I started with this shallow glass dish from Walmart ($3) and a layer of rocks in the bottom for water drainage.

Next I added a thin layer of potting soil.

This big bag was about $4 and should be enough to fill several more containers.

Also a few weeks ago, I decided to try my hand at propagating a few succulents from some old plants I’d let get too spindly.  Thanks to Google I learned that cuttings taken from succulents need to be left out of soil for a few days for the cut ends to heal.  So for a couple days, our window ledges looked like this…

Then I planted the cuttings, and when it was time to transplant them to this new container, they looked like this!  Success!

The three leaves from my old succulent are at 12 o’clock in the planter below and the two smaller cuttings from the plants are down at 6 o’clock.  I made sure to break up the roots of the cactus and the bright green succulent so they’d take hold in the new container.

I left some room for the plants to grow, but the container was looking a little sparse, so I added a few pretty rocks to cover the topsoil and fill in the gaps.

Here’s a shot of those spindly succulents I mentioned.  I think they got like this because they weren’t getting enough light where I had them before.  Once I moved the pot to this window, the ends started to grow in much thicker.

This is the only window in our house that gets enough light for plants, so it’s gotten a little crowded.  I’m trying to get some basil to grow in that little pot in the back!

While I was taking these pictures, our kitty Tina decided to show up and get some sun.

I may have gotten a little distracted by her cuteness…

But back to the subject of plants – what do you think of our little plant collection?  Have you planted anything inside this spring?

We’re 95% moved back into our house after the Great Floor Replacement of 2012, and you can probably imagine we’re on the hunt for some area rugs to cozy up the joint.  I love the look of wide expanses of wood flooring, but we definitely want to protect our new floors in high traffic areas like the living room and entryway.

(Not to mention our couch slides all over the place without an area rug under it!)

I’m a total area rug novice.  Aside from the solid gray rug in Stephen’s office (a whopping $20 at Big Lots), and the yellow and gray Ikea rug for our master bedroom ($199), I haven’t had the need to do much rug shopping until now.

Top of the list is a rug for our living room.  We need something in the 9×12 range, but the price range for a rug that size?  Forget about it.  Big rug equals big price tag.  Sorry fancy rug makers, but $1000 for an area rug isn’t happening.  Mama’s got fall textbooks to buy!

Our living room kind of looks like this again, minus the big leather couch and shag carpet. Whatever humungo rug we find will probably stay neutral or incorporate blues or greens in a geometric sort of way.  I think we need to steer clear of florals for this one.

I really like this rug from West Elm, featured in a room redo Kristen Krasen just finished, but for $599, Stephen has to love it, and he doesn’t.

 I’ve been scouring the internet for the right rug (geometric prints or neutrals), in the right size (8×10 at a minimum, 9×12 is better), for the right price (can it be done for under $400? $500?) but so far I’m coming up short.

So here’s my call for help.  Do y’all have any suggestions on where to find affordable, quality area rugs?  Have you bought a big rug that you love?  Please share links to your favorite sites and stores and help an area rug newbie out!

We loved the mid-century credenza we found to replace it, but the new piece was pretty dark and still too big.  There are few things more frustrating than hitting your hip on a piece of furniture every time you walk into your home – no matter how much you love it!

You probably remember when we decided to empty the entryway and look for something new – right before our wood floors were installed.

After our trip to Denver last month, we finally found our solution: the Malm Dressing Table from Ikea.  This console has three things going for it that the previous table didn’t – it’s not as deep (so fewer bruises – hooray!), it’s much leggier, and it’s white!

Just swapping out this one piece of furniture has made the room so much more bright and open.  I moved my desk chair from the guest room out to the entryway too.  It does a nice job looking cute and hiding the outlet where I plugged in that lamp.

Here’s the little faux plant I picked up at Ikea.  We’ll probably swap out the books and plant every once in awhile to keep things looking fresh.  I’ve already promised myself some fresh flowers once this crazy week is over, so maybe the console will be the lucky winner of my bouquet!

I love this photo of Stephen and me from our honeymoon.  This is the time of year to bring out the beach photos, everybody!

One of the best parts about this console is that there was enough room underneath for a copper boot tray I found at Target.  This turned out to be a great solution to protect the wood floors from Molly’s food and water bowls (labs like to make messes).  The watering can is our cute way of filling up the water bowl without constantly bringing the bowl to the kitchen sink.

The console looked pretty crowded with both of our vintage lamps on top, so just one made the cut.  This one still does a great job lighting up the entryway (when it’s on – ha!).

There’s actually another reason why my desk chair ended up in the entryway.  It has to do with more furniture swapping in other parts of the house, so stay tuned for those changes soon.  Ohhh the suspense.

So we’ve checked the entryway off our list for now.  With all the commotion over the new floors and busy-ness with school and work, we’ll probably have a few other room changes to share as we move back in over the next few weeks.

But for now, what do you think of the entryway makeover?  Is the new console a winner?

Stephen and I are still here and are working like crazy towards the end of the semester (me) and the Professional Engineering exam (him).  The big test is coming up this Friday, so wish Stephen luck!!

We have literally not had a chance to finish moving the last pieces of furniture back into our house after the wood floor installation, but in a sense we’re enjoying the wide open spaces.  I thought I’d give you a little sneak peek today at all the goodies we picked up at Ikea on our trip to Denver last month.  Hopefully soon you’ll get to see these things in our place!

Let me tell you – I have to work hard to reign it in when I’m in an Ikea.  I just have to keep reminding myself that I don’t want our house to look like an Ikea showroom… or do I?  This picture makes me think we’ve already gone too far.  Not our house, but our curtains, couch color, and now our throw blanket!  I picked up this beige throw blanket (Ikea Stockholm), and it’s already firmly found a home on our living room couch.

I originally picked up this rug (for $20 – who can resist that?) for our entryway, but it was too wide for the space.  Tried it by our sliding glass doors and it was about 6 inches too long.  Can you guess where it ended up?  Stephen’s office of all places!

Ikea has some of the better faux plants I’ve seen.  Both of our bathrooms are lacking in the natural light department, so I grabbed one of these faux herbs (the one on the left) and plan on using it in our guest bath.  The cream colored pot below was only 49 cents!

The last two purchases are the most exciting.  When we scraped the popcorn ceiling in our hallway, we replaced the globe 80s light fixtures with the best looking light fixtures we could find for $30 at Lowes.  Needless to say, we’ve never loved the fixtures we chose (and they burn through light bulbs like crazy), so I’m really excited to see these new fixtures in place!

And our last purchase?  You guessed it – the Malm Dressing Table for our entryway.  Turns out I didn’t have to wait too long after this post for a trip to Ikea after all!

So there you have it – a shining example of Meredith reigning it in at Ikea.  Stay tuned for more pictures as we get out the Alan wrenches and put these pieces in place!

Wednesday night found me chillin’ in our dining room, painting some baseboards black. Do you know that that means? It means the wood floors were finally installed in Stephen’s office on Thursday!

I’d show you a picture of the pretty new floors in his room, but you can’t really see them right now…

No, we’re not hoarders (though every time I have to move more stuff I think we might be)!  As soon as the floors were installed in this room, we had to move everything from the other two bedrooms over to prepare for our new carpet.

Carpets went in on Friday and they are soooo soft and cushy and sooo clean. I love them!

These photos were taken before the trim guys came to replace the old baseboards. Both of these rooms have nice tall white baseboards like the rest of the house now.

We finally got our pets back this weekend. My mom kept them for us over spring break, and we really missed them!

And lastly, apparently we have a neighborhood beaver?

Poor guy looked a little lost, but he was super cute!

What have you been up to the past few days?

P.S. Thanks everybody for your emails and comments the past couple weeks!  I’m really behind on replying, but I’m trying to catch up soon!

The yard may be more weeds than grass at this point, but Stephen has vowed to make it right this weekend.  I guess you could say I was actually rescuing these little pretty little weeds as I unceremoniously yanked them out of the ground today.

Free bouquet?  Don’t mind if I do.

If you couldn’t tell from the fact that I posted every single day last week, last week was actually my Spring Break.  I was able to relax on Monday and Tuesday, but on Wednesday, we took a little road trip to visit friends in Denver.

Stephen, our friend Robby, and I made the 13 hour drive and got to Colorado Wednesday in time for dinner.  Thursday was all about skiing!

The temperatures were incredibly mild, and we spent most of Thursday taking skiing lessons at Winter Park (none of us had ever skied before).  I am officially a fan of the sport!

We met up with another friend for dinner that night and enjoyed some local brews.

Friday was another skiing day for Stephen and a shopping day for me!  We took a trip to Ikea and then caught The Hunger Games on the big screen.  I was a huge fan of the Hunger Games Trilogy but wouldn’t recommend the movie to somebody who hadn’t read the books first.  The film was well done – it just might not have made much sense to someone without the back-story.

Saturday, Stephen and I stopped by the flagship REI store in Denver.

We spent the rest of the afternoon touring Redstone Meadery and Avery Brewery in Boulder.  Did you know there are something like 120 microbreweries in the Denver/Boulder Metro Area?

Here are our accommodating friends Geoff and Megann on the left and road trip buddy Robby on the right.

We had dinner in Boulder Saturday at a great restaurant called The Gondolier (highly recommend!) and packed up to head home Sunday.

It was a quick trip, but we had so much fun!  Definitely lots of new experiences for all of us and good times with friends.

Monday morning was a rude awakening, but we’re getting back in the swing of things and should have more to share on the home front soon!

Did you get a Spring Break this year?  Any spring house projects going on?

The brown-on-brown look isn’t our favorite, so we’re thinking about keeping it neutral and going gray or taupe in these rooms.  I like the idea of having a lighter shade in the kitchen, so maybe we’ll choose a wall color along these lines (via Young House Love).

We’ve also come to love dark gray walls around these parts (see Stephen’s office and our master bath, for example). In the dining room, we could use the same hue as we’ve used before (Valspar’s Mountain Smoke), which I think would look something like this.  I love the gold accents!

(via Small Shop)

Or we might head a little more taupe-y, like the color of this living room (also from Restored Style, featured on Young House Love).

As a side note, we have that map and are looking for the perfect place to hang it.  Maybe it will end up in the dining room since we know now it works with this wall color!

I’m nervous even thinking about opening a can of paint over our new floors, but we’ll have to do it sooner or later.  What do you think of our new color direction?  Are there other wall colors you think we should consider?

Things were all well and good until poor Stephen, who’d been working his tail off every evening after work and dealing with installers while he worked from home all week, got a migraine.

That meant I was in charge of clearing out his office.  By myself.

I got the job done, but it was a long night.  Luckily, after Mr. Heard had taken his medicine and a good nap, he was able to come rip out the baseboards and laminate flooring in this room before bedtime.

It was a bittersweet evening.  Even though the laminate flooring had been in this room since May ’10, we’d really just finished Stephen’s office in January and now we were tearing it up again!  We were able to save the laminate, though, so some lucky buyer at the Habitat for Humanity ReStore will be happy to get new floors at a lower price than we originally paid.

The installers showed up early again the next morning, and by that afternoon I was surprised to find all the floors were done and the baseboards were in!

Check out our new, very dusty, wood floors!

Buckets of old tile were used to weigh down the transition pieces in the hallway as the glue dried.

The installers made sure that there were no transition pieces between the rooms that got new floors.  The result is amazingly seamless.

We’re still missing some quarter round in the kitchen, but the wood looks loads better than that linoleum did, right?

They ran the new baseboards around the beam we constructed (to hide the 2×4 in the ceiling from the old wall).

This is probably my favorite view of our new floors.  Everything flows so well now!

The title of this post is New Floors: 90% Done.  The remaining 10%?  Turns out they ran out of wood before they could do Stephen’s office.

So all that work we did Wednesday night during Stephen’s migraine?  Kinda pointless.  The room STILL looks like this.

Whop-whop.

We’re a little frustrated since the floors for this room will take another week or two (they’re still backordered), but overall we’re happy with how everything is turning out.  I just wish the flooring guys would get back out here and clean up the glue residue (they use a special solvent, I guess) so that we could finally move our furniture back in!

In the meantime, I suppose I’ll just sit and stare at this view.  It’s alright, isn’t it?

I took these pictures last Monday and Tuesday, when the installers were about halfway done with the floors.  They undercut the fireplace in the living room and the door frames throughout the house and laid the wood right under them.  (In case you missed it, we chose engineered wood floors by Invincible – 5″ wide Caldwell Oak planks in Antler Brown.)

This picture is not very true to color, but it give you an idea of how quickly these guys worked!  The floors were glued down and the blue tape held them together as they dried.

There’s the stack of lovely lovely new baseboards, waiting to be installed.

And here’s how things were looking in the kitchen and dining area.  The guys moved the boxes of wood as they worked so that the heavy boxes were always on top of the most recently glued areas, weighing them down.

Stephen and I were both amazed at how much bigger and more seamless our hallway and entryway looked with cohesive flooring.

Molly has been slip-sliding all around the house, but she’s finally getting used to the new flooring underfoot.  I think she approves.

Tomorrow we’ll share the really pretty pictures – floors complete with new baseboards! Stay tuned.