Monday, December 16, 2019

Christmas Home Tour - Getting Our Place Ready for Holiday Guests

Friday, December 6, 2019

Christmas Bedroom Blog Hop








Monday, December 2, 2019

Holiday Gift Guide for the Decor Enthusiast



Thursday, November 28, 2019

Create a Cozy Living Space with These Black Friday Deals from Serena & Lily

Tuesday, November 26, 2019

Master Bedroom Refresh with Serena & Lily

Saturday, November 23, 2019

An Icy Forest Tabletop Christmas Tree

Monday, November 18, 2019

Trying out an $80 Christmas Tree

Wednesday, November 6, 2019

One Room Challenge Fall 2019 - Week 6 - The Guest Bedroom Reveal



Wednesday, October 30, 2019

One Room Challenge Fall 2019 - My Tips on Creating the Coziest Bed Ever!

Wednesday, October 23, 2019

One Room Challenge Fall 2019 - Week 4 - Painting the Room "Rustic Taupe" and "Park Avenue"



Welcome to week 4 of the One Room Challenge! Here's a recap of the previous 3 weeks in case you need to catch up:




This week I worked on painting the walls and putting up the wallpaper. 

If you watched my stories on Instagram then you already know what a pain it was to hang up the wallpaper. It wasn't hard, it was just a slow, tedious, precise process that I have NO patience for! There's also very little room for error. Once you make a mistake, it's difficult to fix. One mistake I made when hanging the wallpaper was that I somehow measured incorrectly and the first panel I put up ended up being too short! I didn't want to waste the wallpaper so instead of throwing out the panel that was too short, I just ended up cutting a small piece of wallpaper and added it to the bottom. The good news is that it will be covered with the side table and not only that, you can't even tell that I had to add that missing piece! Happy ending!  I only wallpapered one wall with 6 panels of wallpaper and that took me as much time as it did to paint the whole dang room!  NEVER again will I be tackling putting up wallpaper by myself! I definitely needed the help of someone who is more detailed than me and doesn't mind working at a snails pace.

Oops! Wallpaper hanging didn't start on the right foot!
But in the end it came out looking decent :)


Fortunately, painting the room was a lot easier! Plus, my Mom volunteered to come help me paint which I was so grateful for! We had such a great time getting the painting done even though my Mom was nervous about me painting the wallpaper. She was trying to talk me into leaving it white. You gotta trust my vision, Mom! 

The wallpaper in white is definitely beautiful, but  looked a little too "precious" . I want a bit more moodiness to the room.

Out of the 6 paint colors I sampled, I ended up choosing 2 different colors for the bedroom. My first choice was the popular vote on Instagram -Rustic Taupe by Behr Paint. I absolutely love how that color looks on the wallpapered accent wall but it looked a bit too dark for the rest of the room. You see, the accent wall where the wallpaper is gets a lot of light compared to the rest of the room. So what I did to balance out the light in the room was to paint the accent wall in Rustic Taupe and the rest of the room in "Park Avenue" by Behr which is slightly lighter. I think it worked! Using the two colors in the room gave me the saturation I wanted in the wallpaper without darkening the entire room.

Wallpaper painted in Behr "Rustic Taupe"
Walls painted in Behr "Park Avenue"
Having the two tones makes sense. The brightest wall in the room can take the darker paint color.





 I have tons of experience painting; so much that I don't even use painter's tape anymore! But nothing beats having the right tools to make the job easier. These paint pails that we used to cut into our walls felt so much more secure compared to a flimsy disposable container we usually use! Or even worse, climbing up and down a ladder with the paint can! đŸ˜“  The paint pails have a secure handle to put your hand in AND a little magnetic strip to hold your brush while you're moving your ladder. ME LIKEY! It really is the little things... :)

my Mom, always willing to help me out :)
This little paint pail from HANdy Paint really made painting the edges and corners a lot easier :)


We ended up finishing the whole room in just a few hours! It helped that we used Behr Marquee paint for the whole room, including the baseboards. The Marquee line of paint has amazing coverage which meant that we were able to skip priming AND a second coat and that saved us like 4 hours, I'm sure! I've used Behr Marquee in all the bedrooms and bathrooms in our home because it's also easy to clean -even in the flat finish. With two kids and a dog, that's very important :)

Before...
After!

I am super thankful for my parents who came over to help, for my wife who did a great job painting the window sills AND cooked up  an amazing dinner! I'm also thankful for our One Room Challenge official sponsor,s  Behr Paint and HANdy Paint Tools! * Of course, the reviews and opinions expressed  in this post are my own and from my personal experience with the products :) if you have any questions about any of the products used, just ask!  I'm here for you!

Now that the walls are done, I feel really good! The hard part is pretty much OVER! I'm just waiting for a couple pieces of furniture to arrive and after that it's all about the icing on the cake... the accessories!

Next Wednesday (if all goes as planned) I'm going to be teaching you how to make the most perfect, most comfortable, most beautiful-looking bed! SO, if you haven't signed up to receive my blog updates via email, do so now!

'Till next time!
-Oscar

P.S. 
Don't forget to visit the blogs of the rest of the featured designers participating in the One Room Challenge! Scroll down to click on their links. I know I have a lot of catching up to do and now that the painting is done, I feel like I have time to do it!









Wednesday, October 16, 2019

One Room Challenge Week 3 - Choosing Art, Wallpaper and the Perfect Shade of "Greige"

Wednesday, October 9, 2019

One Room Challenge Fall 2019 - Week 2 - The Floor Plan and Mood Board

Wednesday, October 2, 2019

One Room Challenge Fall 2019 - Week 1 - The Room That Get's The Makeover

Saturday, September 28, 2019

12 Things You Need To Know When It Comes To Water Damage and Home Insurance

Monday, September 9, 2019

Teen Bedroom Makeover with Green Walls

Monday, September 2, 2019

New Carpet Installed! LOVE IT, but NOW Everything Else Looks Dirty!



Thursday, August 29, 2019

Choosing New Carpet



If you've been following along, you know that we have been in the restoration phase in our home due to water damage. So far our amazing restoration company, Mission Restoration has done a fantastic job in taking care of us and our home. As of now Mission Restoration has completely dried the water damage, installed a new water heater, ripped out damaged carpet and installed and painted new drywall to damaged areas. We are almost done getting our home back to normal! All that is left is to replace the old carpet with new carpet and put back the baseboards. SO EXCITED!

Let me just start by saying that this isn't  necessarily going to be a post about "how to choose the right carpet" or a "10 things you need to know before buying carpet" post. I actually don't know much about buying carpet and have no experience replacing flooring with anything else but wood or tile. Carpet has a bad wrap, yo! But I actually don't mind wall to wall carpeting upstairs and in bedrooms especially because it helps muffle sounds which is very important when you live in a small home with a wife that loves gangster rap, two gamer kids and an annoying ass dog that barks at everything that passes by.  ANYWAYZ, like I was saying, even though this isn't going to be one of those informative posts it's still fun to share the process with you and look at the pretty samples together, am I right? A bit shallow, yes -but whatever.

I did take some time to do a little online research on what makes a good quality carpet but nothing groundbreaking, really. A lot of the information I read about carpet I already learned in my college textiles class but I will share it with you cuz I guess not everyone takes textile classes in college, LOL.

I know I said this wasn't an informative post, but I'll just quickly share the little I know about carpet.

Oscar's Carpet Facts and Tips: (take them with a grain of salt)

So basically, most carpet is made out of nylon, polyester or wool. There's a couple more options out there but those three are the most popular.


WOOL:

Wool is probably the most durable carpet out there as far as resilience. In other words, wool carpet retains it's "fluffiness" for many many years compared to nylon or polyester. The average life span of wool carpet is about 25 years! Wool also naturally resists oils and dirt which is great. The cons of wool carpet is #1 it's expensive. Also, even though wool carpet resists basic dirt and oils, it IS prone to mold and mildew, and prone to soaking up liquids. In other words, NO.  Even if it lasts you over 25 years, that wool carpet's gonna be dirty AF.

NYLON:

Nylon is a synthetic fiber which means its very durable. Between nylon and Polyester, Nylon is usually more resilient and will retain it's texture better than polyester. The drawbacks of nylon is that it's not naturally stain resistant BUT nylon carpet is usually treated with some anti-stain solution so you're probably good. Nylon can also discolor in the sun and I really don't know if they make sunscreen for carpets.


POLYESTER:

Out of the three, polyester carpet is usually (not always) the least expensive BUT that doesn't mean it's not as good. Polyester is inherently stain and dirt resistant so she's going to stay clean for a loooong time. Polyester is also softer than nylon and wool so it feels great under foot. The cons of polyester carpet is that even though it will significantly outperform wool and nylon in the stain resistance category, it's texture resistance is not better than nylon or wool. But there are other factors that can make some polyester carpets more durable than nylon like fiber density and twist. 

So there are my tips! Honestly these tips helped a little but really it seems like you can't go wrong with any carpet except wool, lol. All the carpets that we looked at had amazing 25 year and lifetime warranty on their texture retention, stain resistance and pet stain resistance (a big deal for our family) so I was pretty confident in having style be my guide :) My advice is to take into consideration the warranty that each carpet company and installation company has.


OK, let's talk style!

I've been envisioning a herringbone pattern carpet ever since I can remember so as soon as I found out we were going to need to change our carpet, I already had that in mind. Sean from Mission Restoration recommended we check out Rayo Wholesale Carpet in Santee as they have a huge selection so that's what we did and wow, Sean was right. It was actually a bit overwhelming at first, and I didn't really know where to start. So I did what I do best...just jump right in and start looking! My wife and I both wanted a pattern on the carpet and I wanted herringbone so we just started going through the store displays pulling out samples that we liked. We ended up with about 10 samples, then narrowed it down to about 4. Rayo Wholesale allowed us to borrow the samples and take them home so we could get a better idea as to how the carpet would look in our house. Out of the ones we took home, these 3 are the final contenders:




From left to right, the first one is a true herringbone style which I love. The second one kind of looks like it's woven and almost resembles wool carpeting and I really dig it's texture. The third one is a contemporary take on herringbone which is my wife's favorite out of the three. All three come in great, neutral color choices which is important to me because if we are going to pick a patterned carpet, it has to be neutral and have minimal contrast so it won't look too busy.

"Distinguished" by Masland. They have so many beautiful styles.


Love this contemporary take on herringbone by Shaw Floors called "Urban Design"



Another beautiful choice by Shaw Floors called "Tranquil Waters". What's not so beautiful..? My sneakers.


Out of the three I am really leaning towards "Distinguished"  by Masland and my wife is leaning towards "Urban Design" by Shaw Floors. Or do we go "safe' and choose tranquil waters? Because for some reason I'm a little nervous going with such a graphic pattern like herringbone in a whole second floor! I know that's what I've been wanting but since this is such a big commitment, it's making me nervous! What if the herringbone is too overwhelming?!

Let me know in the comments what you guys think we should go with. I'd love to hear your imput! I will let you know what we end up choosing soon! Also, like I promised, I will be working on my post on homeowners insurance tips so that will be up on the blog as well.

Take care!
Oscar






Monday, August 12, 2019

Restoring my Home after Water Damage


If you've been following my stories on Instagram then you probably remember that last month we had a leak upstairs which lead to our home being turned upside down. It was a fiasco for what I thought was just a simple leak. Let me either remind you or let you know what went down last month.

We have our water heater upstairs in the hallway inside a water heater closet. I know you're probably thinking why anyone would put a water heater upstairs and yeah I agree - it's a really dumb place to put one because water heaters leak! But, that's how all the homes in my neighborhood were built and I didn't really think anything of it when we first bought our home. Anyway, the water heater leaked and ended up damaging the carpet, some walls, the flooring upstairs and the ceiling downstairs. There were no gushes of water or anything...it was just a small leak that I think happened throughout the morning hours but it was enough water to really saturate the carpet upstairs and the wood in between the top and bottom floors.

Monday, July 29, 2019

An All-White Dinner Party


Monday, February 11, 2019

My Attempt at DIYing Fancy Sketch Art






FYI I changed my furniture layout again.

I get bored with my surroundings from time to time and when that happens I get the itch to go out and shop shop shop! But, unfortunately I can't really afford that and even if I could that would be very wasteful so instead of going on a shopping spree I use what I have and just move it all around. Not only is change therapeutic for me, it also helps me appreciate what I already have. Sometimes my plans of appreciating what I have backfires on me and I end up finding out that I “need” a few other things…like art.

I've been seeing a lot of figure sketches being hung up in homes and I really love how elegant and simple they look. I've been praying to the thrifting gods in hope of finding some vintage sketches for myself but unfortunately I haven't had any luck.

Wednesday, January 23, 2019

I Love My Stuff Too Much To Kiss Them Goodbye




While it seems like all of the world is de-cluttering their homes Marie Kondo style, I'm here celebrating the artistic approach to displaying and layering my treasures on almost every flat surface in my home. Don't get me wrong -I am most definitely not a fan of clutter and I totally understand what Marie Kondo is preaching with her famous KonMari method which in a nutshell is to only keep what we truly love. But what if you have a lot of love for a lot of things?