Decorating Our Home

One of the really neat things about moving (and I've done a lot of that in my life!) is getting to decorate a place to reflect you and your family.  Growing up that meant for me getting to set up my room a different way after each move or buying new sheets to match my new room.  But as an adult and purchasing your first home that means getting to decide how EVERY room in the house is set-up and even getting to pick paint colors!

When we decided on which house we wanted to buy we immediately started to think about if & when we wanted to paint, what colors we wanted to use, what furniture we needed, and where stuff was going to go.  Because we were leaving a 900 square-foot apartment we knew we weren't going to have all the furniture necessary to begin to fill our new home, so we made specific rooms priorities over others.  The first one on the list - master bedroom. 

*Master Bedroom
We love our bedroom furniture, its all from the same line of furniture from Ikea (if you've never been to an Ikea go to one ASAP, they are awesome!) and it's this beautiful shade of reddish brown. All of the bedding we already had was shades of browns and cremes with hints of light blue.  Since this room was priority #1 we picked out paint colors before we moved in and Will set to work painting as soon as we had keys.  Three of the walls are "Moroccan Moonlight" and the fourth is "Puppy Paws".  After we got the furniture moved in we started to brainstorm what we wanted to put on our freshly painted walls.  I love spending time on Pinterest and one of my favorite categories is Home Decor. I found on there a few different pins about picture collages and those sparked the idea of doing a picture collage above our headboard of our engagement and wedding photos.

It was hard to pick just these 11 pictures!

Our photographer William Mahone did such a beautiful job with the pictures and the colors were perfect for our bedroom.  All of the frames came from Ollie's and are mismatched on purpose. So far that's the extent of the decorating, we're in the hunt for artwork for the largest wall to add some more pops of color to the room.

*Living Room

Top: Wedding day items and sits above the TV
Middle and Bottom: Favorite photos and personal mementos

The next room we were excited to get decorated was the living room.  The biggest thing we wanted to add to the room were floating shelves to help not only display our photos and other items but to also help breakup some of the large white space of the walls.  We didn't decide to paint this room because were weren't sure what colors we wanted yet - we are now already thinking of doing just one wall a color but haven't picked the color.  We got three floating shelves from Ikea (again love that store! wish it were closer...) and after much frustration trying to find studs in the walls hung two behind the couch and one above the TV. The two behind the couch frame in my favorite part of the living room! Ever since I saw this picture from our wedding I knew I wanted it blown up and put on a canvas for above the couch.  It's absolutely stunning! Take a look:

Easily one of my favorite photos from the wedding! Thanks Bill!

The rest of the living room is a work in progress - we have few VT items hung up, some more pictures, and eventually really neat green curtains will frame in Maddy's window.

We've started work on a few other rooms in the house - Master Bathroom has a neat new shower curtain and has a future DIY makeover that I'm sure will get it's own post, the Guest Bathroom will be neutrals, the Office right now is pretty standard until we decide on a new desk, the Guest Bedroom is the next project that I'll let Will share with you all (lots of Pinterest ideas and DIY coming soon!!), and the basement needs some organizing and eventually will house the Craft Room!!  The last room in the house is the Kitchen.  We didn't have to do much here because it's already bigger than our old one and mostly white.  We have put up a few pictures and purchased a wine rack for our apparently growing collection.  The neatest thing we have done is take the chalkboard from our anniversary photo and mounted it to the refrigerator to be our weekly menu and reminder board:

Look even blogging made the To Do list!

We update the board each Sunday with the meals for the week which has turned into a nice habit and helps to keep impulse buying at the grocery store to a minimum when you've got a plan. 

We aren't done decorating the house yet but that's the fun thing about decorating, it takes a while and it's what you want it to be!  Most of the ideas we have planned or have done come from Pinterest - this has allowed us to do a lot on our own instead of just buying something and hanging it on the wall. We've noticed our home matches Maddy really well, which doesn't surprise me because we love her and she's apart of our family too so it's only natural that our color palette has migrated that way as well: white mixed with browns and blacks, and the occasional splash of color.

Thanks for letting me share a little peek into our home decor, I'll share more as we tackle new projects.

-Julie