BATHROOM ACCENT COLOUR - SELECTED

When it comes to home decor it takes me forever to select anything for my house.  For a client I can do it in no time; myself well it took us 6 months to select a bunk bed, but that is for another post.  This post is about the main bathroom.

When we moved in last December the house had no mirrors; we have been taking our time selecting mirrors for the bathrooms.  In January we selected and purchased the one for the main bathroom; however before putting it up we want to paint the bathroom.  Selecting the accent colour took me another 4 months.  I decided I wanted to paint one wall to match the accent colour of the towels and bathmat.  The image below is the winning colour.  After bringing home 12 different towels and returning them all we found this one at Simons it was exactly the colour I was imagining in my mind.  Now to make the trip to Paint Depot to have them colour match it for my paint.

Image from Simons 

I almost forgot you are probably curious as to what mirror we selected. Trinity from Electric Mirror.

Image from Electric Mirror

FRONT HALL RENO - PART 2

My parents were visiting for the last few weeks and my dad helped out with the front hall he finished the painting and hung up some of the hooks.  Now I need to set up some sort of organization for shoes, hats and gloves.  I need up painting twice the first yellow we selected turned out to be a fit too florescent; I am really happy we took the time to re-paint.

For the shoe organizing I have a design in mind that I want to have custom built for the space.  If you know any good carpenters in Toronto please do share their info with me.

I also wanted to take tho moment to share a picture of one of the many details from our house that made us fall in love with it when we first saw it.

The above is a picture of the stained glass window that is in our front hall.  We have another one that matches in the staircase and I am pretty certain that once upon a time their would have been one also in the top half of the front window of the house.  One day we will change the front window and have an artist recreate a matching stained glass window for us.

Moving

The day is approaching and as everything else in a mother's life a curve ball is tossed your way - the C Monster is sick, fever of above 100, since last night.  As long as the grown ups can avoid getting sick we just might successfully get ourselves moved from one house to the other.

Geoff and I spend just a little over 3 months looking for our new home, we really felt we had outgrown our cute little 2 bedroom house however the past 10 years we had grown extremely attached to it and we knew it would take the right house in the right location to get us to move.

We did find the right house (we hope) and I think I may feel lost in it at the beginning as we are more then doubling our square footage.  Geoff will now have a great office on the 3rd floor and until our family grows I will also have a project/office room.  We will have a playroom until the C monster get a bit older and after that a formal dinning room.  My TV will no longer be in my living room; did I mention my TV will no longer be in my living room. 

The house is not perfect as is it does have some work and we are happy to take our time to renovate the parts we want to change; however it is beautiful the way it is and is 100% livable so we can take our time to the work.

I wanted to say a great shout out at our real estate agent  Josee Couture who has now helped us with the purchase of 2 homes and the sale of one.  It did not take her very long to understand exactly what we were looking for and find our new home. I say find because I had written off the home we bought before we saw it and told myself it was not the one for us; and since we were looking at one near by Josee said why don't we go see it anyways.  I fell in love with it the second I walked in.

Pictures of the new house after we take possession on Nov 30th.

My Ikea experiance part 1

On June 26 we had a minor flood in our kitchen and this prompted us to decide to renovated our kitchen; the kitchen really needed a makeover and we were planning on doing it at some point so why not now. The only concern was cost we needed to keep the full reno at around 10,000. We got to this number after talking with my Realtor Josee Couture (if you live in Toronto and need a Realtor she is great) she basically said with the market value in your area and the condition of our home a kitchen reno would add approximately 10,000 to 15,000 to the value of our home. That said since we are doing all the work ourselves (or I should say my dad is doing the work) all we needed to do is try the keep the materials cost down and everyone knows that Ikea gives the more bang for your bucks in wow factor.

Luckily I am an Interior Designer so I was able to measure design and turn around a preliminary floor plan and elevations for my kitchen in a day; so off we went to Ikea North York on June 28 to purchase my kitchen. I had already chosen at home all the Ikea finishes that I wanted (their website is extremely detailed); they even have a kitchen planning toll online that I would have used instead of drawing my plans by hand other then the fact that the software is not compatible with a MAC. We go to the kitchen section of Ikea and I find someone in a yellow shirt; this is a brief description of our conversation:

Me: I would like to speak to someone to ensure that the kitchen I've designs works and then get some help to make sure I have all the components.
Ikea: Did you plan your kitchen using our kitchen planner?
Me: No, but I am an Interior Designer and I have full plans and elevations of the kitchen.
Ikea: You have to enter your kitchen in our kitchen planner; let me set you up - it should not take you too long. We will also place your name on a list so someone will come to talk to you.
Me: The only reason I did not use your kitchen planner was that it does not work with a MAC
Ikea: Yeah we know you should have just come straight in to the store; here is everything you need to get started.

I would like to point out that the whole family (Geoff, Chrstophe and me) left for Ikea that day around 10am. So I sit down get started various people come around and tell me how the plan looks great; wow you have such a big project, your kitchen it going to look great, and to answer various questions I have. Lunch rolls around we have pasta at the Ikea restaurant (the kitchen planning tool lets me save my kitchen on-line o I could leave freely and come back as I needed). After lunch I come back and finalize my kitchen around 4:30pm it's done I am finally ready to order. You ask why it took so long?

1. If I could have used the planning tool with my MAC I could have came in with a plan already inputted in their oh so sacred kitchen planning tool
2. Every time I tried to add a upper cupboards the system would go bonkers
3. I could not override the pulls to mix and match the styles (we are using long D pulls and want to select the length based on the size of the door or the drawer)
4. Unless you have a perfectly square room the programme does not seem to like you and gives you a hard to to place cabinets in that will need to be cut to fit your room
5. Every time I tried to rotate my 3D drawing it would zoom all the way in and I would have to restart looking at the 3D a few times before it worked
   
6. Whenever I wanted to speak to someone i had to wait 15 to 30 minutes on average. 15 minutes is acceptable; 30 minutes is a bit long. One time I waited almost 45 minutes. they really need more staff.

So at 4:30ish (it might have been latter then that at this point the time is all a blur - I have been there all day). Janice comes over to help me finally finalize my kitchen. I ask her all the right questions such as.

1. Will the cabinets fit with the height of my ceiling?
2. Will my range hood fit with the height of my ceiling?
3. What pieces will have to be cut to fit - so when everything gets home I know what to do.
4. Can I actually cut all the pieces we talked about?
   
5. What is the return policy
6. What is the warranty
   
7. Is there anything I did not ask or seem to have though about that your expertise as an Ikea Kitchen Planner can add?

TO BE CONTINUED...

Drywall anchors

As we are preparing the house for baby one of the items I needed to do was hang a few shelves on the wall.  I bought these ez-anchors for drywall and I will never go back to those annoying little plastic things.  Anyone that has ever mounted anything in drywall has struggled with getting those stupid little pieces of plastic in the drywall with out bending them.  Well the ez-anchors (that I bought from Home Depot but I am sure you can get anywheres) screw in; no fuss; no mess; perfect in the first shot. You could even do this when baby is sleeping, since no hammering equals no noise.