Spring Freshening Up: Living Room

The weather here is so beautiful this weekend! I have my windows flung open (the cats are happy!) and the melting snow and warm sunshine are making me think of spring.

And, for the first weekend in a really long time, I had absolutely no obligations and could spend my time doing whatever I wanted. Report cards are done, so now I can have some relazing time for me.

So I decided to bring some spring to my living room. I made some new pillow covers and some new curtains and decluttered. And put together a nice little grape hyacinth planter for the coffee table!

My favourite fabric is the kind of tie-dyed looking one.
It reminds me of the night sky.

I love the curtain fabric, too. The grey part is velvet.

Aren't these vintage berry containers darling? I foudn them in an antique store a couple of weeks ago.

Living Room Reno

For Christmas, my parents gave me a gift certificate for hardwood flooring for my condo.

Since I was off for Spring Break last week, my dad and I agreed that it would be the perfect time to do the floors. My dad took the week off and came down to Calgary to visit and work.



After a bit of investigating, I decided that laminate was not for me. Maybe I'm a snob, but I can't handle the cheap look of laminate. So we soon decided to look at hardwood and engineered hardwood. The style that I liked was the sort of rustic handscraped look. We finally found one in my dad's price range that was a solid hardwood, handscraped, and very rich looking! Yay! It's called black locust wood, which is apparently a bit like acacia and is one of the hardest woods there is. Cool!



So, the work began.

First of all, I painted my wall. I love the colour. It's a very dark green, but appears black in some lighting. Then my dad, who's in contracting, decided he wasn't happy with it (snob!) and painted it again.

Then we cleared everything out of the room and ripped up the carpets. There was a bit of mold on the floor, which dad (who knows these things) painted over. Apparently, he says, doing so locks it in. He said it was harmless anyway, but that's why the floor is speckled.

Then we got to work. My job was to hammer in the flooring. Dad worked on using a mallet to knock the hardwood loosely into place, and cutting the ends to fit the edges.

It took an entire day to do the 250 square foot room, and it really wasn't a terrible job. The backs of my legs ached (and are still sore, days later!) from the bending motion of hammering in the boards, but other than that, that was about all the damage done. It took another day to put the baseboard back on and get everything moved back into the room.

Here's some photos of the room today!

(I experimented with the brightness settings in Photoshop for this one.

Do you think that's what they do in Ikea catalogues?)

I got this idea somewhere in the blogsphere to glue feathers to a lampshade. 

Love it!

And a couple of extras:

Trotsky sitting near some really interesting flowers my dear friend Sarah brought me for Easter dinner.

And my all time favourite flowers, ranunculus.

My sister and I went to the Calgary Farmer's Market on Friday, 

and I couldn't resist making a bouquet from the offerings 

at the flower stall.

I love anemones, too.

All in all, I'm SUPER happy with my room. It feels like a brand new space! It feels great.

And I'm a billion million times thankful for an amazing dad who helped make it happen! I know I couldn't have done it without him!