I’ll start this post on a positive note. All children are precious gifts from God and it is truly a blessing to be gifted with not one, but three sweet girls.
However, every time we add another child to our family, our simple, zippy little life becomes a bit more…frumpy. Does anyone feel me on this?
Read MoreEver get caught in a designing snowball? You decide you would like one new item for your house: say, a new arm chair. And before you know it, you’re thinking, Well, if we’re going to get a new arm chair, we really should switch out our sofa as well. And while we’re switching up our furniture, it would probably be a great time to refinish the floors in this room. And come to think of it, that area rug is pretty nasty. We should probably get a new one of those to match our new furniture. And this, my friends, is a designing snowball.
I’ve been tossing around the idea of switching to a king size bed from our queen. Once I started looking at new headboards, I found myself in a bit of a snowball. Well, lucky for you, I use my designer snowballs for good! Today I bring you three different bedroom designs, at three very different price points. Each design has the same elements: a bed, nightstands, lamps, art, area rug, plant, planter, throw, and throw pillows. But each one has a very different price point and a slightly different feel. So which one is your favorite??
Bed // Nightstands // Lamps // Area Rug // Plant // Planter // Art // Throw Pillows // Lumbar Pillow // Throw Blanket
Clean, classic, and dreamy, this bedroom has a few higher end pieces that make it oh-so-luxurious. That Serena and Lily bed is to die for and if I didn’t have little kids playing on my bed several times a day, I would totally want one just like it!
Bed // Nightstands // Lamps // Area Rug // Plant // Planter // Art // Throw Pillows // Lumbar Pillow // Throw Blanket
This one is probably the most “me.” A bit mid-century with some fun pops of pink and yellow. This bed from One Kings Lane has been in my online cart for a few weeks now. And I love the idea of sconces next to the bed instead of table lamps. They free up some more space on my nightstand for the stacks of books I’ll never get to!
Bed // Nightstands // Lamps // Area Rug // Plant // Planter // Art // Throw Pillows // Lumbar Pillow // Throw Blanket
This room is absolutely fabulous for the price. And the major pieces (take away the throw pillows, etc) total under $1,000! What a steal! Add some beautiful white bed linens and this budget bedroom can totally pull off a high-end looK!
Give me your thoughts in the comments below! Which room would you choose right now? Your opinions might just sway my future design decisions!
Hi friends! It’s that time again! Time to start planning out Baby H’s nursery! I can’t believe we’re over halfway there already! If you’ve been following along with my Instagram stories lately, you probably know that in addition to planning for baby #3, we’ve also been house hunting. We’ve seen some beautiful homes (and some not-so-beautiful ones). However, we sat down a few weeks ago and decided to remove some of that stress from our lives. We can always move, but we do not need to hold the baby’s due date over our heads as a deadline. Does anyone else do that when they’re pregnant? Feel like ALL of your life decisions MUST be figured out before the baby comes? I have felt like that during all three of my pregnancies. Probably something to do with the anticipation mixed with a lot of restless energy.
So for now, I’ll keep an eye out for that perfect house in our budget, but we’ve gained a new respect for staying put, and making the most of what we’ve already been given. I really do love our house. I’m not crazy about the location, but the house itself has been very good to us. It also has a lot of potential I’ve been itching to expose. I’ve got my list of projects I would love to get started on, but for now, this baby’s nursery is taking priority.
I know you’re probably thinking by this time, I should be an expert on girl nurseries. And I might agree with that. You can click here to check out Logan’s Millennial Pink nursery from last year. I’m planning this one out a bit differently though. My thought for this baby’s nursery is to almost go gender-neutral with it. Mostly whites and woods, maybe a touch of soft pink here or there.
This is the girls’ playroom that we will be using for the nursery. In the bottom-right picture of the two doors, the door on the left leads into our master bedroom, and the door on the right leads to the den. We’re obviously going to need to get rid of that tile floor (something that’s been on my punch list for years), and I will probably paint the wood paneling white. I’m contemplating leaving the wall with the large window unpainted.
This room gets tons of light which I love but unfortunately, can be a pain for a sleeping babe. We will need to account for that skylight as well as the huge window that takes up the whole one wall. Here’s what I’m thinking in terms of style:
I love the Scandinavian feel of this nursery above. I’m even contemplating that white floor. The room we’re putting this baby in is about this size too. We have an extra bedroom in our house but it’s currently being used as my office/storage. We talked about moving my office into this space and using the bedroom for the nursery, but I love how this room is attached to our master bedroom and I won’t have to walk throughout the house to get to the baby in the middle of the night.
This inspo pic, other than being adorable, is for my husband. He is a big Friday Night Lights Fan- so I’ll know if he read my post when he mentions something to me about that letter board. I’m just really liking the calmness of the color pallet in here- but notice how much texture they’ve incorporated through the rug, wicker, plants and lampshade.
I’m always drawn to a black-and-white pin-stripe. I’ve had this nursery pinned for a long time. I think it’s neutral and calming, while still being interesting.
This mood board will surely see some changes over the next few weeks, but this is my starting point. I’m going to try my best to keep costs down, so we can do other things to our house. Plus, I really do have plenty of little girl things for this nursery. Buying another crib might be a tough sell for my hubs too. But I’ll keep you updated! In the mean time, what do you think?? More color? Too much color? If anyone has had a good experience with skylight shades, let me know! I haven’t even started looking into that yet. Sixteen weeks left
If you are a Netflix lover like myself, you have probably seen promotions for the new show, Tidying Up, with Marie Kondo. The show demonstrates principles from Marie’s best-selling book, The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing . Just like her book, the show is quickly gaining traction and has everyone looking to purge their unused and unwanted items from their home, and leave it tidy and organized. Being an organizer and lover of clean homes myself, I thought I would give you my honest reviews of the show…
Of course, I always love to see people getting organized in their homes. It honestly makes me breathe easier when I see them let go of all their excess things throughout the course of the show. If you are newer to The Mom By Design, you may not know that I created my own organizing course last fall, right before our second daughter was born. Yes, a lot of my ambition for this course came from my crazy amounts of nesting energy. But, it was literally the cleanest our house had ever been and that purge set us up so nicely for those infant months of not being able to do much other than survive and sleep.
I remember Marie’s book being pretty popular around the time I was making my course. I never read the book because I always loved to organize and never really had an issue with getting rid of things I no longer used. I certainly appreciated that someone wrote a book about tidying up and understood why so many people were intrigued by it, but because I didn’t need to learn about it myself, it wasn’t on my must-read list.
Now having watched a few episodes of her show, I can’t help but see a bit of myself in Marie and a bit of Marie in my course. We have a lot of similar principles, though we articulate them a bit differently. I do not take the time to “greet the house” before I organize it, or tell my clothes “thank you” before I put them in a bag to donate or throw away. Times like this usually spark an eye-roll or a chuckle from me while watching. However, there’s a part of me that is touched by this action, of acknowledging what we have and how it has helped us in our daily lives. Our home does so much for us that we take for granted, and I appreciate that Marie makes us stop to give thanks to our home for all it has done for us in protecting us and our families.
Marie divides up her organizing process into 5 sections: clothing, books, paper, Kimono (which is your kitchen, bathroom, garage, and miscellaneous), and finally, sentimental items. I divided up my course, Organize It by rooms- but they were similar to Marie’s categories: closets, kitchen, office, playroom, garage, and laundry room.
I went through the course last night to see the similarities and I thought this one section from the “Closets” module sounded very “Marie-like.” You guys, I was 9 MONTHS PREGNANT when I filmed this course! Was I nuts??? I can’t help but chuckle when I look at that belly and how winded I am in some of the clips. But I’m also totally proud of all the work and nesting energy I was able to put into this course this far along in my pregnancy.
Closet Organization: Organize It
A lot of people ask Marie about how she manages a tidy house with two young children. She admits that it is difficult, but she tries to include them in tidying up as much as she can. The main reason my house gets messy in the first place is BECAUSE of my kids. I literally can’t believe how much of my day is spent picking up and putting away. It’s basically a never-ending process. But like Marie, I do try to involve them as much as possible when I can, and when they are able. Last night as I was putting Logan down, I asked Riley to clean up her room a bit (it was a disaster). After rocking Logan to sleep for about 10 minutes or so, I went into Riley’s room fully expecting to help her clean the rest of the way. It was SPOTLESS. I’m not kidding. I almost cried. And she was soooo proud of herself when I made the fuss that I did. The Playroom Organization module reminds me a lot of Marie in encouraging your kids to be a part of the organization and tidying up process.
Playroom Organization: Organize It
So basically, I’m a fan of the show. Admittedly, it gives me a bit of a boost with how well I did in my Organize It Course. And I’m grateful I don’t have the heaps of belongings her clients have in the show. Feeling like you need your “stuff” can be a pretty intense feeling sometimes. But once you start letting go, it all becomes a lot easier.