Calendars, Memos, Message Boards, and Pianos!

After months of searching, I finally found and purchased my dream white baby grand piano! I am so excited! It plays beautifully and fits right in with my living room decor ; ) It was a long and tedious search (it's hard to find a new white piano; they are pretty rare) but it well was worth all the driving, patience, and time that it required!
The pictures aren't the best quality because the sun was gleaming through the window which ruined my camera lighting!

I also found these darling calendar/memo board ideas I wanted to share:


Isn't this kind of cool? It's a life size calendar constructed with ribbon!
I fell in love with these sea foam shutters framing the memo board!

Simple, fresh, colorful.

Perfect symmetry. Life sized. Love it!

Inspiration

Wow how the time flies in between blogs! It has been so hectic and nutty around here! I know, I know.. I'm not the only one with a lot going on so it's no excuse! But, this morning, things slowed down a bit and I had time to get on my beloved Mac and do some blog hopping and create a blog post myself!
I was driving home from a soccer game last Saturday and saw this little fella just sitting on someone's driveway garage sale at 10:30. I thought to myself, "what in the world is a chair like that still sitting at a garage sale at 10:30"!! So of course I pulled over and got myself an amazing deal on an amazing antique chair! I am so excited to recover this beaut! As you can tell, it's in storage along with all our other belongings (as we wait for our home to close on October 3rd!) so, until then Mr. Chair!

Aren't these curtains beautiful? The whole bathroom is amazing, but the curtains just totally stuck out to me!

I love the simple elegance of this room. The mirrors on the wall are perfectly hung (sometimes when people try this technique it can look a bit cluttery). This room has nice clean lines but still allows for a "home-y, lived-in feeling".

I absolutely love this room. I am a huge fan of color because I feel it makes a home "a home". I love the combination of yellows with the mint oversized chair. Beautifully done!

Isn't this a fabulous glass bottle collection? The mirror behind the bottles was a brilliant choice! Love it!

I have finally started putting my "idea notebook" together which consists of hundreds (maybe thousands?) of magazine clippings and printouts of pictures from the wonderful blogs I visit who provide such beautiful pictures! Thank you all for the inspiration! There are SO many ways to go when decorating a home, it's hard to narrow it down! But that is the beauty of design; you can change and rearrange any time you like!

Finally Back in Town!

Wow! I feel like I have been all over the place this summer! I am so excited to be able to be back home (well, my temporary home while I wait for my REAL home to close escrow!) and excited to catch up on everyone's blogs! I haven't been able to blog for a while now!

First things first... I started off with this whole out of town deal with a little trip with my husband to Santa Barbara to stay with his parents. Little did we know it would turn into a whole shopping extravaganza! We pulled in Friday night and my husband says, "you better get on Craigslist and get some garage sale addresses together. I don't know if there are going to be a lot of garage sales in Santa Barbara, but we should give it a shot.." Because we were in Santa Barbara, I definitely didn't have high expectations because it is such a ritzy little city, so we assumed that most people just give away their unwanted items to Salvation Army. We sure did misjudge! I had never been to better garage sales in my life! There were SO many garage sales and people were selling GREAT items and at really good prices. Too bad Santa Barbara is 3.5 hours from where we just moved to! SORRY I didn't take any pictures! Everything is being stored at their home in SB but I will definitely take pictures when it gets moved down to our place.

After coming home and hanging around the house, I (of course) decided to check out the city's Craigslist. There wasn't a ton listed, but everything that was listed were some fabulous craigslist finds! So frantically I emailed all the listings I was interested in (I hate it when they don't put phone numbers in their ads!) and patiently waited for a response. The three things I was most interested in were 1) A Rachel Ashwell Settee (If you have followed my blog, you know how LONG I have been wanting a long sofa settee!) 2) A matching set of 2 antique chairs and a small 2 seater settee 3) A Rachel Ashwell big comfy sofa (perfect for our loft!) SO to make a very long and stressful story short, it was the same woman selling all three of these items and she emailed back the next morning saying she had SO many responses to these items that she was going to take bids and the highest bidder would win. You KNOW she was loving this! I've never had craigslist turn into a live auction before! So, we went over to the home to take a closer look at the items and of course fell even more in love. I know I promised to make the long story short, so I will just tell you now that I "won" all three of the items thanks to the woman who happened to take a liking to us!

I didn't take any pictures of the items I bought, but I found the same settee in a magazine:


And here are the pics from the actual craigslist listing for the chair/settee set.. they are really BAD quality but you can at least get an idea:
The comfy couch we purchased had never been used (I guess she kept it in some random room) which is a big bonus because I'm not a huge fan of "used couch" buying. The couch is the one pictured at the top of the blog. It's not the actual picture but it's pretty much the same couch.

SO that was our Santa Barbara weekend in a nutshell! I can't wait to move it all in! Next on the list? A baby grand piano!