BDH Updates: a new brown sectional sofa, furniture shuffling & more

Hello barbies! Over the past few months, we've had a handful of updates at the BDH that maybe weren't worth a full post on their own, but I thought I should share altogether.

 

The biggest of these updates would probably be that we moved our family room furniture into our sunroom and purchased a new large brown sectional for our family room in early December. We LOVE our family room furniture - its so us and our first big furniture purchase together - but we really wanted to get back to having a sectional in our family room like we did in our Texas house (that well loved, yet tired sectional is now living out its golden years in our media room, in case you were wondering).

So we sold our leather couch that we had in our sunroom on Craigslist, moved our nice family room furniture into that room, then replaced the family room furniture with a really large brown upholstered sectional... and we're so happy! Having our nice set in the sunroom has been great, because its so cold in there this time of the year (hardwoods, lots of windows) (the leather couch was just too cold for that room) and the new sectional is amazing and just the right size for two humans and 3 dogs that insist on all sitting on the same piece of furniture. My BFF Vanesa and I picked out the fur pillows together - love them. We also bought a new peace lily houseplant to keep the indoor air clean (peace lily's have indoor air filtering qualities) and to add some greenery.

The new family room:

 

The new sunroom:

A few mantle upgrades and updates:

Some changes to our downstairs hallway side table:

 I'm OBSESSED with this new iron coffee table that my mother-in-law gave us when we were visiting Texas over Christmas. In addition to our DIY patio (full post here), with DIY couch (full post here), we now have a cute little sitting area on the porch thanks to this table. I plan on doing more to this spot soon, but for now, you get the picture.

And of course, our new wine cellar, which I blogged about last week here:

Now we're working on some upgrades to our foyer (and I'm loving what we've bought so far so much I can hardly contain myself!), filling out our media room (to my surprise, hubby denied my request to hang 6 different Titanic movies posters) and beautifying our kinda bland upstairs guest room (it's going to be so light and dreamy! my mom is already sewing the curtains). Stay tuned and thanks for reading dolls!

Our DIY Wine Cellar with Carrara Marble!

Hi Barbies!

I hope you're doing well. I'm late to tell you this, but happy 2015! For those of you who made resolutions, I hope you've been able to keep them so far and that they're going well.

I wanted to take a minute to share hubby's latest -- and possibly greatest -- project. As you all know, we have an empty room off of our formal living room that was intended as a wine cellar. We didn't have the builder build the shelving because their quoted price was high (it ended up being roughly 30 times the cost of what hubby spent to build it). Despite being in our house for almost two years now, its never been completed because its never been a priority. Fortunately, thanks to some persuasive spousal lobbying on my part and some unexpected free time on his, he did it (!!) and in my opinion its his best work yet!!

He built the wooden frame on the bottom, then built the three top pieces (2 full sized and 1 half sized for the middle) that he eventually mounted on top of the bottom frame. The top pieces were very, VERY time consuming considering he had to cut so many thin pieces to hold the bottles. He then stained the entire thing in this grayish stain I picked out, which is Minwax Slate. I wanted gray because I knew I wanted carrara marble as the countertop, which has a lot of grain veins.

We chose a stain instead of a paint to highlight the wood - a really beautiful cherry poplar. After staining it all, he added trim all around it to make it look like one piece. He also installed the carrara marble himself - which we bought as a remnant very inexpensively. I had to help him carry it into the house - boy was that thing deceptively heavy! Last, we selected a gray and white tile that he installed as a backsplash - he even cut the tiles himself by borrowing a friend's tile cutter. Installing the tile took under an hour - super easy for him.

Oh, and as an added bonus, he ran electricity through the piece so that we could have accent lights in it... he even made his own LED tube lighting (which was probably the most time consuming part of the entire project aside from cutting the wood). Isn't hubby so talented??