Are you ready for the longest fireplace mantel make-over in history? No? Me neither. But that’s just what we have here folks.

After we finished repainting our main floor from an avocodo-ish green to a creamy bone colour our fireplace looked a little washed out all alone in the corner.

Don’t mind the painters tape, my brain works in weird ways. Take photos before Elaine… take them before. Anyway….

So, a little painting party was in order and black was going to be the guest of honour. My supply pile looked like this:

Okay, so we’ve been blessed with awesome neighbours and can safely say we love them. I think I can also say the feeling is mutual. What I can’t say though is that they love a good ‘peep-show’ from us. Yes. I think I can 100% commit to that statement. Not that we’ve asked… but just saying.

After we repainted our main floor we were left with this…

Holy freakin’ light Batman! 25¢ a peek people (and let me tell you we had no line-up and I didn’t see any open wallets).

So off to remedy this we must. Pre blinding light was your standard early 1990’s vertical blinds complete with faded fabric (a sheen fabric I might add – oooh-la-la), a hideous bowed valance and of course, the clunky weights at the bottom of each shiny fabric vane nastiness. Good times.

We had to remove said hideous bowed valance in order to paint. And in order to get the valance down the whole blind contraption had to come with it (how is that for bad design planning). That being said, there were no tears shed  (except of course from any poor neighbours who may have seen me in my summer nightwear) and I took this opportunity to do a MUCH needed update.

I entertained many options for a replacement but aside from going custom (bank breaker – you may have noticed those aren’t really ‘standard’ window sizes) I didn’t have too many options. The rest of our windows have nice white faux wood horizontal blinds so after a lot of searching and weighing our options we decided to go that route for the small window. We couldn’t do it in the large window without using multiple packages and I thought it would look messy. Plus that pane on the right opens so that was another issue to work around. And let’s be honest, who wants to open three sets of blinds on one window? Not me.

So for the large window we outfitted it with (wait for it) verticals! What? Verticals and horizontals side-by-side? Yes. Let me change you skeptics into believers.

But doesn’t vertical = hideous fabric accompanied by clunky weights? Nope! I didn’t know that you can now buy faux white wood vertical vanes but guess what? You can. And I did. Goodbye shiny fabric and stupid bottom weights. Hello clean streamlined vanes that match the rest of our windows. Thank you for stopping by.

Here is how Operation-Save-Our-Neighbours-Eyes went down.

We first tackled the small window to the left. Since we only needed a small width (about 21″) I bought the closest size to that and had Mrs. Home Depot cut it down for me. Plus side? I didn’t have to do the cutting. Down side? I now know far too much about Mrs. Home Depot’s personal life. Her grandson is named Charlie FYI.

Next up we installed the two corner brackets. You can assemble these outside the window or inside the window ledge – we opted for the latter. I didn’t bother patching the hole from the last set as the new track would cover it completely.

The steps after this were simple – install valance clips onto bracket, insert bracket and close clip. However, we were left with a lot of excess length so this puppy needed a hair cut had to be shortened.

To do this we simply had to cut the strings and remove the unnecessary blinds, and then put it back together again!

The trickiest part was reinserting the center thread through the base. Chef Kev came up with a good idea (old boyscout trick I am told) to singe the end with a lighter. Your unfrayed cord slips right in after that!

The hole on the underside is much larger so no problems there….

Then you trim off the excess ‘ladder’ (leaving about 2″), twist together and insert into the large hole in bottom. You feed the middle (singed) cord through the supplied plug and close ‘er up. From there you tie a knot in the threaded centre cord and snip off any extra length.

Guess what is back? Hint: it’s creamy, smooth and full of Autumn goodness. Yes! It’s Pumpkin Spice Latte Season and this morning I enjoyed my first taste of the year.

First up are these amazing little front facing book shelves (made from Ikea Spice Racks!) created by Lindsay over at Aubrey & Lindsay’s Little House Blog. Lindsay is a stationery designer (like me – well, not exclusively. I’m  a Graphic Designer but have done my own fair share of wedding stationery designs!), a mom (like me) and a blogger (like me) – cool chick! I guess I will have to be (like her) and make some of these adorable little bookshelves for my son Chace. Love these!

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Next up we visit Ashli over at Maillardville Manor. Ashli has a wonderful clean, organized, simple – yet beautiful – approach to her home and I’m a big fan of her blog. This week she featured this amazing cupcake stand made out of second hand dishware. How genius is this!?

Love that mini bunting. too cute!

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And last but certainly not least we pop on over to visit Katie at Bower Power. Katie’s blog is one of my absolute all time faves! Katie is an amazing photographer and blogger. And she is just as talented on the keyboard (I mean computer not sythesizer but maybe she does that too?) as she is behind the camera. Her posts have been known to have me snorting coffee out my nose (seriously – girl is crazy HILARIOUS) or at times, even choke me up. She has an amazing way of expressing herself – as a wife and mom to a little boy – that is so real. This particular post about ‘bubbles‘ I found especially poignant. And it reminded me of the recent fun with bubbles that I had with my own little nugget (bottom pic).

Enjoy!

As recently mentioned, we’ve been brightening up our main floor. On a recent trip to Home Depot with my toddler in tow the new adorable Disney paint chips from Behr caught my eye. And my little guy Chace’s eye too!

He started pointing out the colours – on repeat (he’s almost 2 1/2 so you can imagine that “green” is a very exciting topic with a high priority rating) and it got me thinking… Free. Excitable to little one. Colours… A perfect match!

So two each of select colours came home with me and now we have a free, new, fun matching game.

I chose very obvious colours – bright green, red etc so that the game was easy and fun for such a young guy. Making him match “persimmon” seemed a bit out of his comfort zone at this stage.

The new match game was an instant hit! “Mommy green mouse, green mouse, two!”. What a sweet sweet sound.

Hello!

Long time no blog! Let me explain – A wild pack of Alpacas came out of nowher… er, ah the dog ate my homewor… Okay seriously, I’ve been ridiculously busy. Enough said. Blogging is very fun but unfortunately the first to go when my days get too full. That being said, I’m glad to be taking a moment to write and do enjoy it! Thanks for checking back in!

In our spare moments around here we’ve been doing some upgrades to our seen-better-days-family-room-furniture and have brightened up our main floor with some much overdue paint! Ah, feels so much fresher in here! And in the process has provided some fun projects and of course spawned a few new ones that I can’t wait to do… and blog about!

Plus, Chef Kev will be back with some new creations too 😉

Okay, so first off I paid a few visits to my friend (you may know him) Craig Slist. If you don’t, check him out, he’s got a great website. Via our friend Craig we got a new (to us) love seat, coffee table and leather club chair! I’ve got some big plans for the coffee table and folding side table you see beside Mr. Leatherson. Fun. Fun.

Exit old upholstered chair “redecorated” by cats and dog. Hello new club chair. Have a seat? Don’t mind if I do…