Hi everyone! Happy Wednesday.. we made it to the middle of the week! So, Im sure most of you have a very similar experience to me, where your home’s family room is where you spend most of your time at home. In our current home, our family room is attached to the kitchen which makes that living space, truly the heart of our home. This is where you will find me writing this blog post with my morning mug of tea, where my daughters 500 toys are spewn all over the carpet and I have just stopped picking them up at nap time.. because who are we kidding? This is where, we spend majority of our time given that meal prep, cooking, eating, watching tv, playing games and so on all happens here! This space is not perfect, but its comfortable and its baby friendly to say the least now that our little one has decided that she can stand up by pulling herself on any and every thing.
In this room, we had a sectional sofa, which was not working. Since buying new couches is out of the budget for now, we split up the sectional so it can fit on either sides of the room and removed the hooks that usually connect the sofa. The big black box i.e. the TV stays above the mantel, given the configuration of the room.. if it was up to me, there would be no TV on this floor of the house! We barely turn it on and it doesn’t let me go wild with decorating the mantel. Alas, until we finish the basement, the TV will stay here.
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I made this winter garland for the mantel using ikea curtains that we were not using from our last move, but you could easily make it from fabric you purchase. My goal in decorating seasonally is to be as frugal as possible and first shop the house! Once the holiday season was over, the garlands I had on my dining table (you can see them here ) came onto the mantel. I purchased the snowflake candle holders from Home Sense. To continue the snowy theme, I added snow flake shaped chalk boards from the dollar store to the garland. The buffalo check fabric is actually from an old shirt dress that I was donating.. so I literally just cut it up and used it here to add some contrast.
The other half of the sectional sofa sits on the other wall to the right. The mosaic above the couch is a hand made work of art by my sister, who gave it to us as a wedding present. She individually cut pieces of glass and created that design which reads ” Bismillah ir Rahman ar Raheem” which translates to “In the name of God, the Most Gracious, the Most Merciful”.
Then, if you turn yourself around, you are in the kitchen/eat in space where the most action happens. The exit to our yard is here too, so we get tons of natural light in this room.
I try to keep our kitchen table simple because we eat here all the time, and now with a 9 month old, food flies everywhere.. so anything that goes here is relatively inexpensive in case of an accident hehe. This centre piece is all from Ikea (candles, candle tray, sprigs of their popular lambs ear plant) except for the pine cones, which I picked up from campus in the fall. One day I came home with my pockets full of pine cones and then spent the evening baking them to get them to open up. Don;t they look lovely? 😀
Here is our stove.. we still don’t have backsplash installed. Its sitting in the garage and is calling out to be displayed in all its marble arabesque glory. Another project waiting to happen!
Isn’t this tea towel this stunning? Its made my Kendra at So Vintage Chic who makes the cutest tea towels and pillows. I got this during a flash sale post-christmas. Its winter-y enough to hang around until March.
And obviously, no kitchen photo is complete until we have some Rae dunn! Here is our tea corner as we don’t drink coffee or own a coffee machine of any sorts. This cute mini was hand painted by Brooke of The Painted Birch and its one of my favourite mini signs!
So that concludes the home tour series for at least the main floor of our home! I hope you found some fun decorating tips/ideas and some small shops that you can find awesome hand made items at. Hope you have a lovely rest of the week and see you next time!
xoxo
Areeba
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