08 May 2011

Back in Business and a Living Room Update

Between trips to NY, mother's day, planning our anniversary, and me starting to train my temp replacement at work, we have been very busy in the DeMaio household. But I am finally back and have some projects in the works this week to update you all. First was the bookcase project I mentioned in the past few updates. We finally got around to doing it! 

A few months ago....

Me: I just thought of a great idea for the living room! One corner of it actually. Where the bookcase is.
Jordan: Do I even want to know?
Me: It would involve giving you the bookcase for your man room. You can put DVDs and baseball memorabilia on it. Does that help..?
Jordan: I'm listening...



This is the said bookcase. Making a bookcase look attractive without losing its practicality has always been a challenge for me. As you can see I start strong on the top shelf or two and by the time I reach the bottom I'm just shoving the leftover books and junk that have no other place to go. 

This beauty will be relocating to the man room in the basement. 

What man room? 

Well it isn't quite there yet. Now that we have a baby on the way, we've pretty much realized we are here to stay for a few more years. We have plenty of room in this house and it's the perfect size to maintain with our busy schedules. I've always promised Jordan the basement as a man cave of sorts, and it wasn't until recently that he's decided he wants to take on the project. He always figured we would wait until we got into our 'permanent' house to put the money into a man room. This will be a work in progress as we need to replace lighting, put in carpeting and fix the paneling on the walls. But we've got a spare room/office in the basement jam packed with all sorts of Red Sox/baseball memorabilia waiting for a place to call home. 

Here is how the corner of the living room has looked for the past two weeks with our new floor:

One thing that has frustrated me about this corner is how dark it is with all the furniture. Now that we have ripped out the carpet and replaced it with hardwood, it is even darker than before. But I came up with a plan. That bookcase is outta there. Booted to the basement. In place of it - three white Lack shelves from IKEA. By choosing white shelves we can break up the space and the dark corner of the living room. I have plans to add plenty of colorful accent pieces to keep things fresh.

We've had the shelves for about a month now, but never had a chance to put them up. Initially our goal was to try to hang them before the carpet was replaced, but time got away from us. This weekend we finally got around to hanging them. 


We chose the 46.5" Lack wall shelf - $19.99 each.


In the next week or so I will play around with decorating the shelves. I'm afraid to put many books on them because of the weight restriction. The instructions claim that these shelves can hold up to 33 pounds depending how you mount them, but I don't want to push the limit. 

My plan is to mix and match different sized and colored frames with some bright decorative pieces as well as some clear glass accents. I'm already loving that corner of the room. Without the dark, tall bookcase the space is so open and light. It completely breaks up the room and adds that pop of white that I've been craving.


We have a busy week ahead. Tomorrow we have our first class - Infant CPR. I also have a mini project to work on for Jordan for our anniversary. He's going to a soccer game Wednesday so my plan is to work on it while he's out, but won't give you the details until after we celebrate this upcoming weekend. Since traveling is somewhat restricted for me, we decided to have a simple weekend getaway down the beach. We live about an hour and a half from the Delaware beaches and have booked a hotel for Friday and Saturday nights. Our plan is to enjoy the gorgeous weather with long walks around town, a little shopping, great dinners and no interruptions.

Hope you all had a great weekend and a beautiful Mother's Day!

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