Planning our beach vacation got us totally beach inspired. Check out our new decor around our house - lots of blues, whites and green. We even decorated our dream beach cottage. What can be more relaxing than the beach?
Kitchen table center piece
We love to rent cottages when we travel. We get the most privacy, access to nature and feel like home. Big resorts and crowded hotels are not for us. If we ever get our own beach cottage, it will reflect everything sea. Here is our dream beach cottage created using polyvore. 
Our mood boards.
Thank you so much Kinga for having me here on Blueloom. She's given me the opportunity to introduce myself and my blog.
My name is Ashli, and, I live in British Columbia Canada with my husband Lee and our little doggy Max. Our blog is Maillardville Manor, and it's about everything from Organizing, to Cleaning, to decorating, and everything in between. We are trying to make greener choices around the manor while still keeping everything stylish.
It hasn't been easy, not everything green is stylish and definitely not everything stylish is green.
We recently made some changes to our Mudroom, while they aren't particularly Eco-green, they are definitely Green:
Then we worked on the Bathroom
Followed by the Master Bedroom and Guest Bedroom
And most recently we completed work on our Living Room and Dining Room.
But the most popular room in our home, like in most homes, is the Kitchen. It's the most organized room in our house, and with a lot of blood sweat and tears we made it as close to our ideal as possible.
I couldn't give you a tour of the manor without including our Dog Max, he's the heart of this home.
I hope you enjoyed touring our home. Thanks so much to Kinga for hosting me here at Blueloom. And I hope she'll come over to The Maillardville Manor and maybe share her beautiful garden (seriously it doesn't get any more serene then that). ______________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Ashli M www.maillardvillemanor.com
We are thrilled to be back on The DIY Show Off blog. Roeshel, thanks so much for featuring our pond on your fantastic blog. We hope that your readers will enjoy it.
If you love all kinds of projects, renos, makeovers, crafts and everything creative, you need to visit Roeshel's blog.
Here are some pictures of our pond taken this summer.
We are looking for tips and ideas on what to do and see on Cape Cod. We booked a small beach cottage and will be going for our first Cape Cod vacation. Can't wait! So we did some research online and were happy to find out that Cape Cod ranked #1 in the top 10 National Seashores in US (Coastal Living).
I guess we picked the right spot. We heard from people who vacation there every year for many years now and always come back happy. After a busy and hot summer, we need a quiet getaway, just the two of us and the beach. We don't need the heat, just some nice coastal breeze will be fine.
If you live in the area or have been to Cape Cod, we would love to hear from you. Did you visit Martha's Vineyard and Nantucket? Did you go antique shopping?
Thanks
We had some unusual visitors this summer. It started with the bird nest right above the front door. We noticed it one morning on our way to work. Joe decided to build a support for the nest and the mom bird was quite happy raising her family here for a while. Once she was gone, we removed the empty nest.
Our blog received 5 spam comments today, so you can imagine the surprise we got going through the emails that one of them was not a spam! It was an award! Wow! Thanks Childfree Chic! We are honored.
Check out Childfree Chic blog and her amazing kitchen reno.
Third on The Right
- We met in university and moved in together 9 months later, got married 4 years later and will celebrate 10th wedding anniversary next year.
- We don't have kids or pets, just the house and garden to look after.
- English is our second language, so we apologize if you are confused reading our blog sometimes.
- Kinga got her driving license when she was 30!
- We are in our mid 30s.
- We got addicted to home renovations and everything domestic when we bought our first house 5 years ago.
- Kinga loves red wine, Joe prefers beer.
When we bought our house, we knew we had to do something about the ugly kitchen from the 70s. We didn't want to spend thousands of dollars on a complete renovation, so we decided to do it ourselves. Total kitchen reno took us more than 2 years (working mostly on weekends) but we saved a lot of money.
KITCHEN BEFORE
Here is our original 1975 kitchen
KITCHEN AFTER
New 2010 kitchen
The biggest project was to restore the existing cabinets. We were lucky they are solid maple, so we were able to send them and apply white paint. It's the only reason we decided to do the kitchen ourselves because the biggest saving was on cabinets. Check our original post here. Money saved on cabinets allowed us to hire contractors to instal spanish tile floor and new windows.
- restored kitchen cabinets and replaced hardware
- installed the back splash
- installed new countertop
- replaced all light fixtures and added two new ones above the sink
- removed one kitchen cabinet and installed a dishwasher (originaly there was no dishwasher in our kitchen). We also built the new cabinet for the dishwasher
- replaced the old trim
- replaced electrical switches
- removed wallpaper
- painted the kitchen
We came across many great kitchen diy's posted on blogs and other websites and most homeowners admit, kitchen reno is very time consuming and can be exhausting, but the money saved makes it all worth it.
Are you thinking about renovating your kitchen?
We love sinamay. It's so easy to work with and you can get really creative. It works great with outdoor or indoor decor. We talked about sinamay a while ago. You can find the original post here.
Today, we just wanted to show you our summer planter. There are some good deals out there right now, so we got this ivy planter for $10 and just added sinamay. Another simple and inexpensive project.
Don't you love simple and inexpensive projects? One of the walls in the laundry room was totally empty and did't look inviting, so we installed two simple shelves for extra storage. We picked up two white shelves and simple hardware from Lowes (look for them in the storage section of your local hardware store). The entire project was quick, simple and the best part was the price. We spent only $20.
The same storage idea works great in mudrooms, kids rooms and even garage, so get creative. You can also install more than two shelves. We love our new simple storage.
The only thing missing is the "laundry" sign...
If your flower beds start to look tired and get a lot of weeds, you can quickly and easily improve their look and eliminate weeds! Here is how. Buy mulch in your favorite color. We couldn't find brown mulch this year, so decided to go with red. This time of year mulch is on sale in many gardening centers, so you may save some money. Most nurseries charge more at the beginning of summer, so now it's a good time to look for deals on mulch and other gardening supplies. So, this was our flower bed before. The old mulch was from 2 years ago and it lost its color.
Remove the old mulch if you had it and of course all the weeds. Rake the soil really well. If you do it after the rain, the ground will not be as dry. Get landscaping fabric which protects weeds from growing but it lets water through. Apply it around your shrubs or trees.
Most landscaping fabrics will last 5 years, so can you imagine the freedom you will get by getting rid of weeds! Put top soil on top and then apply mulch.
Mulch works great in gardening, it makes your flower beds look good, keeps the moisture in, so you don't have to water as much. Our flower bed got a quick makeover and it looks like this right now. Let's just hope weeds are gone for good!
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