Kitchen: Before/After

Alrighty - a little late but as promised here is the first part of the house we are ready to show!! The Kitchen and Kitchen eating area are as good as it gets at this point. We are elated with how it turned out. At first the paint color shocked us a bit...it was a bit more green than we expected but over time its growing on us and has given our home this unbelievable coastal feel that we LOVE!! I feel very blessed to come home to this!

Before
After

Before
After



Island fixture found here

Paint Color is Sherwin Williams Comfort Gray

Farm Table and Chairs is from World Market.  Babies table is from Ikea.  20 bucks!!

Farm table fixture found here

And I couldnt' resist some updated pictures of my little buddy.  He's growing so fast! Sits at his own table to eat, loves to color on his easel that Big Daddy made.  This past weekend our neighborhood put on an easter egg hunt at the neighborhood park.  It was a great way to meet some new neighbors and made us very glad we picked such a wonderful family friendly neighborhood.

Jakes a big helper these days too.  He cleans up for me after Hunter's dinner ;)

The next before and after you get will most likely be the Master bedroom and bath. What about the living room you ask? Oh, yeah. We are STILL sitting on outdoor patio furniture, college style, because MACY's has delayed our sofas by 8 weeks. COUNT EM! EIGHT!!! GRRRRRRRRRRR Look for that in May.

But look for pictures of my nugget at his first easter egg hunt in a couple days :)

Who knew....Knobs!

Who knew new kitchen knobs could make such a big difference. This might be my favorite change to date. And who knew kitchen knobs could make a girl sooo happy :) Props to hubby for hanging them perfectly straight (he had to drill new holes to install them!)

I was sick last week...like down for the count sick allll week! But we are making progress. The whole house has been painted, kitchen table lantern installed and we are just waiting on the island fixture to get back from big daddy's shop. It needed some height adjusting!

I've been really bad about taking pictures with the good camera of the house and of HL5. I'm going to make this a priority this weekend so look for some good posts next week! :) Happy almost Friday!

Busy with boxes and paint

Well, we're in! There's LOTS LOTS LOTS still to be done, but we're in. At the end of this I'll be ok if I dont see another box or paint swatch for LOOOOOOOONG time!

We've been busy little bees unpacking boxes...

While working around our kitchen cabinets being painted....

And trying to figure out a paint color for the walls....

Oh and I MIGHT have done a little shopping too. Maybe. I blame this girl.

Can't wait til it all comes in and things start to fall into place. I foresee some before and after photos in ya'll future :)

Baby Stats - 15 Months

Daddy just took baby to his 15 month appointment so I thought I'd report the stats for all my Grami, Granmommie, and Nana readers out there.

HLV was 26 pounds-60th percentile
And 33inches tall - 90th percentile

And in true Melrose form that is 33 inches of all torso and No legs ;)

Love this little nuggie!

A dreamy creamy kitchen

If there is one thing my husband and I agree up when it comes to home decor it's that we both LOVE white kitchens. Hands down we are just white kitchen people. We didn't want that to stop us from buying a home though because kitchen cabinets can be changed. When we were house hunting we almost built a new construction home in a neighborhood called Robbins Park. Walking through their model we homes we feel in LOVE with their open airy decor and open floor plans. However, these top notch homes came at a price tag that was going to end up being more debt than we wanted to take on. We acheived our open floor plan dream with our new home on Linksland and now are working to give it that open airy feel. First, here's some our inspiration. These are photos of the Robbins Park model homes.






Beautiful right?

Here's a picture of our kitchen now...



And this was mine and lindsey's sad attempt at painting the cabinets white/cream to see what it will look like. bahahahhaah.
Pretty terrible visual...guess we'll just have to wait for the real thing!! The cabinets are being repainted on Feb. 14th! Happy Valentines day to me.

The other thing we loved in these robbins park model homes was the pale blue paint. I would never think of doing so much blue in a home but it's so pretty and if you go pale enough with a touch of gray it really can act as a neutral. This past weekend we spent some time picking out the perfect white cabinet color and the perfect blue/gray wall color for our new home. This is what we ended up with.

Sherwin Williams "creamy" and Benjamin Moore "gray sky" All the trim in the house will be Sherwin Williams "pure white"

Hunter and I read in a design book that you should look at your wall color as a pair of pants. If someone told you, you had to wear the same color pants for 3 years what would you pick? If you went with your royal blue pants you might have fun wearing them for the first month but after a while you'd get sick of them and probably run out of ideas of tops to pair with them. But a pair of Khakis you could probably wear all three years, never run out of top ideas or tire of them. Interesting way of looking at it...I think i could wear Gray sky pants for three years. Could you?

From Gardendale to Linksland to Chesterfield

Well folks we closed on the sale of Gardendale and now are looking forward to life on Linksland Drive. In the meantime we ARE enjoying Lake life at Grami's, having fun (well most the time) picking out furniture for our new living room! Our old livingroom furniture will be moved to the basement at the new house leaving us a beautiful blank slate. We decided to tackle the couch decision first and after recieving a macys furniture flyer in the mail decided on the beautiful Chesterfield sofa design. At Macy's its actually called Saybridge by Martha Stwart. It comes in a pretty grey called storm which we really like but decided to be brave (or just plan crazy) and go with an ivory color called buckwheat. After couch testing at Macy's we made our way over to Potterybarn to see the rug we want in person. Potterybarn Gabrielle rug. It's the perfect combo of grey's blue's. Enough color for a rug but neutral enough to go with anything.
While there we also fell in love with these chairs.
I immediately went home, drew up a picture so we could see how everything we picked out looked together. Hunter and I are very visual people and lack the ability to visualize in our heads. We love it! Now the chairs are a little pricy so we've been keeping our eye out for something more budget friendly. Came across these on One Kings Lane yesterday....
Def a viable option and 300 a peice. yes please! Except when you add them to the cart your heart gets crushed by seeing they charge you 250 dollars to ship them. Such a racket!! Now here we are about to order out couches, having fun picking out chairs and BAM! My wonderfully awesome husband AKA Mr. Awesome, decides to get all analytical on me and says he doesn't think the couches are going to look good placed facing eachother in the new living room. He thinks it will leave TOO much space between the couches and they are going to look funny. In an effort to change his mind and stop WWIV from starting I call on my bestie Linds for help. Gosh...this girl is GOOD! I mean REALLY GOOD!!! She immediatlely leads us to this website called Furniture Land South where you can type in the dimensions of your room and furniture and plan our your room to scale. Now we're talking!! I spent a good part of last night playing around with this great little tool and was able to (i think) successfully convince the hubby and all is good in the new hood.
See..it's gonna look great (i hope). Yes, theres a good amount of space between the couches but space is good, we just aren't use to space and we need to EMBRACE our more space. And if we get moved in and decide it looks silly there are several ways to take up that space...add two medium size coffee tables instead of one, add a coffee table and two ottomans...
For the visual...

Traditional Family Room design by Philadelphia Interior Designer kat robbins Interiors

Traditional Family Room design by Other Metro Interior Designer Anna Baskin Lattimore Design

Traditional Family Room design by Baltimore Interior Designer Elizabeth Reich

Traditional Family Room design by San Francisco Architect Pacific Peninsula Group

Let's end with an ode to the Chesterfield...

Eclectic Living Room design by Los Angeles Home Staging Madison Modern Home

Eclectic Living Room design by Atlanta Interior Designer Niki Papadopoulos

Traditional Living Room design by Atlanta General Contractor Blake Shaw Homes, Inc

Contemporary Living Room design by Los Angeles Interior Designer Jeneration Interiors

It's really pretty in grey too, isnt' it!?

Contemporary Family Room design by Baltimore Interior Designer Patrick Sutton Associates

We love these spindle chairs as well...Basset Furniture has a great one!

Contemporary Family Room design by Minneapolis Interior Designer Martha O'Hara Interiors

All of these photos are from Houzz, please tell me you know about Houzz!
Well this is all just the beginning. What do you think? Are we crazy for ordering couches before we have moved in? Thing is they are only on sale until Feb 4th, and they take 6-8weeks to come in! All advice is ALWAYS welcome :) xo

Mooovin on out...

Saturday's the big day, MOVING DAY! BUT we dont close on our new house for 3 or more weeks so as of saturday we'll be living with GRAMI! YAY!! What fun it's going to be for baby Hunter to spend so much time with his GRAMI, and What fun its going to be for mom and dad to have so much help from GRAMI. Thanks for opening your home to us Grami, we can't wait. xoxo THIS is our current state of affairs... Secretly, I like living like this...I don't have to clean, or pick up after anyone. It's been nice!