Party like it's 1999, Oh wait we're still in 80's

What that song is now over 10 years old? How? What in the world? Where did all of the years go? Our house is saying just the same. Our lovable house has finally came out of it's teen years and has now reached the big 2-0! Although most of us are able to change our own style as we become older, our poor house was stuck with waiting for its owners to do it for him. We heard that kitchens and bathrooms sell homes, and since we won't be living in this house forever, we figured we'd better do what we can to help out our stuck in the 80's old house. We finally took the punge and began to update one of our bathrooms. But bathrooms can get expensive you know, so we chose our smallest bathroom to get our feet wet. Our little powder room was the first thing to get our little mark.

Yes that's me reflecting in the mirror. Sorry I couldn't avoid that.

We have since changed out the toilet flusher with matching bronze handle as well. So our bathroom is now super happy to be back in the year 2010.

Styling the Office

Does anybody have an office that seems like it's just a dumping ground for everything that has no other place to go? Well that is certainly how our office has turned out. And since we have our laptop that we haul around the house we don't go up to the office that often. When we do go up there it's usually a scene of Ben sitting at the desk, me sitting on the floor since we have to no other chairs up there, and Autumn finding something on the ground to use as her next toy. Well we are now on the move to creating a place where we would love to hang out, read a book ( that would be the day, I'm pretty sure Ben would die the day that he saw me reading a book), or maybe just get me off the floor. We finally found some handsome leather club chairs that we thought would look great in our office.

So I hauled Ben clear across town twice in a day to check them out and then again to haul them home. Here they are in all of their lovely glory. My lovely  husband was dreading and agonizing over the box stating "ASSEMBLY REQUIRED." Little did he know that it would take him all of about 10 minutes to simply screw on the legs. Well this is the start to hopefully a wonderful room that we will actually inhabit, instead of just a dropping ground for all of our things.

What To Do With My Basement: Finale!!!

Ever feel like you were in a cave? Well, you might have been in my basement then. It was a brown dirt color all over that did nothing but be a constant reminder that you were underground. Awhile ago I posted a group of basement moodboards when we were debating which color to cover up our cave like walls, and it was unanimous that we should wash away the dirt with Olympic's rain cloud. After only a week of painting I'm now able to show off our new basement!

It's SOOOO MUCH BETTER!!! Here you see my remake of my Crate and Barrel Pics, along with my recently updated lamp. I got this lamp my junior year in college and it used to look black with red lamp shades. I spray painted it using Rustoleum's chrome metallic spray paint. I was so happy with how it came out considering all of the floor lamps I had been looking at were so similar and were at a pretty penny cost and definately out of our budget.

Here is our bar down here.

And our Muhammed Ali punch out pic that we won on our honeymoon's Art Auction.

And my own creation of DIY canvas art here.

Here is our console table with our on the cheap holiday decor. The glass apocethary jars I got for $5 each at TJ Maxx ( a jewel in our city I never realized existed) and got the silver ornaments at Hobby Lobby at 50% off. The word art I made describing different places that meant a lot to Ben and I which I wrote about here. What is in that humongous shell you say? Well let me show you...

Why more shells! After painting my lamp I decided to DIY some silver shells that I saw for $10 a piece. So I dug out some old shells that I had and painted away, and now I have this.

Well that is my newly decorated basement. There's no more caves and only light and bright cloudy days from here on out.

A Master's Retreat!

We've done many things that have updated almost every room in our house EXCEPT our master bedroom. According to HGTV, that always seems to be the last place to be updated even though it's where we spend the majority of our time while at home. I've bought and returned about 10 different comforters. I just can't find the perfect one. BUT!!!! On our honeymoon we got some inspiration. While on our cruise we attended an art auction, mainly for the free champagne, but we were sucked in. The auctioneer educated us about the artists and the significance of the art that was being sold through out the afternoon. It was so interesting that we actually bought a piece! It was an autographed picture of Muhammad Ali getting punched out by some random person that ALMOST beat him. I know what your thinking, how romantic could a boxing picture be right above the bed. Well besides making me swoon, Ben just had to have it down stairs. Luckily, when we were telling them where to ship it, we informed them of the wonderous occasion that had taken place just a few days prior and they gave us a picture free!!! It was an Emile Bellet

I just love the colors of it along with the movement that he put into it. Every time I look at it, I just get taken away out to sea and fall back into our honeymoon state of mind. Now, what could be better inspiration for a master bedroom than our honeymoon. But what to do with it. It has such vivid and bright colors, I can't just throw all of those colors in there. It would look like a kindergarten went crazy in there. So I was stuck again... Until I found an amazing picture of what Candice Olson called "Caribbean Nights" !

I just loved the calmness that I felt when I saw this picture. Even though the bed is massive, the ivory bedspread felt light and airy ( the cloud background might have helped that effect a little as well). So I went looking for something that would give me the same feelings, along with something that wouldn't be the Candice Olson price.

I just loved this West Elm comforter once I saw it on my friend Kaylee's bed. I asked to steal her idea, and what else could she do since I let her steal my reception location for hers as well. The blue blanket I actually bought from Pottery Barn on clearance and had a monogram embroidered on it and the pillows. The chair is from Ikea, and the table from Walmart. I have the little flower votive holders on order from Zgallerie on clearance. I also ran out of work to go pick up two of the lamps from Pier 1 that were on clearance as well. The mirrored table is adorable, but haven't put in the order as of yet. I would definately have to get a better looking alarm clock. I wouldn't want to put my ugly white one on top of this beautiful table. I'm now on the hunt for a little rug that I could place under the chair and table along with a few extra decorative pillows. I'm thinking about pulling out my DIY hands and making a few of the pillows that are seen in the inspiration picture.

So there you have it! Hopefully our new master bedroom. I'll post pics once I start putting everything together. Stay tuned.

Spooktacular!

We're still just getting our home decorated for year round decor, so I don't have much to make our home spooktacular for the month of October. Perusing the blog world I found some really amazing and easy things that would definitely deck your home out for Halloween.





These spooky labels that I found over at Kristine McKay Designs make the ordinary jars into some very interesting displays. You never know when your going to need some bat juice or mice dust to mix up your next dinner party.





A few books with these spooky labels lying around by your stash of elixirs will seal the deal for making your house ready for Halloween. Kristine will let you download these labels at her site.

A few grapes and cauliflower put in a small votive container with some dyed water and wax beads on top make some candles that look like you have your own collection of specimen jars.

And your Halloween decked house would not be complete without a grouping of bleeding candles on your coffee table. Sherry over at Young House Love did this creepy one. Do you feel like you're in a vampire's layer? I sure do.

I hope I showed some cheap and easy ways to make your abode spooktacular. Maybe next year I will have a chance to join in on the fun.

Find Some Inspiration

I have had to try to be creative with my dining room as it is big enough to have a good sized table, but no other pieces. Since I can't have a big buffet or china hutch to display colorful nic-naks I was forced to find another way to bring some color into the room.


With that in mind I found loads of inspiration perusing the internet and flipping through decorating magazines. After months of looking I finally found something that I loved and thought I could do in my own dining room.

In the middle of the mirror is a framed menu (how appropriate for a dining room, huh). I thought that it might be fun to have one of our wedding mementos displayed here. I had a few copies of our wedding menu that we had at each place setting left over and why just throw them out when I spent so much time getting the design to be perfect. So stay tuned for some future dining room decor that will hopefully look similar to this.

Raise the Roof!

When we purchased our home 10 months ago we inherited a very pink room that the previous owners' two daughters shared. It was surrounded by a border of stamped on dragon-flies and ladybugs. They spent a lot of time making it nice for the girls, but a bright pink guest bedroom just wasn't our cup of tea. The constant badgering of every friend that came to stay with us just pushed us over the edge to finally tackle it. I got some inspiration from the kids over at Young House Love with their striped powder room.

I loved the chic-ness of the stripes especially the tone-on-tone. I found out the colors that they used and decided to switch it up from horizontal to vertical stripes. I also wanted to accent the main wall that you see when you walk into the room, which is the wall the bed was centered on. Ben and I took a three day weekend to tackle this project. Here's how it went down:

1. Paint the entire room with the darker tone ( since I wanted the warmer of the two tones surrounding the room). From my limited experience, if you are changing the tone completely it will take two coats to cover, along with primer.

2. Pick the thickness of the stripes. I decided that I wanted large stripes so I went with 10"

3. Bust out the good ol' tape measure and make three marks every 10" at the bottom, middle, and top of the wall.

4. Start tapin'. I put a big X where we were going to be painting and put the tape on the outside of the lines surrounding the "soon to be stripe"

5. Get to painting! Start painting the lighter color over the section marked with the X. It might take two coats to get rid of brush strokes.

And there you have it! A really cool accent wall that's not too much in your face. PS. It is SO true what they say about vertical stripe making you look tall. I feel like the room just got 10 foot ceilings! Well that's a little exaggerated, but we did just raise the roof in that room. What do you guys think?

DIY WordArt

As you can see to the right <----- Over there. I love to read many other decorating blogs. One of my favorite is Katie from Bower Power. She has given me lots of inspiration to make my own versions of her DIY art. One of my art and crafts projects was a version of WordArt that describes a special place for me. Katie made two different word arts that pull from the two states that she and her hubby are originally from, New Jersey and Tennessee.



Aren't they cool looking! I thought that they were so neat, and I figured they were pretty easy to make. I decided to try my nack at making one, but I wanted it to represent a special place to both Ben & I. I picked Manhattan,KS , where Ben and I met while attending K-State. I broke out the Microsoft Word and used my skills that I learned from writing a million lab reports back in the day. Here is how it came out...




It as definitely harder then I thought it would be to come up with that many places/things to fill up that small of a space.

While I wasn't doing homework we were able to enjoy some of these hot spots in the area. It also includes streets that we lived on, the highways that let you get into the valley, and even state facts. I decided to put this modern piece in our basement on our sofa table. What do you think?

I wanted to give everybody a little preview of a BIG future project that we just picked up.

This is our new poker/game/bumper pool table! We picked this baby up off of craigslist. We've had this empty space for quite some time waiting for an affordable option to come along. This might be a little bit before you see the finished product. I'm still debating on how I should fix it. I'll definitely be recovering the seats as they are pretty wore out, so that should be pretty interesting. It has some very cool woodwork on the top that I would like to still see, but I wanted to make it a darker cherry or espresso brown to match our tastes. I'm thinking about putting a gel stain on it to be able to still see the grain, but may have to resort to paint if I can't fix the scratches to be able to look natural. Any suggestions? Leave me a comment and let me know.

Crate & Barrel Art On A Budget

I have seen this grouping of geometric designs on Crate & Barrel's site for quite some time now, and have wanted something very modern like that for our basement. But $70.00 a piece was a little out of my budget. So I took a deeper look at them, and figured I could probably DIY these designs. The geometric shapes were very easy to make using word's auto-shapes.

They only took me about 10-15 minutes a piece. I took one of the designs to Hobby Lobby to try and find a square frame for them. I would have had to have it custom made, which came out to around $62 a piece! I couldn't believe it and figured their must be a better way. So I did what I do best, and started wandering around the internet. I was lucky enough to find these frames on Target's website for only $12 a piece.

A far better deal then Hobby Lobby, even on their 50% off days. I immediately ordered 6 of them to finish off this DIY art project. Here's how they came out...

I was even able to make the colors match the color scheme of the room. What do you think?

Craigslist Find Made Fabulous!

We want our guest bedroom to be like a chic Paris hotel room. A mix of vintage and modern to make a incredibly luxurious and stylish place to get away. But as pretty much everybody is these days I'm trying to decorate our new house under a major budget. Craigslist is definitely a major help for kids like us. I found an incredibly gaudy gold mirror for $5 that I was able to see as something different. I got my inspiration from ZGallery with this mirror.

It is a very vintage Victorian design, but the black modernizes it to make it chic. After painting the gaudy gold frame a with a glossy black spray paint. It came out pretty close to the inspiration.

And here it is put up in the room. You can see our vertical stripes that we painted after being inspired by the kids over at Young House Love. What do you think? To vintage for you? Let me know.

Decorating for Fall

Well now that the air is getting crisp at night and the first day of fall has officially past I thought it was necessary to start adding some fallish decor to my home. After my recent visit to Pottery Barn where I got some inspiration I thought I could make them with things in my very own backyard.

This is a pic of a centerpiece Pottery Barn made with their artificial acorns. I figured why pay $14.00 for a bag of stuff I can find in my right behind my house. Well not really my backyard, but down the street and around the corner. But the trees belong to my neighborly HOA, and since I paid my dues this year it might as well be in my own backyard. Well here is my homemade version with a little help from the wonderful TJ Maxx & Walmart.

I found the vases for $3.99 for the smaller cylinders and $9.99 for the big guy at TJ Maxx, and $2.49 for each of the candles at Walmart. Everything else was FREE! You gotta love that!

Along with loving everything free, I thought this would be the perfect time to introduce our Gurtler + Home mascot. She loves leaves, especially when they're falling from the trees. She plays football non-stop. And she's the color of the changing leaves. Her name is AUTUMN!

This is our wonderful new cocker spaniel puppy. She has only been with us for a couple of weeks, but she has figured out that she has the reign of our house. We have to keep a close eye on her as she will haul off anything that is at her eye level. We just got her that bed today when we enrolled her in puppy school (somewhat as a bribe, but don't tell her that). Well there is a little update of what we've been up to in the Gurtler household. I hope you're enjoying the cool weather before you'll have to pull out the big and burly winter coats. It certainly is beautiful outside, so it might be a good time for a walk.