A Real Photographer Came to Our House

I don't know about you but for me this weekend was all about relaxing. I finally sat outside in the backyard and just enjoyed it without doing any work. Last week was slightly stressful as a Montreal newspaper came and interviewed Chad and I and then took pictures of our house for a feature in their weekend homes section. The thought of having someone else photograph our space was both exciting and terrifying and automatically made me want to update everything. Luckily Chad reminded me that this was not an option and I settled on a few small projects, finishing touches and re-arranging (a.k.a. still losing my mind for a week). Here are the places I made some updates:

Front Entryway

Our entry-way closet originally had faux wood panel doors that we removed with the intention of someday replacing- but dammit- closet doors are either cheap and ugly or nice and expensive, so we left it. I had some leftover paint from another project (coming soon!) so decided to give the coat closet some depth and interest if it was going to be exposed like that. The colour is a perfect retro mint from the Behr Marquee line (Farmers Market). I also happened to find these new hooks at Ikea (from the  new PS 2014 collection) that perfectly match the mint paint and an existing frame.

Upstairs Hallway

Here is where I used up the rest of my mint paint, finally updating the last dusty pink item in the house. This little side table at the end of the hall was left here by the former owner and I really love it's shape and size -just right for that alcove now that's it's freshened up. 

Dressing Room

Just a little sneak peak into my redone closet room. While it wasn't horrible before, I repainted the room from the original light blue paint and suddenly can't imagine why I waited so long. I'll give you a full tour later...

Office

Another room that I'd put off doing anything to because it's really Chad's room and therefore full of wires (boxes and boxes full of wires - I'm not even kidding). There are also three computer monitors and a driving simulator. Not the stuff of great design. Again, this is more of a sneak peek as I'll eventually do a full tour and show you how I used things from around the house to update it and hide those damn wires.

Living Room

I'm pretty happy with this room so there wasn't that much that I wanted to do. I ended up doing something fun in the dining room corner where our citrus tree was before I moved it outside for the summer. That's another one of my 'coming soon' posts. I really just wanted to focus on restyling our buffet by adding a few more items. 

While it's not drastic, I think it fills out the space a bit more. The small box (turned on it's side) and the standing sculpture are two items I picked up at West Elm on super sale. I actually stained the base of the sculpture darker as I found the original wood too light. It was a quick five minute project using some leftover minwax stain. 

Kitchen

Again, there wasn't much I wanted to change in the kitchen (apart from building that floor to ceiling wine rack, which I knew better than to ask Chad to build). I added a rug to soften the space and tie in the red and mint accents. The rug is from ecarpetgallery which I was pleasantly surprised to find has beautiful rugs at really great prices. While they are primarily an online business their warehouse is in Montreal and they were nice enough to let me come and pick up the rug in person. Their customer service was excellent and I am beyond pleased with the quality of the rug. Take a look at some of the beautiful traditional rugs they have- I want them all!

Apart from those projects and some crazy cleaning, I didn't do much else! It was an excellent experience speaking with the reporter (who was beyond nice) and I loved being able to see a professional photographer take pictures of our space (he also noted all the same difficult angles I did). The feature should be coming out before the end of the summer and you can bet I'll be sharing it here. Happy Canada Day on Tuesday to all my fellow Canucks. I'll be back to share all of the 'sneak peek' projects I mentioned soon.