250,000 views!

Late last night, as my birthday was winding to a close, I got a very special birthday surprise from you all - the blog hit one quarter of a million views! I can't think of a sweeter coincidence! Thank you all for your wonderful support!

To celebrate, I thought it would be fun to count down the top 5 viewed BDH posts since the blog's creation.

5. Our DIY chalkboard tutorial (for under $10!)

4. A compilation of some of my favorite dream swimming pool inspiration photos.

3. The recent reveal of our dining room makeover, with custom paint job and wainscoting.

2. Our 2013 Christmas Home Tour, complete with 26 full sized Christmas trees!

1. The reveal of our 11 ft Restoration Hardware inspired table, 100% built by hand by my hubby.

Thanks again for all of your loyal visits barbies! You're fabulous!

Dining Room Makeover!

Hello barbies!

I'm so delighted to report that we've finished our dining room makeover! We started over two weeks ago and thought we would be able to finish it in a weekend - boy were we wrong. With a TON of measuring and taping (we went through 8 roles of painters tape!), painting the walls twice (once white for the lines and then gray over it), painting the tray ceiling, hand stringing crystals for the chandelier and adding full wainscoting to the room - it was quite the undertaking!

My handy hubby, who also built our Restoration Hardware inspired dining room table himself for under $150, did the wainscoting himself in about 3 hours. Our builder charged $1500 for a room of wainscoting and Ross did it for about $100 in materials, which is great considering our dining room is 18 feet long! We're so happy with the finished product though and were really pleased to be able to take our builder basic tan room to a glam space with wainscoting and a custom paint job.

BEFORE:

DURING:

We created the diamonds by carefully measuring and marking where each line should go. The diamonds are each 12 inches wide and 8 inches tall. Taping perfectly straight like this is definitely a two person job - for us Ross was on a ladder and would start the line, and I would stretch it down diagonally while standing on the floor.

 

AFTER:

Our china used here is Lenox Butler's Pantry, which I've loved since our wedding. The crystal glasses are Crystal Darques in Baroque.

 

Last but not least, I have to point out that we survived Raleigh's 2014 Snowpocalypse last week, which ended up getting tons of national media attention. My normal 35-40 minute commute took 5 hours, spanned 4 cars (mine which I had to abandon because it got stuck, two strangers' cars who I hitch hiked with (everyone was hitch hiking because they had to abandon their cars), and my husband's truck (which also got stuck when he tried to come rescue me), and two separate stints on foot between rides. It was a nightmare!

Thanks for reading barbies!

Sunroom Makeover!

Hello lovelies!

I hope you're all enjoying this beautiful fall weather as much as I am! As I mentioned in my fall decorating post, decorating for the season is one of my favorite things about it, not to mention the food. I also love going to the North Carolina State Fair, which I've only missed a handful of times in my life. Even when I lived in Texas for law school I would fly back every October for it. Hubby and I plan on going tomorrow night, since Mondays are supposed to be one of the least crowded days (although the Scotty McCreery show at the Fair might change that). If you live in NC and are thinking of going, the State Fair's newly redone website with all of the info you'll need is here. Oh, and here are our newly carved pumpkins - I bet you can guess which belongs to which of us.

Fall fun aside, hubby and I found ourselves in the midst of an unexpected room makeover project last week. On Monday night we had an epiphany: our sunroom is probably the nicest room in our house (not to mention the only one that gets much of any sunlight with E/W facing windows) and we never ever EVER set foot in there... life ever. Why not? Because we used the giant room for our not so giant kitchen table, which we never eat at. I love the table - its a gorgeous hand me down from my mother in law and one of the prettiest things we own - but we just don't eat at the kitchen table much (which is bad, I know). We eat at our bar, on the couch (which we always resolve to stop doing but never do), sometimes on our front or back porch when the weather is nice and at our new
dining room table that hubby built when we have company, but somehow never end up at the kitchen table... possibly because it was so out of the way in the sunroom.

Our kitchen has a spot for a kitchen table, but we'd been using that as a sitting area, with two wingback chairs and a TV mounted on the wall (which was kinda cool because we could watch TV while we cooked). So on a random Monday night, we decided to move the kitchen table to the builder-designated kitchen table spot. To our surprise, it fit perfectly and looked great. We moved the cream wingback chairs that were there to our dining room as end chairs and we seriously couldn't have planned it any better. They matched our side chairs perfectly (which are also cream linen) and I had always wanted wingback end/head chairs. Then, magically and out of nowhere, we had a giant, semi-circle shaped sunroom completely empty, a blank canvas, and ready to be converted into whatever we wanted.  Here are the before pictures of the sitting area with wingback chairs and sunroom with kitchen table.

BEFORE:

 

Since our house has no playroom and we're probably going to have kids sometime in the next few years, we wanted the space to be kid friendly (which to us, baby rookies, meant no sharp edges, fabrics that can be easily cleaned and are dark in color, patterned flooring to easily hide any future baby vomit stains). We also wanted the room to be really comfortable. The biggest and most seemingly unattainable goal of the room was to find furniture that accented the room's unique architectural shape: preferably a round couch.

To our surprise, we found a round (!!) leather sectional (we LOVE sectionals and always have) for sale on the cheap on craigslist! We then bought a coordinating blue, brown and gold damask rug from Garden Ridge, one of my favorite stores. I bought a lamp, but I think I'm going to exchange it. I'm also working on cream colored floor length curtains to replace the navy damask valences (which I love and hate to get rid of) because the room needs more warmth/softness I think. Last but not least, my handy hubby got a new HDMI cable and ran wiring for the TV from the kitchen sub-flooring to that room and moved our mounted TV from the kitchen into the sunroom. We still also need a TV stand, but the room is great! We're really enjoying having another comfy living space and I think it will be perfect for kids when the time comes. :) Here are the photos of the (almost) finished product! I can't believe that only 5 days and a small amount of $ later, we have a cozy new living space!

AFTER:

Last but certainly not least, our first born Gus turned 8 last week before we rearranged the furniture. Everyone please wish Gus the pug a happy 8th year! <3

Thanks for reading my ramblings barbies - xox!

DIY Rustic Dining Room Table Reveal!

Finally, the time has come where I can reveal the finished product of the table hubby built from scratch for our dining room! He finished it just in time for my bff's bridal shower, but I had to wait for our chairs to come in before the big reveal. We're SO happy with it and I'm still in awe that the crazy man I married could build this with his own hands, and for under $150 at that!

I showed him some pictures of what I wanted - a rustic Restoration Hardware inspired, dark plank table with cream linen upholstered chairs. From Restoration Hardware, the tables I liked ranged from $2,600 to $3,600 - and that wouldn't include the chairs - woof. Plus, they were all 7-9 feet long.  As I wrote about here, we've had quite the struggle finding a dining room table long enough. Our dining room is 18 ft long, which we loved about the floorplan, but posed a challenge in terms of being able to find a table that could fill the space. To allow room on the ends for chair movement and walking past, we determined we would need an 11 ft table. We looked in probably 15 furniture stores (not to mention TONS of places online) and didn't find a single 11 ft table. The general market size cap seems to be about 9 ft, since most dining rooms are no longer than 12 feet. The difficulty finding the right sized table, our love for DIY'ing, and the cost savings benefits were enough to persuade us to try to DIY - and I'm so glad we did! Here is our dining room/empty void BEFORE the table:

We picked out the wood for the project ourselves from a local lumber dealer. Ross drove us out there and I was so surprised and pleased to have ended up less than two miles from where I grew up in Bahama, NC. So not only is this table special because it was handcrafted by hubby, it was also made from Laurel Poplar planks from the exact zip code that I came from! Here's the raw product, still covered in bark. :)

The table top is two inches thick (a thickness I don't think we would have been able to find at a home improvement store) and the base is 3 inches thick made from one massive 3 inch thick plank. We paid only $75 for all of the wood we needed to make the table, which felt like a STEAL, especially for an upgraded type of wood like poplar.

It took hubby about a week flanked by two full weekends to construct it. He started with the top. That took the biggest chunk of time. Then, I drew on posterboard the shape I wanted for the bases and he used a jigsaw to trace them. We spent a lotttttt of time sanding - like days. Hubby did most of this but I helped for a couple hours. Then, he stained the whole thing. We chose Minwax Wood Finish Stain and Minwax Fast-Drying Polyurethane because of the dark, natural look. It was less than $25 for the stain and polyurethane combined.

Ross did a beautiful job staining. It really brought out the beauty of the poplar. Lastly, our fabulous neighbors helped him carry it in (thanks Tim and Mike!). It's incredibly heavy. While he was working on the table, I ordered sconces and mirrors for the dining room wall and after months and months of chair browsing, finally bit the bullet on some budget friendly chairs that had the tufted linen upholstered look I wanted. Here are some photos of the work in progress:

And here's the finished product! It's an 11 foot, dark, plank style table that seats 12 comfortably. We still haven't found the right end chairs (I'm thinking the same color linen but larger, monogrammed and wingback), but the side chairs fill it out well.

 

And because I just couldn't help myself, I also did a sample place setting in our formal and casual china. I love both with the table!

How amazing is my hubby? I hope this thing stays in our family for generations (I hope our kids and grandkids have big dining rooms or open floorplans!) and that our children are proud of what daddy could do with his own hands. <3  Kinda cheesy, but I love everything about this table!

Thanks for reading barbies! xox!

UPDATE: we later completely redesigned the color motif in the dining room, doing a custom gray diamond paint job, upgrading the chandelier and doing wainscoting. Check it out here.

Submitted to: http://www.savvysouthernstyle.net/