Fall, fall everywhere!

Let me just start off by saying that Fall is my favorite season.  Ever.  If it could stay hoodie and jeans weather all year round, I'd be thrilled.  Throw in color changing leaves, UGGs, northfaces and pumpkin spice lattes and my life is complete.

We are currently trying to save every ounce of extra money since now the house is done and decorated, we figured it would be a good time to start planning a wedding lol.  So while I've been eating breakfast at home and bringing my lunch, I still find a way to spend money on holiday decor.  I can at least use it next year, right? :)


First off, to get into the fall mood, you need lots of fall goodies.  These two things made my weekend.  Pumpkin wine which smells real bad but tastes amazing and pumpkin spice k-cups for our Keurig.  Yum.

Yarn Wreath

With the edition of pinterest in my life, I have found so many cute craft ideas.  I decided to jump on the yarn wreath bandwagon and make one of those!


I decided to do a mixture of orange and mustard yellow.  J told me it reminded him of a 70s couch and I got real discouraged...I may or may not pouted for a good hour and a half and left it laying there on the floor barely started.

 

He then went upstairs to watch football and I went to town.  It really isn't hard...just very very very tedious.  Very.

I'm not very good at tutorials obviously.  I added some felt flowers, stuck it on a ribbon and tacked it to the back of my mirror and tadaaaaaaaaaaaa

I followed this tutorial if you are interested :)

Moving onward to: 

Fall Wreath Numero Dos!

I ran to Michael's, picked up a twine wreath with a 40% off coupon, grabbed some packaged leaves, warmed up the hot glue gun and got moving.

Found this cute little scarecrow on a stick at Walgreens for $1...

stuck his stick into the twine, hot glued him down and got real leaf crazy.

Final product?

Other Fall Decor

That's right...I learned how to cover books from Raven Symone

I am slowly getting more and more D&Ry ladies!  Be proud!

Canvas Dying

A few weeks ago, I turned this plain canvased wine bottle from west elm from white to offwhite with the help of a wash bucket, warm water, tape (since my bucket apparently wasn't big enough) some teabags.

From this:

To this!

Not to shabby if I say so myself!  Esp for me who usually prefers to pay for things instead of attempt to make them my own myself   :)

Speaking of canvas, I fell in loveeeeeee with the canvas wrapped books Restoration Hardware had set up all around the store a few months back...they weren't for sale (yes, I asked lol. Even if they were, I'm sure they'd be $48.50/book).  I thought to myself...I could make these!  FI took a liking to these little book ends from Z Gallerie...

 

and insisted that they have a spot on our multi shelf media center.  So it became my goal to cover some books.  Who did I turn to? Google.  And who taught me how to do it?  Yes that's right...Raven Symone.  You know, the little girl from The Cosby Show?  Found some random tutorial on how to make padded covered journals and went from there!

Canvas Covering

This was my original inspiration from Restoration Hardware.  I just think the look of the all similar books looks so...polished and neat.

 

What you'll need:

• Books of different sizes/heights of your liking. (I sure hope nobody picks up my books, because I found the most random books I could get my hands on from my parents house!)
• Canvas (we got ours at Joanne with a coupon)
• Hot glue (I'm sure there are better glues, but coming from a DIY newbie, it is what I had ha)

1.  My girl Raven suggested cutting a 2" border around each side of the book.  I found that was waaaay too much material, so I stuck to between 1"-1.5", depending on how straight I cut :)

 

 

2.  Next, I cut two slits on each side of the binding on both ends of the book-top and bottom.

 

3.  Starting with the front cover, I then put a strip of hot glue on the top edge of the book and pressed the fabric down, then did the same for the bottom edge of the book and then did the same for the side edge as well.  Repeat on the back cover.

*TIP* I realized that after covering 3/6 of my books that I prob should have cut off the extra fabric so it wasn't so bunched up in the corners...eh you live and learn...it still worked out ok :)

4.  I forgot to take a pic of this part, but I then just chopped off the flap at the binding pretty close to the edge of the book and kept pressure on them for a few hours to avoid the covers popping up

And the finished product(s)...along with one of the coolest books ever Post Secret!

Dresser Makeover

Last but not least, I finally painted my dresser!  Our master isn't huge and I wear scrubs on a daily basis (all hangable) and FI wears dress clothes and suits (again with the hanging)  so we both agreed that we didn't really want to buy an actual bedroom package since we didn't need the dresser space (plus, the nightstands and dressers that came with the frame we liked we not easy on the eyes.  yikes.)

Of course I forgot to take pics, but it looked something like this before...simple.

 

annnnnnnnnnd after a little sanding and a few coats of SW Nifty Turquoise, we were in business!

 I decided on turquoise because I wanted to paint our laundry room (er....laundry closet) this color and FI was worried it wouldn't exactly go with our theme on the main floor (it is off the kitchen)....I agreed, even though I'll ever admit that to him, and got turquoise out of my system by dresser fun.  We put it in our walk-in just for pjs and stuff like that and just have an ikea hemnes black brown in our actual room.

Picked up these cute little knobs from World Market for 2/$4.50 which was a pretty good deal!

Kept myself pretty busy these last couple weeks!

 

The great transformations! (And a funny mishap on my part haha)

House tour coming next week!  Having our housewarming party Saturday, so it will be as ready and clean as it ever will be!

Our builder was pretty good with picking neutral light fixtures and such, but then there was the kitchen and dining room light fixtures...

Exhibit A

The kitchen "bathtub" as we liked to call it lol.

To Pottery Barn Track Lighting!

Exhibit B

The Dining Room "chandelier"

To a 52' ceiling fan!

Exhibit C

"Boob lights" as FI likes to call them.  We still need to figure out what to do with these fellas...The same domes are all over the house, which is fine, but why place them like that? After he said that, it is all I can think about when I see it! HA!

My pretty windows!

We originally went to Home Goods by our house to pick up a little end table that we had seen and wanted for the top of our stairs just for a vase or something just to fill up the space...well we got into a little debate because I was convinced the one they had there was the original one we liked and FI was convinced there was a 2 drawer one.  This sparked a "Well no, Ellie...I know I am right...let's go to another HG and I'll prove you wrong!"  Bringing about a friendly bet-whoever wins has to buy the other an item for the house of their choosing, under $100.

Ended up being a blessing in disguise because we found this guy! (ahem...I'll have you know that they DID only have the one drawer table (which I knew lol) and I had a pic of it I had forgotten I took, so guess who bought these pretty little bench...yep..he did :)

I went back and forth with what to do with the space. Originally, it looked like this

It just needed something.  So after finding it, we bought it immediately.  With the addition of these curtains from Crate and Barrel, I think it ended up looking pretty good!  Need some different throw pillows, but those work for now.  Maybe some color!

This just made me laugh...who knew you couldn't wash/dry dishtowels with regular towels?  Learned that the hard way!  The green one on top went thru a cycle...the guy underneath, did not.

Also picked up this little guy at Home Goods for $40 the hallway upstairs...I'll post some pics of that decorated soon! :)

  

Closing...crown molding...furniture building...and everything inbetween.

 That's right ladies and gents...the keys are finally ours!

After nearly 7 months of waiting for construction to be complete, we finally own it!  YAY!!!!  We closed on Friday the 10th.  Went pretty smoothly, but of course, we got stuck with a new closer from our lender which resulted in a call to both of our employers where we've worked for over 3 years to verify employment.  My call went great ( I work in a small medical office)...but of course for J, he works in a pretty high profile department for a pretty high profile organization so asking the call board operator if he works there, wasn't cutting it.  An hour later, his department head was finally reached and all went well...phew! :)

DAY 1:

First thing we did was let the painter in and he started our bedrooms.  LOVE the color!  

Dovetail by SW

Finding a good gray was nearly impossible but I am really happy with how it came out!  (I'll add pics of each color as they go up and add to the paint color page.)  Built two of those cute little endtables turned nightstands from World Market  since I despised the ones that were part of our bedroom set, and called it a night!

DAY 2:

Attempted to do things around the house and ended up with all this instead.  

ALLLLLL the basics :

• Lean Cuisines
• Water
• Diet Coke
• Boxed Sangria
• Beer
• THE best fat free ranch dressing in the world
• Box of coffee
• Creamer for said box of coffee

Followed by a classy first dinner together in the new house of take out italian, on a tarp, on the floor with takeout plates, no knife and sharing of a fork since we only had one.  Perfect!

DAY 3 :

Passed out a key to the painter and a key to our friend doing our crown molding.  I needed to sleep past 6am!  Crown molding is finished and BEAUTIFUL!!!!!!!!! And after seeing all of the work he put in,  I know that if we would have attempted to do this on our own, we would have "crown mold..."  not "crown molding" because I would have last one wall and would have been DONE ha.

 

DAY 4:

Bathroom paint...I don't have a pic of my second bathroom, but meet Sassy Green by SW.

I am going to get some more pics of it, and I have def gotten a lot more used to it, but I think we are currently in a fight.  

Sassy Green - 

You surely didn't look so sassy on the color card, online, on the 1,000s of images I googled.  You are about 5 or 6 shades too sassy for me and not exactly the "spa like" master bath I dreamed of, but you are cheery if anything! I think I need to tone you down a bit.

Sincerly, 

Ellie

Add more later, friends! :)