Nesting

Whenever I make an design changes to our apartment Landon says, "You're quite the little nester aren't you?" I have to admit, it's true... but what's wrong with that? Making our space reflect us and making it feel like ours instead of living in a plain jane apartment for 2 years really is something I enjoy. Designing makes me happy and really excited to have a place that is truly ours someday. I think I really have found my niche in life, something that I love to do. Here's a few shots of our living room. You can see what it used to look like when we first moved in here. You can see some of the DIY projects I've done and remember my TJMaxx yellow table I raved about in a previous post...





This cute little plant stand used to belong to my mom. It was painted a bluish gray and had a home in her living room at one point, but after painting the walls a different color she decided she didn't want it so I took it off her hands and painted it a bright red orange. And let me tell you this was the most pain in the butt paint to have mixed! I wanted just a small quart of oil base with a semigloss finish and went to I think 3 different places including Lowe's, Sherwin Williams, and Southfork Hardware and all of them told me it couldn't be done. So instead of just picking another color like most people would probably do, I drove to Salt Lake to the Benjamin Moore store where they finally said they could do it but not in a semigloss. So I settled for a different finish but atleast they could actually mix the color I wanted. All that for a measly quart of paint!
But I do love how it turned out!



I have been trying to incorporate more of my own artwork into our apartment, so this is what I came up with on top of our tv cabinet. One thing we talk about in many of my design classes is how important it is for you to use accessories that have meaning and importance to the person living there. If you just go and buy the whole cute new display at Taipan it just isn't the same and really isn't good design.

These cute little guys are my latest DI find. I have been seeing lots of cute white owls everywhere lately and wanted some for myself. So I hit the DI with my mom a few times and found these. They were originally a dark brass color and I just hit them with a few coats of white spray paint. I must say they look pretty cute up on my shelf.

I always try and switch up the pictures and things about our couch. I get sick of the same thing there all the time. This is the latest display. Now for all of you Anthropologie lovers, have you fallen in love with the oversized metal initials they have!? But at almost $100 that wasn't going to happen. So I just happened to find paper mache initials at Joann's that were only about $20 on sale. I painted it first with a coat of plain gray and then sponged a metallic silver over the top of it to make it look like galvanized metal. What do you think? I think it turned out pretty good, looks like metal to me!