Bathroom Before & Afters

It's been a LOOOOOONG time since I've posted anything about our bathroom remodels. And in all reality - I NEVER posted anything about our hall bathroom, just our master bathroom. 

Here's the big reveal of the master bathroom, and some of the photos you'll find there:

The big beautiful frameless shower door... that is currently quite soap-scumy.

But now, here are some pictures of the hall bathroom (aka the PINK bathroom). This is after we moved in and tried to make the pink "work". 

And now... the beautiful blissful new hall bathroom:

We used the same tile in both bathrooms, for the floor and the shower walls, but this one has a tub and shower instead of just a shower. The curtain was actually from my apartment, and was only supposed to be a stand in until I found something else. But it matches really well! 

The walls are a beautiful smokey blue-gray, and I loved them so much that we painted the big boy room the same color! 

We love love LOVE these bathrooms and are so thankful to not have pink and blue anymore! :)

Dining Room Shelves: {Before & After}

I love the display shelves that are in our kitchen/dining room area, but I've never really felt like I had them "styled" in the best way. My wonderful sis-in-law, Vanessa, is a PRO at styling. We tried to coordinate schedules to have her come over and help me work on them, but it never worked out. 

Then POOF! I came home from the hospital after having Miller and the styling fairy had come!! She is so sweet - she took before pictures before she started re-doing it, in case I didn't like it! (Yeah right!!)

So here's my before. Fine, but nothing special. And I HATED all the mismatched glass pieces near the bottom; I couldn't figure out what to do with them.

And the AFTER!! The first thing I noticed was how AWESOME all the glass pieces looked on the top!!! I hadn't even thought of that! And now the rest of the shelves don't look nearly as cluttered. I love the little "scenes" she made with the books and the green canisters. Heck - I love everything!!

Here's a side by side:

Isn't it awesome?! I love it, and I'm so glad Vanessa took a chance and just DID it for me! 

THANKS SIS!!!

Evolution of the Big Boy Room

{This is my 900th POST!!! Oh my word, I can't believe I have been blogging long enough to have 900 posts. Wow!}

Let's start at the VERY beginning, yes? Here is the back bedroom when we first bought the house 4 years ago. We affectionately called this room the Rainbow Room, and planned for it to be our office.

As the office it was a mishmash of furniture, and no one really used it much. 

Then we got rid of the couch and added a full sized bed to make this an office/guest room when Jack came along. As you can see with the addition of the two computer monitors and the TV, Jason actually did use this room! The bedding was from my apartment, and we actually got new bedding before we changed this to be the Big Boy Room (BBR), but this is basically how it looked for over a year.

And NOW as the Big Boy Room!!

Navy blackout curtains, blue-gray walls (the same color as our hall bathroom), a fun new train table, my FAVORITE trellis rug, and some of Jack's furniture (crib, changing table, bookshelf) from the nursery. Now, I hesitated to even post pictures yet, because it's not "done" but who am I kidding - things are NEVER done around here!!

Now for my favorite view! The stripes wall!!!

I REALLY love how this turned out, but I almost gave up on it before even starting! We have plaster (read: textured) walls and trying to use a laser level to pencil in a straight line was IM-POSSIBLE!! Luckily my friend Casey's sister had written a blog post about painting stripes in her boys' room, and it was immensely helpful! Measure down from the ceiling and draw dots every foot or so, then connect the dots with tape. Brilliant! My mom painted everything else while I taped up the stripes. It took a while but I'm so glad I didn't throw in the towel! 

I have a really cool map that I got for Jason a few years ago, that I want to frame and put above the crib, along with a few other accents to make the space feel more finished. 

I was also planning to put shelves above both windows to corral all of Jack's stuffed animals, but for now, they live here. :)

And just to show you where we are in the nursery, here's a "right now" picture. I didn't even try to straighten up.

We moved the full size bed in here (see the awesome new bedding hiding under all that junk?), left the big chair, and got a crib that matches Jack's (thank you Miller family!!) which will go on the left wall. I plan to sleep in here at the beginning with Little Brother, nurse in the chair, and let him sleep in his big boy crib (which Jason will be assembling this weekend). 

We are going to play it by ear to see how long we will have the baby in here before moving the boys into a room together - probably 9 months-1 year, but we'll see. Then we'll have another furniture rearrangement and make this room more formally the guest room. Or maybe I will have already changed my mind by then. :)

And like I said, the BBR is not "finished" yet, but we're getting there!

Jack loves the "neeeeeew room" and has been sleeping like a champ in there! 

Last Look at Jack's Nursery :(

Oh goodness. Just the title is killing me. 

I've been REALLY excited about getting the Big Boy Room (BBR) ready for Jack (and Little Brother when he's a bit older), but for the BBR to be done, Jack's nursery as it has always been, has to be dismantled a bit. :( 

So I thought I would do one last look at the nursery before we start moving things around. 

Here's what the room looks like right now. 

And a final video tour I did the other day:

My little boy looks SO BIG in his bed!!

...compared to the tiny little thing he was in this picture at 6 weeks - ahh!!

The gallery wall still looks the same as it did when I finished it - I will DEFINITELY have a hard time taking this down! (to move some of the pieces over to the BBR)

One funny change is this wall:

Besides looking like completely different colored dressers (the first picture is more accurate), you can tell that Little Man has accumulated a TON of stuffed animals over the last year and a half! We're going to add a new element in the BBR to corral some of these friends, so that the bookshelf can be available to hold - wait for it - more books!

the original nursery reveal

nursery update - the gallery wall reveal

Well... nothing left to do now but start moving stuff! We're going to try to move everything but his crib to the BBR and bring in the full sized bed from the office/guest room in the next few days. Then we'll let him start sleeping in the new room! He already loves it - my mom painted it and we did a cool feature wall(!!), and he goes in there all the time and says "Jack's NEWWWWW room", so I think he will be happy to move. It's just Mama we have to worry about over here!

Do you get sad when the "end of an era" comes? Surely I'm not the only sap around here...

Inspiration

I've been feeling inspired lately (in spurts, mind you). 

And here are a few of the things that have been inspiring me:

One of my FAVORITE bloggers (iHeartOrganizing) is featured in this season's Storage magazine, so I HAD to get it! I also saw the newest HGTV Magazine and between the two mags - there is so much beautiful eye candy! I'm not usually a big magazine person (I've cancelled all my subscriptions because I would never read them and they just added to my clutter problem), but these two are awesome.

My family got me the Young House Love book for Christmas! I hadn't actually seen it in person, so I had no idea that it was this thick hardcover book with all kinds of tips and tricks - it's a really awesome resource! And I got Organized Simplicity (by Tsh of the Simple Mom blog) about a year ago, and just pulled it out again this fall. The first half of the book is the mindset behind living simply, and the second half is a room-by-room cleaning, organizing, and simplifying guide - both helpful at different points of your organizing journey.

Finally, I've been reading through 7 by Jen Hatmaker (another blogger, do you see a trend here??) and it has been really good, but hard to get through. You can read more about it if you want to, but basically it's a convicting read about how much STUFF we have. It will make you want to get rid of a million things... and if you're like me - you need to!

So between all these things - getting rid of stuff, simplifying, and beautifully displaying the things we choose to keep - I'm feeling very inspired. 

The best thing I've been doing is writing down smaller tasks of things to do. A big goal right now is to clear out the office and transform it into the Big Boy Room. Well, that's overwhelming, but "go through everything under the bed" or "put up curtains" are not nearly as daunting. And y'all know I love to cross things off my list! 

What's inspiring you these days?

Blue Bathroom: REVEAL!!

Whooooo hoooooo!! It's time for a REALLY good reveal! :)

Let's take a look at the "Blue Bathroom" BEFORE & AFTER:

I seriously can't believe how amazing it looks! We are SO HAPPY with the change!

Here's a closer look at the shower: 

Now, it's not 100% finished... I know, I know - it never ends! We still need to find a shelf/cabinet to put above the toilet, install a towel bar and TP holder, and touch up the paint. 

But it has come so far!!

Okay friends - what do you think?

(Pssst! Wondering what happened to the OG Daily News? Check out my new blog name here!)

Pantry: Before & After

At the end of March, I found out about a show called Clean Freaks (link to the whole show!) on HGTV that featured one of my very favorite blogs, iHeartOrganizing! I recorded it and I literally watched is 4 or 5 times. I was INSPIRED! 

My house was a wreck... cluttered and not clean, but this was the kick in the pants I needed to change that. I knew I had the time to do it, I just had to have the drive! I set a few realistic goals and one of them was to organize our pantry. 

Here is the before:

I had already pulled almost everything out of the bottom left before I thought "Hey, I should probably take a BEFORE picture..." There were 2 boxes of oatmeal, a box of Ritz crackers, a box of Club crackers, a cake mix & frosting, a brownie mix, a few packs of crackers, etc. etc. etc. 

Then the whole right side only has one shelf where we keep the spices and our medicines, and all our extra plastic bags. The bottom houses Dash's dog food, and a few stockpile items.

Now, before I got started on all this (and after seeing some of the AMAZING pantries on Clean Freaks - swoon!) I made a list of all the see-through containers I needed to buy to make my pantry into what it needed to be. Then when I actually started, I decided that once I decluttered and organized it, THEN I would decide what extra containers I needed.

Here's the after:

The bottom left has a little green basket full of oatmeal packets (rather than the boxes), and in the middle is a basket holding the sleeves of crackers (instead of all the boxes). Everything else is just reorganized a little bit on the left side and it looks and feels so much better! Then on the right side, I found the green container for $7 bucks at Walmart and filled it with the stockpile items on the bottom and the bags in the top drawer. 

So all in all I spent $7 on this little before and after! 

I may get some more see through containers at some point, 

but for now, it makes me happy every time I open it. :)

Have you done any spring cleaning projects?

(I know Alex has!)

Blue Bathroom: Progress

I think it's about time for a little master bathroom progress, don't you think?

Let us begin again with the official "Before" pictures: 

Then after Jason started demo...

  

...And finished demo. Yikes. Not a pretty space.

Then the drywall went up! It's actually starting to look like a room again!

(Apart from demo which Jason did entirely by himself, 

we had others do the drywall, tiling, plumbing, electrical, etc.)

Then the backer board went up...

...And sneak peak! Here's some of the tile up in the shower!

As with all things, it's taking a little longer than we originally expected, but we were also a little bit unaware of how long things usually take. That said, ALL the tiling (and grouting) will be done tomorrow! Whoo hoo! Then next week we will start putting all the fun stuff back in and HOPEFULLY by next weekend, we will have a functioning (if not done) master bathroom!