Michigan summers are just magical. Warm weather, breezy evenings, long days and time spent with the family. We have been up north the last few weekends and the kids and dogs just love it up there. Who doesn’t love boating, campfires, s’mores and swimming?
We have been working on our little bungalow a lot also- but I will save that post for another day!
I finally have some before & after pictures to share. Our little house has come a long way in a few short months! But we still have so much to finish! Here is the living room BEFORE:
Since then we have had the floors refinished, drywall repairs throughout and fresh paint. Also the 2 windows on both sides of the TV are new.
I also wallpapered the entryway:
I plan on adding more pictures to the right of the big mirror.
Here is the dining room: (I painted that table an off white using Annie Sloan chalk paint, sprayed the chairs & recovered the seats with Amy Butler fabric).
I love our bay windows, however they badly need to be painted or varnished. I am thinking of a few shades darker than the cherry wood color they are now. Onto the kitchen BEFORE:
My husband laid the tile floor in a herringbone pattern & the quartz countertop is new along with the farmhouse sink & faucet. I painted the walls even though we have to rip them out in a few months & replace all the drywall. The drywall that is in there is so poorly done and cracking. We also need to tile the backsplash & I am thinking a white subway tile look. Oh and add baseboard & knobs on the cabinets! In the meantime it looks like this:
Right outside the kitchen is a little toddler table that I painted for the kids:
Off to the kids bedrooms! This was Anna’s room – nasty carpet & wallpaper BEFORE:
Now:
Anthony’s room was in bad shape as well BEFORE:
Now:
That’s it for now! I am not ready to share our bedroom yet or the downstairs bathroom. So much to do still! It’s freezing temperatures here right now so I don’t mind hibernating and working on house projects.
Madison was built in 1937 and is an adorable brick bungalow in need of some MAJOR TLC. I love these older brick homes with the original wood floors and a real fireplace! My husband is doing most of the work himself and we won’t be moving in just yet, it needed a lot of drywall work done, water removal, sealing, windows, painting… and the list goes on. These pictures are not pretty at all but here goes!
The front of the house: (we have recently trimmed all the bushes and cleaned up the vines a bit)
Now the inside front room has an awesome bay window! That’s the old kitchen counter my husband ripped out on the floor:
The kitchen floor was some nasty laminate that was laid over more nasty laminate. We plan on laying down some tile in there, and put in new countertops, a sink, faucet, the whole deal. 
This is one of the kids bedrooms. There was water damage to the ceiling and it ALL had to be ripped out. (shout out to GTJ!!) 
Our bedroom upstairs was made into a little mother-in law suite type deal so we are knocking down the dividing walls up there to make it one large bedroom:
The scariest picture of all I think is the basement! Looks like a dungeon. Wait until we finish it off though (this is a little later on the list of to-do’s)
The garage was a mess also. All the walls had to come down and new siding put up. It’s still being worked on. The downside to this house is a TINYYYY yard. Very tiny. But we will manage, this is after my husband mowed the weeds and knocked down the little fencing that was blocking this area. We are going to lay sod in here:
So much work to be done! But looking forward to getting in there! Sorry the pics are crappy, taken quickly with my phone.
Stay tuned, we are having fun picking out paint and the rest of the finishing touches!
It’s been 6 long years here in Florida! Don’t get me wrong, I have loved my time here, the people I have met, I started my career here, got married here and started my family here. But I have always been a northern girl at heart. I love seasons and the lakes and my family and friends who live there. And I am excited to say we are moving home soon! Our house went on the market last week and is already SOLD. Yup, it happened that fast… Packing time! I started this blog to post about our progress and projects. It’s been a lot of work but rewarding and fun. I love to look back and see how far we have come with the house. We have lived in this house just about 3 years and boy has it changed. Here are the pictures I have gathered of the Before & Afters:
Living Room:
Family Room:
Kitchen:
Guest Bathroom
This is one of the guest rooms. It was in pretty bad shape. It was used as my office for awhile and then we turned it into a nursery for my daughter. 
I can’t find a before picture of the other guest room, but it was pretty icky. Here it is when it was a guest room:
Then we turned it into a nursery for my baby boy:
This is our bedroom, the master: 
The Lanai (what I will miss most about this house!)
That’s it! More to come of the Michigan house 🙂
I pin a lot of stuff on Pinterest and I do actually get around to trying a lot of those recipes and making some of the crafts. Here are 2 I did for Christmas: 1- the ornament wreath. I didn’t take pictures of the progress but you can see it all here if your interested: http://matt-and-becky.blogspot.com/2009/12/12-days-of-christmas-crafts-day-5.html I used the glittery plastic bulbs from Target. They are in the $1 section for a tube of 10! I had the foam wreath left over so I spent about $10 on this total.
Next 2- The Ruffled Tree Skirt. It’s so pretty and maybe one of my favorite projects I have pinned and made. It was pretty easy too, just took a few nights of gluing and some patience. If I ever do it again I will cut my strips thicker so the ruffles are larger. I used a cheap quilting fabric I had for the base part and then cheap $2.99/yard muslin fabric from JoAnnes. I followed these instructions: http://mycrazylife-lauren.blogspot.com/2011/11/i-pinned-it-i-did-it-ruffled-tree-skirt.html
Here are some pictures of mine:
I love the smell of a real tree! Happy Holidays!
36 weeks! With only 4 weeks left I am happy to say the nursery is DONE! We converted our guest room into a nursery/guest room. We wanted to have a place for someone to sleep if they come visit (mostly my Mom!). Here it was before:
So we ditched our king sized bed and night stands and replaced it with a pop-up trundle day bed & crib. I bought the frame for the trundle bed off craigslist and sanded and painted it the pale yellow. My sister Amy is awesome and bought me 2 new twin mattresses as a shower gift:
Here is a close up of the sunburst mirror above the bed (home depot $35) and the little boy plaques are antiques off etsy:
I had this small dresser from my Mother-in law that I re-painted to use as a changing table:
Another view:
I made the curtains from some yellow polka dot fabric I got from JoAnne’s on sale and added pom poms to the bottom:
I mounted some wire baskets on the wall to hold burp clothes and diapers:
The dog “Tutu” was mine as a child and the blue bunny blanket was my husbands when he was a baby:
More views:
On the wall above the crib is a mirror my husband bought me for mother’s day last year and to the left is a picture of our 4 dogs & a letter ‘A’ I made for ‘Anthony’ out of some old buttons. To the right is a Renoir painting my Mother-in law gave me that hung in my husbands room as a child and a framed picture of baby Anthony inside my belly at 7 months.
The crib skirt was made by my very talented friend’s mom out of my Grandma Mack’s fabric. The bumper is from babybedding.com and the crib sheet, blanket and changing pad cover are all Aden & Anais “The Brave Dog”.
The wool chevron rug is from overstock:
The mobile I made out of felt. Talk about a long & tedious project. No wonder people charge $80+ on etsy to make them!
And on the wall by the closet I hung a wire magazine rack I got for $7 at home goods for books. I printed out old dog book covers and framed them and hung them around it:
And that’s it! Now time to continue my nesting…. re-finishing kitchen cabinets… decorating for Christmas… have to squeeze as much in as I can before I have 2 babies that take up all my time 🙂
Linking up to: 
I love this time of year. Would love it more if Florida actually had a fall, but oh well. I decorated for Halloween last week and wanted to share some of what I did. I made this banner for the entry way table.. got the idea from Cassie at Primitive & Proper. I did something similar last year with the spray painted branches. They are from some type of palm tree outside. I just added some black birds and cheese cloth to the mix.
For the banner: I used old book pages, cut them out and glued them with mod podge to black construction paper. Then I drew some bats and cut them out on thinner black glitter paper and glued little orange buttons on each of them. I strung it all with twine.
I decorated the kitchen table with the same branches and added some spray painted pumpkins.
Linking up to:
This is our bathroom on a budget project! Here is the bathroom around when we first moved in (I had already painted it that pale yellow color)… not sure why I didn’t take any pictures of the corroding slab of mirror that hung on the wall or the corroded nasty yellow faucet. Wish I would have so you could have seen how ugly it was – that’s well water for you!
So we:
Ripped out the old tile & ripped off the ugly towel bar
Replaced the vanity with one that was never used from my brother-in law
We got a nice new white toilet from my in-laws for Christmas to replace the pink one with.
And we added a slab of granite to the vanity & got a new sink & faucet
I spray painted a $30 mirror from Marshalls
and lastly, Stu tiled the floor the same tile as the rest of our house and added new base board and I added some white stripes on the walls with paint.
And I hung this antique iron sign I got from the flea market:
It’s been busy around here trying to get ready for the new baby – but a lot more posts to come!
I can’t believe Anna will be ONE next month. This year has flown by too fast. For her 1st Birthday I wanted to give her something meaningful. I loved the idea of a play kitchen but didn’t love the plastic store bought ones. So I found Ana White’s amazing website with DIY plans to build your own play kitchen out of wood.
Luckily I have an amazing Father-in law who is very handy and was able to build me the frame with no problem:
Then came the fun part for me, picking out paint and accessories for it! Here she is all complete. Now if I can only wait 22 more days to give it to Anna on her actual birthday!
The ribbon thing in background is something I made for decoration for Anna’s one year pics next week, it’s just cut fabric tied to a ribbon. I used an opps paint mixed with some stuff I had at home to paint it that seafoam green color. After I painted it, I sealed it all with a waterproof polyurethane.
Breakdown of parts:
Sink is a kitchen bowl I got for $6 on amazon
Faucet was a little pricy – $32 on ebay. It’s a bar facet so it’s made smaller
Handle for oven was $5 on amazon
Stove skirt was made from $10 worth of fabric from JoAnnes and lil pom-poms, and I hung it with a 14″ curtain rod I had to order online for $8. Hard to find one that small!
Stove burners were $1 each – little wood basketball decals from JoAnnes
Knobs were a little pricey, but I was in love with them from the start – from Anthropology $8 each
I spent about $55 on the wood…. so just over $150 total but I am a sucker for handmade gifts and this one is worth every penny!
And of course she has to have some food ready in her panty! These are wood toys made by Melissa and Doug toy co.
Can’t wait to give it to Anna!
Sharing with:
Baby BOY on the way! Due Dec. 16th. We figured life was not busy enough with work, 4 dogs and a 10 month old baby girl 😉
Now time to start planning HIS nursery, the fun part. We have a 3 bedroom house so his room will have to double as a guest room (sorry little one you have to share) here are some ideas I found for inspiration:
So I am thinking the theme will be “Vintage-Dog”. I made a little style board already for some bedding/decor:
1. Aden + Anais Flying Dog crib sheet
2. Plain white crib bumper
3. Crib skirt – fabric by Annette Tatum
4. Curtains – fabric by Amy Butler
5. Idea for wall art – old children’s & dog story book covers
6. Idea for shelving – old books
I also love this dresser and want to paint one similar and use it for a changing table:
Ooo and I love these baskets mounted to the wall for easy access storage, perfect!
And since it goes along with the theme… I must get this hat for newborn pics:
I want to get a trundle bed for in there. But they are soooo expensive. So hopefully I can find a frame for one on craigslist, spray paint it and then buy new twin mattresses.
Anna is oh so excited about being a big sister too!
My Dogs & I
Inspire Me 