If you ever have a minute and want to look at great home decor check out my new favorite spot www.horchow.com . Lots of oohhing and ahhing. I love it all

Before

I have been painting and I can't wait to show you. There is still tons I want to do in the room but I was to excited to wait.  Since we don't have basements here in Texas a lot of homes have what they call a game room upstairs. We have a great game room with a theater room right off it (the double doors). When we moved in it was painted red. You know in the past I have had some red accent walls but I actually have a thing against rooms painted all red. It was very loud. You turned the corner and bam! there is was.

 So I gave it some new life.

After

Ballard Design

Mike came home and was very unsure of the color (even though the wall had swatches of the color on them for at least 3 weeks). He got me a bit nervous until I got the mail that day and one of my favorite catalogs, Ballard Design had come. It is full of aqua, full I tell you. Even for outdoor rooms. You have to check it out.



I have also been drooling over this wall in Pottery Barn forever. It is filed in "house ideas" on my computer. (I will have to share some of the other pictures someday) I have been collecting frames to do my family photo wall right over the chair

Pottery Barn

I am going to add some more color to the room. The colors of the lanterns on top of the book case. 

 This is the fabric I have picked out to make the drapes  (no I don't sew) but Mike has put me on pause for a bit.

I am really liking the color.  It is very relaxing. My style is kind of changing from the reds and deep yellow  feel to the light bright feel but with all the stuff I already have it is hard to start over.

Pink

I have to admit I have always been kind of  a thrift store snob. It was not somewhere I frequented. But, while looking on all the blogs they always talked about this store called Goodwill. So when a brand new one opened right down the street a few weeks after we moved in I had to go see what I could find. The first time I went I made it a very short stop because I thought it smelled really funny, I know snobby.  And I was not sure I was going to ever make a second trip. But I did go back and now I enjoy the thrill of the hunt and make it a frequent stop.  One of my first purchases was this cute dresser for Whitney. I paid $35.00 for it.

I saw it and thought it was so cute but it wasn't until later that night that the idea came to me to paint it pink.

It was very clean, in great shape and the drawers smelled like cedar when you opened them. The hardware was in great shape and so cute so I just gave them a quick coat of spray paint. Whitney was a little hesitant to have a pink dresser but I think it turned out so cute. I have been toying with the idea of glazing it.

Her room is still a work in progress

So have you heard what color Pantone picked as the color of the year for 2011? Honeysuckle Pink.  We are right in style ;)


Attending party at http://chiconashoestringdecorating.blogspot.com/

Beadboard

 We decided we wanted to dress up the front of the bar a bit. This isn't our first go round at it as we did it in our last house but this was the first time we had corners and rounded corners at that.





Mike was just excited that he got to get a new toy. I plan on keeping that baby busy.

 We prefer to go with the tongue and groove pieces verses the sheets on a project like this. We found that they are easier to hide the seams and easier to work with when the wall is not the exact height all the way around.

 So don't forget here is the before

 And the after -wet paint and all :)

Back splash

One of the first things we knew we wanted to update was the back splash. It just felt so dated. After further investigation Mike figured out that they had actually taken the different tiles that they had used all over the house and made this design. I have to give them credit for their creativity but it had to go. 






I had the idea right away that we could probably spray paint them to look like metal with that new spray paint from Kiltz. But I was not sure the paint would actually stick and that we wouldn't end up with a mess. We also considered using a Brummel tool and removing the tile and replacing it with something of similar size. The spray paint method sounded a lot easier. We had some extra tile in the garage so I did a test on it and found that using spray paint alone, once it cured (dried  for a few days) was not easy to scratch but if you worked on it a bit it did scratch. But, if you sprayed a primer then the metal spray paint it was a very hard surface.
So I got to work. I first taped off the square to be painted.

Then I taped a large garbage sack up to avoid any over spray. I put one coat of primer on, let it dry for at least 10 min. Then put one coat of spray paint, let it dry for 10 min and then followed up with a second coat of spray paint.
And here is the final product

BEFORE

                                                          AFTER

 

Linked to Thrifty Decor Chick

Paint

 I am FINALLY done painting the main areas of the downstairs and the hallway upstairs. Man it took forever. I was trying to get it done before we moved in but with our crazy schedule I was not able to pull it off. Then when our pipes froze the day after we moved in, it put things are the back burner for a few days.
Those tall ceilings are a big job to tackle.  The color is only a few shades darker then what was here before but I am happy with the color. I always start off saying I am going real dark but in the end I choose a lighter color. I really like to live in light spaces. I love when the sun shines in. The way our home sits it does not get a ton of sunlight and there are no windows in the kitchen so I had to be careful not to make it feel like a cave.

I love the clean look of fresh paint. Plus getting rid of that flat paint was a must.

Paint

Am I the only person in the world who has such a hard time choosing a paint color? I am known as the girl who has 10-12 samples of tans. Call me sometime and you can borrow them too. They are great for narrowing down colors. So I always tell suggest to people that they definitely need to get a quart of the color before they dive into a gallon or worse yet the 5 gallon. You have to put the color on your wall to really get a feel for it. So before I do a repaint my walls always look something like this.

But I learned it is a better to be safe then sorry. Many times I thought I had chosen the perfect color just to bring it home and hate it.

There has got to be 30,000 different shades of tan/beige, basic house colors, out there so why is it I can never find one? Once again in the end I had a color custom mixed for me. Did you know your paint store can do 1/2 strength of a color? They can even do double strength.  I learned that Home Depot is not aware that they can actually do this but actually there little computers have it all figures out for them. I did end up training 3 different salesmen in the paint department how to do this once the first guy finally admitted that they could do it ( after he had told me they could not). In the end I went with 1 1/2 strength Mushroom bisque.