Fabric for our living room and dining room is starting to arrive and I'm so very excited, like cart wheel inducing excited. I just adore fabric, seriously is the best thing since sliced bread. I thought I was pretty settled on what fabric wanted for living room, until I stopped into our local Calico Corners and began to look around. I was just in there to take in all the pretty fabrics and dream of places to use them, not to shop. Well while in there, I accidently fell in love with a Thom Filicia fabric called Griffith Citron. The print reminds me of a abstract birds flying on a bright clear and I'm in love with it.  

Only two hiccups to me actually buying the fabric. 1. I had to make sure Hasani was OK with the fabric for pillows, he's not into floral prints (accepts them in the dining room) but overall he prefers Ikat and geometric or a basic solid. 2. The price! $44.99 per yard. I'm not one of those people that can have a $100 pillow and be cool with spending that much, bottom line in my world its just a pillow, lol. But after showing him the fabric and he was cool with it. However, I was on a mission NOT to spend $44.99 for one yard. Ebay came to my rescue and I found the exact fabric I was looking for, I got close to two yards of fabric for far less than one yard plus free shipping. So here's the fabric I've been raving about, along with samples of the two other fabrics I recently ordered. 

The floral fabric is called Gazebo Cloud, I ordered 7 yards for fabric from Mary Jo's Cloth Store.  I plan on using 5.5 yards of the fabric for drapes in the dining room and the remaining I'll use for pillows in the living room. I also ordered this pretty chartreuse shade of velvet fabric for pillows from fabric.com. I still want to add in two more geometric prints in our living room, one print for a pillow and the other for drapes.

I like this Geo Maze fabric from Toni Living for pillows, its a nice smaller scale geometric print that would look nice on a sofa mixed with the above fabrics. 

via Tonic Liivng

For living room drapes, I can't decide between these two options. The one below is called Outdoor Secret Garden, I also like it in the lighter silver shade, which might work better. 

The other option is Courtyard Oyster, I love love this print, but I need 5.5 yards of fabric and its $29 per yard. I've been on the lookout for something similar that's a little more budget friendly. After all I already had one fabric splurge in our living room.  

I'm excited to start sewing pillows and drapes for our living room and dining room. Even with the majority of our fabrics picked out, I'm still trying to decide how many pillows of each fabric I'll sew. I got pillow problems. What fabric to you like better for our living room? Have you see the Courtyard Oyster for less elsewhere?

Edit: Please Note I brought my fabric from Etsy Seller RedFinchLane

Drawing Kitchen Ideas

Lately I've been drawing ideas for our home, including furniture layouts, bathroom cabinets ideas and more. Last night I drew a portion of kitchen / dining room area, so I could see a visual of how our view would look from the living room looking into our dining room / kitchen area. I love that since we widened the doorway between the areas, our home will feel much more open. Here's my recent drawing of how I'm picturing a portion of our dining room and kitchen from the living room. 

As I mentioned last week, I'm considering doing a gallery of family pictures for our dining room. I had a fun drawing a mixture of frame sizes for our wall. 

 I always felt that our old door that led to garage was always 'visually heavy' for our small space, so we decided to make a change to the door. Since our new door is now leading to our laundry room instead of the garage we like the idea of doing a frosted glass door with window panes that will let light into both spaces. We think the glass door like the one I drew will look so pretty in our dining / kitchen. I can't wait to have a pair of upper glass cabinets, like we've always planned, for these doors e want to go with solid glass doors. I can't wait to see the transformation of our kitchen in the next couple of months, here's a reminder of how our space currently looks. So happy to have windows in our home again!  

I plan on sharing more of the drawings I've been working on for our home very soon. 

Do you like doing sketches of your home to help you visualize a space better?

Pin of the Week

Lately I've been lovely the details in small spaces, like entryways and hallways. This entryway gives me so many fun ideas for our own home.

image Via Pinterest

Our Home Rebuild: New Windows

Friday is quickly becoming one of my favorite days of the week, partly because its the kick off to the weekend and I also get to share and keep a record of our of home re-building progress. My goal is to share our weekly updates both big and small as we rebuild our home do to a fire in July 2012, read more about it here. I've learned that sharing the progress, is helping me heal and get excited about moving back into our home in a few months. This week, our house has received all new windows! I can't express how much it means to mean to see our home no longer boarded up except for one window, that was hanging on by a thread. Here's a few pictures of our new view! 

Avery's new twin windows, replaced the sliding glass doors. All the 'white paint' you see on the inside is actually smoke sealant. I can already picture him playing in his room & looking outside his windows, it makes my heart happy.  

His windows from the outside.

Our new dining room window! I love all the natural light shining though. It's so easy to picture banquette seating in front of our window, read more about my dining room plans here.

New kitchen window! 

We decided to put grids on all out windows, and I'm so happy with our decision. I love the extra character they add to our little rancher. Looks like our move home date has been pushed back to Mid-April beginning on May, which gives me a little more time to pick out paint colors, lol :)

Lighting Ideas: Dining Room

1. Overstock 2. Lighting Universe 3. Lighting Universe 4. Ballard Designs 5. Lighting universe 

Yesterday, I shared our ideas for our dining room, we are thinking about adding banquette seating along with a gallery wall read more about the plans here. Our dining room once had a simple white drum Shade from CB2 which I loved, but I'm ready for either a slight change in pendant drum style or a huge change. Now that our dining room / kitchen and living room are more open to each other, since we widen the doorway I want to make sure whatever lighting we choose in our living room (see ideas here) will also flow nicely with our dining room lighting. They don't have to match but since our space isn't large, I'm all about visual flow room to room. I like the idea or round pendants since our dining room table will be round, but also think #4 would be a good option and really stand out. I also like the sparkle of # 1 and  # 5 for our small dining room, while # 2 and # 3 are both pretty and not too plain. 

In addition to looking online for lighting ideas, Hasani and I spent sometime over the weekend looking at local lighting stores are were able to see # 3 in person, its really lovely. 

This huge schoolhouse pendant was amazing and huge!! 

Out of the above styles which to you prefer?

Our Home: Dining Room Ideas

Hi Everyone! I've had a few much need days off from work that allowed me lots of mommy time with my kiddos and husband! In addition to family time; we looked at kitchen cabinets with a local cabinet maker, checked out counter-top ideas, looked at lighting ideas (post coming Wednesday!) purchased some fabric and start pulling together ideas for our dining room. Whew, trust me its been a busy few days and I know it will get busy the closer we are to our move home date, but all so worth it! Recently I've started referring to my personal design style as California Modern Casual think: relaxed, clean lines, natural elements with layers of pattern. Like most 1950's California Ranchers our home foot print is on the small side, but my plan is to embrace it! Hopefully this should be easier now that we widened the doorway between our living room / dining & kitchen area creating a more open floor plan, read about our changes floor plan changes  here. 

My goal is to create a dining room that's relaxed and fussy free, but still pretty enough for a chic intimate dinner party with friends. I always have fun creating idea boards as a starting off point of a room design. For me it helps to get an overall feel our how a room will look and allows me to picture my family in the space, I like spaces most that are functional and pretty. Here's the ideas  I'm currently considering for our dining room. 

1. I really liked how back tab drapes I sewed looked in the dining room before, my plan is to sew another pair using a floral print fabric that will also be in our living room as pillows. Since the spaces are open to each other I think it will be a nice compliment to both spaces without feeling too matchy-matchy since we are using a geometric print for the living room drapes. I love this simple black drapery rod from Target, and its a good price! Most likely one of the bird pillows I purchased for the living room will wind up in the dining room, after its been Scotch Guarded it! I either want to do a large print from Etsy seller Anek in the dining room, we both love her Basil print. Or I like the idea of a small gallery wall. This simple gallery wall is so pretty, it makes you want to stop and stare at each picture on the wall. If we go this route, I want our wall to tell the story of our family with mixture of more formal pictures, casual ones and pictures of places we've traveled too. 

(via Pinterest)

2. Seating: We've been thinking a lot about the space our dining room and what would work best now for our family of four. Before we had four parson style chairs, which I loved in the space however their individual width began too feel bulky. I mentioned a while back, I'd love to add a banquette seating in our dining room. Since our dining room is an eat in kitchen style, and more along the size of a nook for lack of a better word a banquette in the place of two traditional dining chairs would work amazing in our petite space. I've adored this banquette seating by designer Sarah Richardson did on the TV show 'Sarah's House' a few years back, and I'm excited to incorporate this seating style in our house. 

(via Sarah's House)

We love the look, color and size of this World Market Banquette, I'm hoping to buy it when it goes on sale. I love the size of it, its huge piece for our dining room! It's a whopping 67 inches in length that's over 5 1/2 feet! If we get the banquette, I'll be using lots and lots of Scotch Guard on it! We also like these simple and affordable chairs from Crate & Barrel, I like the combination of solid wood chairs pair with an upholstered piece in a dining room. Here I am over the weekend in our dining room measuring for the banquette  I was concerned it might be too larger for the space, but after doing some measuring in our dining room we are pretty confidant it could work. Yup, I'm standing on the actual sub floor of our home, they don' make them like this anymore its all super thick tongue and groove sub floor. My dad tells me its shows the quality and time they took on building our home over 50 years ago, since he's a contractor and my dad I value his opinion:) Gotta love Dads. 

3. I love dark wood dining room tables! For me they are timeless, although if we can along dining room table in need of TLC, I wouldn't be opposed to painting it high gloss white.  I love the lines of this Pottery Barn dining room table, however I'll be in the hunt for a more budget friendly piece either from Craigslist, a consignment store or thrifted, Wish me luck on my search :) I haven't mentioned any storage in our space, before we have a small buffet that held so much extra stuff such as, dishes, candles, silverware and picture frames. If have the room, I'm thinking maybe we'll use a small side table next to the banquette, like what Sarah did. 

These are my ideas so far, I'm looking forward to creating a dining room for my family that feels like us! Can't wait to see it all come together over time. 

What do you think of banquette seating in a dining room?

Pin of the Week

The Pinterest Pin of Week is officially back and along with my blog re-design the Pin of the Week has also gotten a makeover! Read more about about the blog re-design of CLH here. I love a good hallway that tells a story of the family that lives there. I'm looking forward to creating a lovely hallway where our friends and family will want to linger and look at whats on our hallway walls. I adore the hallway below its full of STYLE. 

picture via Pinterest

I hope everyone has a wonderful weekend! You can follow me here on Pinterest. Happy Pinning.

How is your hallway styled? Any plans to re-vamp the space? 

Our Home: Building Progress

As a reminder every Friday I'll be sharing updates of our home rebuilding progress, in case your a new reader to Chic Little House our home is being rebuilt due to a fire in July 2013. I love seeing progress at our home, everyday its a reminder we are closer to moving back home which is a good feeling! But, I still consider the 'building phase' the boring part, lol. I'm so looking forward to the design phase where we seeing our ideas coming together & becoming a reality. I'm really in love with how our bedroom addition of a master closet, bathroom and french doors is coming along, read more about our floor plan changes here. 

 Here's our new view in our bedroom in the middle opening their will be french doors, on the left side is our walk-in closet on the right our new bathroom. 

In last weeks home progress post, I mentioned how I was having a creative block with our bedroom and was hoping that would change once I was able to walk in the space. I'm happy to say my creative block is clearing, and I'm starting to work out some ideas for our bedroom. I can't wait to find the perfect fabric for our drapes for the french doors and our bedroom window. 

Here's our new view standing in the backyard looking into our master bedroom where our new french doors will go. I'm hoping our bedroom will get lots of natural light. Read more about my french door inspirations here. 

More progress is happening in our main bathroom, we placed the tiny old bathroom window with a wider window that will let more natural light in. 

Hey Girl

I was reading a new to me blog the other day Decor & the Dog, and decided to participate in the 'Hey Girl' link party - I thought this idea was seriously funny! This is my first time doing a linky party :) Here's my 'Hey Girl' love it and Hasani thought it was crazy funny :) 

Also, you may have noticed my blog has been redesigned  check out my post from this morning with all the facts on the new blog design, read about it here. 

Have a Look Around

You may have noticed the blog has recently gone under a re-design, and I'm thrilled with it's new look! My new blog re-design feels so me! I love that its fun, modern, clean design with plenty of visual interest with colors I already adore. I'm so thankful my blog re-design now reflects my blog Chic Little House, and how I'm feeling when I look at my new blog design and style I can't help but smile. My much needed blog re-design was designed by the lovely Latoya, blogger of A Peaceful Crib & designer of Latoya Monique Designs. I've always adored Latoya's own blog designs so it was a natural that reached out her to re-design Chic Little House. I love that this blog re-design was a collaborative experience, between her and I. Latoya was patient in answering all my questions and most importantly saw the vision & style I wanted for my blog.
If your considering a new blog design for your own blog or invitations please stop by
Latoya Monique Designs. 

I invite you have a look around, we've made some changes to Chic Little House. On the side bar you'll notice social icon links to the social media I'm on: Twitter, Pinterest, Instragram and a email link. Also on the side bar is a link to our DIY Projects, Recipes and Our Home. My goal is to make Chic Little House more user friendly, so its easier to find our DIY projects, How To's and much more. Recently I've fallen in love with baking yummy treats for my family on the new recipe page you'll find links to all my recent baking adventures. 

The DIY Projects page has also gone under a makeover, projects we've completed around or house is now broken up into categories making them much easier to find: Painting Projects, Outdoor Projects, Sewing Projects and How To I'm in the process of linking every project listed on the DIY Project Page. 

In the next couple of weeks I'll be adding to additional pages to the tool bar, one will be about our home re-building project and the other will be focused on ideas. For instance I just started a new lighting ideas series on the blog in an effort to help narrow down our lighting ideas for our home. One the new ideas page is 'live' it will easier to reference back to various ideas and mood boards I've created. 

I hope you like the new look of Chic Little House! Thanks again Latoya, it was great working with on my blog re-design. 

Lighting Ideas: Living Room

We have a lot of light fixtures to buy for our house inside and out, which is exciting and scary because I'm used to doing it one room at a time. Which met I could hunt for the perfect light fixture I felt was right for our space and not worry about a timeline. Just like a pillows can help transform a ho-hum sofa into a showstopper that's how I feel about lighting, it can quickly improve the look of the room. It did just that in our dining room

So in an effort to just cave in and stick up boob lights all over our house and you know I loathe those (now I get why they are so popular with contractors, lol). I decided to start a little lighting series that will help us narrow down the lighting choices for our home. I've already shared the gorgeous peacock blue gourd lamps I picked up for a steal at a local consignment store, read about them here that we plan on using in our living room. Now I'm on the look out for an amazing overhead lighting for our living room. We plan on doing recessed lighting, and also a main light source in our living room to create a balance of overhead lighting. Here's the lighting we are considering for our main light source. 

 1. Lighting Universe 2. Lighting Universe 3. Lamps Plus 4. Lamps Plus 5. Overstock

All the lighting we are considering for our living room, will be close to the ceiling. I love the look of each variation of the drum shade style. I like how some of the lighting we are considering is simple, like 1 & 3.  While I like simple  I'm digging the look the suitable look of glam in 2, 4 & 5. The pretty crystal finial in fixture 2 has me swooning, and I love the chrome finial in 4. While looking for lighting, I also came across this beauty its way out of our lighting budget for the living room but its amazing! It's Tiffany Glass stained, not something I'd normally fall for, but for some reason I can so picture it in our living room, I'm hoping it goes on a super clearance in the next few months. A girl can dream right?

via wayfair.com 

Out of the above styles which ones do you prefer? What type of lighting do you have in your home?

One Year Later, Still Cable Free

It's been a year since we said our good byes to our local cable provider and decided to only watch TV using our Roku device. By going cable free for the past year, my family has gladly saved $480 bucks. There also was a short period of time we were both cable and Internet free (due to the fire, if your new to my blog we had a house fire and temporary living in an apartment while our home is being re-built). Now being cable free was the easy part, not being able to access the Internet HARD, like super HARD. Yeah we have smart phones, but I can only do so much online looking around on my phone before I get bored, more on that in a few. I was so excited about our decision to cut the cable cord and save money, I even blogged about it!  Read my post for last year here. For some people it's a hard decision to give up cable altogether, what made it so easy for us besides the savings is still being able to enjoy watching all our favorite shows & movies on Netflix, Hulu and Amazon.com and sometimes Crackle. 

So I thought I'd write a new blog post and share how our current setup is going and the tweaks we've made the past year to our setup. As said mentioned, we were Internet free for a several months and also TV free. Our old setup at our house we were able to get 20 channels for free, such a good thing, just by doing a scan on our TV and hooked our TV directly to the cable outlet.  However we moved to our temporary apartment, it has Fiber Optics verses our house which has DSL meaning even though we'd do a scan looking for free channels none would appear the only option is paying for cable or Internet. We initially thought we'd be in a temporary place for a few months, so we held off on getting Internet and just made do. When reality set in, we decided to go with Comcast for Internet service while we live here than switch back to AT&T since Comcast is more cost effective at the apartment. 

Current Set Up

We are paying $37 bucks a month for Comcast, the Fiber Optics is more per month than DSL, so that sucks, but its the best price we could find for Fiber Optics. Anyways we now have two Roku players and are very happy! In our living room we have a Roku 2 XS which is a second generation Roku, we love it. The new Roku player is tiny, and works so great we can also play Angry Birds on it, and trust me you haven't lived until you've played Angry Birds on a big TV, lol. 

A few months after buying our new Roku, we decided our family need another Roku player, for our bedroom we purchased the Roku HD. Our remote for the Roku HD is actually a little different than in the picture below, there's dedicated buttons for Netflix, Pandora and Crackle, which is so cool. 

What We Pay For 

We subscribe to six channels: Netflix, Amazon, Crackle, Hulu Plus, Pandora and Flixster but still only pay a small monthly fee for two channels. We pay for Netflix and Hulu Plus, which are both only $7.99 per month. We did a trial period with Amazon Prime, since I love shopping on Amazon we gave it a try. In my opinion there wasn't enough options for movies and TV shows, or maybe it was such hard to find programs I wanted to watch. That's one thing I like about Netflix, its very intuitive and recommends movies and TV shows based on recent watches. For instance Netflix, 'knows' I love period pieces and British TV shows, thanks to Netflix I have discovered so many amazing TV shows and movies. In the future, we might give Amazon another try, we still rent movies from them. If you follow me on Instagam, then you already know we had a Die Hard-a-thon over the weekend and rented those movies online via Amazon. 

What TV Shows We Watch

As I said, we discovered so many great TV Shows thanks to Netflix & Hulu. Here are a few shows Hasani and I enjoy watching together: Breaking Bad, The Killing, The Walking Dead sadly all three of those shows are on AMC, and they don't release their shows to Netflix so were always a season or two behind what's happening, which is cool gives us time to do marathons something we love. We also love Shark Tank! Such a good show. Solo, I like to watch Downton Abbey so glad other people are discovering this amazing show! I watch Downton directly on the PBS website. I also enjoy watching Doc Martin (one of my favorite shows) George Gently, Revenge, and Scandal. Our tween is also able to watch his favorite TV shows, so he's also a happy camper. Can't forget the little guy, Avery is able 'watch' Sesame Street and Yo Gabba Gabba, his shows are on for background noise. 

My Must See TV

Even though I'm very happy to be cable free, I do miss watching shows like Real Housewives of Beverly Hills / Atlanta and the crazy Jersey ladies. So I'm always happy when Hulu Plus shares a few episodes online. In addition to watching cable, I love listening to Pandora on the Roku player and creating my own channels, especially since MTV has played music sine the 90's 

Now your turn how are you currently watching TV? Have you cut the cable cord and loving it? If so, how much did you save each year going without cable? Or could you never give up cable and why? Ever heard of a Roku player? 

Last year, I asked everyone a bonus question. This years bonus Questions what TV show are you obsessed with and why should other people get hooked on it? 

Our Home: Some Walls Go Up

It's been a busy two weeks around my house, and I owe you all and update on the progress of our house re-build. My goal is to share to weekly updates of our house progress every Friday. In case your a new reader to my blog, we lost the majority of our belongings and house due to a fire in July 2012 you can read more about the fire here. We are now in the re-building stage and very grateful for each day. 

We now have a garage! Since the was needed to be completely torn we decided to push it forward five feet to accommodate a small indoor laundry room / mud room and also widened the garage door opening. The garage door was once a measly 8 ft wide, which is really scary trying to park in side, it will now be 10 ft wide. Making it much easier to park my SUV inside the garage. 

Here's a closer look at our new laundry room space, our water heater will be placed outside the laundry room, which will help maximize space. 

The frame up of the laundry room / mudroom us coming together, I'll share my plans for this new space next week. 

Here's a view of our master bedroom addition. We are adding a bathroom, walk-in closet and french doors on to our room transforming our smallish bedroom into a true retreat. The opening in the middle of the space is where our french doors will be. Read more about the floor plan changes here. I've been having a creative block with our bedroom ideas for a while, but I think once I can walk in the space and it feels more real and apart of our home, then the ideas will come flooding in and I can share. 

Our new space is now enclosed in plywood, which will go on the outside our home and eventually be covered with new siding. I'll share what we selected for new siding soon.  

That's all the updates for this week, lots of progress will be happening this month and then we'll be in the home stretch mid March / beginning of April. Please let me know if you have any questions. 

Our Home: Door Shopping

We recently went door shopping for exterior and interior doors for our home. We had lots of fun looking around at various door styles, there are so many door styles. For our home we were most drawn to front doors that let natural light in, have clean simple lines that fit well with the style of our 1950's rancher. I really liked that our old front door, had a glass middle panel that let lots of natural light in our home. For for door shopping trip we visited two local lumbar stores Meeks Lumbar and Homewood Lumbar. Both stores have door shops and were really helpful, we bought in a copy of our house plans to get an accurate door count & find the doors that would best work for our home. Below is a door from Homewood Lumber, but the glass design isn't exactly our style. 

Out of all the exterior doors we looked at, we are most drawn to the Craftsaman style doors from Jeld-Wen, the style is a good fit for our little rancher. For our interior doors we looked at four panel doors and craftsman three panel doors.

While there, I also glanced at french door glass options for our master bedroom addition. I love full glass panel french doors such a clean modern look. However french doors with glass panes are so classic and make me swoon.

We narrowed our exterior and interior doors down and will be making our selections this week. Looking forward to seeing how our new doors will look in our house. On Friday I'll be sharing two weeks worth of house construction updates, there's lots of progress happening at our home. 

What exterior and interior door styles do you like?