To Dos for a New Year

It's been a very productive couple of days around here, what a way to kick off the new year.

Let's start in the kitchen. For Christmas we received a gorgeous mirrored floating shelf from West Elm (the one on my list!). Unfortunately it did not fit with our wall studs and would be too heavy for wall plugs, so it had to go back. After perusing West Elm for alternatives we opted for their silver branch shelf brackets. We'll top the brackets with a pale piece marble for a look much like this shelf from West Elm, just longer to accommodate more glassware. 

{west elm}

The next kitchen project is the completion of mudding and sanding the hood fan. Chris was adamant  about finishing this before he's back to work next week and I am pretty excited to see this drawn out project complete (it will be nice to look up in my kictchen and see paint rather than exposed drywall). My kitchen may look like a crime scene, we can't use our stove and Chris has been ingesting drywall dust for days with the endless cycle of mud, sand, wait, mud, sand, wait, but the process is always the worst part, right? 

Moving into the living room, we decided to reclaim our IKEA sofa bed from upstairs. When we moved into our house a few years ago we traded it up for a nicer, custom couch in caramel brown chenille but we've realized we missed having a place for guests to sleep over and I'm very over the colour brown. In fact, save for the brown of wood or a good handbag, I want to eliminate brown from my life. I'll add that to my New Years resolutions: Find balance! Banish brown!

So, out with the brown and in with Ektorp. We replaced our old white cover with a new twill cover in a greyed beige that just happened to be on sale. It is perfection with our wall colour and the light couch makes such a difference to the feel of the whole room. I'm a happy camper.

Still a little wrinkled, but I'm okay with that.

Next up in the living room (which is basically our foyer, and also my office...) we finally bought a new desk chair. We chose the saddle desk chair I've been lusting after at West Elm and I am much happier sitting for hours while I work. Plus, it's really pretty.

{west elm}

And finally, our bedroom closet. Yes, we decided to tackle this too before Chris returns to work so we spent several hours in IKEA working out a closet system that would work for our limited space. Based on my research, the price and quality of IKEA's Algot system can't be beat, so this is what we ended up going with. Thanks to interchangeable pieces we were able to customize a configuration to fit our needs and our new bedroom closet, including wood supports to screw the closet brackets into, cost us less than $400. 

And will you look at that?! So we have no closet doors, my dresses are homeless and my shoes still live in three different spots, so what. The hustle Chris and my Dad put in yesterday to give me a functional closet got us one step closer to making room for Baby 2.

Just don't tell Eloise that I will be taking back a quarter of her closet after all...