper/rose gold look!

These awesome serving trays are both from Target. Now that I have a place to store my serving boards and trays I allowed myself to finally get some that I love. No more serving holiday meals on regular dishes and paper plates! These would be absolutely perfect for the holidays. You can find the hammered one here, and the smooth one here.

And if you were worried about what happened to our DIY bar cart, it has been re-homed! I still love it and I think it looks even better here than it did at our house.

Cheers and happy weekend, friends!