Fall Decorating at the BDH!

Hello barbie dolls!

I sure hope you're enjoying fall as much as I am. At the BDH we've certainly gone overboard, with this being our first decoratable (I just made that word up - decoratable - adjective : a season that one can really decorate for) season since moving into the BDH. I love summer as much as any girl, but lets be honest, there's not much you can do for it in the decorating realm. A couple bright colors and prints here, an American flag there, but that's about it. Fall, on the other hand, is a season where a girl with a new house can go off the deep end with pumpkins, earth tones, raffia, mums, leaves and burlap... and this girl has done just that.

At the risk of making the BDH look like this excessive pumpkin palace, I've been putting touches of fall virtually everywhere.

Here are a few of my favorite fall things from around the BDH:

I've also been indulging my love for fall via burning pumpkin roll scentsy in every scentsy warmer in my house for two weeks straight. Last Saturday we also invited my parents and grandma over for chili (vegetarian and non-vegetarian - thanks for the recipe Ranita!) and pumpkin bread.

To those of you interested in jazzing up your own dream houses for fall, here are a few inspiration photos from some other fab fall-lovers. I'm absolutely OBSESSED with the pumpkin place settings. You could even cricut on your monogram or that of the guest who will be sitting there. Adorbs.

This weekend I'll probably pull out our seven tubs of Halloween stuff! The giant spiders, bats and skeletons have a tendency to freak me out, especially when I'm up in the middle of the night and forget they're there, but I guess that's what Halloween is all about

Aside from fall, here are some other things I'm really feeling these days:

Prints on prints on prints, also known as "power clashing" makes me swoon.  It takes a lot of skill to execute it well, but this decorator definitely did.

I'm in love with this burlap bow pillow. Seems like it could be DIY'd pretty easily.

I run into this photo on the web constantly, but it never gets old. Love everything about this, especially the striped wallpaper. Hubby and I will be wallpapering the formal living room in pink stripes this week/weekend. We're major wallpaper rookies so wish us luck!

Of course I adore this chevron and burlap frame. Again, it could be easily DIY'd. Could be a good Christmas gift for the gal pals.

I'm in LOVE with my Maybelline Color Sensational lipstick in Pink and Proper. It's probably not appropriate for fall, but I can't help myself.

I bought this tunic from Target of all places this weekend and I'm obsessed. I'm wearing it with black tights, tan boots and a tan scarf. This picture totally doesn't do it justice, but its gorgeous. The sleeves are sheer with buttons at the wrists. LOVE.

Lastly, I'm loving my weekend breakfasts on the back porch with hubby and our pups. This fall weather is so nice, especially in the mornings, that I feel awful not being outdoors (and that says a lot coming from someone as not-outdoorsy as me).

As a parting gift, here are some fab photos of fall for you barbs! Enjoy whatever you love about the season, from the pumpkin lattes, to the boots and scarves to the 10,000 pumpkins you want to adorn your house with (notwithstanding your husband's objections). 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/