Stencilled Herringbone Wall

I've had quite an obsession with the herringbone pattern for awhile now and I had been wanting to do something with this wall in our kitchen for a long time.

One random Wednesday afternoon I threw it out there to Nels and we pulled out the painters tape and magic happened.

I had been looking around at different stencil companies and I had actually decided I was just going to bite the bullet and buy one but the whole idea of stencilling kinda scares me.  How do you keep that stencil straight on the wall?  Doesn't paint get everywhere??  And most importantly I did not want to pay for a stencil plus any other extra supplies I might have needed.  I still LOVE the results of stencilling I see online but I'm not convinced I could do it.

Nels thought he could easily tape off the wall... so he taped the whole thing off for me. we used this tutorial on pinterest for a reference and it was GREAT!!  I wanted a bit of a different pattern so when it came down to painting I just alternated the white colour a bit differently

We used Benjamin Moore Cloud White paint that we have for painting our trim and the original wall colour is Hawthorne yellow (also Benjamin Moore).  Best part is in total this project cost us $8.20  and that's cause we ran out of tape so I ran to the hardware store in town to get some.  I LOVE a quick painting project that has major impact.

Our kitchen is my favourite room in the house so we do like to play around with decorating it a bit.  We put the most money and by far the most time into fun projects for this room.  Next up we are going to paint the door that leads to the deck red and I have some fabric ordered to sew some curtains… we'll see how that goes.

Making our back entrance awesome

This is the title of one of my boards on pinterest so on Nels' days off this week we started actually doing this.

Here is my #1 inspiration for the room... absolutely love what this girl did with her front entrance!  You can find the link to her project here

Our back entrance was looking super scary and that made me sad so i started cleaning it out one day and Nels and I got to talking about whether to use the tile we had for the floor or get some cheap linoleum (the room is about 190 square feet) so we decided to use the tile we have to save on the cost and then Nels could lay it himself.  

This is what the room was looking like a few weeks ago...yikes, here's the cat food and the freezer and the drying rack and the shoe rack and the laundry hamper all in the same ugly picture:(

This pic was taken before we had the doors in for the bathroom and kitchen (which did make it look much more 'finished' anyway)

here is our beautiful washer and dryer with a fairly ugly plastic shelf beside them... that had to go

First things first for the flooring, we had to move everything out.  The freezer and shelves for tools went in the basement and our washer and dryer found a new home in the kitchen.  Not gonna lie... we kinda like them there:)

Here's the sub floor going down and the head of my handyman. 

The home of the washer and dryer and the lonely shelf

Sub floor is finished and you can see the doors are in and now all they need is some trim.

Closet looking cleaner but in need of some doors and trim

Sub floor looking from kitchen into laundry room

Ok, enough subfloor pics, lets get to the tiling!!!  Here's the first bit of glue going down...

... and the first few tiles.   Wahoo!!

So this is how far we got on the first day after we realized that we were short 8 boxes of tile.  Lets just say the people working at Carpet One might have failed "measuring 101"

After a quick trip to Calgary (complete with and Ikea run for some pic frames to put up in here) we had more tile and grout and glue and whatnot.

Here's the last bit of tile waiting to go in

We were all excited to see the big scary room looking a lot more awesome already:)

So obviously the next step will be to grout and then paint and cut trim for the doors and baseboards.  

My job comes in when we have the trim, baseboards and wainscoting up and its wall painting time.

Then we'll put hooks up and add a bench and get some art on the walls and we will have one sweet looking back entrance:) 

Just to keep up with my New Years resolutions I thought I'd post some stuff we've been doing on the house

I love our little "labour of love home".  We have so much fun dreaming up things to do to it and I am so lucky to have a husband who encourages and helps me paint and decorate and organize and re-purpose old crappy furniture over and over again.  

Mason jar candle holder


We decided to have a bit of a "do it yourself" Christmas decoration year.  Basically we weren't aloud to spend any money on Christmas decorations.  I have a rule that I'm only aloud to buy Christmas decorations AFTER Christmas when they're 75% off so that kinda puts a bit of a damper on the Christmas decorating but it makes you get creative

Here are our Mason Jars that we decorated with some ribbon I got from Costco last year.  Just glued the ribbon with a glue gun and threw a tea light inside and that was that

Christmas paper creation

I'm actually not even sure what to call this but Nelson took some strips of leftover wrapping paper once a few gifts were were wrapped and he rolled them up and stuck them in this glass jar and there you have it... a "wrapping paper jar thingy"

Decorative Clothespins

First of all I did these a long time ago after finding the idea on Young House Love.  They're sweet to hang pics from and I plan on doing them in Molly's play room with letters from the alphabet once I get around to decorating it.  These are currently hanging in my office/sewing room and if the room was even somewhat tidy there would be a better view of where they are but a closeup was the safest thing to do.  

The paper and yellow ribbon are from Michaels.  Clothespins from the dollar store and a regular ol' gluestick was used to paste paper onto the clothespins

Framing the thermostat

I got this idea from Pinterest and it was the sweetest thing ever to jazz up our thermostat.  The frame is from here.  All we had to do was cut out the back with an exacto-knife and throw it on the wall... awesome!

Here's a little perspective of what it looks like in the house.

Wall Gallery

I finally got around to putting up my very first wall gallery.  We love it:)

Here are the 3 lonely frames I had in this space originally:

Here are the frames we added.  The original 3 frames were from Homesense and the black frames are from Ikea.  The extra white frame is also Ikea

Here's a different angle

close-up shot of a few pics developed from Hawaii and some free printables I  developed at Costco

Printables

I've been quite a regular user of the Costco photo centre lately.  I printed out these prints and framed them for the kitchen.  Frames are from Ikea and prints were found on a lengthly "free printable" search on the web and unfortunately I have no idea where the tree came from now but the Subway art is from here

Fabric

Last but not least I picked up this super awesome Amy Butler shower curtain from Bed Bath and Beyond.  It was regular 50$ but on sale for 13$... yeah!!   I LOVE the pattern and I'm going to make it into two small curtains for the openings to the tunnel in the playroom.  

Yesterday I finally got around to painting our door in the kitchen and Nels is at the paint store right now getting some paint for the upstairs bathroom and the coffee table in the living room... Hopefully I'll have time to post pics of those things in a few days.

My latest Addiction

Pinterest....
It is so lovely.  Basically its the best thing to happen to the internet.  I could literally spend all day on there finding cool things to make/buy/bake/paint and since i've been on a bit of a hiatus from anything house or crafty since Molly was born i've had a bit of an itch lately.

so here begins my one of many posts of things i made that were inspired by pinterest.

wreath made from cinnamon sticks.  Very simple and could probably be up year round if i switched out the ribbon.  Currently on our bedroom door but after Christmas i'm moving it to the kitchen

quote sitting in my office

partly pinterest, partly Young House Love.  wrapping up books as presents to Christmas-fy our armoire 

more to come regarding the house as I work on making the office awesome and the trim goes up in the next few weeks (hopefully!)