Fall Family Photoshoot

Our friend Angela (sagerstudios.com) took our family photos again this fall - it was so much fun! Here are some of my favorites, although I really love them all it was very hard to chose.

Elizabeth's Room

Last month Elizabeth moved into her big girl bed. I was dreading the change. She is a very restless sleeper and I was imagining many nights spent picking her up off the floor. I was wrong - the transition was a dream. She loves her new bed and has never once fallen out.

The twin bed frame used to be my Grandpa Mason's bed. My Aunt Joanne held on to it for me after he passed away 3 years ago and my parents were able to get it to us this last fall. I don't have a before picture, but it was a medium wood and looked a bit masculine, so I just gave it a couple coats of white paint. I thought it still needed something more interesting so I distressed it a little. With a quilt as bedding, I thought the "chabby chicness" of it would work.

I need to give a huge shout out to my sister, who made this quilt. It is the most perfect little girl quilt I have ever seen - way nicer than anything I could have found in a store. Elizabeth's baby room was lots of soft lavendar and white, so the the new bedding colours give new life to her new big girl room. I love how the fusia, dark purple and mustard yellow colours are feminine but not too frilly, and have a sort of vintage feel! I know my sister spent many hours making this quilt - and it shows - because I truly have never seen a nicer quilt in my whole life.

This is her dresser area, nothing much changed here: Here are the shutters I found on mega clearance but weren't quite sure what to do with them. They used to be yellow and pink, so I painted out the yellow to white and distressed them too, to match the headboard. I really like the whimsical crown cut-outs: My attempt at distressing: The footboard. She needs this footstool to actually get into her bed because it's so high: A nice closer shot of my sister's work. The fabric has little mermaids on it if you can't really see. She also made the little flower pillow (who's fabric is also featured on the reverse side of the quilt) when she found this perfect matching material! That's all for now - I am now trying to decide on how to recreate an old kitchen table a friend gave me. Hmmm....

Master Bedroom Makeover

Here is our bedroom before. When we moved in just over 2 years ago, we worked on decorating the main floor, bought new furniture, and immediately worked on doing the kids rooms also. Our bedroom was left untouched. It has been the same builder's beige colour (that we chose...) that was painted throughout our whole house when it was built. Even though it's a nice warm colour, I have gotten really sick of it, especially in our bedroom, since it seemed to make our bedroom boring and nothing like the relaxing master bedroom I pictured in my head. Our bedside tables were the same drawers that my sister and I had as kids, and opposite the bed we had a couple more that were a bit bigger, but were starting to fall apart and look yellow rather than white.

My Mom and Dad offered us these bedside tables after they moved out to Victoria - I thought they would be perfect - just perhaps in need of sprucing up. They were in perfect condition, a nice old solid Sears set - just slightly dated... Here is the before picture of our headboard I bought right before we moved in. I bought it second hand and was never happy with the knotty pine finish....but loved the style. Here is our bedroom after. Most things are the same - just lots of paint! I painted the walls a cool grey (I wanted something totally opposite than the very warm beige that stares at me from every other wall of the house) and added an accent wall in a darker grey for the white headboard to punch out from!

Ideally it would be nice to have dark wood floors...but since that will never happen I found the next best thing - a 5'-8' rug on clearance at Superstore for $25. The rug is a rich brown and it's design mimicks wood grain, voila!

This is the bed frame after a few fresh coats of white paint. The side tables from my parents got reinvented with some black paint, and I kept the hardware the same since it looked fine. I thought about doing them white as well, though I was trying to stay away from having everything too "mathcy matchy". I splurged on the side lamps...I the room needed some jelwery to add sparkle. I love Homesense.... This is the dresser I finished this summer - which now holds our new tv. Morgan isn't usually very "encouraging" of my painting projects, since I usually take over the basement during the process, though when our room was finished he had a big smile on his face and said he loved it. He said that it was only missing a new tv....He got up at 6am on boxing day, after he had been throwing up all night Christmas Eve, to get this tv. He managed to get the last one they had at the door crasher price. The things men will do for big tv's....

We also bought the small black/brown Ikea side table to house all of our computer gadgets (the modem, mulitple external hard drives etc...) which were previously sitting on our carpetted floor in the corner (our computer is in a little nook upstairs right outside our room and there was no room on the smal desk for all the other things so he drilled a hole in the bottom of the connecting wall into our room for all the electrical cords). I was hestiant to spent $100 on such a small cabinet that we could have definatley found cheaper somewhere else, or else use something we lready had, though I really loved it and knew it would be a perfect bedside table for Mason's big boy room perhaps in our next house so I was willing to pay a bit extra if it meant it could serve multiple functions.

This is a mirror that I bought at Homesense a couple years ago and the frame was a sort of washed on gold faux finish...which I thought I liked at the time....so I gave it a little face lift by spraying it with flat black paint. Without counting the tv....the room was madeover on a very moderate budget. Paint and supplies probably cost us about $60. All of our dressers/night stands were free (except the one that holds all the computer junk). My area rug was $25, my curtains are the same ones as before, I bought them 3 years ago at Bouclair's in Ottawa on super clearance for $15 and they seemed to work perfectly since they are a grey/blue colour. My lamps were a hefty $100 for both, but they might be my favorite thing in the whole room and much deserved (right?) after all my hard work painting and revamping old furniture instead of buying new.

Now for the next little while I am immersed in different project....potty training.