The “rooms we love” tour, from some favorite home decorating blogs…
Welcome, welcome! Welcome to our mess! I mean, “nest”. Welcome to our DIY and home decorating blog, The Heathered Nest. If you got here from a stop out in the midwest at CC and Mike’s breathtaking, super glam, colorful and eclectic home, we are thrilled to see you here on the east coast! The rural suburbs of Washington DC, in fact.
My husband Dave (a nerdy but adorable engineer), and myself (former physical therapist) blog here about our adventures in DIY and creating a beautiful home you love on a…budget. YES, budget. I know, it feels like it should be a four-letter word with a couple of $%^ thrown in there, right?
And we are thrilled to be a part of this “Rooms we Love” tour orchestrated by my friend Tammy. She’s the very kind, genuine and amazing talent behind the blog, Pink Peppermint Design. BTW, if you are ever trying to plan a party and looking for some inspiration, you MUST go to her blog.
Tammy brought together some fantastic home decorating blogs, and each one is sharing their own personal “favorite space” with you. Trust me, you do NOT want to miss these tours!
As far as our favorite room goes, I was tempted to pick our closet, since that is the latest DIY room renovation we completed here. We had an unused room that’s inaccessible from anywhere except our master bedroom. So after years of debate, we finally decided to make the room into a big walk-in closet…
Here’s the space BEFORE:
And here is our closet – AFTER:
Seriously, I feel like one of the real housewives in this space. Well, one of the housewives without their bank accounts…
Or skills with with makeup. Or propensity for drama. But I digress. Point is, I do LOVE this room right now. We found used Ikea PAX wardrobe system components and spliced them together around the perimeter of the room. Using the secondhand units instead of buying new saved us thousands of dollars on this space.
We buy (and sell) a LOT via Craigslist and Facebook yard sales…if you’re not on that bandwagon already, JUMP ON.
But as much as I am loving the new closet space, I’d have to say my favorite room in our home is my daughter’s bedroom ❤:
We have three children, and our daughter is the middle child. The lone girl, surrounded by her two stinky (but sweet) brothers. The middle is a tough place to be, I think. And when we moved into this house about 4 years ago, I had a lot of trouble figuring out how to design this space.
Here’s how it looked before:
A beige box. And not a super sizable box, at that. What made planning even harder for me was that I *loved* her nursery in our old house.
This is how our daughter’s former room looked when we moved in, BEFORE our renovation:
So the color was a bit…smurfy. Yikes ?! But the shape of the room was just so cool. All those funky roof line angles. The curve over the larger window. It had character.
Here’s how it looked after we renovated. Forgive the poor picture quality. I took this back before I knew that ISO meant something other than “in search of” or that depth of field wasn’t referring to the size of someone’s farm acreage or whatever.
It was such a happy space. So when we moved and her room became a beige box with zero architectural detail, and a weird configuration as far as where the closets and windows sat, I was kinda sad. And stumped. I wanted her next bedroom to be at least as cool as the last.
When we finally decided that the best layout for the room would be to create a niche for her bed with some built-in bookshelves right by the window, the plan just took off.
We modified (well, more like sawed in half) and refinished an awesome vintage bamboo desk that we scored on Craigslist and put that at one end of the niche.
And on the opposite end of the niche, we built the bookcases and made a DIY upholstered, tufted headboard under the built-ins.
The addition of some ruffly curtains hung from the ceiling using our 10-minute DIY curtain rod hack is one of my favorite parts of this bedroom. It breaks up the monotonous lines of the room, adding some interest to the otherwise boring four square walls. Best of all, it creates this cozy little nook where she can sleep, read, and hang out.
For the gallery wall, we gathered inexpensive thrift store and flea market frames, and spray painted them to give them a uniform look.
Then we filled each frame with wallpaper, for a fun visual pop. We decided to do the wallpaper this way instead of using it on the whole wall because:
- It is another way we tried to break up the boring, straight lines in the space, and
- It was less expensive than wallpapering the whole wall
Plus, we love to mix color and pattern into our spaces, and the wallpaper does just that! Mixing pattern used to be such a roadblock for me, but NOW, it’s one of my favorite aspects of design! If that’s a struggle for you, definitely download this free guide !
She really wanted a pink room, and I don’t mind pink, but I feel like it can be soooo overdone in kids rooms. So we wanted the space to read “pink” but not a pink punch-in-the-mouth kind of pink.
The chief “pink” component is the large ceiling ring surrounding the sweet vintage tole chandelier we found. If you’d like to add a similar ceiling feature in your home, we wrote a tutorial about it *here.*
It started out looking like a large, pink UFO on the ceiling. I think most people who saw the room at this stage thought we were nuts. They’re right, but I still think we made the right call with this ceiling feature.
I could go on and on about all the little DIY projects we did in this space…but I will not because you guys have a tour of some favorite rooms at a bunch of amazing home decorating blogs to get to!
Below is a list of links to the various DIY tutorials we’ve written about from this space if you want more details:
- DIY ceiling ring installation
- DIY ceiling medallion installation
- Vintage bamboo desk makeover<
- <DIY roman shades (that we will never, ever try again)
- 10-minute DIY curtain rods
- 10-minute DIY pillow cover with dollar store bandanas
- Quick & easy DIY ribbon drawer pulls>
- 5-minute rolling underbed storage Ikea hack
Every time I need a pick-me-up, I head for this room. It’s punchy colors make me smile. And it’s so cute decked out for the holidays…
I hope you enjoyed hanging with us for a few minutes at our nest. We were THRILLED you stopped by!! It’s so nice to make new friends across this big www. Please feel free to tour our whole house anytime you want!
And NOW, you are in for a MASSIVE treat, because the next home decorating blog on this tour schedule is one of my all time favorites.
This blogger’s styling is impeccable. She is an amazing artist (check out her shop), and every time she pushes the shutter on her camera, Lucy creates another masterpiece. I am sure this home decorating blog needs no introduction, so head over straight away to one of the best of the bests, Craftberry Bush!
Monday
CC and Mike | The Heathered Nest | Craftberry Bush | Two Twenty One | Pink Peppermint Design
Tuesday
Haneen’s Haven | House of Hire Designs | Valerie Wheeler Interiors | Meaningful Spaces | Meme Hill Studio
Wednesday
Spicy Salty Sweet Home | Noni’s House | Remington Avenue | The Posh Home | Tuft and Trim
Thursday
Life on Cedar Lane | Nina and Cecilia | Almafied Blog | The Green Spring Home | 11 Magnolia Lane
Pssst…before you go, I sure would love to hang out with you again really soon! Sign up now and get a FREE copy of “Builder-Grade To Beautiful: 10 Totally Transformative Home Decorating Solutions, All Under $100!” Click here to enter your email or on the image below. Your copy will be sent right away!
That white pink themed room is like a dream for me. lol I do home staging and im an interior designer. I loved that white pink theme girl room you shared. I m planning on renovating my room and i will do something like this to my room. Anyways.. I loved your article. Bookmarking it. Will go through it all again when renovating the room. Thank you for sharing!