4th Times a Charm

I have been trying to stop sneezing long enough to write a post! Seriously! I am officially allergic to the morning. Hello world, here is your memo! For 3-4 hours every morning you will get nothing but sneezes out of me! Now back to our regularly scheduled post....

Hope you aren't all sneezy! So when Joey was working on the Pinterest Challenge in the Kitchen, I was in the weird-o breakfast nook, which by the say is way too claustrophobic to be a breakfast nook. What was I doing in the breakfast nook? Beautifying!

Pulling colors from the newly modified wall space above the cabinets, we chose a warm grey to cover one wall in the nook. So far we have invested $15 in wood and $10 in chalkboard spray paint. Compared to those rockstar prices, this $26 gallon of paint has been the luxury purchase so far.

So the plan was to simply paint the wall and add some $3.50 decals I found at Home Goods.

That was the plan. Then the plan changed. We have a bev-fridge that lives where the fork is, and has to live there because there are no outlets on this room. Behind that wall we have an outlet at the perfect height, hence the bev-fridge must live in that very place.

Down came the fork and the spoon. Out the window went the vision.

Perhaps I was distracted because at that very moment Joey was working on the chalkboard fridge two feet away from me. Being the nosey Nelly that I am, I kept peeking in and "helping".

So I carefully restuck the fork and spoon on the swing door which leads into the dining room to give them a safe and temporary home. Then I problem solved that darn wall. It seems like a waste of space, so I wanted to give it purpose. 

Soooo I came up with the idea of rustic built-in's. Reclaimed wood, like in the kitchen, to house the massive amount of kitchen goods we have.  Plus give an attractive place for little miss bev-fridge to live. 

So I took a very simple idea to plot out how the shelves would be best utilized based on how Joey hung the deer head, and went to work. Goodness, we love our Scotch Blue Tape! I looked at the items we had, and measured them, then started taping and labeling on the wall.

This was exactly the guide we needed for when we put the shelving up. We are still on a hunt for salvaged wood, but so far we are excited about the vision of this wall. And why is 4th time a charm you ask?...

We had to paint the wall four times before it stuck! It kept peeling and nicking. We almost gave up on it all together! Weirdness.

Any tips on where get to reclaimed wood around NYC? We are on the craigslist.org hunt, and of course checking out Build it Green in Queens....Secret places anyone wants to share?

Flash Master Jam

Happy Monday Lovlies! How is your holiday weekend treating you? We have some family in from out of town and are very excited to see everyone. The weather has finally decided to be beautiful, no complaining over here at Casa Katsaros. As we mentioned in a previous post, we have been working on the master bedroom, and are ready to share with you! Brace yourself, this is going to be a long post.

If you aren't up to date with how we got to the current state of our bedroom, check this and this out to get you in the know. Now that everyone is up to date, we had to make a bit of a mess to get things in order.

After moving things out of the room, and coving up the heavy stuff, the room looked like a wreck. Almost so bad, I couldn't image it actually finished. A messy room is a messy mind, and this room was pure chaos.

We had only painted one wall with the stencil we bought over at Cutting Edge Stencil, the rest of the room was in the original putty color that came with the house. It was driving me bananas.

=

We decided to take the lighter color from the stencil, Cumulus Cloud by Martha Stewart, and have it color matched with Behr Premium Plus Ultra so we wouldn't have to prime + paint + paint again. It's a really large room, and as much as we love the result of paint, the process is kinda grueling. We also invested in some new tools because of this.

Let me introduce you to your new best friend. This is the Ryobi Duet Power House Paint System. She's not perfect, but she's darn good. Here is the deal in a nutshell. For $99 bucks, this investment is totally worth it. We picked it up at our Home Depot along with two gallons of the paint to finish off our room. Being this paint system is so efficient, we wasted nearly no paint, and only needed one gallon of paint. The process of painting the room took about 1/4 of the time we thought. It has a duel option, but Joey pounded it out with out my help. I did corners and used 3M tape, while he did the bulk. So why isn't she perfect? Truth is, she is a pain in the booty to clean. The cleaning instructions are vague, and he made a mess in the laundry room. Even with this flaw, we totally recommend the investment, it will save you time, paint, and in the end a lot of money. We have a lot more painting ahead of us, and the quote we got from professionals (we were curious) was outrageous.  

Notice the dramatic color difference on the two walls? Looks a bit more blue than we anticipated. Odd thing is, the room seems to change colors depending on where you are looking. The number one rule of design lives in lighting, and this is the first time we really experienced how dramatic the difference can be depending on said light. 

So the bones of the room are finally finished. The furniture is purchased and placed, the patterns and textiles have been selected and some are even living in the room. The "sparkle" and fun stuff is missing. One major item we haven't bought yet is this amazing mirror via Restoration Hardware:

She's pretty and would fit perfectly over this:

Best news is, she's $1,200 and that's not including shipping. If you paid attention to previous bedroom posts, we have only spent just a speck over $3,000 for the whole bedroom. Seems a bit silly to spend that much on a mirror, but then again, she is very pretty....

In the meantime, the room is pretty unsparkely. The fun part is picking all the accessories and homey/cozy things. Check her out so far. We would love to know what you think!

We have some of those sparkle items in hand. If you remember, we have some amazing pillars from India circa 1880. I love them I drool over them. Right now they are hanging out in the upstairs hall until we decide on a few things.

We also have the amazing white moose head from Z Galleries, which sadly did not fit in the mudroom chilling in a basket, soon to be hung over the fireplace.

We also got some curtains from West Elm we placed behind the bed....for now. We love them, but aren't quite sure how we feel about them dressing every window in the room.

After we put the pillars back up, we will have a better idea of what works. Also, notice we are still fan-less? Another massive Restoration Hardware love fest going on there.

So there you have it! Our "finished" bedroom! As we add the elements that make it a home, we will happily share. Some financial contemplations and moral dilemmas going on as far as the things we love, and is the cash worth it. Have you ever faced this? Let us know, we are curious about how to solve a problem like a $500 fan you can't DIY your way through.

Happy Memorial Day!

Monday, Bloody Monday

Mornin' super lovlies! Just a quick reminder, today is your LAST chance to enter the give-away! Two Hundred Smacker from MirrorMate.com - pretty sweet, so hop to it before it's too late! We will also be hosting an excited new give-away very soon, for you art lovers hint, hint. 

So how was your weekend? Were you like us and totally ignored your growing to-do list? Or did you kill it this weekend and do more than humanly possible? We did a lot of day dreaming of what we wanted to accomplish, but in reality we cracked open the windows and spent half the weekend in bed. This is very rare for us. If you want a peek into the typical life of Joey and Lana "taking the weekend off", here ya go:

• Washed and Trimmed Rocket
• Met with the Tax guy, and left severely depressed about what we owe 
• Booked tickets to LA
• Cleaned the floors down stairs
• Washed the bath mats
• Planned out the office design once and for all
• Started brainstorming the garden room design
• Went to a friends house for dinner
• Watched Alice in Wonderland, Chloe, and a Beatles documentary 
• Made smoothies
• Walked the dogs

Bored yet? Haha. We won't leave you hanging there. The interesting part is fleshing out my office, which has turned storage room this winter.  Here's the plan.

We found paint! We love the paint we found very very much! We wish we knew about this paint before we started painting out bedroom, but we are super happy we found it before we painted the rest of our home. Lesson learned. Why's loving this new paint to exciting? Umm...there is really good primer mixed in with the paint. It comes in a million colors. It cuts time in HALF. True Value just released EasyCare Platinum, and it's the new winner for all of our indoor paint moving forward. 

If you go to TrueValuePaint.com, you can use their super handy tools, like we did to help select your paint. We have been drooling over this Natural Riverbed for a long time, and had many discussion of where it would look best in our home. Right now the office is a bit....yellow. 

As you can see the office (aka storage room) is in some need of TLC and clearing it out and painting it will do wonders for a new and fresh feel. And instead of just a simple paint job (Why would we keep anything simple?) We are pretty set on using this stencil from CuttingEdgeStencils.com, check her out!

Can you see it? We had to spend half a day in bed visualizing it. Yep, that's what we are telling ourselves. 

So our unproductive/productive weekend got us pumped up at the end of the day to start a new room. A mix of fancy damask + farmhouse chic will be the road we start with for my office, who knows where it will end. 

Hey there! We hope you like all the give-aways going on at MAHAH! We are excited to host them! Just a reminder, we don't get paid to host give-aways and we didn't get paid to write this post about True Value or MirrorMate.com or CuttingEdgeStencils.com - we just really like their products and feel excited about sharing things that work for us. 

Oh yea! If you are super prepared like me, check out our post over at Yahoo! A sample of our emergency kits, just in case disaster strikes.