Sweet dreams are made with this

Last weekend Mike and I found ourselves wandering around Star Furniture looking for a sleeper loveseat small enough for his basement office yet big enough for a full size bed. That's not an easy find. What we did find was a cloud, I mean, a mattress. I have been begging Mike for years to get a new mattress. All it took was getting him to lay on the perfect one and he was sold. Star Furniture's deal helped out his decision, too.

(warning: The following the pictures are of horrible quality. Poor Mike had to use his cell phone because I'm stupid and didn't leave the camera for him or batteries for his camera. I'm sorry.)

So here's our old, flat, pancake of a purple mattress. Mike purchased it in 2002 when he rented his very first adult apartment. He's always been attached to that thing ... who knew he was so sentimental. He loves to tell the story of how the guy in the shop in Westover recognized the young sports journalist and gave him a discount on his mattress set for his celebrity. I, on the other hand, have always hated it. Recently, I have loathed it. So have my ribs and my hips and my lower back.

Look how flat that thing was!!! And it is sitting on risers to make it taller/give Lilo space to hide under the bed.

Now, feast your eyes on this beast, I mean this Restonic memory foam beauty.

Lilo approves of this height (with risers) because she can sneak under the bed.

Unfortunately for Lilo, using the risers just won't work. Look at this! We would need a ladder to get in and out of bed and The Original Grabber to put a glass of water on the nightstand.


So Mike removed the risers and made the bed. Our new mattress fits better now and Lilo is quite miffed because she can no longer crawl under the bed.

Stairway to painted paneling heaven

This post lacks a lot of before pictures. I thought I took them. But I guess I hated our paneled stairway so much I avoided pointing the camera toward it. The following is all Ican find. It shows when we painted the paneling in the upstairs hall and TV room (long time ago!). You can see a glimpse of the stairwell.

None of this matters, though, because look at it now!

The first picture shows the same angle as the before shot, just from farther back inside the TV room. You'll notice the two recently hung prints on the wall, too. These are two more of my Find Harri prints discussed in the basement hallway/room reveal. The smaller print seen in the other two pictures is an original piece by Annie Morris Simco. Yup, I have a print of one of her pieces, Almost Heaven, hanging in our living room. I have grand plans for including more of her work in our stairwell -- those are some big walls to fill! But I have to save my pennies for more originals like her Wildflowers piece.

As for painting ... this was a beast. I started it way back during basketball season while Mike was away. I finished it April 20. But it's not even finished. There are some corners and trim that still need some love, I'm just having a hard time reaching them. This took two coats of Killz primer (we had it) and two coats of paint in Lyrical Yellow. We didn't have enough of that, so I ended up buying another gallon. We have half a gallon left, so who knows what I'll paint next.

For when the feather boas are in use

I mentioned an art project in the works for the antique glass knobs now hanging out in our hallway. Although I have yet to create the three monogram-themed prints I've talked about doing, I did come up with a temporary solution. So the three white frames and white ribbon I've had since the week after we moved in are finally being put to use! But, like I said, it's temporary because I'm not 100% in love with what we have.

We have three pretty monograms showing some love for Mike, me and our last name. I'll admit I yanked these from a Web site I won't mention here. It doesn't matter because I won't be keeping them up long, right? The C is slightly bigger than the other two, but I don't think the difference is dramatic enough.

In closing, I hope you don't love these too much because I sure don't!

So, I needed a place to hang my feather boas ...

One of the Bungalow's 2011 resolutions was to finally get glass knobs up in the downstairs hallway. This is probably the first project we discussed when we moved in, but just never got around to doing it. My mom and dad gave some antique glass knobs to me for my birthday (sssh, way back in January). I needed my handyman around to help me, though, and basketball season got in the way. So Mike drilled in holes and we twisted in the knobs. Pretty easy, actually. The two smaller knobs came from Anthropologie and my March Madness trek to NYC.

The first one!

Finished!

So then I had to hang my boas and see how they looked.

That's OK, but not quite what our hallway needs. For now, the new (old) knobs are sporting festive Easter eggs. I have an art project planned for them for the future.

Here comes Peep-er Cottontail

Easter is just a week away and I was inspired for an easy project. It took about 2 minutes and cost under $3.

Check out the jars on the windowsill in the kitchen. Usually they sport green and yellow pears that go well with our Fiestaware.

After deciding they need "Easter-fied," here's what I came up with:

Here's the kitchen windowsill after these bunnies and chicks hopped into the jars:

Festive, right?

Not So Shabby

My friend Jamie and I spent the weekend in the Lehigh Valley of Pennsylvania visiting our other friend, Ashley. We trekked over to a town called Jim Thorpe, PA (yes, named after that Jim Thorpe). This town is full of charm and character ... and Saturday it was full of charming characters:

I purchased a few trinkets along the way and, of course, the Bungalow got a gift. I found this treasure in a store on Broadway St. called Shabby Foo Foo.

Shabby Foo Foo is a pink, lace-explosion of a store. And the best part of it was the nice older lady working there belting out Neil Diamond tunes along with her CD that was playing for us all to hear. She didn't understand why Jamie was wearing flipflops. We explained the first sign of Spring -- it was 58 degrees and sunny -- was reason enough.

After glancing in the store's window I had to go in to see what it would have for our guest room. It seemed like it would definitely have something our pink frilly room needed. Ta-da! The before and after: