Basement Gets A Fresh Coat of Thunder by Benjamin Moore while we are in a ThunderSTORM of our own!!

Do you ever wake up in the morning and just know your going to have a great day?  I had that thought for a brief minute until I got out of bed, lol.  

Part 1:

Devastation ensued when my daughter decided that her pinky toe doesn't look like she wants it to and it annoys her in her sock.  Insert over sized meltdown here.

After I got her on the bus, I was excited to head back to the house since things were getting done at my house today.  My dad is building two bookshelf side tables for my daughter's room, Dustin is painting the basement, and I am working on design boards.  It is rare that we are at the house together on work days, so we wanted to get a lot done.

Insert second situation here.

Part 2:

Dustin was moving stuff in the basement to prep the walls and somehow managed to cut three fingers open.  

I love how someone else gets hurt and all I have to do is see blood and suddenly I'm the patient.

I recovered quick and did manage to bandage up his fingers, so I was feeling mighty good.   UNTIL...

Part 3:

I decided to go down to the basement and take before pics with my camera.  Somehow I managed to step on the back of my pant leg, fall halfway down the stairs, and put a huge bruise on my hip. NICE!

So the motto of my story is wake up thinking your day is gonna be crappy and it will only go up from there, lol.

Nah, I know the day will turn around.  It is only 10:30 A.M. for crying OUT LOUD! 

Why I'm really excited to see the basement painted is that we have lived in this house over 3 years and it still has the builder beige paint color on the walls throughout the upstairs and in the basement. 

Here is the before photos I took this morning...

Nasty builder beige!

I have scoped out various shades of beigy grays or gray beiges before I landed on the color Thunder AF-685 by Benjamin Moore as the choice.  

Here are a few of the inspiration pics that caught my eye with this great color...

VIA

VIA

VIA

The other exciting thing is that since I currently don't have any extra time to work on my own house, my dad has offered was gently persuaded to not only build units in my daughter's room, but with the help of my mum, they are also going to put together a fabric covered bed frame and headboard to finish off the space.  

So it is 11:13 A.M. now and the house is calm.  

A fresh pot of coffee is brewing for the Guys and Ibuprofen is my new best friend. Dustin is in the basement painting, my dad is in the garage working on the units, and I am no where near a staircase.  Fingers crossed that the peacefulness will continue the rest of the day.  

If you are in the Hampton Roads and Richmond area of Va and would like a consultation to begin transforming a room or rooms in your home, I'd love to chat with you.  You can reach me at seasideinteriors01@gmail.com.

If you are located outside of the Hampton Roads and Richmond area and would like to have a Design Package created for a room in your home please contact me at www.seasideinteriors01@gmail.com.

A Lemon and Navy Bridal Shower

It has been several months since I had the opportunity to help put together a bridal shower for Krissy, a family friend of ours.  I am now finally getting the chance to post about it.  Krissy has probably had 4 children by the time it has taken me to post this, but hey I thought I'd share ;)

We wanted to make it very special for her, so we put together the decorations and I did the desserts, favors, and party printables for the space.  It was a lot of work to get it together, but well worth it when we saw Krissy's face light up when she saw everything finished!

Right by the front door we set up the Favor's Table so that all of the guests could grab a monogrammed cookie and jar of lemon drops.

The Favor's Table

I created a Thanks For Dropping By Sign that matched the theme to fit the 8 x 10 frame.

 I created these little Pucker up printables using some sticker paper from the office supply store and a small circle punch.  I tend to use the sticker paper for most party printables.  It is so easy just to print straight on to the sticker instead of hot gluing the paper down, but whatever you have on hand will work.

A monogram cookie that I created for guests.

THE CAKE

Sorry the picture is so blurry, I had to brighten the photo up since there was hardly any natural light in the space.

You can catch the truffles that I tend to make for any occasion off to the left.  I dipped them in white chocolate and drizzled them with yellow chocolate.

For the cake, I iced it in buttercream and created some fondant accent pieces with the lemons and yellow banding around both tiers.

I glued them suckers down with some pretty stiff royal icing.

Here are some more YUMMY cookies...

I don't get the chance to make many cakes and cookies these days unless it is a very special event, so it was so fun to just sit and relax and create these lemon slices and monogram cookies.  I have to say, I came across the most delicious recipe to make sugar cookies and royal icing that tastes SO GOOD!   It is the only sugar cookie recipe I will use.

The recipe is from Sweet Sugar Belle, one of my favorite cookie decorating sites, and you can find the recipe for her Perfect Sugar Cookie Here.

I also switched to her Royal Icing recipe and it is my favorite one too!  You can get the Royal Icing Recipe Here.

Again sorry for the dreary lighted picture, but this picture shows most of the desserts.

We put lots and lots AND LOTS ;) of lemons in glass canisters for simple and pretty decoration. We use these style jars for all of our family birthdays and events.  They are really cheap and versatile!

I created several table tents for the event including this Sweeee-tea sign.  You can't have glasses of tea without some lemon slice lids.  Well I guess you could, but they wouldn't be near as cute as these are.  We got them Here  on Etsy.

Here is an overhead shot of the lids.

I don't know why I love water bottle labels, but I do!  It is just another way to bring in the theme and color of the party. To keep the running theme of lemons going I made some of these my main squeeze labels.

The food was amazing!!  The Bride-To-Be's Mom put together a beautiful spread.

To finish up labeling some of the food, I created several more table tents including one for the truffles...

I created these lemon sliced tags that my sister added ribbon to so that all the guests could write advice to the NEWLYWEDS.  We then hung the cards on branches to create our own indoor lemon tree.

Thanks so much for checking out the bridal shower party my sister and I put together.  If you would like to order the party printables for this Lemon and Navy Bridal shower, they will be available soon in my Etsy Shop.

On another note, the Mohawk Rug Giveaway is now closed.  Thank you to everyone who entered.  The winner is Kelly D.  The Giveaway was done through Rafflecopter and the winner is

Kelly D!!!   Congratulations Kelly!!

Have a great rest of the weekend,

If you are in the Hampton Roads and Richmond area of Va and would like a consultation to begin transforming a room or rooms in your home, I'd love to chat with you.  You can reach me at seasideinteriors01@gmail.com.

If you are located outside of the Hampton Roads and Richmond area and would like to have a Design Package created for a room in your home please contact me at www.seasideinteriors01@gmail.com.

Blue and Gold Living Room Makeover!

Have you gotten your Thanksgiving Menu together?  I'm the type of person to constantly try new dishes even though I should stick to what works.  There are some family favorites that I don't mess with, like the green bean casserole and the pumpkin pie, but I love finding new additions for the menu.  Since I am in charge of Thanksgiving dinner this year, I should probably get to work on the planning since I have just about a week and I will be out of town for two of the days.  

So while I go search for the yummiest recipes to possibly screw up ;)  I will leave you with my most recent Design Board Package.  I mentioned recently that I was working on a Living Room Design Board that would incorporate both new pieces and older pieces that the client owns.  The living room has a much more formal feel than what my client would like for the space, so I wanted to add some fun unique pieces that had a lot of character while still working with and mixing with the current pieces.

Here is the Design Board I created...

My inspiration came from these beautiful deep golden drapes that are already in the room.

    

From there I pulled different shades of blues and yellows to run throughout the space.  You can see the blue shading in these fun denim pillows.

Why can't you bring denim pillows into a formal living room?  I say you can.  It adds a fun factor so that the room doesn't take itself too serious!

Here is another pretty pillow to lighten up the sofas.  It pulls the gold, but also the white that brightens up the space...

The sofas and the rug will stay.  We are going to move the blue gray chair, to the right in the picture, into another room and bring in two of these gorgeous tall backed gray Kensington chairs...

The smaller sized coffee table will depart to make way for this larger more substantial piece...

 The current piece above the fireplace will go on the opposing map wall as we are calling it.

Above the mantel, I wanted something unique, something non rectangular.  So I am looking for an additional piece to go there.

 Since the space will have so many different pieces of photographic or scenic artwork, I wanted to break that up with an abstract piece of art that incorporates the color and has a lot of depth.  I chose this Beautiful piece that will do the trick...

Over yonder is the infamous Map Wall.  It will house different maps from around the world and also various photographic pieces of art from different places.

Also flanking both sides of the entryway off to the right in the picture above, I wanted to add two over sized mirrors for a few different reasons.  One, because the size of the mirrors will help ground this rather large room.  Two, because the mirrors will reflect the colors throughout the room.  AND Three, because the detail work on the mirror pulls in some of the antique feeling from other pieces.

Here is a look at the mirrors that are on there way...

Thanks for having a look at my most recent space and if you missed yesterday's post for The Mohawk Home Rug Giveaway, you can click HERE to enter.

If you are in the Hampton Roads and Richmond area of Va and would like a consultation to begin transforming a room or rooms in your home, I'd love to chat with you.  You can reach me at seasideinteriors01@gmail.com.

If you are located outside of the Hampton Roads and Richmond area and would like to have a Design Package created for a room in your home please contact me at www.seasideinteriors01@gmail.com.