Category Archives: Our Home

Guest Room Love

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Since Day 1 (meaning since we put an offer on the house), I had a vision for how I wanted the guest room to look (thanks to Houzz.com*). We knew that we wanted a light and bright room to make it feel a bit larger and we wanted it to coordinate with my college IKEA bedroom furniture that we put in the guest room. After searching a bit, I found this inspiration and fell in love with it for the guest room:

Isn’t that gorgeous!?!? I just love the gray and yellow combination. It’s so simple yet inviting.

The white duvet cover was relatively easy to find. We first looked at Target and Bed, Bath & Beyond but the bedding at those two stores was unfortunately out of the price range we were willing to spend for the guest room. Luckily though, we made a trip to IKEA one day and found the perfect plain white duvet cover for approx. $30. We were so excited about the find and even more excited about the price tag!

So, as I said before, decorating the house really is a process. Below is a picture of the guest room on the day we moved in. I didn’t have the energy time to iron the sheets so I just laid them on top of the bed to give the illusion that it was made. I know, so sneaky. I would have fooled you if I didn’t tell you my secret.

Day 1 – February 10

As time went on, the room started to evolve more. We put the nightstand to the left of the bed, I ironed the sheets (GASP!) and finally put them on the pillows and duvet cover, and we bought a nice gray blanket to mirror the inspiration room. So that brought us to this:

Not winning any awards but still progress. That brought us to our latest project that I reference in my last post. We bought 5 frames at Aaron Bros (as I fondly call it) and wanted to do a nice little arrangement on the left wall. We also got an adorable lamp and pillows from Cost Plus and then BAM! We were ready to start making the room feel more inviting.

Step 1: Pick the photos & put them in the frames
This part is pretty self-explanatory. We chose a photo of the mother-son dance, father-daughter dance, my bouquet, me and the groomsmen, and CJ and the bridesmaids.

Step 2: Choose an arrangement
I saw a super helpful post on my favorite blog YoungHouseLove.com that talked about first doing the arrangement on butcher paper, sketching it out, and using that paper to help with hanging the photos. We decided that, since this was more complicated than the master bedroom, we needed the extra help.

So we bought a big roll of white paper (it was impossible to find butcher paper, for some reason), and rolled it out on the floor to lay out the arrangement.

Step 3: Trace the pictures with a pencil, mark where the nails should go, cut the roll of paper, and tape it up to the wall.

I swear, the squares are up there. If I were to draw on top of that so you could envision the arrangement, it would look like this:

Step 4: Mark where the nails should go in the wall by following the guides on the paper and nailing a small hole in each area.

Step 5: Remove the paper, find the small holes that we made, and nail it in!

Step 6: Hang the pictures!

Step 7: Admire your work 🙂

After we were done hanging the photos, we put the adorable pillows in the room and the lamp and Voila! We had an adorable guest room.

I now creepily walk past the guest room several times a day to stare at our work.

Here’s a close up of the lamp:

It has the gray and yellow to go with the color scheme and has a cute owl base!! Oh, I’m so in love.

Right now, the lamp is hanging out next to my bridal bouquet but we’re not sure if that’s the permanent home for the bouquet. I’m afraid someone will knock it off and then we will lose our wedding keepsake.

We still need some blinds, curtains, and a rug for the room. I also think we might get a bookshelf for the right side of the room; that wall is looking pretty lonely right now. But we’re content with how it looks right now! No need to rush through the rest of the enhancements. 🙂

*Houzz is an amazing source for decorating ideas so if you ever feel stuck on what to do with a room, I highly recommend going there. They have a great app and their website is super helpful too. You can create ideabooks for whatever floats your boat (I’ve created them by room, it’s easier for me to find stuff that way).

One Step Closer

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Two weekends ago, my parents came over for dinner at our house and after my mom did her usual “inspection” of the house to see what’s changed, she turned to me and said, “You really need to start hanging some pictures.” Man, is that the truth! I knew that was the reason why we still didn’t feel fully moved in. I completely agreed with her so my goal for last weekend was to hang all the frames that we bought a few weeks ago.

First up, the master bedroom! I would have to say that the hardest part of hanging picture frames is figuring out what pictures to put in the frames. We went through a ton of our engagement and wedding pictures and chose three – one of us holding hands in our engagement photos, one of our wedding date from our engagement photos, and one of us holding hands on our wedding day. We wanted to keep it simple and thought that these ones were really sweet and romantic.

Hanging these frames wasn’t too difficult but it was a lot more difficult than the method we used in the guest room (to be talked about in a later post). The hardest part is making sure that you’re nailing everything in the right place especially since I’m a perfectionist and will notice if something is even a 1/2 inch off.

Here’s a before and after:

Anddddd here’s a close up of the photos above the bed:

One thing I’ve learned throughout this house process is that it really is a process. You can’t just move in and have everything set up and decorated the next day (unless you have superpowers). It’s really not possible and, even if it was, it’s better to take your time. It’s so much more gratifying to enjoy the process of picking out the decorative items and to see the house come together step by step. I LOVE seeing how one day the guest room is just a bed and then the next day, after just a few pillows, it’s a bedroom. (More on this in another post!)

And last but not least, CJ, my mom, and I participated in the Silicon Valley Kidney Walk on June 1 in support of our wonderful friend Sheila. Go Team Fred!

Hello June!

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Oh man, May really did a number on us. 3/4 weekends in May were spent traveling.

The first weekend, I flew to Las Vegas for a bachelorette party. The second weekend, we flew to Chicago for my sister-in-law’s college graduation. The third weekend, we went to a fundraiser for one of my coworkers in Fremont. The last weekend, we flew to NYC to visit one of our friend’s that lives in the East Village. Sooo much traveling but sooo much fun at the same time. I have to admit, I am SO happy to be home to relax, catch up on sleep, and work on the house.

CJ and I at the Natural History Museum in NYC
CJ’s one request was to see the T-Rex behind us 🙂

While I was in Las Vegas, CJ pulled out all of the plants in our front yard (which is a HUGE job). Our amazing neighbor helped CJ by tying the hedges to the back of his truck and pulling them out with a bit of horsepower. It definitely saved a ton of time! We’re so lucky to have such helpful neighbors.

It looks so naked right now but it’s going to look so amazing when it’s all done!! We had a landscape designer come over 2 weeks ago to look at our yard and do a mockup of the landscaping. We absolutely love what she came up with so now we just need to figure out when we’ll do all this planting. (Now’s the time that we would love a ton of volunteers to help us with this!! **Hint hint nudge nudge**)

Here’s what our yard looked like before:

Our house in February
And here’s what it looks like without all the hedges:
Our house yesterday 🙂
It’s so much more open without the hedges! We can’t wait to start planting and making the front of the house more cozy. In the meantime, we’re just excited we don’t have to accidentally walk through a spiderweb that appeared overnight in between those hedges.
Other than that, we’re slowly starting to get frames and decorative items for the house but it’s is a veryyyy slow process. We want to make sure we make the right decision for each item so we’re definitely taking our time.
I’ll try to be better about posting this month now that we aren’t traveling as much!! I’ll try to do a recap of our trips to Chicago and New York!

Inspired by Illinois Homes

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We went to Chicago last weekend for CJ’s sister’s graduation from Wheaton College and not only did we have a ton of fun, but we also fell in love with the adorable homes! Not enough to move there, don’t worry. 🙂 But enough to motivate us to “leverage” some of their interior design ideas.

The house that we stayed at was built around the same time as our house and I loved how they worked with the quirkiness of a house built in the 50’s to make it cozy, adorable, and stylish. For instance, in the bathroom (one of my favorite places in their house), they had the most adorable doorknobs (probably from Cost Plus World Market or Anthropologie), bathmat, shower curtain, and decorations on top of the toilet. I took a few photos with my phone (I promise, I’m not a creeper) so I could remember what they had done.

Cute little decorations on their toilet. I love the little couple kissing. She said that she bought them in Sweden.

I should have taken pictures of the rest of the house but, since we were out allll day errrrday doing fun activities, it was too late to be starting a photoshoot when we got back. They also had a ton of adorable photos from their wedding and engagement shoot throughout their house which I loved. One of their frames was an old window and they put the photos in each glass pane. SO cute. I really should have taken a picture of that one. Here’s one that looks similar:

They had it propped on top of their mantel. That’s not an option for us since we have a TV over our mantel but I’m sure we could find another place or hang it on the wall just like the photo above.
Another house that we visited was built in the craftsman style to match the original houses from that era and it was sooooo gorgeous. 
I sent my sister several photos of their craft room because it seriously was unbelievable and so organized. CJ and I also took a few mental notes from that house.
CJ’s sister contacted one of her friends that has an interior designer as a mother-in-law and said that I wanted to tour their house (since she had been listening to me rave about the cuteness of the houses all weekend). Oh my, this one was soo cute too! We took several photos of their house for inspiration. Our favorite parts were their photo arrangements in the hallway, decorations in the family room, office, and master bedroom. Okay, so maybe their whole house was our favorite part. Unfortunately, they’re selling their house so they won’t be there for much longer. They’re moving to Santa Barbara (so exciting for them!) so they will be starting the decorating process all over again once they find a home there.
We got home feeling extra inspired and headed over to Cost Plus World Market to get some fun doorknobs for our hallway cabinet. The cabinet is a bit old and we’re not planning on replacing it anytime soon, if ever, so we wanted to spice it up. We decided on the ones below and installed them right when we got home. 
New (on the top) vs. old knobs
A close up – LOVE the design on the knob!!

It only took about 5 minutes to put them on. They were $4 each and make the cabinets look so different!! It’s amazing how such a small change can make such a big impact.

Finished product
Have you ever visited someones house and felt inspired to adapt some of their ideas for your house?

Living Formal

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One of the most common questions I get when I haven’t seen someone in a while is, “How is the new house going?”, and I normally respond with, “It’s good.” When really, I’m thinking, “Well the packing is done. We have furniture to get for the formal room and then need to actually decorate the place – curtains, pictures, decorative pieces to go on the furniture, rugs, yada yada yada…” But I try to avoid bogging people down with the details. We have so many plans for the house that it’s hard to say that we’re done moving in when there is so much left to do to until it feels complete.

One thing that we can check off – major furniture for the front room! Last Friday, Macy’s delivered our adorable little loveseat for the front room. Our formal living room is starting to look like a real room instead of a big empty space that we pass through on our way to the kitchen that echos when we walk through it and I am SOOO excited about it.

Our painting is propped on the sofa so you can imagine what it will look like when it gets hung up

Once we moved the furniture in the layout that looked best, we could see that there was a void in between the two side chairs that needed to be filled. We saw a little Tibetan stool in Cost Plus a few weeks ago that I fell in love with but had no idea where it would fit in the house. After seeing the front room come together, I knew that it would be the perfect side table so we stopped by Cost Plus and snatched it up. I’m so in love with it because it’s functional but also is a piece of artwork.

With the cute little stool!
Let’s take a look at the “to do” list for the formal living room:
  • Loveseat
  • Side chairs
  • Side table
  • Buy a bookshelf for the wall to the left of the loveseat (should arrive in the next week or so)
  • Paint the walls a grayish blue (I think it’s called Rain Nation by Kelly Moore) – this is happening next week…hopefully
  • Hang our beautiful wedding gift (painting by family friend)
  • Buy the remaining furniture – end table, ottoman, floor lamp, and rug
  • Pick out fabric for the curtains
  • Sew the curtains (task for my superwoman mother)
  • Hang the curtains
  • Get a plant to bring in some life
  • Hang pictures
  • Make/buy a piece of artwork to hang over the credenza
Okay, so yes, there’s a lot left to do for this room but at least it now feels like a room. I love walking through that space now because I can now imagine what it will look like when it’s all put together. 

Setting Up the Guest Closet

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Our guest closet has needed an upgrade for quite some time. Because we reduced it from a full closet to a half sized closet, it wasn’t set up for functional use when we moved in. We were using it for one of our hampers and for the ironing board but I realllllly wanted to hang up my coats in there. Up until now, I had them on a clothes hanger in the garage because there wasn’t enough space in the existing closets.

Here’s what the closet looked like before we spruced it up:

Ready for a fresh new paint job
Uneven painting done by our contractor

Step 1: Paint the closet. Although the picture above looks like a perfectly white closet, it was quite uneven and drove me nuts. Even if we filled up the closet with clothes, I would still know that the uneven paint job was hiding behind it. So, when CJ was on a business trip a few weeks ago, I painted it a standard white shade and voila! It was ready for shelves.

So fresh, so clean

Step 2: Buy the supplies. We went to Home Depot and picked out shelves and clothing rod for the closet. We chose the standard white metal so it blends in with the rest of the closet. The shelf came in a few standard sizes (none of which fit the size of our closet) so CJ asked one of the employees to cut it down to the size we needed and he did it at no extra cost. 
Step 3: Setting up the closet. We borrowed a handy dandy stud finder from my dad and started by finding where we could screw in the brackets. After that it was super easy: screw in the brackets, set the shelf on top, throw in the adjustable clothing rod and BAM. We had a working closet.

So functional

Taming the Monster Tree

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A few weeks ago, we decided that our monstrous tree had gotten out of control and that it was time to give the tree a little haircut. It was getting to the point where the branches were so low that I could even reach them. GASP! I know, you’re amazed.

So CJ called a tree trimming man and had him come over to estimate how much it would cost to trim the tree. It was definitely worth the cost because we did not want to have to deal with any repercussions that a windy day might leave behind if some of those branches fell down onto our roof.

Helpful Hint: Ask your tree trimmer whether or not they have liability insurance (thanks Mom for the tip!). If you hire a company that does not carry liability insurance, you will be responsible for injuries or damages incurred to or by the tree trimmers while they are working on your property

Here’s a before picture:

As you can see, it was on the verge of eating our house

Branches low enough to grab
Bullying the tiny little tree next to it

A few days later the Tree Man, as I’ll fondly remember him, came over when we were at work and did a wonderful job trimming the tree. CJ stopped by during his lunch time to check on the progress and sent me a photo of the finished job. I never knew I could get so excited about a tree being trimmed but see for yourself, it’s a work of art! I had a huge grin on my face the rest of the day and showed everyone who was interested in seeing the before and after.

Woohoo!

The Tree Man said that we will only need to do this every couple of years so luckily this isn’t a regular expense that we have to account for. The smaller tree in our yard  might end up getting removed at a later time because it was being bullied by the monster-sized one. It was gasping for sunlight by trying to lean to the left so it clearly doesn’t look healthy. Poor little guy.

Happy 6 Month Anniversary to Us!

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CJ and I celebrated our 6-month anniversary on Sunday! Unfortunately, CJ had to work the whole day but we were able to go to a nice dinner in Danville to celebrate. The restaurant was an adorable little place in downtown Danville called The Peasant and the Pear and they had amazing food! We highly recommend it.

It’s amazing how fast these past 6 months have flown by! We’ve renovated our kitchen, refinished our floors, moved into our adorable little home, started decorating, and so many more little things. Tomorrow marks exactly two months since we’ve officially moved into the house and four months since we officially became homeowners. Our contractor kept assuring us during the construction that we would forget all the hiccups once we moved into the house and that it would all be worth it. I definitely believe him now, it was all so worth it. For those wondering about a housewarming party, we still have a few more pieces of furniture to get before we start planning it but it will happen. 🙂

Tomorrow, we’re having a tree guy come over to tame the monster tree on our front yard. It is ridiculously large so we need to get it under control.

As promised, below is a picture of our new table lamp for our bedroom. I loooove the print on it and how it contrasts with the stripes on the duvet cover.

What Have We Been Up To?

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Wow, lately we’ve been slacking a bit on the blog updates. I’d like to say there was a good excuse for not posting in the last two weeks but, the truth of the matter is that we really haven’t had much to talk about. We took a break from making changes to the house for a couple of weeks.

Two weekends ago, we celebrated St. Patrick’s Day by going on a brew crawl in downtown Pleasanton which was a ton of fun! Because Pleasanton doesn’t really have that many bars, 27 of the local businesses opened up their doors for the brew crawl and they each served a different type of beer along with a snack. We’ve been meaning to go to downtown Pleasanton to explore since it’s so adorable so this was the perfect opportunity to see all of the cute little shops. We also went our ring bearer’s 2nd birthday party, and wine tasting in Napa! It was a busy weekend but so much fun.

Last Saturday, we bought a table lamp for our nightstand from Cost Plus World Market. CJ and I like to read in bed at night before going to sleep and we always hated having to climb out of the warm bed to shut off the lights, so having a lamp in arm’s reach is pretty amazing. Not to mention, it’s extremely adorable. I’ll post a picture of the lamp soon, just need to upload it from my camera. Next up for our bedroom – picking some photos to frame and hang above the bed. I think it would be nice to use some of our wedding photos.

Last Sunday, we worked on cleaning up the backyard, the front yard, and scrubbing down the entire house. We also FINALLY found an entertainment center to house the millions of cords and electronics that have been living on the floor for the past month. It’s been driving me nuts to see all the clutter sitting on the floor so I can’t wait for it to be delivered!! Our furniture guy told us that it will be delivered this week, woo hoo!

Our new entertainment center!
Once we have that delivered, we’re going to pick out some curtains to hang up on either side of the fireplace. That will soften up the area and hide the outlets that are in random areas of the wall.

Bridal Bouquet Project

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My beautiful bouquet

After our wedding, I did a bunch of research on what could be done to preserve my bridal bouquet. There are plenty of companies that do some sort of bouquet preservation technique to freeze dry it so it looks exactly the same as it did on the day of the wedding (for a shadow box or dome), or press the flowers and frame them. Unfortunately, I started doing this research a week or so after the wedding because it didn’t even occur to me before the wedding. If you want to do one of those preservation techniques, you need to ship off your bouquet within a day or two of the wedding to ensure that it can be properly preserved. So, you should contact the company way before the wedding to see what needs to be done. Some companies need to ship something to you before the wedding to put the bouquet in so it doesn’t get damaged in shipping.

I decided that I would just press all of the flowers and then try to do something with them when they were all flattened out. I pulled apart the bouquet flowers one by one and placed them in CJ’s college textbooks (glad we could make use of them one more time!). Once they were all put in the textbooks, I weighted them down with a ton more books to make sure they were as squished as possible. Then, I just left them there for several months.

Last weekend, CJ and I were running a bunch of errands and decided to venture into HomeGoods for the first time. As were were wandering down one of the aisles, we spotted the perfect shadow box for my flower project and it was only $12.99! I was sooo excited to bring it home and get started on my bouquet project.

When we got home, I took out all the flowers from the textbooks and started to place them in the shadow box to see how I wanted them to look.

I also rewrapped the fabric from the bottom of my bouquet so it was nice and neat.

Once I got the flowers where I wanted them in the shadow box, I laid the fabric base on top of the stems of the flowers and started pinning the base into the cushioned shadow box backing. Luckily, I had some extra pearl pins from my bouquet and the shadow box came with about a dozen of them. I kept pinning the fabric until the base was as flat as it could be and then lifted it up to make sure nothing moved. I closed the front of the shadow box and, VOILA! I was done.

Super easy project and it looks so professional. I’ve already had two people tell me that it looks like I bought it from a store. 🙂