Pre Halloween

I can barely wait for next Friday! It's October 1st and every October 1st I have my Sweetheart pull out the Halloween bins from the garage and I get busy decorating! I absolutely love it!!! Our first year together my Sweetheart was surprised with my obsession with holiday decor. But now he totally gets into it too. For Halloween, he takes control of decorating the front yard while I work inside. It's great!

I went to Michael's and Hobby Lobby yesterday; I was picking up a few last minute items. Mr. Bones in the picture above being one of them. I thought he looked cute in the cake stand. I may add some feathers or black leaves to it...not sure yet. I just couldn't resist putting him in there.

My Sweetheart walked in the kitchen after I had put him in and thought it looked really cool. :)

Hall Bathroom

My Labor Day project that I forcasted to take only 3 days has morphed into a three (plus) week project! And such an easy project too: paint the walls, re-purpose accessories to match the room and sew a new shower curtain.


It started like this:




And currently sits in this state:

I have the walls painted. The accessories are in the room, not yet properly placed (tags still hang from some). Awesome.

The problem, I believe, is with the shower curtain. I don't know how to make a shower curtain. I can see it in my head, I just get scared when it comes down to actually doing it. So for now, my shower curtain is fabric draped over the rod with the hooks sitting on top of the fabric:




Not a great picture I know. My issue is with the holes where the hooks go. They are like button holes. I don't know how to make one button hole, much less twelve of them. I read online that there is a "button hole presser foot" on the sewing machine that will make the buttonhole on the fabric. Great, I still don't know how to do it.

My Sweetheart asked why I didn't just buy a new shower curtain. Well, because I wanted a shower curtain that was more than 72 inches long. I want to hang the rod higher so I need an 85 inch shower curtain. Yet another one of my brilliant ideas.

My goal: complete this bathroom this coming weekend. Wish me luck. It's a guest bathroom so no one is using it right now. But with the holidays around the corner...I need to get moving on it!

Pillow Dilemma

Yes, I have a pillow dilemma. Last spring, I changed the color scheme in my living room/dining room to a lighter, more spring/summery color -- see here. But wiith Fall upon us, I am thinking I want to change my colors again. Mostly, the pillows and the candles and the throws. I love the neutral of the curtains so they will stay.

Currently, I have apple green as my accent color:


My pillows now:

The new pillows I just bought (on a whim). I love the brown color on the pillow and I love the pattern!

Which is better?

My thoughts behind the purchase were that the brown color totally keeps with the 'darker colors for fall/winter' rule. The second is that I am totally loving the color blue these days. I can totally picture blue candles, blue throws and these pillows in the room.

The dilemma is this: does the light yellow, light blue and light green in the pillow make it too summery??

Fall Wreath

I love decorating for the holidays! I don't normally pull out my fall decor until Thanksgiving. It's usually October 1st that kicks of the holiday decor. But this year, I just wanted to get my fall decor out on Labor day. The only reason I didn't is because all of my fall decor is in my Thanksgiving bins in the garage and sifting through it to pull out only a few items didn't seem worth it. Only because on October 1st, I would be putting it all back so I can have my Halloween decorations out for the month of October.

So I thought to myself.. maybe I'll just put a fall wreath on the door.. so that from the street it will appear as if I'm in full Fall spirit! Great idea! So I went to Joanne's today and picked up a vine wreath, garland and some ribbon. I've been seeing square wreaths everywhere online lately so that was my inspiration for this project.

Using floral wire, I attached the leaf garland to the vine wreath:




Then I made a bow out of the ribbon that I bought:



And here is my end result:

I think it looks great! Now I feel like I'm in total Fall decor compliance!

Have a great weekend!

Oh my stars, it's finally here!

It's here! It's here!! My Arizona Cardinals license plate came in today!


I was surprised to see that my Sweetheart was as excited as I was! He is a die hard Cowboys fan (hence the Dallas cowboy blue on the wall...) but he was totally supportive of my decision to order a Cards license plate.

Oh my stars, I totally love it!!!

Go Cards!!!

Floor Project Complete!

Wow! It's been over a month since my last post. Time sure does fly! We finished the floor project. It actually only took 3 days to complete the entire house (minus the bedrooms).

Here's the picture I last posted which shows what it looked like while they worked on it:


And here's how it looks now:

We bought the tile at Lowes. It was on sale. It's not the most glamorous of tiles but we had limited funds. We didn't want to spend too much since we wanted to make the house look nice mostly for resale value. Even though it's not super expensive, it still looks very nice:



We've been on the hunt for rugs. We need one for the living room and for the dining area and for the entrances. Until we find what we want, I bought these at Target. They help keep dirt outside:




My Sweetheart has been aching for a new TV. The TV we had was a big screen but it was projection and fit nicely into this cut out. We decided months ago that he could get his new TV this year and he had been on the hunt for weeks now. He was looking for the best deal. I outlined the size of the TV he was looking for with painters tape so we could see what it would look like on the wall. This was our view for the past 3 weeks:

Since his last TV was a projection, it took almost the entire wall and we used a shelf to house the electronics (see here). Well since we were getting a flat screen that either had to be mounted or set on top of something, we decided it was time for a new entertainment center too:

I know that shot is a little messy. I was listening to my ipod while cleaning (you can still see my cleaning supplies). Oops.

On to my new project! I am painting the hall bath. Previously builder white with beige, brown and burnt orange decor. Here's a peek at the new color:

Back to work. I think it's going to be stunning!