Spring is here

Happy Easter!

It's been a crazy couple of days... I have SO much to tell you about.  I am just itching for some showing off... but as usual I have not downloaded any lovely pictures for you lovely readers.  I AM SORRY.  I'll make it up to you I promise.

Over Easter we were visiting family and generally enjoying ourselves and the lovely warmish weather (5-10 degrees Celsius).  We had snow last week (no joke) so we'll take what we can get.  The plants are enjoying the weather as well, and it seems that Spring has really arrived.

Lately, I have been having so much fun watching my tulips come up in the front garden; it is SO exciting.  Tulips are my absolute favourite flower.  In our area (we are Zone 5 for you gardeners), we plant bulbs in the Fall and then cross our fingers all winter and wait expectantly in the Spring for the little green leaves to poke out of the ground.  Of course there are some that get eaten by squirrels (little buggers!) and other animals before they have a chance to grow, but when they start growing out of the ground it's like magic.

The front of our house used to look like this.

Yup, just grass... how boring.  In fact, it's all pretty beige.  We planted a garden along the front path and around the giant cedar tree that you can see in the bottom right of the photo.  It looks so much more homey now.  The tulips are not blooming yet, but for now the little green leaves are excitement enough.  Happy Spring!

I hope you have something growing!  I'd love to hear about it if you do.  Are the flowers out in your city?

Bathroom "Sketch" Art

I'm no artist, and I don't pretend to be, but that's something that I always wished I could do... draw.  It's amazing to me what artistic people can do with just a pencil or paint.  I was looking for some art to add to the powder room that would go with my Renoir print that has been my inspiration for the powder room.  Seriously, he painted that.  Amazing.


Renoir's "Dance in the City"

I wanted something simple and monotone like an etching or sketch.  I hinted at this before when I told you about the paint colour for the bathroom.  So I looked to my good friend Google to help me out with some ideas and stumbled across this really inspiring idea.  It was perfect, but could I pull it off?

From starterhometodreamhome.blogspot.com

Step 1: Find and print out clip art pictures (from Microsoft Word or anywhere online) that you want to sketch (resize if necessary).  I wanted to do 4 frames so I found a bathtub and toilet (similar to above) and added a sink and a roll of toilet paper (so cute!).
Step 2: Trace the clipart in pencil using "sketchy" strokes.  You want the lines to be soft so that it looks like a real sketch.  Add some shading... just follow the darker areas in the clipart and shade softly.  Trust me, if I can do it, you can do it too.
Step 3: Sign your art.  You can just do a squiggle, or sign your (or any) name or initials... no one will know!

Voila!  Beautiful custom made art... for FREE.  Can't beat that.

I have some amazing "after" pictures coming I promise.  Painting the powder room is really taking WAY longer than we'd hoped.  Looks like it will be FOUR coats of primer to cover that sponge painted madness.

Weekend Bliss and Reminiscing

So as most of you know we celebrated hubby's birthday on the weekend with a party at our house for a bunch of our friends.  We had so much fun!  I think the best part (other than the cake - yum!) was that we took an entire weekend off from working on the house.

We have been having a lot of fun working on the house, but I think we really appreciated having a break.  We have come a long way, so far we finished the family room and the front hall, we've also made some progress on the powder room.  On the weekend we got a chance to kind of show it off and it was so great to hear everyone's wonderful comments about our progress so far.

We are so happy that our house is starting to feel like our home.  Even though its only been a few months, it's still fun to look back at how far we've come.

Remember what the family room used to look like before...

And now...

The front hall is also one of my favourite places in the house now.  Before it was SO green!

And now it's so lovely...

It's nice to see how far we've come, but I know that we still have a long way to go.  I have some great projects coming up including the powder room getting painted!!  I can't wait to show off that before and after!  Stay tuned...