Creating Kris ~ a young mom blogs…

more home decor: tile idea

I’ve added a new blog category called “house to home”, dedicated to the home decor ideas and projects I blog about. As we decorate our new house to make it a home, everything feels more comfortable and warm and cozy. There are much more than just walls surrounding my family now and I love it that way…

Here’s a quick idea for jazzing up your kitchen if you have extra tiles from a renovation or new build…

Remember my kitchen? and differently-toned brown/caramel backsplash tiles?

Right, so we had some tiles leftover that I wanted to have some fun with… So I cut out adhesive magnetic strips that were the same size as the tiles (maybe a wee bit smaller) and applied them to the back of the tiles. Et voila!

I used mine to decorate the oven hood, but they could also be used as fridge magnets. Also my friend Amanda had the cool idea of using them to hold recipe cards above the stove as well (which I think I will try the next time I’m not testing a new recipe torn from a magazine page!).

Simple, but adds a little “something”. And I find it also makes up for the fact that those tiles are actually hidden behind the stove… I wish they’d made them higher up in that area of the kitchen or something. Maybe when the kids are a lot older and we’re getting a new stove we can get one of those cool ones that is flat and has the buttons all at the front.

Speaking of the joys of home ownership, we’ve been having some repairs done to the house lately. We’ve discovered a couple of areas that are leaky so there have been tradesmen here quite a few days out of the week/month!

That’s part of what has kept me from keeping up with my usual blogging schedule of a few posts a week (besides the constant pain, of course, which puts me completely out-of-commission at least several days of the week). Hopefully I can get back to it soon.

Valance #2 ~ family room (blue)

Encouraged by my first attempt at sewing a valance, I decided to go ahead with my idea of sewing box valances for the family room next. Of course they didn’t turn out exactly as planned (does anything?), but I’m happy with the results and it’s created a much “homier” feel in the room where we spend a lot of our time together.

The materials – a good match with the paint colours (blue), the blinds (stripes), and our furniture (light wood)

Improvising on the corner pleats – I couldn’t get proper ones so I went backwards and just kind of made it up as I went lol

Getting the hubs to put them up – you can kind of see the “before” look when the blinds’ hardware was in plain view

When all is said and done, they fall quite nicely!

Other than a few yet-to-be-unpacked boxes, our family room is mostly assembled the way we’d like it

And it’s so great to have at least one room that you can go to that’s mostly complete. We’ve been moved in about 2 & 1/2 months now but there are a lot of rooms that are still really “in process” as far as decor is concerned – including a couple spots where we’re using storage bins for coffee tables.

I look forward to our Family Movie Night (a weekly Friday tradition since Harmony was about 2!), and one of the features that drew us to this model of house was the open cut-out between the family room and kitchen. We start our movie and watch from the table, then tidy up our messy selves (especially Avery… OK and me too, what can I say? I’m a bit of a sloppy eater) and go sit on the couch.

my 1st valance

So my learning-to-sew adventures continue and it’s going pretty well. I made only 1 trip to a fabric store and got 2 different fabrics on sale. For those few metres and 4 buttons, it was less than $20. And out of it, I’ll be able to make 3 valances, give a piece to Paul to construct some nifty Roman blinds for our bathroom AND have enough left over for a pillow or 2.

The fabric I chose for the kitchen valance is just amazing, I love it. Cream with streaks of metallic gold!

I kept the valance pretty simple – just a rod pocket about 2 inches down. After the pocket, there was about 15″ of fabric to make up the valance. The kitchen window was 51″ wide, and the width of the valance was more than that to give it some volume.

We’d been very lucky to find custom wood blinds in our local Home Depot that were almost exactly the size of our window! It’s possible someone in the area also had a Minto home that was the same model or a different model that had a similar window. So we were able to get the blinds (a dark brown with 2″ slats) for a third of the price!

All in all, the look came together really nicely…

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