The $4.50 headboard

Whether this is considered a headboard or wall art, I'll never know. But, are you ready for the reveal of what this beautiful piece is made from?
It's $1.25 piece of poster board, covered in a $1 pillow case all from Dollarama. The centre is an 8x10 canvas art piece that Big N painted for me, there's actually a lot of dimension in the piece, but it doesn't really photograph very well. There you have it ladies and gentlemen, a budget basic redo.

Master Bedroom Reno

After a year and a half, I finally decided to buckle down and finish the master bedroom. It was merely a matter of putting up some finishing touches to make everything come together. So, lets reminisce about how far we've come in the past year.

This first picture is from a couple of days prior to us taking possession of the house where we checked to make sure everything seemed to be in good order and my parents got the chance to come view the beautiful property with us. I'm sure they were awestruck. I mean with a master bedroom like this, who wouldn't be?
We quickly got to work CLEANING, patching holes, burning curtains, CLEANING and the room was starting to take shape. We added some paint to the ceiling and walls, put up some new trim, added new closet doors, and ta da, it was livable.

And that's pretty much how it stayed for over a year, until one day last week, I decided I wanted a room that was a little more relaxing and a little less, I just graduated from university and all I own is this bed. There was a lot of consideration over what to use as a headboard for our bed, but the lack of funds available for frivolous redo's, Big N and I got to work making this wonderful piece for $4.50. Check back for a full post of what it is made of, I have a feeling you'll never guess.

We added a mirror that was found in the clearance section of the Superstore above the dresser, although being 5'2" on a tall day, it's a bit high for my liking, but it's just right for people of normal height.

And we couldn't kick Little N out quite yet, so during the big bed move (dragging it across the room to the other wall), he got pushed against the inside wall now. The pictures above his bed are three pictures I took after my European Adventure in 2007. I still love looking at those pictures in the morning and remembering what a great adventure that trip was.
We finalized the bedroom for under $5. We pieced together the furniture over the past year, the platform bed and dresser are from the South Shore Lux collection which we got from Direct Buy. We have the same dresser in the kids' room, so some day when we are ready to get an actual grown up bedroom set, the kids will likely inherit this whole set. The night stands and lights are all from Ikea and had been taking up residence in other parts of our house. The blinds were from the rec room downstairs, and immediately after moving in and realizing the windows were the same size, I scooped them up so R had to buy new sets for the rec room, hehe oops. All in all, I'm pretty happy with the results. Some day when we decide to pull up all the gross blue carpeting, I'll enjoy the space even more, but for now, it suits my needs just fine.

Patio Reno

We've been homeowners for almost a year and a half, but the list of things to get done on our place is still no where near being complete. But, we received another check a few weeks ago when R and his friend R buckled down and re-did our front patio.

This space is right off of the playroom and it's now a great spot for early morning and late afternoon adventures, the pure sun it receives mid-day makes it much too hot to do anything there, except sun bathe, which I may or may not do during nap time.

Here's a couple before pictures of the space. Everything was completely rotten, and there was both a door and a large window looking on to it. Which in itself, rendered that wall quite useless inside.

When we put siding on the house, we took out the door, and added a big sliding door where the existing window was. With the help of my drywalling pro dad you can't even tell there was a door in the space before.

R&R took to work on the patio, and after much discussion, it was settled on patio boards for the walls and fake stone paint over top of OSB boards on the floor.

We still haven't purchased furniture for the space as we need to find something that the kids can't move and jump off since it is a second story patio.

Overall, I love the space. R&R did a great job!! It's so nice to finally have it completed and actually be able to go out there. I'm imagining enjoying a nice morning tea sitting out there, although my imagination is showing a peaceful relaxing tea, so that means, I'm either drinking it at 5am, or my kids have grown and moved away from home?


Thanks R&R for all the hard work! It's awesome!!

Bathroom Renovation

I love to read other blogs about home renovations, and our house has had many. We purchased our house a little over a year ago, and are slowly completing all sorts of projects. Today, I thought I would lead you on the adventure of our bathroom renovation. Let's say this was the easiest renovation in the house for me, mostly because my parents came and did the entire thing while we were in Nova Scotia last summer. It was definitely the best thing to come home to.
I've heard that bathrooms and kitchens are what sells a house. Now obviously this was not the case in our purchase, price sold the house, the rest we could work with.

Here's our before bathroom from the previous owners:

The counters were ugly.
The storage room was horrible.
The tiles made me cringe.
And the peel and stick floor was hideous. Although that cute little girl there does enhance the picture quite a bit.

After having owned three of their own homes and helping my brother and sister both do renovations in their respective homes, my parents are definitely getting the hang of everything relating to renovations. This was their third complete bathroom re-haul. I gave direction as to the type of fixtures I wanted to see, but otherwise left everything up to them, knowing full well that my mom was there to reel my dad in when he was picking tile, etc.

I must say, the end product is more than I ever could have imagined. They tiled the entire shower, the floor, gave decorative touches to the tile. New vanity, new toilet, new space saver, new fan, new EVERYTHING.

It's not a huge bathroom by any means, but it has so much more room to store everything and works great for our family. A close up of all the tile work.
I can't thank my parents enough for this renovation because I didn't have to deal with ANYTHING. It was great!

A Space to Play

After purchasing our house almost one year ago, we've taken the plunge to make our upstairs living room a very kid friendly space.

This is what our living room/playroom looked like when we purchased our house:

And this is what the space looked like prior to us embarking on making it our full fledge play room:

We've done a lot of work in this room, including turning that window into a patio door. This is what our space looks like today:

We still have more work to be done, but we're slowly getting a room that we can use as both a playing and living space. I'll show details of some of our projects in another post.