There's something new in my home office....

Hi friends,

How are you this week? I am finally starting to feel better. I am on a 5 day Z pack antibotics for a sinus infection. It didn't help that I forgot to take it one day. I felt like I was losing my mind there! But on the mend now thank goodness.

Do you notice anything new in my home office? 

Yep, I slipped some fabric below my plastic topper for my desk. I may try to find some really pretty paper at some point but I already had this fabric since it's on the bar stools, pillow, and edges the curtains in this room. There's my sweet daughter, Bryce, in the picture. She's the little rascal who marked up the far lower right edge of the plastic topper with crayon (it will NOT come off! Argg!).

I'm keepin' it real here people. Here are the piles of messes that I have in my home office. Stuff for an upcoming business trip and a wall with paint swatches- still can't find the right shade to paint this room. Now, I'm thinking light blue.

So so so happy springtime is here!

I hope you're doing well.

Happy decorating & living,

Megan

Finally, I'm Sharing Our Kitchen and Missing Our Old Kitchen

Hi friends,
I hope you are well. Thanks for joining me today. I guess I am sharing with you this week the rooms in my home that are not my favorite rooms. After all, we moved in our new house in North Carolina almost a year ago and I think I've just about shared each and every room. I could still share my husband's office and our laundry room but there are not too exciting at this point. So, this week I shared the Bonus Room with you. And now our kitchen. We haven't done a thing to our kitchen because it's a perfectly fine kitchen.

Now, I recognize how lovely it is to have a relatively large kitchen with working appliances, running water, dishwasher, etc. and I definitely keep that in prospective.

But.......this is not my dream kitchen. We had recently renovated our kitchen back in our old house in Virginia before putting our house on the market. We had selected each and every finish and material ourselves so that kitchen which I'll share with you later in this blog below is more like my dream kitchen and a reflection of my style.

However, having written all of that, I am starting to get used to and warm up to the finishes/materials which were chosen for our kitchen (though again they are not the choices I would have made). But, we're trying to go with it and embrace the warm Tuscan kind of mood that our kitchen has to offer.

Here's our perfectly fine kitchen which I am trying to embrace because it would be absolutely insane to change anything about it even if it isn't my style. When I think of our kitchen I think of one word: Brown. Brown, brown, and more brown. I guess that really sums it up for me why I don't particularly like our kitchen. Brown is not my favorite color or even my second or third favorite color. Our kitchen lacks contrast. It's a safe kitchen. It doesn't take any risks in it's decorating. I guess I like risky kitchens that are interesting.

We still want to add some cool pendant lights (maybe 2 or 3) over our bar area. The kids eat at the bar area for every meal (it's an easy area to clean up/ wipe down/ sweep) from those messy rascals.

What I do like about our kitchen:

-the archway into my home office
-how it opens up to our family room and eat-in kitchen
-the bar area
-the recessed lights in the ceiling
-the under cabinet lighting
-stainless steel cabinets

Here is the kitchen from our old house in Virginia that we completely redid:

What I LOVED about our old kitchen:

-the stainless steel sink and drawer pulls (versus the bronze we have now)

-the different shades of blue glass tiles on the backsplash

-the white beadboard on the backsplash

-the cool recycled blue linen floor tiles

-the two glass front cabinets which were lighted to show off pretty things

-the cool stainless steel light over the sink

-the warm bamboo shade on the window

-the variety of lighting options all on dimmers

-the black granite countertop

-the white cabinets

Oh, I miss you little sweet kitchen!

However, I did not love how small it was and that it didn't have a bar area or an island.

Here are some dream kitchens that reflect more of my style:

While I am in the dreaming mood, my ideal kitchen would have two materials/colors of wood-one for the cabinets and one for a large island. I am in LOVE with glass tiles for the backsplash, especially rectangular ones. And it would have color, color, color. Probably white, black, some natural tones, and the perfect shades of blue and green. What about you? What does your dream kitchen look like?

Happy decorating and living,

Megan

Bonus Room

Hi friends,
Thanks for joining me today. How are you doing this week? I am happy my z-pack is doing it's job with my sinus infection this week. I hope you are well.

I wanted to share our Bonus Room with you. Since we don't have a basement in our North Carolina house, I think of our Bonus Room like our basement. It's upstairs near the kids' bedrooms and has my husband's office off of it. It's where we play games, watch mostly kid movies, play wii, and play.

When the kids' have friends over it's a great room to have them entertain their friends in. It also also a futon/sofa so it's an additional space for guests if our guest room is full. Honestly, the BEST thing about our Bonus Room is that when our kids (4 year old boy and almost 6 year old girl) wake up early in the morning (which of course they do each and every morning) they head to the bonus room to watch tv (they're too scared to go downstairs to the family room without us) for a few minutes before we get up. Our only upstairs tv is in the Bonus Room.

There really isn't anything new in our Bonus Room. Basically we reused our basement furniture from our old house in Virginia. Honestly, this room hasn't gotten a lot of attention from us. We use our first floor family room a lot more than this space. Maybe that's why I haven't shared it yet. I have bought some new accessories that I'll share with you. The coffee table for this room is in the corner (I don't think I got a picture of it). We moved it away from the sectional sofa so that we had space for Wii games and Just Dance.

Here is our Bonus Room:

I did pick up the fun graphic blue shade to compliment this room as well as the red graphic tray and shell red and blue flag art:



Storage hiding kids' toys:



My favorite pregnant photo of myself. Pregnant with Bryce (who is now almost 6):

This is actually a red and white quilt that I bought for Christmas time but it seems to work in this mostly blue room with touches of red as an accent color:



Our pets, Raven the dog:

Millie the cat:

Steve tackled this wall:

The previous owners left these cloth red shades for us. They also left us heavy velvet red curtains which I took down and put up the cotton navy curtains (from our old basement in Virginia):



Postcards from Pawley's Island, South Carolina that I matted and framed. One of my favorite inexpensive decorating ideas: frame interesting postcards from fun vacations:

Things I am not crazy about in our Bonus Room:
-the ceiling lights
-the wall color

Maybe we'll get some cool drum lights for the ceiling at some point. We have many, many, many other decorating priorities right now.

Like:
-landscaping backyard (Steve is going to town out there!)
-painting upstairs hallway (Steve's project)
-painting my home office (Steve again)
-purchasing a cool white coral chandelier for our bedroom (bye bye big ugly bronze fan)
-purchasing beautiful Porcelain Blue panel curtains for our bedroom
-redoing Brayden's room: this summer! It's going to be super cool! Including a magnetic chalkboard wall!
-redoing Bryce's room: someday
-spicing up our screened-in porch with an outdoor sectional sofa and lamp

This was our basement in our Virginia house a year ago, as you can see, all of the furniture is the same:

Bye bye for now Bonus Room, one last look:

Thanks for joining me today. I hope you are well.

Happy decorating & living friends,

Megan