I Heart Houses

Television Show "The Insider" Airs Photos of My Home

2012-05-19T20:21:12Z

Hello, all. This is somewhat related to houses. "The Insider" aired a segment about me this week regarding my career as a new media personality. They showed some photos of my house, so I thought I'd share it with you. New blog posts coming soon.

The Morning Room - Coastal Victorian Decor

2012-02-20T20:11:02Z

So I've been saying for a long time that I'd do a post on the morning room. I haven't had a chance to take more pictures, so I just thought I'd put up the ones I have.

According to Wikipedia, a morning room is a nineteenth-century designation for a sitting-room, often with east-facing exposure, suited for daytime calls, or the middle-class lounge, a late nineteenth-century designation for a room in which to relax.

This is the only room in the house that we didn't paint. I wanted to go with a coastal look, and the walls were already a light sand color which was a perfect backdrop for the punches of blue I had planned. For this room, I was inspired by a painting I had called "Beach at Trouville." As shown below, it depicts the beautiful french coastline during Victorian times. It's another Claude Monet, like the paintings in my diningroom.

If you look around the room in the after photos, you can really see all the colors in the painting. The blues and yellows are in the stripes of the sofa and loveseat. The sand is the color of the walls, the turquoise on the staircases can be found in the vintage bottles on the mantel, and the brick color on the buildings match the brick of the fireplace.

And now for the before's and after's:

BeforeBefore
Before
After

I found the victorian fireplace screen on ebay. It was originally black and I spray painted it white to have that victorian lace look.

The mantel displays lots of vintage bottles, old nautical-themed books in different tones of blue, and a ninteenth century toile vase from England.

And the room most certainly wouldn't be coastal without some shells... :-)

I'm not typically a fan of tassels on drapery, but I wanted the window treatments to embody both the airiness of a beach house and the elegance of the victorian era. So for the drapes, I went with a light blue and white striped sheer from the Martha Stewart collection. And I went with the white tasseled valances, because they reminded of me of a victorian lady's parasol.

In decorating, I just kept picturing young girls picnicing on the beach in their victorian dresses and dainty parasols to shade them from the sun. Add lots of beachy accessories and you have what I call, Coastal Victorian.

AfterYankee Candle of the room: Beach Walk.

This post is part of Met Monday.

New Diningroom Slipcovers

2012-01-02T02:39:41Z

Hello everyone. I hope you had a wonderful holiday. Over the Christmas season, my mother knew how much I've been wanting to get slipcovers for my dining room chairs. But I've had difficulty finding them already made- since my chairs are so large and a unique shape. I ended up going with white linen for the fabric. I wanted gathered skirts and three tie ups in the back for a cottage look. Below are the results.

I love them, but I know I can only have them out for special occasions. Our cat is just dying to roll around on them!

Happy New Year!

Christmas in The Old South - Our Tree

2011-12-07T20:20:53Z

Seasons greetings! I hope you are all having a wonderful holiday season thus far. I thought I'd share some of my decor with you. You can click each photo to see it larger. This post is included in BNOTP's Met Monday and The Hooked On Houses Holiday Decor Party.

For the front parlor, I wanted to go with deep tones of gold and deep crimson red. The red looks brighter in these photos than it is in person. The tree is 12 feet tall.

First, I'll share my favorite photo with you. Someone managed to sneak into frame lol.

The red flowers are hydrangeas, the flower of the Old South.

And here is a shot during the day.

I also put up a smaller tree (6.5 ft tall) in the dining room.

For the Dining Room tree, I went with the colors white and platinum. I wanted to incorporate some old fashioned flare, so I hung some pieces from my antique cameo collection as ornaments.

I'll work on sizing some other photos I took. In the meantime, please comment and let me know what color scheme you did on your Christmas tree this year.

The top part of these crystal candle holders where the crystals are hanging from is actually a piece from one of the old chandeliers in the house. The piece is rounded so it sit perfectly right on top, and the candles fit perfectly through the hole in the middle.

Thanks for stopping by!

Dining Room of Doom

2011-10-27T21:42:56Z

Hello, all. I'm still working on the party decorations in the back porch and throughout the rest of the house. But I thought I'd share some photos of what I have done with the Dining Room so far. I went with a bit of a Gothic style, using black, white, and a pop of orange.

What is your favorite Halloween themed scent? I have "Candy Corn" by Yankee Candle, but not a big fan of it. Any suggestions?

Going Old South for Halloween

2011-10-20T02:51:41Z

Hello, everyone. Happy Halloween season. It's my favorite time of year!

So it's no secret that I'm a huge fan of Gone With The Wind. My southern home is definitely my version of Tara. :-) For work, I did some promotional shots for a costume line. One of the costumes of my choosing was of course, Scarlett O'Hara. The photos were taken in my home, in the ballroom. I thought I'd share them with you, since they show a little bit of the house.

This first photo is taken in front of the fireplace. A couple of months ago, we switched out the painting that was above it for this beautiful 6 foot tall mirror. I'm only 5'1" but the mantel in this room is massive and the ceilings are very tall, so it makes me look even more vertically challenged lol.

Here's another from a different area of the room.

In case you are wondering, the area rug was from Pottery Barn. :-)

That's pretty much it. I just thought I'd share. We are currently in the process of decking out the whole first floor for a Halloween party we are having. I'll post some photos once everything is in place. I'm excited for the set up we have in the back porch.

Do you decorate inside your home for Halloween? If so, do you do more than one room?

Victorian Kitchen Before & Afters

2011-09-03T21:25:16Z

Hello, all! Happy Labor Day weekend! Good news! The light fixture that I ordered several months ago finally came in this week! My hubby knew how long I had been waiting for this piece to finally complete the kitchen- so he put it up immediately. I'm really happy with how it pulls the whole room together. It adds a steampunk kind of twist to the Victorian/Old World style of the kitchen.

Get ready for tons of pictures!

I love light country kitchens with antique white cabinets. But I had already gone with the light country/cottage vibe for the dining room and a lot of other rooms in the house. And all the antique white cabinets we found at home improvement stores looked dirty. (We finally found decent antique whites after we installed the ones we ended up getting. Oops too late!) We went a whole different direction from the white and brought in a deep rich wood tone with the kitchen. We ended up getting Shenandoah Cabinets in Cherry Bourdeaux. But before we even got to the cabinets, we gutted the entire kitchen to start from new.

Demolition

The kitchen was actually rebuilt, as it burned down in the fifties. So the ceilings were a lot lower than the 12 foot ceilings in the rest of the house. We wanted to raise the ceiling, so Hubby gutted that too so that he could create a tray ceiling with recessed lighting and decorative crown molding to bring in another touch of Victorian flare.

Flash forward to the cabinets and countertops, we had fun designing the new layout of the kitchen to make it more spacious and easier to move around. Going back to the cabinets, we ordered some of the doors in seeded glass, again to bring in a Victorian look. The countertops we went with are Quartz in "caramel." (Quartz is supposedly more durable than Granite and it has a more uniform look. It's a lot more expensive, but I personally feel that it was worth the money. I love my countertops.)

The overall look I was going for was a little more formal than a country kitchen. At the same time, I still wanted to bring in some aged textures as I did with the butcher's table made of reclaimed wood. Well, I'll stop blabbing and let you take a look at the before & afters. :-)

Before I bought the houseAfter

BeforeAfterAfter (Nighttime)

Before

After

Before

After

I wanted to stay primarily within the Victorian style, but I added bits of "Old World" or "French Vineyard" decor. (Basically wrought iron with swirlies and anything related to wine! lol.)

I love my wine opener from pottery barn. If you look closely, you can see the cork inside the bottle lol. It was my first time using it and it got stuck inside hehe.

Here's a simple canister from Walmart that I filled with white and black coated almonds.

Pears anyone? :-)

I bought the vintage wooden bowls on ebay. The Latteriera glass flower bottles are from Napa Style.

Forget the pears! I know you've been eyeing the cake! :-P

The glass cake stand is from Ross and the wrought iron tiered stand is from Ballard Designs.

Getting back to Victorian/Steampunk, I found these Apothecary jars at Ross.

I won both the apothecary spice rack/bottles and antique kitchen scale on ebay. Hint: Don't buy antique replica scales at the store or online. There are plenty of listings for real antique kitchen scales on ebay, and most of them are half the price of the replicas Napa Style and Pottery Barn have carried.

And of course, my beautiful antiqued copper light fixture. It can be used as a kitchen island pendant light like I did, or it can be used as a billiard light. I ordered it from Lowes.com.

I'm also really happy with the Victorian bin pulls I ordered from LookinTheAttic.com. They didn't have any knobs to match so I had to do some serious online searching to find something similar.

After days of no success in finding knobs to match the bin pulls, I was at Lowe's one day and saw one of their special order displays in the hardware section. I discovered the perfect knob! They were $3.98 each. I quickly busted out my iphone and took a picture of the manufacturer name and model number. When I got home, I did some more researching and found them for $1.99 on amazon! Saves to do the research!

And here are the victorian outlet covers I ordered from HouseofAntiqueHardware.com. I forgot to take a picture of them, so I had to crop this out of a wide shot. I apologize for the blur. Anyway, I really liked what they brought to the room. They are sooo much better than the plastic outlet covers we had on before switching them out. (Prior to ordering these, I tried spray painting the plastic covers bronze and it came out that funky sparkly color they used to use on motorcycles in the 70's lol.)

Switching back to nighttime again, here is my little candle corner. I found this cute baker's rack on clearance at Kirklands. It was brown and I spray painted it black. I had a couple cook books and an old coffee grinder that I thought filled it up nicely. I also included a few food-themed candles from my Yankee collection.

So we've been through a lot of pictures in this post. Just to remind you of how yucky this kitchen was before- let's do one more before & after:

BeforeAfterAnd that's it. I'll leave you with my current Yankee Candle scent of the room, Cinnamon stick.

Thanks so much for reading! Stay tuned for the transformation of my Den/Morning Room. :-)

Special thanks to my Hubby for all of his hard work in making my vision come true. He did everything from the floor to the ceiling.

Dining Room New Additions

2011-08-24T20:32:20Z

I apologize it's been a while since my last. I just had surgery, so I haven't been at the computer much at all. But I wanted to share with you the new additions to the dining room. My hubby made me four wall shelves to finally fill in the wall space on either side of the hutch, and display my whiteware.

So happy with the results. I think it really pulls the room together and gives it that cottage feel I've been wanting for the room. (I also have some new Delftware as you can see on the top shelf of the hutch. I thought the blue added a nice pop of color amongst all the white.)

A lot of the pieces are finds from Marshalls and Ross. The plates and bowls are from Target and a couple pitchers are from ebay.

I also had Hubby install a door to separate the dining room and kitchen. The kitchen has dark wood and has more of an Old World French feel, very different from this room. So I really felt that it needed a door between the two.

And of course, I had to get a fun door knob. As I always say, a door knob is a fun necessity that can also be an accessory. Of course, I went with a Victorian look with the face plate, and I thought a crystal knob would look pretty in the sunlit room.

It's similar to the other decorative knob sets I purchased for the rest of the house. (Only the other knobs are not crystal, they are oval shaped and in antique bronze like the face plate.) I ordered them from HouseofAntiqueHardware.com.

Recovering from surgery, I've spent a lot of time on the couch watching movies. My favorite movie of all time (mainly because of the house in it) is Practical Magic. I watched it twice recently and was really inspired by the Owens kitchen and dining room. I'm already a fan of hanging candles as it is, but I noticed hanging candles on the wall of the kitchen in the movie.

That inspired me to hang mine in the dining room. I decided to hang them on a little bird hook that I had purchased at Joanne's a few months ago, but had no use for.

And that's it for the dining room. To see what the Dining Room looked like before we transformed it, click here.

We've finally finished our kitchen and have been accessorizing as we wait for the final touch- our light fixture to arrive, as it has been on backorder. As soon as that goes up, I'll do a post on the kitchen. It's one of my favorite rooms in the house. As you can see, the overall theme of my home is definitely a form of French. Each room just takes on a different style of it; the ballroom- French Pronvincial, the Diningroom- French Country, and the Kitchen is more like French Vineyard. Very excited to show you. I still need to do a post on the Morning Room. It's all coming very soon, I promise. Thanks so much for reading! :-)

The Ballroom - Another Transformation

2011-05-22T01:45:53Z

I've been wanting to post the the Ballroom transformation with you for a while now. Sadly, I've been so busy I hadn't had a chance to take some decent photos of it. But I finally did this weekend, and I'm happy to share them with you.

Just a little information about the room: We call it the ballroom because back in the early 1900's they use to hold a lot of formal functions in that room. Our street was named after the woman who built the house and back then, our neighborhood was the dwelling of many prestigious people. One of them, being the governor himself. So you can imagine the kind of parties they had back then.

Here is what the room looked like before we purchased the house last year. No offense to the previous owner, but I think she had a very "minimalist" approach to decorating lol. (She wasn't very kind to us, so I think it's okay to say that without reservations):

Before

Before - The Bay Window

Before

Not sure what paint color they had on the walls, it was like a brownish-purple color. Very drab! First thing I wanted to do was lighten up the room with a neutral beige tone. I planned to go with a French theme, so I'd add in pops of powder blues and bronze tones in paintings and fabrics.

Let's take one more look at the Before:

Before

And now for the Transformation:

After

The flowered pillows shown here are French aubusson pillows from one of my favorite ebay stores. All of the other pillows are taffeta and silk, my mother finally taught me how to sew recently and we made them together.

The bronze mirror is from Neiman Marcus, the urn holding the roses is from Pottery Barn, and the random statues and candelabras seen throughout the room are from ebay and local antique stores. And as with all the other paintings in the house, they are from art.com. I am very picky with art, so I have a blast searching through their database for exactly what I want. I had all the art in the ballroom delivered on stretched canvas and had them framed at Michael's.

I'll stop blabbing now and let you take a look around. :-)

After - The Bay Window

Some more of my antique book collection

As I mentioned in my Shabby Chic bedroom post, since I was a little girl- I always had a love for victorian trinket boxes. I think your house should be a representation of who you are. That's why I make a point to display my collections. Groupings can bring everything together nicely.

I love mixing old with new. The candelabra here was purchased on ebay, it is an antique Tole piece imported from Italy. The casket box next to it is made of resin and was bought at Family Dollar! I just painted it with metallic enamel paint and TA DA! :-)

And for my themed candle for this room, I took a departure from my usual Yankees. I went with a Cozy Cashmere scent, a Colonial Candle.

And that's about it for the ballroom. I know I didn't get any full on shots of the entire room. I'm waiting for our upcoming banquet to show some wide shots with people in period attire. Should be fun to share! :-)

I'll post another transformation this week. I'm going to share the before & after's of my Morning Room. I hope you enjoyed this post. See you next time!

An Afternoon & Evening On My Back Patio

2011-05-13T03:33:12Z

This week I felt it was time to dress up the back patio a bit. I was going for a garden courtyard look, so I purchased topiaries and ivy from Michaels to bring some greenery to the deck and enclose it a bit. This post is part of Tablescape Thursday on Between Naps on The Porch. Care to join me for an outdoor lunch? :-)

There's a nice breeze, enjoy your lemonade while listening to the sound of the chimes...

Here have a look around...

Oh, it's starting to get dark out! Can you hear the crickets?

Oops! Pardon the cord please

And by the flickering of the lanterns, I wish you good night...