House to home #3: window coverings

Have you ever thought of your house as a metaphor for your life? In your house are all your experiences and your memories.  In looking around my own home, I realized I wasn’t as comfortable and didn’t feel as peaceful as I imagine I should feel in my home.  So I set about to change it.

I read a bunch of books and enlisted my sister-in-law’s a designer’s (ahem) help with adding color and pattern.  She is awesome and I really appreciated her time and expert eye!  After all the work, I feel much more peaceful at home and I definitely think it’s more a reflection of who lives here.  It’s upbeat. It’s modern.  It’s positive.  It’s open to fresh experiences.  It’s evolving.  It’s comfortable.

This is the 3rd of 4 separate topics/posts in this home redecoration series: 1) the dining room 2) the living room (post 1 and post 2) 3) windows and 4) the kitchen (Friday’s blog topic).  I’ll try to share links to each new item so you can locate them yourself.  Maybe you will get some fresh ideas to incorporate into your own home to make it more of a reflection of you.  🙂

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Selecting window coverings is more difficult than I thought it would be!  I had a Groupon for Budget Blinds, so that’s how I decided who to use.  There are choices and more choices and it all adds up pretty quickly and so I had to prioritize.

The most exciting change, and the biggest cost, was replacing the existing faux blinds with shutters across the front of the house.  Now it looks unified, I think.

Here’s a before and after of our kitchen:

The dining room didn’t have anything covering the windows at first:

The office:

For the living room, playroom, and our bedroom (essentially the back of the house), I chose thin linen shades that allow plenty of light through but still provide some semblance of privacy.  The drapes were made with fabric from Spoonflower.

Bedroom:

Drapes for our dining room, also made with Spoonflower fabric.

Adding these screen doors to the living room and our bedroom was a must (to me).  They close with strong magnets and allow us to open the French doors in the living room to get some air without letting in bugs.

Not that exciting, but necessary nonetheless, we had hurricane boards cut for each of our windows… just in case.

And to end on a “light” note, I put up twinkly lights in our backyard and we have been enjoying them so much!

That’s it for windows… on Friday I’ll share my small kitchen update and then I think I’ll take a blogging break until January.