‘Canadian Bloggers Home Tour’: Our House!

Kerri

10 years ago

This post was most recently updated on September 23rd, 2019

Hello my pretties! Today is a fun day around here! It’s ‘Day 2’ of the Canadian Bloggers Home Tours, and that means you’re invited to our home for a little tour.

If you’ve been around awhile, thanks for coming back today, and I promise you that I have some new things for you to see. If you’re new here, welcome to A Pop of Pretty! I’m a home decor blogger from Newfoundland, Canada – which is as far east as you can go in North America without stepping into the Atlantic Ocean. It’s an incredibly beautiful and inspiring place to live. I’m a lifelong home decorating enthusiast, and my blog is all about finding ‘the pretty’ in an every day home.

Shannon from AKA Design + Life and Christina from The DIY Mommy have teamed up to host a mega-tour of 18 Canadian bloggers homes all this week. You can find the full list of Canadian bloggers involved in the project with links, by day, at the end of this post! You can also drop by Shannon and Christina’s blogs any time to get all the deets.

But first: A word about ‘home tours’: This is just a fancy word for “we’ve cleaned up for y’all”. My home doesn’t always look this neat. On last count, we had 3 kids (including twin boy pre-schoolers – need I say more?), 1 geriatric dog, and 1 puppy….which, if you do the math, means 30 sticky fingers + 8 muddy paws + a whole lot of craziness. So I beg of you, don’t go on this home tour or any the other 17 Canadian bloggers and say, “Sheez whiz, my house NEVER looks like this!” Because, frankly, mine doesn’t either! It’s just a special day today because I was having guests. Yes, silly, that’s you!

OK, enough with the disclaimers. On with the tour! Feel free to pin, share, tweet and like away!

You’ll quickly see that I’m coo-coo about blue. I love blue because it’s soothing and it pairs well with neutrals and so many other colours. On our open concept main floor, we have a palette of neutrals with hits of blue and a little sparkle here and there with crystal chandeliers and metallic accessories. Our Living Room / Piano Room is the only ‘fancy’ room in our home. Oh, and by fancy, I mean it’s where I dump the big pile of laundry for folding that I never get back to, and where the kids wait for the school bus every morning. Yup, fancy.

I’m a huge fan of wall art and gallery arrangements, and I’m always switching things up and around. This is how our entry hall looks right now. I love a little whimsy here and there – and hello, I HAD to have that print of the eye glasses. Cute, yes? Both our 4-year old twin boys now wear glasses (and so does their Dad), so it’s a fun little tribute to them!

Our entry hall opens up to our open concept kitchen which has white cabinets, grey walls, and a sea glass backsplash. The kitchen island is where you’ll find us pretty much all the time, doing everything from homework to crafts to eating PB&J sandwiches – or, apparently grapes and french bread when we want to look tres chic ;-).

We don’t have a formal dining room; the dining area is adjacent to the kitchen island. When we built this house, I thought separate dining rooms were extravagant and frou-frou. Silly me. These days, I’m sold on the idea, perhaps because our one and only table is now a landing place for bills and crayons and hair bows and remote-control robots. Oh how I’d love a room where you can close doors, and keep it all pretty and guesty-like!

Our Kitchen /Dining Area opens up to our Family Room where we watch TV and hang out – when we’re not at the kitchen island!. The big ottoman in this room is usually covered in a traffic jam of Disney Cars and Hot Wheels. We use giant baskets (from Target) to store the kids’ things ~~when my head is about to blow because I just can’t take the clutter anymore~~ (<– oops!)

A big leather sectional might not be the prettiest (it’s a beast), but it’s so practical and cozy with 3 kids and 2 dogs.

Dark leather furniture can make a room feel cold. So I’ve softened things up with a soft-textured floral rug, and a chair covered in light seersucker fabric. The textured grasscloth-style wallpaper on one of the walls also helps to balance the leather.

My fireplace mantel is in this room, and if you follow my blog, you probably know that it’s my decorating muse. I love to decorate it seasonally. Here’s how it looked earlier this summer, inspired by the beach. (If you’d like to see how it has looked throughout an entire year, you might like the post My Year in Mantel Decorating: 2013 {Mantel Decorating Ideas}.)

In addition to the mantel, I also like to play around with bedding and textures in the master bedroom, depending on the season. This is how it looked last Winter when I wallpapered that feature wall behind the bed.

And, here’s how it looks for summer, with some hits of chartreuse and aqua.

Not everything in our home is neutral or blue, I promise!

I actually LOVE bright pops of colour, and you’ll find lots of it in our kids’ rooms and in our basement TV room/playroom.

We recently re-decorated our twin boys’ room when they moved to ‘big’ beds. The room has lots of bright green and aqua, including big fun horizontal wall stripes. (See How to paint wall stripes). If you’re interested in seeing more of their room makeover than what I’ve shown here, pop over to the full post here: Travel-Inspired Boys Bedroom (Shared Bedroom / Twins).

Our basement family room was designed for our kids, so it’s very casual and has lots of fun pops of colour.

There’s more rooms to show you, but perhaps I’ll save that for another time. After all, you need to save some time to visit the other Canadian bloggers scheduled for today…the awesome Rambling Renovators, Craftberrry Bush and Elliven Studio (just click the links below under ‘Tuesday’)! I hope you enjoyed the tour!

If you’re new here, I’d love to see you again! You can follow me on Facebook or Instagram, or sign up to receive notification of my blog posts by e-mail.