Our Living Room

Today I am linking up with Kelly's Korner 'show us your life' series. Today's topic is living rooms. I wanted to participate because I LOVE looking at the way other people live and I also thought it was time to start sharing our home with all of you that have been asking about it the past few months.

I will do some all over views, then point out some of my favorite things about this room.

So here we go...

When you first walk into our front door, this is your view:

The little white bench to the left is one of my Canton finds, along with the ceiling tile mirror hanging above it. It sits in front of an under-stairs storage door that we rarely need to get into.

This is just a little to the right of the last picture. Our entire bottom floor is tile, but I have a rug in the living room area so that if someone wants to lay in the floor, then they will be more comfortable.

But our dog is really the only one that regularly lays on the floor.

But I bet if she could tell me 'thank you for the rug', she totally would.

Working around to the right of the room is the main wall in the living room. When we were building, we had them build a place for a TV into the stone, and I'm really glad we did that. I was worried about the fire getting the TV too hot and messing it up, but we had several fires in it after we moved in and it didn't affect our TV at all. We chose to not have a mantel since that would've put the TV being up too high, and, although I do enjoy hanging Christmas stockings on a mantel, I'd rather not break my neck trying to watch TV.

If you've ever sat on the front row at a movie theater, you know what I mean. It's really not even worth it.

Continuing to the right is our front windows, a couch, recliner, and coffee table. You can see a little bit of our front door in this pic, so I've just about made a complete circle now.

The bookcases on each side of the fireplace were a MUST HAVE for me. I've completed around 25 scrapbooks during our almost 15 years of marriage, and I've never really had a good place to keep them all. There is enough room on these shelves to actually spread them out a bit so they aren't just crammed in there. Every once in a while my boys will just pick one up and look through it, and it makes me happy just watching them re-live some of their life events.

There is an archway leading to french doors that open to our game room, and just to the left of that is the bottom of the open stairway. I am a fan of arches. They are everywhere I could find a place to put them.

Our ceiling in our living room and kitchen area goes from about 9 feet to about 18 feet because of the open staircase. I decided at the last minute while we were building that I wanted it to be a wooden ceiling, and it was a good decision (if I do say so myself). It took a lot of wood, a lot of men to put the wood up, and a lot of time for the painters to stand on scaffolding to stain it. But SO worth it in my opinion.

This is the view of the living room from the top of the stairs.

This is standing at the front door and looking up to the right.

This is the front doors.

And this is looking up from the door. I'm so glad we left the staircase open. It adds design without even trying.

This is a painted wooden pallet at the half-way point of the stairs. Austin told me he wanted me to put BE Nice on there, so he got what he wanted. I cut the lettering out with my cricut, outlined them with a Sharpie, and then just filled them in with the Sharpie. These letters were too small to try to paint.

Another view of that pallet in relation to the living room.

A close-up of my big wooden pallet art. I had to freehand the letters on this one because the lettering was too big, and I did it with white paint and a small paintbrush. Austin and I just did this together this week. It's a fun and fairly easy project to do with your kids!

This is a stained glass piece I found in Canton. It had one piece of glass broken out of it, which helped me get a great deal on the price, but then I was left with the dilemma of what to fill that hole with. For now I have a "B" in calligraphy on card stock. I want to do something different with that at some point, but I just haven't gotten around to it.

This fireplace cover is special to Robbie and I because it was made for us by his late grandmother just after we got married. I can remember her asking what all I wanted to have on there and she did exactly what I asked for. It is 5 pieces of wood hinged together. The first one is a church, the second a post office, the third a bed and breakfast, the fourth a Little Italy restaurant, and the last is a general store. She was so talented and I'm thankful that we have been able to use this all of these years.

This is another Canton find that I just had to have. It is just 4 old tin ceiling tiles put together, but I love it and it fits perfectly in the space.

I put this Fleur-de-lis up because I lived in Italy for a few months in college, and our villa was just outside of Florence, and this is the symbol for Florence, so I have loved this symbol ever since.

I do feel like I should tell a little bit about what Canton is since I have about 3,000 things in my house from there. Canton is a town just outside of Dallas and they have their trade days once a month. It is huge and you will walk until your feet scream at you to stop, but OH,THE ONE OF A KIND FINDS!! I recommend going if you're anywhere close when they are having it.

So this is my living room! Come back next Friday and I'll show y'all my kitchen!

Spring wrap-up

Now that our school year and soccer season has come to an end, I decided a year end wrap-up was in order. This will be heavy on pictures and light on words.

First up: soccer

Austin's team was called the Raptors. This was the same team he played with last year. Robbie co-coached the team along with another parent. I have no idea how many wins or losses they had because they are just too cute to be counting goals. What I do know is that all of the boys seem to be improving and they have a good time. Even if they are making a goal for the other team.

Eric, Blaze, Austin, Cade, Hudson, and Heath

Aaron has been with the same coach, and many of the same players, for several years now. They have always been called the Hornets, and their uniforms have always been navy blue. But since spring is very laid back and Coach Jeff wanted to shake things up a bit, we were the Red Devils for this spring season. The red and yellow uniforms were quite a change from the navy and white we've been used to. And I had a little bit of an issue saying "Let's go Devils", so I went with "Let's go Red".

This is where they yell "Red Devils"!!

Aaron's team

Second up: field trips

Austin's end of year field trip was to the fairgrounds. I didn't get to stay for all of this because I had a class I needed to leave for, but I enjoyed the time I had there with all of our sweet kindergartners.

Austin and his friend Mason. Mason was his buddy for the day so he made it in most of my pics!

Milking a cow

They got to make their own cinnamon butter. This required LOTS of shaking!

The same day I was with Austin on his trip, Robbie was on a middle school field trip with Aaron to Magic Springs. This was a very special trip because the kids only got to go if they had gone all year without getting any violations. I'm so proud of the young man Aaron is becoming, and I'm proud of him for getting to go to the field trip.

Aaron, Austin, Brent, and Kolby with teachers Mrs. Whitehead and Mrs. Bush

Robbie was put in charge of 5 boys, Brent, Colby, Hayden, Austin B., and Aaron. And he couldn't have had a better group. Aaron has a great group of kids to grow up with.

Austin and Aaron on the log ride

Lunch time!

Third: Kindergarten graduation

Austin just finished up his kindergarten year. I'm not sure which is harder on a mom...dropping them off for their first day of kinder, or watching them get their little diploma on the last day.

Saying the Pledge of Alligence

Getting the diploma

Austin with Mrs. Nash. She was his teacher for the first 9 weeks.

And this is Mrs. Wilson. She was his preschool teacher and also his kindergarten teacher.

This is his principal, Mrs. Reeves

Rob's parents and my parents all got to come to the graduation. He is loved.

First day of school in August

Last day of school in May

Fourth: Memorial Day weekend

On Friday, Sherry, Reva, Melissa, Karissa, and Caley came to spend the night with us. And on Saturday morning, Marty, Chad, and Caden came down for the day. This is my birthmom's side of the family. I love getting to spend time with them. My sister, Reva, is the one I wrote about in this post. They are now only days away from getting to move back into their remodeled house after the tornado. Her family of 5 have been living in a hotel room since then, and they are all just so ready to be back in their house.

Caley, Austin, and Aaron at breakfast

Chad and Aaron

Reva may kill me for this pic, but she and my dog (Bea) were inseperable.

And Austin loved Mel's dog, Rhodie.

This is all of my birth mom's grandkids: Karissa, Caley, Austin, Caden, and Aaron.

While they were here, I decided that this would be a good weekend to paint a few walls in my kitchen. And yes, I do realize that we've only been in this house a few months, but I haven't liked the color of these walls since I had them painted and it's just silly to live with a wall color you don't like. Especially when Sherwin Williams is having a 30% off weekend.

My parents kept our kids for the next few days and I got busy. Robbie HATES to paint or do anything associated with painting, so I didn't ask him to help at all. Other than moving the 15 foot ladder into the house and setting it up for me. And that was only because the thought of all of the things I would destroy in the process of getting that thing in here made me worry a bit.

I had a little trouble trying to figure out what color I wanted to go with. When I picked out the original color, I thought it would be more like a terra cotta color, but it ended up being more like a burnt orange, must be a Longhorn fan to appreciate this color, kind of thing. And we are not Longhorn fans. At all.

First I tried a turquoise color because I was trying to match this plate.

But that color hurt my eyes the next morning because it was so bright.

And then I thought I'd try the blue/gray color I have in my bedroom right now and LOVE.

Original color on top, blue color from my room covering that, and 2 different shades of red on top of that. Yes, I do believe I must've been trying to drive Rob crazy.

I did not love it in my kitchen.

Then I thought a wine color would be nice because it is just for accent walls, but I decided red is too hard. Sometimes it looks too pink, sometimes it's an orangy-red, and all the time it needs some sort of special red primer that I don't have the patience for.

Which led me to the Sherwin Williams online color visualizer. I spent hours on this website when we were building, so here I was again. I typed in the name of the yellow color I have in my kitchen and it gave me coordinating colors. From those I chose a brown color. Looks a little like chocolate milk. I like it.

In the middle of all of this, and yes, still Memorial Day weekend, we sold our trailer house. We haven't tried too hard to sell it simply because we still had a bunch of stuff in there that we didn't really want to mess with and we knew as soon as we sold it we would have to find a place for all of the left-over stuff in our house.

So yesterday, Robbie brought a guy home from work that helped us get our things out of there as quickly as possible. We worked for hours last night trying to get it done. It's much better today, but now I can't even park my car in the garage until I find a place for everything that we moved in there.

But I can't even tell you how thankful we are to get it sold. The guy that bought it asked when we wanted it moved, to which I replied, "just hook it up to the back of your car and you can take it right now". I do realize that this is an impossibilty, but really, I've wanted it gone for months now.

So there's our spring wrap-up. Even though the calendar still says it's spring, my household is in full summer mode. It's 9:30 in the morning and both of my boys are still in bed. We've already made several trips to our favorite local sno-cone stand. And the biggest plans we have for the day is picking my neice and nephew up from band practice and letting them play all day at our house.

Oh summer. How I've missed you.