Master Bedroom Update and How I Refinished The Floors

Just wanted to give you guys a little update on our bedroom! We are so close to being done! I just finished the last section of the floors and as soon as the polyurethane is dry we can do all of the last finishing touches and move in!

The above picture is of the floors before I stained them. These floors were in really good condition and had definitely been stained at one point in their history but there wasn't any sort of sealer remaining on them. I chose not to sand these floors because I didn't want to loose all of their gorgeous patina and because I knew that they were so porous they would take the stain without sanding first. Really all I was looking to do was richen them. After scrubbing them many times to remove all of the dust and debris from the reno work I applied one coat of Minwax's Dark Walnut (same that I used for the overhead beams) with a rag as seen below. When staining I work in rows of 3 or 4 to insure that I have complete control over the amount of stain and so that it's not drying faster than I can work. I really wanted it to saturate the floors so I applied it pretty heavily and did not do any dry back wiping.

Once the stain was completely dry I applied 2 coats of water based polyurethane with a brush. This was my first time using water based polyurethane and I wanted to give it a try for comparison to oil based polyurethane which is what I usually use. A lot of people have warned me that it doesn't hold up well but I wanted to see for myself. Our bedroom is the only room upstairs so it won't be a high traffic area so I thought it was a good room to try it in. It definitely goes on very easily and your brush strokes go away immediately unlike with oil based polys where your brush stroke shows forever if you mess up. Over time I will let you guys know how the water based poly holds up to washings. It definitely seems like it going to look less shiny than an oil based semi-gloss poly does when dry and that is what I wanted for this room opposed to the dining room where I wanted the floors really shiny.

Another really exciting thing that we got done over the weekend was hanging this big old cupboard in the bedroom. I bought it years ago at the Springfield, Ohio Antique Show for this exact purpose. It waited patiently in our garage all these years until finally the other night we were able to hang it!

The inside was really gross (if you watched my Instagram stories you saw the before) so I gave it a good scrub and then painted it Behr's Cottage White  (one of my favorite go to whites) to match the original paint on the outside of the cupboard.

I am going to use this beauty to hold all of my smaller fabric remnants and sewing notions. This corner of our bedroom is going to be my sewing area and I am so excited!

We just have to finish up things like putting the base boards back down and some trim pieces here and there and then we can move our furniture in! I am so excited that I am going to have a pretty bedroom after 9 years of waiting and planning!

Can't wait to share all of the little finishing details with you guys!!

Weekly Inspiration #1

So I am back to doing the Weekly Inspiration posts!!! The whole reason I started these posts in the first place was because I always have so many pictures that I never end up sharing because they don't necessarily fit into any of the blog posts I am working on at the time, or I took them for a blog post and I can't use them all,  or I just took them because the beauty of something caught my eye. There may not be any cohesion to the post, which will definitely drive me crazy, but I figure you guys would rather see a post of random pictures then none at all, right?

One of my wonderful followers pointed out to me that if you subscribe by email to my blog the email that you get is literally just the current post without any links. I always assumed that the email was a link that took you to my actual web page which it is not. I encourage you to go to my webpage to read the post just because my sidebar links are constantly changing and there may be other posts you may be interested in. Plus, you will be able to see what is new in my Etsy shop...many of things above are currently for sale! 

I hope you enjoyed this weeks inspiration! Master bedroom updates coming soon!

Farmhouse Inspiration ~ Red

Hello and welcome to this weeks Farmhouse Inspiration! First of all let me say a big thank you to all of you that took the time to comment on my last post and let me know how much you enjoy my blog! I hope that no one thought I was considering leaving blogland cause I'm not going anywhere...I absolutely love having a place to share our work and inspiring others to bring simple farmhouse style into their homes is my passion. I mean my ideas are endless...it is the hours that I don't have enough of!


So speaking of inspiring...in honor of Valentine's Day I chose RED as this weeks inspiration!! A touch of red here and there mixed with lots of creamy whites...ahhh perfection right? I like to bring little touches of red into our farmhouse with things that are naturally red like berries and fruits and then of course with some my favorite things antique linens and soft worn quilts.

I hope you enjoyed this weeks Farmhouse Inspiration and Happy Valentine's Day!! ❤❤❤❤❤❤❤

Master Bedroom Reno

I wanted to share some of our progress on our master bedroom! I have been talking about our renovations on it so much on here but really there just hasn't been much to show you guys! However, we are finally reaching the final stages and I am getting so excited! 

So just to explain the room that is going to be our master bedroom is the old upstairs guest room seen below.

We knew when we bought the house that we wanted to make this room into our master bedroom. However, the heat and electricity to this part of the house were no longer working properly and the room needed to be fully gutted for those things to be fixed. We knew it would be an expensive and time consuming job and we were only going to do it once so we wanted to do it right when we finally did it. Right after we first moved in I removed the paneling in this room and fixed the plaster walls underneath. I tried to make it as pretty as possible and this room functioned fine as a summer guest room and as a make shift studio for me but this past summer we finally had the money and time to start making into our dream master bedroom.


The to do list would include after completely gutting the room.... putting in new windows, insulating, restoring the floor, running new wiring, adding duct work for heating, putting up drywall and then bead board on the walls and a ship lap ceiling.

I have to say I usually absolutely love demo work but taking down this ceiling was awful! Our farm was originally a sheep farm and we think they used the wool from the sheep as the insulation in the ceiling! The wool combined with 100 plus years of mouse droppings made it such a messy itchy process! It took us forever to get it all cleaned up and out of the house this being an upstairs room and all...boy am I glad that it is done and over with.

As we started taking down the plaster and lath on the walls it was so cool to see the original framing  ...we could also see that there was absolutely no insulation in the walls.  We also took the plaster off of the pot belly stove chimney exposing the beautiful old brick.

I always feel like being done with the demo work and having that all cleaned up is a major turning point in our renovations.  At least then the kids can be in the area we are working on with us. We try to teach them as much as possible and they really love helping.

Once we saw how beautiful the original support beams in the ceiling were we knew we would keep them exposed. We scrubbed them and then stained them Minwax's Dark Walnut. We decided to keep the ceiling vaulted and put up ship lap running it all the way up to the peak. The picture below shows where we are now in the whole process...I have to finish painting and Neal has to finish putting up the ship lap boards that run along where the wall meets the ceiling. The ceiling will need a couple more coats of paint and then it will be done!

This has definitely been one of our longer projects as we started it late in the summer and now are really only able to work on it in the evenings and on the weekends.

I will be keeping to my favorite and timeless "whites and creams mixed with dark woods and metals palette" in this room. We have some new to us antique pieces of furniture and some great hand-me-downs that we are super excited about that will go into the bedroom once it is finished. Being at the antique mall where I have a booth all of the time enabled me to slowly find the perfect pieces of furniture for the room. We are definitely in the home stretch now and I can't wait to start putting it all together!

I will keep you guys updated on our progress! Make sure to follow me on Instagram for videos of our bedroom renovation and tutorials. With the instant gratification of Instagram these days I do hope that people are still reading blogs!  I don't get half as much feedback here on my blog as I do on Instagram but I'm pretty sure you guys are reading and enjoying it, or at least I hope! Each blog post I do takes me hours but for me it is worth every minute if I know I inspired someone! That reminds me, I am going to be going back to doing a weekly farmhouse inspiration post filled with all of the pictures that I took that week...so stay tuned for that!




Windows ~ Anderson
Wall Color ~ Glidden's Swan White
Beams ~ Minwax's Dark Walnut