I've spent the last week painting endless white. I painted all the baseboards in the main room and the front balcony doors. I also painted the gold hinges white so they would blend in more. We bought a new door knob and lock to match the rest of the house. However, the lock didn't fit, so in the meantime the gold lock is still in place. Hopefully we will get rid of it soon, and then we will be gold free in the living room.

I also painted the window trim white, it looks a lot fresher now. It will look nice and crisp once the walls are all painted too. Now, I am painting all the baseboards and closet doors in the downstairs office. I'm trying to fix that room up a bit, as I am going to be moving my office down there, and my current office will become baby's room.

Staying with the white theme, we bought these posters and frames for the nursery. They are going to hang side by side over our baby's crib. We are slowly starting to plan out the nursery, so exciting!

We have finally finished the fireplace! We still have to paint the back wall, change the tiles in front of the fireplace, and of course add the shelves. But the fireplace part is finished. I'm really liking it. The fireplace very striking, and it's the first thing you see when you come up the stairs. This room has gone from early 19th century to sleek modern!

Now we need an amazing art piece for the wall. Maybe something bright and colourful. Here is how the fireplace looked before we started and how it looks now. Quite a change! 

I was asked by my friend Meghan, over at Jaunt and Flaunt, to be a guest blogger. I posted about my home city Ottawa! 

Intro:
I know it quite well, and spent many days wandering about and learning all its little, secret spots. My parents still live here, although no longer in the suburban home I grew up in, but in an awesome condo right in the centre of downtown. We try to visit at least a few times a year, and I’m still learning of new spots through my parents’ newest discoveries.

Check out more from the post at Meghan's blog Jaunt and Flaunt! 

Every once in awhile we have been working on organizing our garage. It started out filled up with so much stuff. Most of it we wanted to get rid of for either garbage or give-away. Unfortunately, I forgot to take a picture at the beginning, but here is process part way through. The future plan is to create a storage area and a workshop, as well still having room for our car.

The house came with a bunch of shelves, some are in rough shape. We are planning on moving some of the white bookcases from inside the house and using them out here. Everything in the photo below is going to the dump (minus our garbage bins of course)!

The following weekend we managed to get to the dump, so this corner is now empty and ready for adding some of the white bookcases. So much more space now!

This past weekend, we set up a bunch of the white bookcases along the corner, and moved all the tools from inside on to them. I think they look a lot nicer and they are more convenient for finding things. Plus, it has given us a place for the endless white shelves in our house. 

We set up a temporary workshop to build the shelves for the upstairs living room beside the new fireplace. It's a pretty ghetto workstation, but it's working well for now. Eventually we are going to get rid of the metal shelves, seen in the photo below, and set up a proper work table and saw. Until then, at least the garage is cleaner and more organized than before. 

A good friend of mine and fellow blogger, Meghan, lives all the way over in Australia. She's from Canada, but has traveled and lived all over the world. If you are interested in travel check out her awesome travel blog, Jaunt and Flaunt! 

Meghan is currently living in a Queenslander house, which is a type of dwelling named after the area her and her boyfriend live in Australia. It's very different then the type of houses we commonly see over in this part of the world, as they are raised up on wooden pillars. So neat! I would love to visit over there one day! 

From Meghan:

Since I live away from many of my family and friends, I thought it would be nice to give everyone an idea of my home. A lot of these people have not had the chance to visit, but I hope these photographs can give you a glimpse into my home while living abroad. But let me give you a bit of background.

Our house is over 100 years old (ghosts included) and is of the traditional Queenslander type. Queenslander houses are named after where they are found, in Queensland. Essentially, these are timber houses built on stilts (or stumps), allowing the cool air to pass through underneath, I guess it can be considered a pioneers air conditioner. Along with that technique of cooling, breezeways above doors are also characteristics of Queenslanders. My boyfriend calls these houses wooden tents, which is essentially true, as there is no insulation. Did I mention sound proofing is non-existent, which comes in handy when my boyfriend is “undathahouse” (aka under-the-house) working out and I need something from our deep freezer down there. I just stand over where I think he is and yell down.

Our house in particular is a worker’s cottage, as it is one of the smaller Queenslanders built with cheaper material. However, some Queenslanders can resemble villas. Another feature of these houses is the porches, which wrap around, acting as an extra room. To give you an idea, we just repaired the old pipe used to release the gases of the outhouse on the back porch. Don’t worry, all that is left now is a covered hole in the roof. Houses constantly move with the change in weather, some days we can’t shut doors, other days we might be hit with a bought of motion sickness as the floor slopes. The ultimate answer to all of this is, “the joys of living in a Queenslander”.

For more amazing photos and description check out A Queenslander House Tour! 

Erik Olovsson and Kyuhyung Cho have designed the ROOM Collection, a shelving system with stackable blocks. I like how versatile these block are, so that you can create almost any shape or size you need. View more images at Contemporist. 

Description from Contemporist:

When it comes to furniture, people are used to placing a object within a square space. While it is common to use a square form to arrange an object, Erik and Kyuhyung were interested in diversifying the relationship between object and space to create furniture as rooms for objects. The focus was to explore the mix-and-match quality of the ensemble in our spaces from a graphical approach.

ROOM collection is a furniture system with 25 stackable blocks and a low table with various geometric voids inspired by architecture and the objects they can hold. When all the elements of ROOM are combined it forms either a long shelf or a tall cabinet with a variety of different graphical compositions. ROOM allows each user to pick their favorite elements to build up your own composition as a shelf, a table or just as a sculpture.

Well, we finally finished painting the railing! It took a long time, and a lot of tedious work, but we are officially done. I'm quite happy with the result, the railing looks a lot more dramatic. It stands out as a main feature, which is what we were hoping as it is the centre of our house. 

We had our big mid pregnancy ultrasound today, where they measure everything. We won't know the results for another week or so, but they did tell us the baby's gender! 

We found out it's a GIRL! So exciting, we can now talk about our baby as a she. It was getting hard to say it or the baby all the time. The ultrasound tech didn't want to say for sure, since the baby's position wasn't ideal, but she said it would have been more obvious if it was a boy. 

We are so excited! She is starting to kick lots too, she's quite the mover!

Alessandro Zambelli has designed a wooden table lamp named Woodspot. I like the geometric shape of these lamps and the fun colours. They almost look alive and have their own personalities. 

About:
“Woodspot” by Alessandro Zambelli: visionary synthesis of material, light and shade.

“The Empire of Light” is all about light and its power. Shadows and reflections, darkness and sudden flashes stretch the imagination to its most surreal limit. Magritte’s visionary genius also offers the starting point for our latest design story. Alessandro Zambelli has conceived “Woodspot” for Mantua-based furnisher Seletti. The item is one of the previews of the Mantua-based company’s presence at the next edition of Maison et Objet, scheduled for 5 to 9 September 2014.

Zambelli’s new work is a table lamp assembled and varnished entirely by hand. Joined to the moulded support are a base and a light diffuser, both in pine with a natural finish. The diffuser itself is available in ivory white, flesh pink or pastel green. The base rests at an angle, like the prop of a photo frame. It supports a light diffuser with the unexpected look of a three-dimensional frame, projected to the boundary of unreality. The object’s highly unusual profile stands out. This is an iconic shape, which imposes itself on space. The emerging beam lightens the solid materiality of the wood and casts a warm and compact pool of light in the surrounding darkness. It may seem a figment of the imagination, yet it remains firmly anchored in a quintessentially material reality.

While we were picking up our dining chairs, we spotted the perfect coffee table for our new modern living room. It has three squares that swivel so you can put it into any shape. Pretty fun!