We knew when we moved into our house that both our hallway and master bathrooms when need to be renovated. The hallway bath has become our boys bathroom, and the first one we’re tackling! Just thought I’d share the pictures/ideas that inspired the changes we’re making.
I love “before” pictures. Makes you realize just how far you’ve come, and also question how you managed to live with a space for so long?!
Before
It really wasn’t awful but most of it was dated and falling apart (vanity, old leaky toilet, water damaged floors, narrow bath tub that made giving little ones difficult). We started demo on New Years Day this year and are 99% done! With it being mainly our boys bathroom, I love a rustic, boy-ish feel with my favorite blue. I kind of wanted to incorporate a similar “woodland theme” as we had used in our oldest son’s Baby Boy Nursery – Woodland Animals Theme
Again, love the blue shiplap and the rounded mirror of this one!
@thismodernvintage on Instagram
One last piece of inspiration was this door from @thismodernvintage on Instagram. We planned to replace the current laundry room doors with sliding barn doors, and love the look of this door for our sliders.
Anyway, come back soon to see how our bathroom turned out!
If you follow me on Instagram (@lifeinthebigwoods) then you’ll know that in the almost 2 years since my last blog and Insta post, we’ve added another little boy to our family! I remember feeling uninspired and burnt out on trying to keep a blog going and couldn’t figure out why I was so tired all the time. It all made sense once I found out I was pregnant!
Jump forward a few weeks, and imagine our excitement (especially my husband’s!) when we found out that we were having another boy! Definitely a moment I wish I would have captured on camera. That night he was already asking what nursery theme we’d go with this time (see our oldest son’s Baby Boy Nursery – Woodland Animals Theme). Cue a new Pinterest board! Seriously, what was it like to have a baby 10 years ago before Pinterest? Anyway, after tossing around the idea of a sports theme or a space theme (science teacher here), we kept coming back to a jungle theme.
Jungle theme nursery
To start, I have to share what this room looked like BEFORE the charming little nursery that it is now. Wow. Picture below is from the listing when we bought the house. That teal. So, so lovely. Being someone who loves neutral colors, walking past this room multiple times a day was cringe worthy. Then one day when my husband was out of town, I tackled painting this room super late at night. Took a couple of nights and multiple coats to cover up that glorious teal but I did it! And the husband was in for a wonderful surprise when he got back. 😉 Funny, looking at the picture it doesn’t seem quite as obnoxious as what I remember.
Yikes. Next fun picture is how the room looked for a solid year(ish). Only slightly embarrassing. Does everyone have a spare bedroom where junk gets crammed, then in our case, frantically cleaned when you actually have guests??
One of the first things we did was look at having the floor replaced. When we moved in, almost every single room in our house had some type of different flooring – hickory hardwood in the living room and kitchen, orange (!) tile in the entry way, shag carpet in one bedroom, laminate hardwood in another, red oak in the next, white tile in the master bath and white carpet in the master bedroom. Our goal was to run hardwood throughout the house, so when our local hardwood company gave us a great quote for the baby’s room and our spare bedroom (shag carpet), we jumped on it!
We had found some adorable plush animal heads at Babies R Us (RIP) for our older son’s nursery, and wanted to add some for our new boy’s room too. I really liked the Levtex brand that we had found at Babies R Us, but since they’ve closed I had the hardest time finding them anywhere else. I somehow stumbled across the plush elephant head on Zulily, but I found a similar one HERE at BuyBuyBaby.
Next up, I have to share how my husband revamped the bifold door! This was 100% his idea and we did something similar in big brothers room. I’ll have to see if I can talk him into writing up a tutorial for these doors. I love it!
I have these big baskets all over the house – perfect for storing towels, blankets, and stuffed animals!
Just so happens that I’m working on this post from this very spot! Love this chair. I was originally looking at a super cushion-y chair at Babies R Us and decided that something with more support would be better. I think I have spent time in this chair *almost* every night for the past 3 years! If you’re looking for a chair for a nursery, here are my two cents:
Love my footstool
Love a glider
Like the all over cushion, but still firm
Cushioned armrests are good for supporting your arms while holding baby
Stains come up easily (destined to have milk or spit up on it)
Wish we would have thought to look at a wider chair or a chair and a half. Big brother often likes to snuggle up in the chair with us!
A friend had suggested when we were pregnant with our oldest that buying a separate changing table is a waste of money and I agree. My husband built this very simple frame that attaches to the back of the dresser that we can remove when we outgrow that phase.
Dresser was a yard sale find that I had completed sanded down to bare wood (why?!) then chalk painted white. We painted it this blue-gray that I love from Fusion Mineral Paint. I love this color! We have it everywhere in our house. I should’ve sanded down some of the chalk/wax finish before painting with the Fusion Mineral Paint. The Mineral Paint usually has a beautiful not-quite matte, smooth finish but layering it on top of chalk paint left a kind of dull finish. And shows fingerprints – which Fusion Mineral Paint usually doesn’t do! Turns out, proper prep is important. 🙂
Here’s the last wall! A few cute prints from Hobby Lobby and this tree from my mother-in-law! It started gold and teal, and became sort of a joke that we still have it and hang it up. Again, brilliant and crafty husband to the rescue with some fresh paint to match a jungle-themed nursery!
Last but not least, this awesome rug from Rugs USA! Love that it ties the room together. It hides dirt really well and is perfect for a kids room!
And that’s our new boy’s little room! Almost two years ago I was hitting publish on our oldest son’s nursery! Maybe next up I’ll share how we’ve transformed it into a “big boy” room!
One of my favorite fall recipes is stuffed green peppers. I have made them for years using this recipe, and they always turn out great! So delicious.
Then, in one of my HelloFresh boxes recently was a recipe for Turkey Chiles Rellenos and it was a game changer. Soo much more flavorful than my standard stuffed pepper recipe.
Since then, I have modified their recipe to make it something that I can make any time. My husband loves it and my 18-month-old son loves it too! Bonus points! Continue reading →
This is the first time I got to decorate our new house for fall and Halloween! I always wait until the first of October before I add any Halloween decorations but it was really hard to wait this year. This year was also the first time I got to decorate with my son and it was SO MUCH FUN! He had all of these cute little expressions to the fake spiders (eww), skulls and black crows. I think decorating for Christmas will be a lot of fun this year. 🙂
When we first found out we were expecting a little boy, we were living in a subdivision in the city. I searched and pinned all of the little boy nurseries on Pinterest before deciding on a woodland animals theme. Jump forward a year, and we now live in a house the woods! I think its a pretty neat coincidence that the theme of his room matches our house. We actually have little racoons (ok, not really little) and deer and owls that like to stop by for a visit every now and then. 🙂
This was by far the most fun room in our house to decorate and the room that makes me the happiest to be in.
We drove by a church a little while back with this on their sign, and it was like they were speaking my language.
Any other fans of The Office out there?? Seriously, reruns conveniently play every day while I’m cooking dinner and while I have seen every single episode about three times through, I still turn it on! I swear, it gets funnier each time.
Anyway, with summer *almost* over, I needed something to take the place of my vintage strawberry art print. I got a little giddy when this idea came to me!
Note: This post includes affiliate links. This simply means that if you click one of those affiliate links, then make a purchase, I may make a small commission from the sale. All thoughts and opinions are my own! 🙂
If you follow me on Instagram @LifeintheBigWoods , you might have seen in my stories that we finally hung curtains up in our living room! By curtains, I mean we hung up drop cloths to make them look like curtains. 😉 They were really cheap and turned out pretty cute!
You probably know that using drop cloths for curtains isn’t a brand new, original idea. I was showing my husband a picture of what the curtains would look like, and he said, “Wait, you mean drop cloth curtains weren’t your original idea??” He’s so sweet.
In fact, if you go to Google and type in “drop cloth curtains” it says that there are over 23,000,000 results. Ha!
I’ve had the drop cloths stacked in my kitchen for some time, and after begging my husband to help me put up the curtain rods — by help, I mean that he did it all 🙂 — we finally have curtains in our living room!
We have this little dresser thing in our living room that I have been dying to paint for years. I bought it at a yard sale awhile back for $25 and it has been that nagging project that I have been dying to start. It is so dark! And it smells. On top of that, the handles didn’t match, so it looked especially funky.
So I have been seeing a lot of green on Instagram lately – green cabinets, green bookshelves, green tables. And I fell in love. I’ve always wanted to paint our little dresser thing a fun color, but couldn’t find a color that wasn’t too loud (I’m a neutral kinda girl) or that fit with the rest of our decor. When I started seeing all of this green, I knew that it would be perfect! Here is some of my inspiration: Continue reading →
