New chairs

During our recent trip to Edmonton, we bought new dining room chairs. They're white and I dig them in a big way:

They're called Erland chairs (from IKEA...of course). They really lighten up the dining room area overall and I like the contrast of the white chairs with our black-brown table (it's a Bjursta from IKEA if you're wondering).

The chairs are a molded plastic and have bit of flex to the them so you can rock back a little. They're sort of matte on the front side and glossier on the back. I also like their sexy curve, which you can see in this pic:

Oh yeah! You may not have noticed, but I switched out the curtains as well. They're the curtains that were in the spare room. And yep, they're from IKEA too (they're Hedda Blad). Not everything in my house is from IKEA, but a whole lot is!

Art for the bathroom

We checked another thing off of our to-do list! This morning we finished hanging some frames in the 2-piece bathroom. So now there are the fancy new glass shelves AND cute little frames in this tiny room. Sweet stuff! It was tricky to take a good pic so you can see what they look like but here's one on an angle:

All IKEA, of course. I had bought these little art cards ages ago but had never put them up because I had a bit of an issue with frames. I had originally bought 4 of these RIBBA 5 x 7 frames for another project that never happened, but I needed 5 frames in order to hang all of these pretty little art cards. I got my hands on another one (thanks Steph!) but it turned out to have a different finish and the matte was a different colour. So I got crafty. I bought some acrylic paint at Michael's and painted all of it! As you can probably guess, I painted the mattes white and the frames black. I used a small roller for the mattes and a foam brush for the frames. I think they turned out pretty well...at least they're more cohesive even if they're not perfect!

Don't rub your eyes...this pic seems somewhat blurry...but it gives you an idea of what the pics look like straight on as you go through the door:

We (by we, I mean Dave) used those handy little 3M adhesive velcro picture hangers. We've used them quite a few times now for smaller pictures and they work great.

So now I have another sweet little homage to beautiful Sweden. Every room should have one!

Shelves for the bathroom

We were on a trip to Edmonton recently and of course we went to one of my favourite stores in the world. You know I mean IKEA, right? Well, we bought a few things (by a few, I mean a lot). We got these great glass shelves for our 2-piece bathroom:

They're called GRUNDTAL glass shelves and the ones we got are only 12 cm deep (and 60 cm long) so they're perfect for our little bathroom on the main floor. They were only $19.99 each...so cheap compared to what we saw at big box stores in our area. So many of the glass shelves we've seen before had really tacky looking brackets but I love these simple ones. Dave hung them up with no problems and they look great! Yay IKEA! (And yay Dave!)