If I could have one “do over” with our bathroom it would be to have gone with a light gray grout color on the marble floors instead of bright white. I am finding it very challenging to keep the grout clean! My mom has light gray grout on her bathroom floor and it is holding up beautifully. Live and learn.

How can my beautiful floors looks so gross, disgusting, and yucky!?

So, I was super excited when I saw a tip for cleaning grout lines on Pinterest. It is so easy. Here it is: You take a Clorox bleach pen and run it over the grout lines, let it set for at least 4 hours (I left it over night) and then wipe it up with warm water and a sponge or old wash cloth. That’s it!

Using the Clorox pen makes it really easy to follow the grout lines. You just kind-of get into a groove. I did the whole floor in 10 minutes…one of the benefits of having a small bathroom. I put the bleach on pretty thick and used a whole pen on our floor.

The next morning my floors looked new again. The bottom line…

This is one tip that really works!

Our Plan
1) Saarinen table 2) Pelle Bubble Chandelier / DIY: how to make your own bubble chandelier featured in the February/March 2009 issue of ReadyMade magazine…RIP… 3) Farrow & Ball Lotus wallpaper 4) Cherner arm chair 5) Sisal rug with border was featured on Fab a few weeks ago

{Confession: I am completely addicted to Fab and Pinterest and spend too much time on both!}

But, I digress…this is supposed to be about our dining room. The dining room is the first room we restored in our house and it holds a special place in my heart.

The truth is that even though I think the dining room is beautiful, it has never felt like “us”. We got so caught up with restoring the house, the strong architectural lines and period details, that we somehow left ourselves out of the equation.

I want something a little brighter and more playful. I intend to leave all the period details intact except for the light fixture, but that isn’t so unusual. I swap out lights around here the way some women change earrings. I always save the antique lights so I can put them back or move them to a new location if… make that when…I change my mind.

I am trying to find a balance between the Modern furnishings that we love and all the beautiful period details…that we also love.

Mix of period details and Modern furnishings. Image from Pinterest

If you follow me on twitter, you already know that we have installed the Farrow & Ball wallpaper that I have been lusting after this fall. The dining room already looks brighter.

I purchased the sisal rug and it arrived last week. Unfortunately, it is letting off the most noxious chemical smell. My whole house smells like Three Mile Island. This cannot be normal…

We are keeping the baby grand piano in the dining room, so I can’t have a dining room table that is too large. There is also a lot of wood in the room with the piano, built-in china cabinet, box beam ceiling and wainscoting. I think the white Saarinen table will be a nice counterpoint to all the woodwork.

I have loved the Cherner arm chair for years. To me, it is a functional piece of art. I’m not sure if we will have the budget for it. Although, I find it incredibly beautiful…I also find it pretty expensive.

It will be a few months, or maybe a few years, before I get this all together, but I am excited and ready for a change.

Lately, I have been strangely drawn to wallpaper, which is crazy because I know from personal experience just how difficult it is to remove.

Image from Apartment Therapy

I am the same person who adamantly hated wallpaper and swore I would never do that to our beautiful plaster walls. Well, never say never…

I am considering indulging my wallpaper lust, but starting small by hanging it in our tiny powder room.

Our power room is in the midst of getting a few updates. We recently purchased an Ann sink from IKEA. It is about the only sink that I could find that fit our requirements of being affordable and small enough to work in the space. We also tiled behind the sink to prevent problems with water splashing onto the walls.

And I am considering the Mme. Jeanne wallpaper from Grow House Grow. The pattern is loosely based on mollusk scallop shells. I like how it mimics the round shape of the sink.

Hmmmmm…will I regret this? It isn’t as easy as painting over the walls if I change my mind.

Our bedroom is finished! Out of all the rooms we have completed, I am enjoying this room the most. It feels so nice to finally have a little haven, a place to rest, after basically camping out for all of these years. Why didn’t we do our bedroom first?

The room was in awful shape before with peeling wallpaper and holes in the walls.

This room was my home office for years. How did I ever work in here? Lets face it, the room before is not at all inspiring.

The bedroom feels very warm and inviting now.

I framed and hung artwork over the bed from a printmaking course I took while in college.

I am in love with the little closet we had built into the dead space behind the wall. I like that the closet feels like it has always been here.

Our contractor did an amazing job building the door and matching the trim with the existing trim in the house.

This room was missing baseboards and some of the original trim.

New baseboards and trim were installed, replicating the rest of the trim in the house.

These windows were salvaged. We had added them to the house when we worked on the exterior. They needed some attention.

The windows are now working smoothly.

Open bedroom door and closed bathroom door.

Closet door, bedroom door and bathroom door.

The armoire survived being pulled through a second story window and is just slightly worse for the wear.

The bedroom ceiling has been repaired. The plaster was filled with numerous cracks. I’m just glad to say good-bye to the hideous ceiling fan!

Closet before and after. The elfa closet system is working out well.

Details
Paint Color: Dunn Edwards called Chocolate Milk (DE6059); Restoration Hardware Empire Rosette sleigh bed; Crate & Barrel Jules accent table; West Elm organic cotton sheets; West Elm Lexington quilt and shams; Overstock silk curtains; flor tiles rug; Restoration Hardware fan; eBay ceiling fixture; etsy table lamp; sarah & bendrix artwork; Luke Stephenson love bird prints; artwork above the bed is from a college print making course; elfa closet system; and last, but certainly not least, our contractor Juan Reyes 626.793.7091

See that armoire sitting on the front lawn? It needs to go into that open second story window. It has been determined that the armoire is 1.5 inches too tall to clear the narrow second floor landing. 1.5 inches!

Not to be deterred, these guys have a plan. Um, what exactly is the plan?

Are you sure about this? Because I’m not really convinced this is a good idea.

Oh my god! My heart skips a few beats as I imagine my antique armoire crashing to the ground and splintering into pieces. Between heart palpitations, I keep taking pictures to capture the end result…good or bad.

Ok, I can breathe again. It is going in!

After this the guys and I cracked open three cold ones…and I don’t even like beer.

I was convinced I wasn’t a wallpaper person but Farrow & Ball’s Lotus wallpaper has completely changed my mind. I’ve fallen in love with it! I am trying to find a place for it in my house. Maybe in the dining room?

Something about fall makes me want to pull on a warm, comfy sweater, a soft scarf and curl up underneath a blanket with hot cocoa and a good book. I am enjoying getting in touch with my farm girl roots with Noel Perrin’s charming book First Person Rural: Essays of a Sometime Farmer.

1.Farrow & Ball Lotus wallpaper 2.Madewell first frost circle scarf 3.T by Alexander Wang chunky pullover 4.Barcelona hot chocolate 5.terrain St. David’s Cross throw 6.First Person Rural: Essays of a Sometime Farmer by Noel Perrin

We moved into the bedroom. It is so nice to be out of the home office. Our bed is on back order so we are sleeping on the floor. Even though we splurged on a new queen sized mattress, we still don’t have enough room for the two corgis who keep trying to sneak into our bed during the middle of the night.

The little closet we had built into dead space behind the wall looks like it has always been here. The door, hardware and trim are a perfect match with the original features of our house.

The light fixture is an eBay find. It came from a 1915 bank in Ohio.

The curtains are hung, but still not ironed. David decided that privacy is a little more important than beauty and that we’ll have to iron them later.

Closet door and the bedroom door.

The room still needs to be decorated, but it is so nice to finally sleep in a bedroom that is clean and renovated. Our clothes are hanging in the closet instead of piled inside oversized plastic storage bins.

Big sigh…either of exhaustion or relief!

To say that this closet is a challenge is an understatement. It is very long and very narrow with a sloping roof. We decided to go with an elfa closet solution from The Container Store.

See all the pull out drawers? Those babies are all mine.

All the drawers, shoe racks and shelves pull out which really does help compensate for the small space. David was able to fit all of his clothes into his side of the closet. It isn’t possible to fit all my clothes into half of this closet, even after drastically cutting down my wardrobe.

We have an antique English armoire, my very first piece of grown-up furniture, that has been sitting in our garage since we moved into the house. It is too tall to fit up our stairs. Maybe it can be taken apart to get it upstairs and into the bedroom? I definitely need hanging storage space!

My friend asked if I would consider this color mauve. Once she asked that I started liking the color a little bit less and having flashbacks to 1986. Maybe I am in denial, but I think this is a softer, more elegant color. If anything, it is mauve’s third cousin twice removed.

I am still deciding if I like the color, Dunn Edwards Chocolate Milk (DE6059). We decided to lightly sand and refinish the Douglas fir floors.

I found silk curtains for sale on overstock.com that match perfectly. Although, they do need to be ironed.

Paint color creates the mood and makes a huge impact in any room. I am looking for something that feels peaceful and soothing for our bedroom, which led me to search for a soft, faded grayish-pinky-tuape color.

After deciding to go in this direction, I found the above photo of a room designed by renowned decorator Windsor Smith. This was enough to convince me that I am going in the right direction. Hey, if it is good enough for Windsor…

I have decided to go with the paint color on the far left, a very pretty color from Dunn Edwards called Chocolate Milk (DE6059) with a soft blue-gray color on the ceiling.