Get Creative With an Accent Wall

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A powder room doesn’t seem like a room to spend a lot of time thinking about, but it’s often the bathroom your guests will visit most often. It’s a small area but there’s still a big opportunity to affect the look of the space.  For our house, the powder room is the only bathroom on the first floor and absolutely gets the most traffic.  When we moved into the house, the bathroom walls were covered in gorgeous dark blue floral wallpaper.  Although you could tell the wallpaper was old, it was almost as though the design had cycled itself back in style. I do think wallpaper is becoming trendy again and I actually considered working with the paper and removing all but one wall of it. In the end, I decided the paper was too dark for a small space and I opted to lighten up the room.

I played off my original idea of focusing on one accent wall, but rather than wallpaper we decided to feature beautiful wood panels. We used boards of Beetle Kill pine with a stain to bring out the natural greys & amber of the wood and painted the remaining three walls with a light, refreshing green.  We replaced the light fixture with a vintage-looking wall sconce and put up a new scalloped-edge mirror that helped further soften the space.  The powder room is the smallest room of our house, but clearly isn’t one we overlooked. I’m now happy that the powder room is the most convenient bathroom option for our guests to use.

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Paint: BEHR Bayberry Frost

Light: Hudson Valley Lighting ~ Keswick 1-Light Wall Sconce in Polished Chrome

Add Charm with Exterior Lighting

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Have you given your exterior home lights even a second of a thought lately?  Dated exterior lights is a missed opportunity to make your home more inviting and help your home style shine through at first glance. It is a pretty simple and affordable project to tackle that makes a big difference. There are so many styles to sift through which can be time consuming, but if you can pinpoint a theme that resonates with you that can help. Are you traditional or more contemporary?  Keep in mind ease of cleaning the light if your home is prone to bugs flying around the lights.

Updating the exterior lights of our home is something I had been thinking about all year. I’d inspect the lighting on homes during walks and make a mental note of what stood out to me. I became inspired by a gorgeous home with a sweeping front porch on Mapleton Avenue that had big hanging lanterns. For our home, I  found medium-sized bronze hanging lanterns with an open seeded glass.  I liked the more traditional look of these lights with the modern element of LED lighting. After installation, they were brighter than I expected so I had our electrician add a dimmer. Now we can dim the lights to a soft glow if we want to sit on our rockers on the porch or turn them more bright for the house to standout.  It has made such a difference to the look of our home and I can’t help myself from staring at the house when we pull into our driveway.