Blog Baby Overload!

Yowza!

Who knew there was such a baby boom among some of my favourite bloggers?!?! Well, I guess lots of people since I haven't been checking them as regularly as I once was and announcements were made a while ago.

During some free time, I cruised on over to catch up with the youngsters at Young House Love and quickly found out they were expecting and that they'd announced an upcoming May baby a couple weeks ago in typical youngsters fashion-with help of their first son-Burger.

And while reading their bebe-related Q&A I discovered that Katie over at Bower Power also seems to be expecting! So, obviously I meandered over there next. And found many posts dedicated to their bebe journey and eventually the announcement that, again-was true to blogger form. Katie announced it in a goofy fashion with herself as the model:

Even as a mummy she looks great!

So between these bloggies and some of my other regular reads (including Ramblings of a Renovating Couple and Nicole at Making it Lovely, who are both fairly new moms) it's baby mania. I'm almost afraid to hit up some of my other used-to-be-daily reads in case there's a baby boom there too!

Congratulations to all of you, and I can't wait to see your ideas in the upcoming months as I'm creating our very own nursery. I can't promise I won't steal any (or all) of them, but I definitely am excited.

Ikea Home Planner

OK, seriously cool!

Has anyone ever tried this? It's Ikea's home planning program and I just tried it for a theoretical kitchen re-do and it's fantastical!

Hubs and I are entertaining some ideas...several of which include some completely redone rooms. Having the one-track mind that I do, I had to act on it immediately, so I was looking at ways to roughly price it out before further consideration.

Enter Ikea.

I downloaded the program and got to work on familiarizing myself with the program with a space I know quite well-our current kitchen.

It's super easy to use and in about 30 minutes, I'd created this:Although, the coolest part came with a little press of the 3D button at the top, which resulted in:

Come on...that's just straight up neat.

And although the 3D view was the coolest part, the absolute best part was when I hit the button that looked like a calculator. Sure enough-it gives you the cost of your choices...and mine? $3,604.83 +tax.

Are you serious??? That's insane. I have no idea what I was picking...as I said, it was just a trial run to familiarize myself, but there's a pretty sick gooseneck faucet, some walnut countertops and mucho pot drawers. I was expecting about 3-4 times that...clearly I'm horribly uninformed.

Anyway, this little exercise (/time waster) was a very valuable one and opens up a couple more possibilities to the ideas we've been entertaining.

Seriously-try it.

Sarah's Cottage

It's no secret that I'm a big fan of Sarah Richardson. I've gushed about her before and I'm always sure to watch her shows on Tuesday nights. She's done 2 seasons of Sarah's House, where she flips a house and you get to watch the whole thing. The most recent season was Sarah's Cottage, where she made-over her very own cottage. Let me tell ya---serious envy going on.
I've seen each episode at least 3 times each. Hubs just rolls his eyes whenever it comes on now and asks if I can give the commentary yet. Sadly, I probably could. Yikes! (And yes, I watched it last night--it was the bedroom episode)

So yesterday, I found this post on Apartment Therapy and thought I'd share the cottage love with all y'all.

I'd hope to save some of the images from the HGTV site, but they're in flash and I'm just not techie enough to figure it out. I'd taken screen shots and gone that route, but it just doesn't work. Next step-google images! Not quite the same, but you'll just have to check the site out for the real eye candy.
The Living Room Addition/Exterior episode boasted some pretty swanky open concept living, and a good amount of antiques:




There was also a whole episode dedicated to the 2 guest bedrooms, appropriately and conveniently named East & West Guest Rooms:



As well as one for the master bedroom & their children's loft (did I mention she was uber preggers during the show waiting on number 2?):

Another devoted to the super swanky cottage bathrooms:One of my personal favourite episodes was the kitchen & dining room episode where Sarah used a lot of rustic looking stuff to cottage-up an otherwise quite modern kitchen & dining room:And the final episode was fairly Sarah-less because she was thisclose to delivery, so they recapped the season as well as focusing on the bunkie, which was just too cute:They just make it look so easy! I've asked before how and where these designers find their resources (seamstresses, antiques, reupholstery) because I've seen and dealt with some, and nothing ever turns out like any aspect of these rooms.

I definitely recommend you check it out though, and if you're anything like me, you'll love all the little details and personal touches. While you're there, check out the galleries for Sarah's House 1 & 2. Just be prepared for some serious day dreaming...

Family Room Windows

Well, I'd better get a move on if I have any hope of crossing June goal # 15 off my list: Cover the family room windows.

Unfortunately I forgot to snag a shot this morning of what it currently looks like (and with a working camera--boo yah!), so here are a couple of past examples to remind what windows I mean: and the adjoining kitchen complete with 2" white faux wood blinds:

So the reason for the delay, aside from chronic indecisiveness and chronic not enough funds, hubs and I just couldn't agree on what we wanted.

He likes the simplicity and clean lines of using the same wooden blinds on those windows. I like that too, I just think it would be nice for some texture there to warm it up a bit. I don't want it to be so clinical-we don't like clutter to begin with so a huge room of all hard, clean, empty and solid surfaces might be a bit much.

But...I didn't know what it would look like with blinds. I'm a visual person, you see, so I couldn't imagine what the finished product would look like (def my biggest decorating dilemma-not being able to visualize the end).

So my options were:

Drapes only, but that doesn't give many options for open & close-ability

Blinds only, but kinda sparse and clinical looking

Both but where do I have the drapes and would it look weird with the bare spot above the window?

TYH inspired bamboo outside-mount blinds with drapes (like this)

As always, leave it up to the youngsters to help me out. Sherry posted a design dilemma where she was suggesting the inside-mount blind + drapes combo. I loved the board (as usual) so commented as such, but also threw in a question about that very suggestion. Hey-I'm not above selfish compliments when it comes to stuff I don't know about.

Sherry quickly got back to me that it would be fine as long as the drapes aren't too high so there's still a relationship between the blinds and the drapes. Seems common sense, but I still gotta hear it from someone who knows what they're talking about.

Armed with the educated info that it wasn't a total faux-pas, I google image searched. (What, I ask you, WHAT did people ever do before the internet?????)

Here are some examples I found, complete with a nifty little drawing to remind me that anything & everything's online:

And I'll be honest-I tried and I tried to make some sort of mock up in both paint and photoshop, but I just cn't do it. It was the piece de resistance for my post and for my own peace of mind, but I can't do it.

So I think I'm quite settled that for now we'll get the faux wood blinds and once we save up a bit more we'll pick up some drapes as well. I just won't hang them too high, and I won't hang them too low. They'll be the mama bear of Goldilocks' drapes.

Any tips? Opinions? Ideas? Other lame nursery lame simile's?

I'm Not Worthy...

I know I've been posting fairly intermittently. But I'm not sorry.

The reason? There are some flipping creative and crafty people out there! Many of whom have blogs; blogs that I've been devouring over the last several days and feeling incredibly inadequate although inspired at the same time.

I posted last month about my obsession with Make it and Love it. And not to take anything away from Ashley, because she's totally uber talented and great, but I have to spread the creative crafty obsession.

First, I came across U Create (I'm not entirely sure how, but I believe via Imperfect), which is a collection of the best of the best of a slew of Crafty McCraftersons. All in one place! This is a great, but if you follow the links, you get absurd (ly fantastic) amounts of ideas, inspiration and tips, tricks and doses of inferiority.

I have to apologize because I didn't save where I got the ideas from (sacrilege I know) and I never did very well in English class, so I'm not crediting them as I should, but here's just a dose of some of the images I've saved:

And that's not even a drop in the bucket.

Where do these people come up with this stuff? Am I missing a gene or something where people see things as they should be and the ability to completely transform it?

Anyways, I won't do a whole post about each and every Crafty chicka out there, because my 'favourites' folder has pretty much quadrupled in size and is growing by the day, so here's several of the more recent ones I've added in case you're interested. (Oh-and I added a UCreate button on the sidebar for easy access)

Big Ideas from a Little Girl

Crap I've Made (love the title)

I DIY

Inspire Me Crafts

Kwerner Design (jackpot for card inspiration...they put my June cards to SHAME!)

Creative Holiday Gift Ideas

The Tipsy Hostess (another great title, and oh-so-me)

OK, re-reading, this is like a name-dropping orgy, but you'll thank me.

All 2 people who've ever read this blog will anyways.

Stay crafty my friends. (Dos Equis? Anyone?)

Could you do it?

Looking for inspiration today on Desire to Inspire , I found this post on a renovated Church in the UK.

Like Kim, I've often thought about repurposing an old barn, building, warehouse, etc. If not actually thinking about it, I've certainly thought of the potential of--even my own office building. It's a heritage building that used to be a barracks and has some very neat character to it that, if highlited and/or camoflauged correctly could really be something special.

Anyway, I think they did a great job transforming the church,





I mean, you can't say that's it's not beautiful, but I just don't think I could do it. Live there I mean. I'm a pretty good person, all things considered so it's not like I'm going to be sacrificing goats or hosting devil parties or anything, it just seems that almost anything is sacreligious when you do it in a church. You know? And a graveyard instead of a flower one? Yeah...I don't think so.

What about you?

Neat Idea: Apartment Therapy

The creativity, ingenuity and general weirdness you can find on Apartment Therpay never fails to surprise me.

Don't get me wrong, there are plenty of inspirational and downright cool ideas on there, but some strange stuff too.

Despite the overwhelming consensus of 45-14 that this idea is a 'Not', I think it's pretty darn cool.

It's an outdoor speaker hidden, formed, whatever into a tree stump.

Cool, huh?

Trying to turn my black thumb green-ish

In attempt to keep my black thumb from ruining any curb appeal we may get one day (lawn is still just dirt & debris), I've really been trying to get tips from anyone and everyone about how to garden. I'm very envious of anyone who naturally has a green thumb and

I'm not creating lofty goals of planting and maintaining a garden like these ones,

Frankly, I don't think I'd even want a garden like those ones. They're lovely, but a bit over the top for my tastes.

Even one like this I realize is way outta my league,

And I gotta tell ya---it is HARD to find photos of nice, simple, home gardens as inspiration. I searched my favourite online mags for inspiration, Google Images using several terms, some of my favourite blogs and even searching through some gardening blops I found just for this reason.

As it turns out, some of my faves come from 2 of my favourite bloggers---maybe not so coincidentally, also 2 of participants in the BH&G makeover contest. Man! It's a small world! Anyways, here are a couple that I like overall:

Young House Love:

Making it Lovely:

And a few other seemingly simple ones I may have a hope of achieving over the years:

Anyways, enough about inspiration. If I don't learn what the hey I'm doing, it doesn't matter what my inspiration is, right? So to Style at Home I went to look for some gardening tips. Here are some good ones I found:

Gardening 101
Gardening FAQ's
The Lazy Gardener
Top 10 Garden Tools
15 Garden Tricks
A Simple Guide to Container Gardening

And finally, a list of my fave flowers that I hope hope hope I'll be able to grow someday.

• Lily of the Valley (going to get a whack of bulbs from mom)
• Hyacinth
• Hydrangea
• Lilacs

What's your garden inspiration? Or Goals? Any fave flowers or tips for a novice gardener?