Living Room Winter Makeover

I'm so excited to finally share our living room makeover! I mentioned previously that we were doing a small refresh to our living room, with a new couch and rug, and I'm finally finished!

I wanted to go with a relaxing vibe, with soft neutrals and blues. For winter, I also incorporated texture, instead of a lot of color. I wanted the room to feel comfortable and calming. Here is our living room now!

I love the way it turned out! This rug was one of my picks from this post, and I couldn't be happier with it! It's the perfect combination of blues, grays, and creams. It's really soft, too! It's not a super high pile, so it's not too plush, but it's so soft under our feet. 

As for our Ikea sofa, we still love it! I talked about my first impressions of it here. We still love the look and feel of it. It's perfect for our living room. 

For the wall behind the couch, I had a few things in mind, but I'm so happy I went with this layered gallery wall. It was easy and relatively inexpensive. Three of the photos are ones we took in California when we lived there, and then in Savannah when we went there on vacation. I love that the photos mean something to us. The middle picture was a DIY I did and I love the way it turned out. It was also really easy and inexpensive. 

I'm so happy with the way this room turned out. I love light and bright spaces, and this is definitely that. I'm looking forward to adding pops of color in the coming seasons. 

I hope you enjoyed seeing our living room makeover! If you have any questions about anything in the pictures let me know! I'd be happy to answer any!

Thanks for reading!

Shiplap Tutorial

I am so excited to write this post because it's about SHIPLAP! I love shiplap and was so excited when we decided to put some in our half bath remodel. I told you when I shared our after photos that I would do a tutorial so here it is! We are not experts and this was our first time doing it but I wanted to share with you all how we did it and show you that you can do it too! Enjoy!

First off you want to measure the wall that you will be installing the shiplap on. You want to measure the height and width. Once you have those measurements it's time to head to the store. We used a plywood that was 5 mm thick but you could really use whatever. We wanted our boards to be cut into 6 in. wide strips so that each plank was 6 in. They will cut it for you at Home Depot, which is a huge help. We also had them cut the board down to about 4 ft. long. So we left with boards measuring 6 in x 4 ft. 

Once we got home we cut those stips down even more to the correct length, I believe ours were about 3 feet long. Once you have the strips cut down to the correct size, it's time to sand. 

You want to sand down the edges to make them as smooth as possible. 

Next it's time to nail them up!

We didn't have a nail gun to use so we did it the old fashion way. By hand. We tried using spacers to make the space in between the boards even, but they kept falling out. I've seen where some people use quarters as spacers, whatever works for you. We were able to kind of eye ball the spaces to make them even. 

I started off doing some and I had big ambitions. I thought, I can nail a few boards to the wall. Easy. 

Not easy. It's hard nailing them each by hand. My first tip would be to get a nail gun. It would go a lot quicker and you will be a lot less frustrated. 

So after I nailed a few in, I handed the hammer over to John. 

When you are nailing the boards to the wall you want to be nailing into the studs. You can use a stud finder or just knock on the wall to find them. Nailing them into the studs will make the boards more secure to the wall. 

We were doing our wall in the half bath that had the light fixture and plumbing so we needed to cut holes out for those. 

Once everything is nailed up, it's time to fill in the nail holes. We used a wood filler from Home Depot and it was easy and dried quickly. Once that's dry you want to sand that down so that it's smooth. 

After sanding it's time to paint! We painted ours white. I believe the color was Extra White by Sherwin Williams. 

The final steps would then be to add your baseboards and the quarter round in the corners and you are done! 

Here is the final product! I am so happy with the way it turned out! It was a lot of work, and we did a small wall, but it was worth it. I am now thinking of other places we can install some shiplap in our home! :) 

I hope this tutorial was helpful and not too confusing. Like I said before, this was our first time doing it and we are not experts. I just wanted to share with you all how we did it and give you a little step by step if you are interested in installing some shiplap of your own!

Thanks for reading! 

Kitchen Reveal

I'm finally writing this post! I'm so excited to share our kitchen reveal with you! We still have a few things we want to do, but it is a huge difference from where it was! We didn't do anything structural, it was just cosmetic. We lucked out with our kitchen having pretty decent cabinets, just not our color choice, and nice black granite counters. So we got to keep those two things and just paint and change out hardware! 

Ok, here are the before pictures. 

So this was our kitchen before we updated it. The only thing we had changed was the wall color. It was red on the wall by the stove and a beige color on the other wall by the fridge. We painted the whole downstairs the same color, Silver Strand by Sherwin Williams. I love this color.

Here is our kitchen now, after paint and new hardware. 

The cabinet color is Extra White by Sherwin Williams and the hardware was from Amazon. We had such a hard time finding these cabinet handles. I searched everywhere and finally found them on Amazon. The drawer pulls were also from Amazon. 

So with a few coats of paint and a lot of hard work, we transformed our kitchen to a light and bright cooking space. 

There are still a few things we want to do, such as install a backsplash. I want to do a subway tile backsplash with darker grout. We also want to either replace the pantry doors or paint them and we will be adding white trim when we install new floors. Eventually we want to replace the appliances with stainless steel and maybe get a new sink faucet. I would love to get a new ceiling light as well. The one we currently have doesn't give off the best light and it's a bit outdated. 

As you can see, some white paint can go a long way when updating your kitchen. Since we didn't replace the cabinets or counters, this was a reasonably inexpensive project. It was a lot of work, but it was so worth it!

Here is a list of sources for our kitchen:

Cabinet door handles

Drawer pulls

Kitchen rug- Target 

Olive oil dispenser- World Market (Can no longer find online)

Wooden crate- TJ Maxx

"You Wash I'll Dry" Sign- Hobby Lobby

Cookbook holder- Hobby Lobby

Ceramic Cow- Kohls

I hope you enjoyed seeing this before and after of our kitchen! If you have any other questions that I may not have answered feel free to comment below or come find me on instagram @stylenestinteriors and we can chat there :)

Thanks for reading! 

Bathroom Reveal

I am so excited to write this post! We have finished our half bath remodel and it looks like a whole new bathroom. I am so happy with the way it turned out. My husband is amazing for going along with all my design ideas and implementing them perfectly. He worked so hard on this room and I love it! 

Here is what our bathroom looked like before. 

The bathroom was livable. It had a working toilet and sink and was clean. But as far as style was concerned, it was far from mine. I had visions of clean, light, simple, and a touch of farmhouse charm. 

We went back and forth on replacing the vanity or not, and ultimately decided it needed to go. New floors, paint, vanity, and a new toilet were all on our list for this bathroom project. I knew what I wanted and we got to work! By we I really do mean John. I helped some with the shiplap and trim, but other than that it was really a one person job. The room is so small only one person could be in there working comfortably at a time. 

This is our half bath now. 

I am so happy with the way it turned out! It is exactly how I envisioned it. I got my shiplap (happy dance) and it looks great!

It took me awhile to pick out the paint color and I love what we chose. We used Sherwin Williams Fleur De Sel. It's a perfect light grey that makes the room feel larger than it is. 

We are going to replace our outlets and light switches so that they are white. We also have a new light fixture coming, it was delayed by about 3 months, and that will be the final touch. 

I will link all of our items at the bottom of this post. 

I will do another post going through the whole process, more of a step by step. I will also be doing a shiplap tutorial. This was our first time installing shiplap so we are no experts, but I will share how we did ours for anyone who is interested. 

We had so much fun designing and doing this project ourselves. I'm excited to start our next project!

Thanks for reading!

Vanity- Wayfair

Faucet- Home Depot

Towel Ring- Home Depot

Toilet Paper Holder- Home Depot

Mirror- Hobby Lobby

Tile- Home Depot

Toilet- Home Depot

Trash Can- Target

Toilet Paper Basket- Target Dollar Spot

Vases- TJ Maxx and World Market

Hand Towel- Marshalls

Paint- Sherwin Williams