Author Archives: vanessawyler

Ikea Shopping

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I love Ikea. I could live there – really who couldn’t? They even have bedrooms, kitchens, bathrooms and more set up for living. Yea the TVs and Computers might not work but still they’ve got a lot going for you already. So this past Saturday Drew and I went down to see our friends Serah & Gabe in Kenosha. Since we were half there already, we figured we’d add another hour to our driving time to visit Schamburg, IL.

We arrived at opening (10am) – did some exploring and got their awesome 99 cent breakfast, Drew even said you couldn’t even buy all those items at the grocery store for 99 cents. The main reason we went is because we are thinking of getting the Karlstad sofa sectional for our living room – I’ve seen it on a lot of blogs recently and I love the fact it’s got modern lines to it, the grey color, and it’s slipcover, meaning you can wash it. I really love the set-up and layout of Young House Love’s Karl sofa, as they call him.

young house love huge sofa ikea karlstad

My goal for this trip was to get Drew to fall in love with it. Right after sitting down he said it himself, I really like this one. (SCORE!) We also tried out a few other couches because we’ll need to eventually get some new ones for the family room. Here are a few others we liked.

Also while we were there, we wanted to check out the Vittsjo pieces. I’d recently seen them done in numerous ways via Pinterest and was wanting them for our new house. We were all ready to get them when we got down to the lower level – and saw the box was 100in long. Yeah, that definitely won’t fit in our little scion. Luckily my parents were up in MN near that Ikea over the weekend and brought home two of the pieces we wanted – just one more to get next time we bring a larger vehicle.

I’m hoping to paint those yellow, like the photo below from Centsational Girl, as long as that goes with our color scheme in our living room – still got to figure out the vision for that room.
colorful vittsjo shelving

Overall our trip to Ikea was a success, even though we ended up only buying ourselves cinnamon rolls that time – but we’ll be back! Funny: when we got in the car to leave I discovered this facebook post Drew posted – that kid! The trip wasn’t that bad, no idea what he is talking about! 🙂

Apartment Living

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The current state of our apartment is chaos…. complete chaos. Before we began packing I wanted to take a few photos to show how it was for a good two years and to keep a memory of it. It was a bit sad taking it down, realizing “wow we’ve been married for two years+” but then I realize all the excitement to follow in our new home once everything is packed. So I’ve been packing little by little now and the walls are getting empty, but here are some photos…












See a previous post about decorating our apartment, here.

Blast from the Past

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Today we got to see our amazing friends Serah and Gabe – we drove down to Ikea, and on the way back had lunch with them and to see their adorable little twins. Somehow we brought up this play (Sound of Music) where Drew had to wear makeup that was really hard to remove. He even had to go to Applebees wearing it and look like a complete weirdo. Also, I just now realized the huge height difference between us…. so much so that I barely made it into the photo. Thank you, photographer-whoever-you-were.

Reese – Three Months

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How is time going by so fast that this little cutie is three months old? This time she’s full of smiles and giggles, but added some chunky thighs too – the only time in your life where you can rock chunky thighs 🙂

Kitchen Ideas & Vision

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I recently shared my inspiration and mood board for our family room, and now I’m moving on to other rooms of the house to figure out how to make them all flow together…now: the kitchen. The kitchen will be the biggest project because we are changing it up so much! Here are the photos of the kitchen as it currently stands (these are the realtor’s photos).






Here is our basic plan: paint walls blue/teal color, tear out floor tile and put in dark hardwood floors, paint cabinets white and add trim to make shaker style, add knobs, turn the island into a longer island that duals as a kitchen table and paint yellow, add dark gray countertops, and add light gray penny tile backsplash, paint mid century modern hutch that I got super cheap, white and dark brown. Here is a photo to help you understand our vision:

Aren’t the original cabinets super ugly? They are basically pieces of plywood… but luckily that gives us a blank slate. Can’t wait to see how it looks done!

Eddy gets an Upgrade

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So since we’ve been in the house-hunting, house-diy-transformation-mode, there are a few blogs I’ve been keeping daily tabs on for inspiration and ideas. One of them being Young House Love – I love their design style, their writing style and the fact that the are no experts… makes me feel like I can do it too. So I saw a random post about their doggie food and water dish and it totally got me thinking.

cat bowl inspiration

I couldn’t pay our cat in cat-nip to keep his food in his dish. It’s almost like he pushes his food out of his bowl onto the floor because he knows it’s my pet peeve.. ha pet pun. Even so that he thinks he is too good to eat it off the floor. His bowl can be empty and food surrounding it on the floor, yet he still makes his whiny-food noise. Drive me nuts.

So thinking like the Young House Lovers, I headed to Target on my lunch break to see what I could come up with for a solution. I found this cute teal-blue dish and grey serving bowls and thought it was perfect.


He immediately had to test them out – noisy cat. They have been working great, and I love the splash of elegant color. The only thing is they are super slippery and slide a little bit. I plan to add some type of grip (maybe velcro?) to keep them more in place. The dish does help a bit because it is curved upwards. This cat is so spoiled…


Blast From the Past: Colorado

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Recently, my macbook pro had an incident where the logic board when bye bye (for the 2nd time). When I went in to get it fixed the Mac Genius asked if I had everything backed up. I lied and said yes but the started to get worried. I hadn’t been backing things up because last time this happened they didn’t delete anything.

I just got it back on Wednesday and the first thing I prayed for was that my stuff hadn’t disappeared. I had tons of file and photos that I would like to keep. So once I got home I immediately backed up everything on my external harddrive (which had 400g empty space – what was I thinking?). While doing so I came across many blast from the past photos. I kept finding great and some hilarious photos and immediately emailed them to all sorts of people, which made this process take 10x longer.

This little incident has inspired me to post each week (trying for Fridays) a blast from the past photo. This week is a photo from a Fine Arts Trip to Denver, Co. We had a few days to explore the landscape and took this photo with some of my closest friends at that time (and some still so). It’s crazy that this photo is legit – the background totally looks fake but I promise, it’s not!

PS. The second from the left is my friend Heather who is an amazing photographer. I’ve recently been working with her to update her photography brand logo, look and website. Go check out the site we are just putting the finishing touches on 🙂

Shop this Room

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Yes the name of this post totally comes from the new show of the HGTV Design Star winner, “Shop this Room“. At first I thought it was a dumb name, but I totally get it. Sometimes you don’t really “get” the design concept of a room until you go shopping – and that is what I have been doing. Window shopping, online shopping, and real store shopping.

My weakness is Target – that’s where I’ve done the real store shopping. I have decided I could buy *almost* all the new decor for my house from Target and I would be perfectly happy. There is something so bad about that place that you walk in for ONE thing, yet you leave with TEN. As I’ve been dreaming of our new home, I’ve made a few purchase that are starting to help shape the vision of our new home.

For the Bedroom: White Duvet Cover

For the Bathroom: White Ruffles Shower Curtain

For the Kitchen: Lemon Towel & Striped Rug (both not available online)
target textiles

I’ve also been doing some window shopping, where I’ve taken photos of things I like but weren’t sure about how they’d fit into our new home. So until I come up with a vision that utilizes those items, they’ll stay on my phone and this blog. I recently hit up World Market and took photos of these items that I loved…

For the Bedroom: Curtains, Chandelier

For the Kitchen: Yellow Ikat Lamp Shade, Teal/Silver Pendants

Family Room Ideas

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Our home buying process is continuing, without too much stress – let’s hope it stays that way! We had our home inspection on Monday and found two minor things that the sellers are taking care of. We also met with our lender on Wednesday and all is set for that – just have to wait now and plan!

Update: We heard from our realtor that the seller’s found a house, but could be bumped if they don’t remove their contingencies. While we think it’s safe for them to do so, they are unsure. I think the plan is to move up closing to September 12 and them rent it out for a week. We’ll see how this ends up. They have 60 hours to decide what they will do – however this can’t impact our sale – which is comforting.

So planning… I stopped at Sherwin Williams paint store yesterday and picked up the HGTV color books to begin this process. I’m starting to determine colors for the house, but I end up changing my mind a lot. One room I have pretty set is the family room – located on the lower level with a walkout to the backyard. Here are the photos of it again…



This room will be where we’ll put our larger tv, and be more of the lounging around room to watch movies and play games. This will also be a good spot of when Drew has his friends over and they want to play video games. We’ll still have the living room which is just another family room that I can hang out it. This will also work well for family get togethers. One area for the kids, one for the adults. Here is a mood type board that I put together to show how I plan to decorate it and make it feel not as much as a basement.

Our plan is to paint the walls that Drizzle color, do some DIY white wainscotting below to make it feel less basement-ish. Then use the existing chairs we have from Pier 1 for some color splash, and pull in those same colors to use to accent the room. We’ll use our current brown slipcover sofa – but will be updating it as soon as we have the funds to something in the lighter brown hues. We’ll probably end up with a love seat and a sofa – like the current owner’s do as well. I’d love to get a bright green rug in a fun print to pull in color into the floor and presto – a complete room! Another thing we’ll add is colorful floor to ceiling curtains and other colorful accents to complete the walls. Those can be added over time as I find things I love (or to spray paint!)