Caught On Video
The Nursery Makeover Begins… On Video!
We recently revealed that we’ll be working on a Young House Love nursery… just not for us. We’re super excited to create a fun and functional baby’s room for John’s sister Emily who’s expecting a little boy this October. And of course we have plenty of affordable DIY ideas up our sleeves that we’ll be sharing as we go. The first order of business in Emily’s blank canvas of a guest room was to get some paint up on those bare walls.
But we didn’t just settle for a fresh coat of soft blue-gray, we decided that a cheerful, modern and awesomely random vertical stripe effect was just the thing to get this makeover started with a bang.
The easy one-night process of taping, painting, and peeling was as simple as picking a color palette…
… getting that painter’s tape up on the wall…
… filling in each randomly sized and spaced stripe with one of our four accent colors and peeling off the tape to reveal…
… fresh slices of color around the room (we promise they’re straight, the camera lens just makes them bow out a little).
And we even whipped up this video of the entire painting process with more step by step details and paint color information:
Yes John’s awesomely long arms came in handy for the filming of this video. And that is an Oregon Trail icon on his painting shirt. Good times. Oh and you can watch it here on YouTube if you’re having trouble with Vimeo above.
And since we’ll be keeping a tally of how much our little nursery transformation costs, we’ll share the tally for this phase of the project. For a gallon of wall paint and three sample cans of our stripe colors (we already had the white paint on hand) the room got a totally new look to the tune of just $39. And we’ll also be using the leftover paint for a few more DIY projects around the room so we’ll get even more bang for our buck. Stay tuned…
And because we love a good teaser, we thought we’d share a glimpse of some of the bedding and upholstery choices along with our paint chip color palette so you guys can get a taste of the big picture:
Don’t you love those cute little elephants? Babies are so much fun, even before they’re born. So what about you guys. Any babies on the way? Any nursery makeover details that you’d like to share? Spill the bun-in-the-oven beans.
Tackled Together: The Garage
Ok, so maybe our messy garage wasn’t disastrous enough for you people, but we did discover several new species of spiders in there… and Sherry was “attacked” by a mouse in the cleaning process (it ran over her feet- yes, both of them- but her shrieking made it seem much more vicious). No matter the scale of our mess, it was very satisfying to spend an hour on Saturday morning just purging, sweeping and rearranging for a totally cleared out and organized end product. In case you were wondering what the process looked like, here’s a fun little time lapse video that we made of our big garage clean-up (you can watch it below from Vimeo or over here on YouTube):
As for how we shot the time lapse, it was just a simple set-up using our newly refurbished MacBook’s built-in iSight camera and a downloadable program called Gawker. Then, thanks to the slope of our driveway, we just put the computer on a box (of which we had plenty) and hit record. The whole thing looked like this:
But back to tackling the garage. It was pretty much just a simple cleaning effort this time around. We share your dreams of someday implementing a few stellar organization systems (nothing excites us like a wall of built in cabinetry and a tool-riddled peg board) but we realized during last year’s clean-up that we just don’t have enough stuff to warrant anything major yet. Maybe once we’ve got kids and have accumulated all sorts of frisbees, basketballs, and camping gear we’ll find ourselves excitedly installing an intricate shelving or cabinetry system. But for now we were just be happy to rid our bike seats of cobwebs and put an end to the cardboard box convention that took place where our car could have otherwise been living.
As you may have noticed on the video, we used the tried & true process of moving everything out and creating three groups: 1) trash, 2) recycle/donate and 3) keep. Then once the garage was empty we broke out the brooms to sweep out all the leaves and remove all the remaining cobwebs. Afterwards the “keep” stuff got moved back in (with a more orderly & intentional arrangement this time – garden tools with garden tools, paint with paint, etc). Storing like objects together always makes it easier to find things and creates zones like “paints & stains” (which are housed on the tall tiered shelf) and “rakes & shovels” (which now hang together in a row on wall hooks).
Hopefully we’ll keep the garage looking this way for a while, but then again, we probably said that last year so only time will tell. It seems that our weakness lies in the fact that we’re not always perfect about cleaning up the remnants of past projects. In fact, the clean-up process was a bit of a walk down memory lane. Just check out some of the “artifacts” that we rediscovered on Saturday morning:
- Two catering buckets that The Nest’s photo crew ordered (now used for carwashing)
- A cast iron sink from our old kitchen, which we finally Freecycled yesterday
- Painted pots from an R Home photoshoot, one of which I clumsily kicked over
- Boxes from our recent mattress delivery…
- … nesting in a box from our new patio lounge chairs
- An old metal firepit that got rusty and was replaced by our new DIY stone firepit
- Sticky scraps of balloon from our failed string lantern project for the front porch
But enough about our clean-up, we’re eager to hear more about YOUR weekend projects. We’ve already received a few great before and (much tidier) afters by email, so we’d love if everyone could share links to their pics in the comment section of this post so that we can all marvel at the weekend projects that were accomplished (photos can be uploaded to photo sharing sites like flickr, kodak and shuttefly and linked to for all to see). Thanks again for tackling this project with us! We’ll have to do it again sometime…
Time lapse video music courtesy of MoOt.
House Crashing & Table Setting
Two weekends ago we stopped in Atlanta on our way to Savannah (sounds like the lyrics to a country song) to house crash Jeremy and Katie Bower’s lovely home. And while we were there we whipped up a little decorating movie for all you lemme-see-you-in-3D peeps. Hope you enjoy the tour (and that you check out our table-setting video at the end of this post)!
First we have this adorable mini mud room that Katie whipped up with an ottoman and a few coat hooks. And since we’re no stranger to this method, Burger felt right at home and made himself comfortable from the moment her scampered in the door.
Beyond the entryway is the posh and elegant dining room full of soft blue accents, white china, and beachy accessories. Katie is a blackbelt sale shopper so everything I swooned over ended up being “oh this old thing, it was $1 at Goodwill” or “TJ Maxx, three bucks.” Talk about having some serious decor envy.
I also fell hard for this chic little hutch next to the door that leads to the kitchen, but I couldn’t linger on it too long before the kitchen beyond beckoned me in…
… yeah, this kitch’ has some serious drawing power. The amazing thing is that Jeremy and Katie ripped down walls, learned how to run their own electrical, installed stock cabinetry, and even laid their own floors to turn this formerly closed off kitchen into an open and expansive masterpiece. Everything from the range hood (we actually have the same exact one!) to the backsplash was put in with their own four hands, and we must admit that we found ourselves gaping at their handiwork at every turn.
And no detail is too small for Katie. From the white china that she artfully arranged in her doorless hutch to the white dishtowel that she hand sewed (she added the pom poms!), not a smidge of style was sacrificed even though her accessories never broke the bank.
Thanks to tearing down a wall, the kitchen opens up to an inviting little den with a fireplace that they tiled themselves and a coffee table Katie found on Craigslist and completely reinvented (the power of white paint is a beautiful thing).
Katie also has a soft spot when it comes to clean white accessories, and everything from the Goodwill candlesticks to the DIY art made us feel right at home. And you know I was all over her adorable ceramic bird, right? I’m nothing if not consistent, and my penchant for white ceramic animals knows no bounds. The fact that this little guy was a cheep- er, cheap score (another Goodwill find) made me green with ceramic animal envy.
Katie and Jeremy also widened the passageway between the den and their living room so the entire first floor feels open and airy. And is that a white ceramic horse head that you see on the coffee table? The same one we have on our TV stand in the den? Yesireebob. Gotta love an equine bust from Tarjay.
We also love the fresh pops of green throughout the space (in fact, one of those lovely pillows on Katie’s couch was actually a Pottery Barn placemat that she ripped apart and stuffed with batting). She’s lucky enough to live near a Pottery Barn outlet, so everything from the couch to those awesome white ottomans was snagged on the cheap (yeah, the whole trip was punctuated by envious gasps).
And just in case it’s not painfully clear that Katie and Jeremy could easily flip houses for a living, here’s a bathroom that Katie recently renovated for under 500 beans (yup, she worked a wet saw and installed her own molding with only a wee bit of husbandly assistance).
You might have seen mention of Katie’s dressing room a few days ago when we crashed her closet. It turns out that while most people have a hanging bar and half a dresser of storage space, she has an entire third bedroom with a wall of wardrobes for clothing/jewelry/shoe storage- and the other side of the room serves as the most charming bonus space for settling down with a good book or sleeping an extra guest.
In another stroke of bathroom brilliance, Katie and Jeremy completely transformed their upstairs guest bath with some moody khaki paint and an amazing wood frame that they mounted around the room’s original mirror for an updated and customized effect that’s so ooh la la. They even distressed each piece of wood with nails, chains, and a hammer before staining and installing ‘em.
And last but not least is their peaceful master suite, which actually bears a bit of a resemblance to ours. In fact we featured Katie’s bedroom pics as a Reader Redesign last year after she sent pics our way to say that she modeled her curtained wall after our very own master bedroom.
And now we’ll leave you with our little table setting video extravaganza. At first we debated what to tape, but we both loved the idea of doing something in stages right in front of the camera in real time. Sure it took a while to sift through Katie’s extensive servingware and accessory collection to create five different table settings and put ‘em together on film (it took us about 20 takes total), but we’re oh so proud of our little film-fest and we hope you enjoy our step by step table sprucing tutorial.
It bears mentioning that some of the settings are a bit more robust than others (we didn’t add the leaf to Katie’s table, so feel free to adapt some of our ideas on a bigger surface or remove a few elements to create more space for platters of food). Oh and there are a few other things that you may notice. Here’s what to look out for:
- We’re both incredibly weird and nervous in the beginning.
- We get progressively loopier, as if we’re downing champagne off camera (we weren’t).
- I confuse apple trees with cherry trees.
- Katie squeezes in some of her signature potty humor.
- Lots of talking with our hands (our moms are Italian).
- I mispronounce faux-bois like foi-gras. Twice.
- Katie saying “pull” the southern way when she’s making ribbon curls.
Thanks so much for devoting eleven minutes of your life to viewing our little flick! Here’s a slightly lower quality one that might be easier to play on your computer if the one above is jumpy. I’d love to know which setting was your favorite. And if I’m louder/nerdier/shorter/scowlier/more awkward than you may have thought. Oh and a big thank you goes out to the Katie (and her main man Jeremy) for letting us take photos of their casa and helping us set the table a bunch of times. Be sure to check out her take on everything over on Bower Power- you know she’ll tell you if we showed up with bad breath…
Itching for more table setting ideas? Here are seven other festive options and a holiday table setting post for your viewing pleasure.
A Video Tour Of Our Nest
You may have seen the old, grainy video house tours that we shot a while back using our decade-old, YouTube-averse camcorder. If you did, forget them. Pronto. And instead, head over to The Nest’s TV On Demand page to check out a new and (key word) professional video tour of our home (watch it here). It puts those other camcorder run-ins to shame… so much so that we’re not going to talk about them anymore. Agreed?
The fine folks over at The Nest stopped by a little while ago to tape the tour, which involved a pretty full afternoon of videotaping and doing our best to keep the cheeseball factor to a minimum. Both Sherry and I (yes, I was allowed to be in front of the camera for this one) described our favorite rooms, DIY projects and style hints while the cameras rolled (and rolled, and rolled). I think we both managed to sound coherent, but Burger still ended up stealing the show with his sneaky chihuahua antics. We should’ve known…
We hope you guys enjoy the tour (again, you can see it here). We’re thrilled with the final product, so a big “THANKS” to all the great people over at The Nest for inviting us to do the tour and putting together such an entertaining finished product. Burger sends dog kisses your way.
