Making A Rental Feel Like Home: Living Room

As you all know, we moved to Denver in June of 2017 and started renting our 1,000 sq ft 2 bedroom 1 bathroom home just 15 minutes from downtown Denver. You can check out more of our entire process here from when we first moved to the area and picked a home.

Now, since then, we've been fortunate enough to be able to work on different elements of the home to make it more "homey" and somewhere we feel like we could be awhile. We already talked about the kitchen and dining areathe master bedroom and lone bathroom, and if you've been following along with the blog we are currently working on converting the second bedroom that was once the guest room and office to the nursery (with tiny corner office area!) through the One Room Challenge. So far it's going well! Check out the week one progress week two, and week three!

The only place we haven't talked about much is the living room space. Here is a reminder of what it looked like when we walked through it the first time last May:




A pretty great space with room for larger sized furniture and to have a bunch of people over. Something that we definitely enjoy being able to do!

Let's talk about what we did to take this peanut butter living room and transform it into something more cozy and that reflected our style. Thank goodness for our amazing landlord who has a lot of faith and trust in us!


Nursery: Furniture & Progress- ORC Week 3

We had an incredible time over the weekend finding out the gender of our little human on their way to join us in this world (we're down to about 16 weeks! Which is still awhile... but... ya know.) and in case you missed it check it out from Monday's post here! It was so special and his brother made this awesome art piece for him to keep forever.

Knowing the gender definitely has helped us solidify our ideas for what we want to do for our little guy's nursery. Ready for week three of the One Room Challenge?




On last week's post we talked about some of the things that we needed to do to get this room "done." Here's a reminder of the list:

To-Do & Shopping List:
  • Lighter paint color
  • Better curtains (but with black out for more baby sleeps)
  • Rug
  • Paint crib
  • Rest of the furniture
  • Organization and storage options
  • Changing station assembled
  • Lamps/lighting
  • Assemble crib 
  • Wall art
  • Organize closet
  • Accessories
  • Name art
  • Chair
  • Pouf/footstool- hoping for this one from my registry!
  • Smaller desk- likely this one from IKEA because we have a $50.00 gift card and it will adjust for when the baby grows up a bit and needs a little coloring desk or something. 

Backyard Gender Reveal Party

We have finally discovered the gender of our baby! It was a really long 22 weeks of not knowing what was going on up in there. We were able to put our Gender Reveal Party on my birthday weekend which was kind of a fun combination! We had a lot of wonderful friends and family that joined us for the weekend!

Since it was a small get together, about 20 people, we decided to keep the festivities small and pretty tame. We used our chalkboard collection and some dollar store tassel banners to decorate. Otherwise, the reveal image was the star of the show! I'll show you that later in this post. It was really awesome.


I am notorious amongst my students for my absolutely love of all things Little Mermaid and Brennan is well known for loving his Dallas Cowboy football team. So we decided to have our party inspired by that. As folks came in for the party we asked them to cast their vote for the gender using paint chips and throwing them in the basket.



Total count for Cowboy: 17. Mermaid: 12.