Farmhouse Fall Decor

I wasn't able to decorate for fall as much as I wanted this year because we just have so many projects we're juggling right now. Part of that is just having so much demolition dust everywhere, which makes it hard to get excited about pretty fall pumpkins and leaf branches. And there's the whole not having a ton of free time thing, too. But, I was able to get up a few things that breath some fall air into this house.

Despite having no free time, I decided to take up another hobby: wreath-making. I sometimes get these pictures in my head of things that I want, and I can't ever find them anywhere. I love how wreaths can instantly add some cozy charm to a room and I wanted a few smaller-scale ones for our kitchen area. An online order and a few trips to Michaels later, I was up and running. I made two of the tiny pumpkin wreaths for our kitchen, and one apple wreath for a little wall that joins our mudroom, kitchen and dining area. We're so, so close to our kitchen renovation being complete, so I don't have any photos of the pumpkin wreath in action just yet, but I really love how the apple one came out.

I got the apple cider sign, apple photo printed on wood and the wreath harvest print all on Etsy.

Our dining room is a total mess right now (because, surprise! We started yet another project that required knocking down and re-building a wall). So, I just did a really simple centerpiece with some faux white pumpkins, faux lamb's ear stems, fresh eucalyptus from Trader Joe's, one or two real white tiny pumpkins, and it was done. I have conveniently cropped out all the tools and drywall pieces laying around this room.

In our entryway, I went all out on our little console. We've had this mirror for years, and I painted it white about a month ago because it had previously been a yellow-green color. Our entryway doesn't get a lot of natural light, so I went with a lot of light, neutral decor items to keep the space bright.

On our entryway door, I hung a wreath that matches the garland on the console. It's impossible to get a photo of it because of the horrible lighting, so this is the best I could do.

The other side of this door is mint green, and I found a crab apple wreath from Afloral that caught my eye. I'm so enjoying the spicy oranges up against the bright mint.

In our living room, as much as I love neutrals, I added some sprinkles of pumpkin spice because fall is the one season I want rich color in my life. I put out a lot of leaf branches, faux pumpkins in all colors, throws in richer tones and swapped out one throw pillow with this cute little apple cider one. I had a lot more throw pillows for fall, but for some reason I liked this color palette, so this year I just went with it.

The only thing I added to our bedroom was this flocked leaf garland in soft colors. It was actually something I ordered online and wasn't thrilled with it when it arrived. It would have been a pain to return it, so I brought it upstairs to our bedroom, and it surprisingly looked okay with all the soft blues and ocean accents we have up there.

I'm hoping to have our kitchen renovation post up by the end of the month. We just need to hang our new doors and put up the new ceiling, and it's done! Stay tuned.

We Made A Laundry Room

So friends, I gotta give some serious props to this husband of mine for building this laundry room. When we first decided to install a bathroom upstairs, he came up with the idea of moving our laundry from downstairs in the kitchen to upstairs off our hallway. I thought he was crazy (just sayin'). I thought it would be more work than it was worth, but he measured it out, analyzed the pipes, created a plan and it totally made sense. And he did most of it himself. He's so cool.

Let's rewind.

This Spring, we started to demo out our guest room to make way for the bathroom and laundry room. This guest room had an existing closet, and once we measured it, we confirmed it was literally the perfect size for our washer and dryer. So framing out this space was actually pretty easy because Josh only had to make minor adjustments. But first, we had to demo out the closet. I started with removing the actual closet organizational units that were in there and then the paneling on the walls. Once I got it down to the plaster, Josh came in to demo out the rest. He also had to remove our entire hallway wall to make way for the opening of the laundry and bathroom areas. It's hard to explain, so here are some photos:

Super remedial drawing of our upstairs layout, so you can kind of get an idea.

We tore down the plaster and lathe to start building entrances to the bathroom and laundry area.

View from the guest room, which is on the other side of the main hallway wall two photos above.
We took a good chunk of this room to install the guest bathroom we've been working on.

The guest room closet that became our laundry room. We just reversed the opening, so now this side is a wall, and the laundry room opens from the main hallway on the other side.

Starting the framing for these two rooms!

View from the guest room.

While I'm certain Josh could have done all the plumbing himself, we hired a contractor to do all the plumbing and electrical for this whole project. That was our next step, and this took about a week for our contractor to do the bathroom, laundry room and living room downstairs. For the laundry room, we had him install a ceiling light and corresponding light switch, and then the appropriate outlets and water things (I don't really know what they are, but he installed them!).

Once that was done, Josh drywalled, taped and sanded, and I primed and painted. We decided to go all white because the bathroom next door will be white and our washer/dryer units are also white. I went with our standby, Simply White by Benjamin Moore (it's my go-to white because it's neutral and easy to work with). How many times can I use the word white in a sentence?

Josh installed the ceiling light, all the switch plates and the flooring next. Even though you can't see the ceiling light, I kind of love it. I picked out a bronze farmhouse-y fixture, and also went with a bronze light switchplate. We chose to go with vinyl floors because of the nature of the room, and on the recommendation of a lot of internet people, and picked out one that had a rustic hardwood look to it with gray tones. It doesn't really matter too much because you can barely even see them (in hindsight, I may have chosen a cheaper, more generic one because literally, I can't even see them. Oh well).

We both also wanted shelving in here for the essentials, so we decided to build a countertop of sorts out of plywood that I stained, and also installed a shelf with metal brackets above it for our laundry detergent and dryer sheets. For some extra decoration, I got this Laundry sign off Etsy from GeorgiaBoardCo, which is pretty self-explanatory.

We plan to do bifold doors to close off the room while not in use, but we haven't gotten that far yet because we need to even out that main wall, and re-drywall it. It'll be so much easier (and nicer looking) to install the doors once we have that whole thing under control. Ideally, we had wanted a sliding barn door system, but sadly, we didn't have enough wall space on either side to make that happen.

Putting a laundry room upstairs was probably one of the best decisions we've made so far. Oh my gosh, it makes things so much easier - the entrance to the laundry area is about five steps from our bedroom entrance - so it couldn't have worked out any better if tried. And it all started with an idea Josh had one day.