Laundry Room Makeover -- Inspiration

My laundry room is horribly boring. I feel like that's typically a pretty boring room in any house. But we enter our house through the garage about 95% of the time, and we walk in to the laundry room first thing. Whenever we have guests, they have to walk through the laundry room to get to the half bath. Also, I feel like I spend an absurd amount of time in there these days....seriously, does laundry ever stop??? So even though it's not that exciting of a place to be I feel like I've got plenty of motivation to make it pleasing to the eye. Or my eyes, more specifically.

I don't want to do a big overhaul, because this is something I'll have to fit in during nap times. I wish we could replace the floors. Oh, how I wish. The laundry room, half bath, and guest bath upstairs all have that awful linoleum flooring that was so popular in the early 90s when our house was built. I desperately want to replace it all, but it's not really in the budget at the moment.

So basically, I need something inexpensive and easy that I can do on my own in not a lot of time. Simple, yeah? I've been browsing through Pinterest and houzz lately for some inspiration, and these are my favorites so far.

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I'm all over the place here. No real consistent thing I'm going for yet, obviously. A couple of notes: it's a small room, only wide enough for a washer/dryer. There are three doors (to the guest bath, garage, and living room), so the only solid wall is the back wall behind the washer/dryer. No windows, no natural light whatsoever. So, yeah...not a whole lot to work with!

So, anybody have any great advice/suggestions/ideas for me? I would LOVE the help!

My First Furniture Makeover

For quite some time now I've been wanting to get into furniture makeovers. I love the idea of taking an old piece and making it into something beautiful. Now that I'm staying home with Grayson, I thought I would have the free time to work on some things. Even though that free time isn't near as abundant as what I was expecting, I can still squeeze a few minutes in here and there during nap time.

The first piece I decided to make over was this antique buffet (credenza? I don't know what determines the difference) that my mom gave to me awhile ago to work on. It was really beautiful, but needed so much work. Kind of a big project for my first one, but it worked.

First I took off all of the hardware and sanded it down. Which took foooorever. I started doing it by hand, but after oh, maybe an hour of sanding and getting very little done, Arsen agreed that I needed to buy an actual sander. So I did.

Things went much faster after that, thankfully. After sanding it I painted it a fun shade of blue that I picked up at Lowes. I've been wanting to incorporate some more color into my house, and I'm kind of obsessed with blue at the moment. I used the color Paddle from the Eddie Bauer Home collection.

After a couple of coats of paint, I sealed it with Polycrylic Protective Finish in Clear Semi-Gloss, put the original hardware back on, and all done!

I really love the finished product. It took so much longer than I thought it would, but I think the hard work was well worth it! Right now I have it sitting in the bay window in my kitchen, but I'm not sure if that will be the permanent home for it. Overall I must say I'm pretty pleased with the outcome!

A Lazy Little Weekend

Well, it's Monday again. And unfortunately, I'm a bit under the weather today. As is Addie. Not my favorite way to start a new week, but hopefully things will improve quickly.

This weekend went incredibly fast, as usual, and nothing too exciting happened. I spent a large portion of time sleeping, reading, and lounging around watching Snooki & JWoww. Feel free to judge. I judge myself for watching that ridiculousness. The only exciting thing about this weekend included having a girls night at a friends place in Dallas, but unfortunately things took a not so fun turn there. We were watching our beloved OSU Cowboys, and let's just say the game wasn't pretty. Plus, it was a 9:30 PM game, so by the end it was after midnight, we were losing, and everyone was just a little sleepy and sad. It was great to see those girls, but we agreed maybe next time to spend our time doing something that won't potentially lead to sadness :)

Also, I got a new look over here on my little bloggy! I was lucky enough to win a free blog makeover in a giveaway from Jennifer over at Finding My Way in Texas.  Emily with Designs by Emily was seriously a pleasure to work with. Going in I didn't have much of an idea of what I wanted, mainly just a color scheme, and she came up with something so cute! We exchanged countless emails, and she made every tiny change I asked for with no hesitation. If you need a new look for your blog, be sure to check out her Etsy shop!

Other than that, I finished up a couple of little spray paint projects I've been meaning to do, and I love how they turned out! Now, I'm a bad, bad blogger, because I totally forgot to take any "before" photos. But I think the "afters" are quite adorable. Arsen keeps asking me where it all will go, because it doesn't match any of our stuff, but I love these colors. So maybe we'll be doing a guest room makeover to work them in somewhere.

The best thing about these three little projects is that I spent basically no money. I bought the spray paint, and that's about it. Doesn't get much better than that! I think they all turned out pretty cute.

And that's all I've got for today. I'll be back tomorrow with my big wedding post....Happy Monday friends!