My New Favourite Painting!

I am always on the hunt for gorgeous artwork to fill our home with. Oil paintings and sketches are my two favorite styles and I'm so excited to share my most recent addition to my collection! Nathaniel, my very own king of surprises, picked me up this amazing oil painting when we were home in Victoria~

The artist's name is Yves Gosselin and he is the father of one of Nathaniel's best friends. He is amazingly talented and I WISH he had a website of some sort so I could let everyone see his other pieces he has for sale. He is so humble and although he has been featured at the Victoria Art Gallery he still only sells out of his home and by word of mouth. He has many beautiful ship, ocean, and beach paintings as well as other scenery too.

Nathaniel was so sweet, he even surprised my sister with one too which you can see here!

I definitely want one of his gorgeous beach scenes too! As well as one with waves crashing on rocks! His ocean colours and stormy skies just bring so much emotion to me every time I look at my pretty painting!

If anyone is interested in seeing his collection of beautiful oil paintings or would like to buy one please contact me and I will put you in touch with Yves. And in the meantime BOTH Nathaniel and I are going to bug him until he makes a website so everyone can marvel at his talents! OR at the very least help him create an etsy shop!

Cane Table Transformation

Just yesterday I posted a preview of a few furniture transformations I have up my sleeve...well here's that sweet little cane end table with soooo much potential! Jessica actually picked this guy up for me a few weeks before our visit! She KNEW I would love it....love is an understatement here...

I almost went with a shade of grey on this guy...but at the last moment I decided on a sweet cream.

It's just the right size to hold a few books beside the couch.

I love the carved rings on the little legs and the cane top adds so much interest to such a small table.

Just a little distressing around the edges and legs makes it look like it's been loved for years (and I'm sure it has been).

 

Just one more piece of furniture I hope I can find room for :)

Back to the Daily Grind

Well life is pretty much back to normal for us over here. And I'm not complaining :) After 7 months of lonely worry filled days I'm welcoming as much normalcy as possible!! We are both back at work and although we do feel a little blue that the holidays are over, we have so much fun ahead of us this summer and I am itching to post about all my latest furniture transformations! But one thing is FOR SURE...we miss home already!

Being home was just what we needed! Sometimes I wish the days were longer!

Here are the last few pictures of our visit home...the view from my Dad's house made me want to wake up extra early so I could take it all in!

Dad and Leah you two are a couple of lucky ducks!

Jess had a hay day painting with the air compressor...and of course when she found out I was taking some photos she had to strike a pose LOL!

Here's a sneak peek at a few of the items I painted and brought back in our truck!

Hmmm I may need Holly's help on recovering this one HEE HEE!

I will MAKE ROOM for this one in our home...

I can't wait to show you what we've done to these beauties!! Have a great weekend everyone!!

Sunshine on a Cloudy Day

Rachel over at Rachel Pink Pants has given me the Sunshine Award! I just wanted to say a big thank you to Rachel!!! If you haven't checked her blog out yet you must! I am in love with her recent kitchen post where she made some adorable artwork and put it to good use in her kitchen covering up an unsightly hole! So creative and inspiring! And I LOVE that chalkboard above the stove...what a perfect place to write what's on the Menu for dinner!
So here are the rules for this award:


1. Thank the blogger who gave it to you.
2. List 7 things that people may not know about you.
3. Pass the love to other deserving bloggers that you have discovered recently.
4. Let them know that you gave them an award


OK HERE GOES :)...7 things you may not know about me...


1. I've been married longer than ANYONE in my immediate family LOL :)


2. I have wanted to own my own business for as long as I can remember


3. I don't like change...staying true to my Taurus nature


4. My favorite TV show is True Blood...Nathaniel loves it too!


5. I have REALLY relentlessly curly (thin) hair that I straighten every day!

6. I had the worst acne you could imagine as a teen...If anyone knows what it's like to have the dreaded teenage pizza face it's ME...and there's hardly a pic from the 90's I can look at without remembering what it was like. Thank goodness for all the help and treatments available today!


7. If I had a ton of money I would have a rescue retreat for abandoned animals!


I would like to pass on the award to three of my new favorite blogs:


Jessica at Sea to My Heart
Melanie at The Frosted Gardner
Londen at Sixty-Fifth Avenue




If you haven't checked these awesome blogs out yet I totally recommend! And thanks again Rachel for the awesome award!!

Creamy Bluish Coffee Table

I realised the other day when I posted about my Mom's two end tables that I had forgotten to mention she also has the matching coffee table... and we made this guy over too! Currently my Mom doesn't have a whole lot of room in her house because my Grandparents live with her so she can look after them instead of them going to an 'Old Folk's Home'...which I think is pretty nice of her. So she made the sacrifice to put all her own furniture in storage so my Grandparents could move their own stuff in and feel at HOME :)

Here is what my Mom's coffee table looks like now and I'm hoping that my Grandparent's see how pretty it looks with their chairs and let it STAY rather than putting it back in storage :)

I know my Mom had a great time watching her furniture come to life again after spending so many years in the attic. She has some pretty good plans for this table...she showed me all her magazine clippings and her design ideas for the rooms of her house...which will one day be all her own again...

We went with a creamy bluish white for the coffee table which is just ever so slightly different from the end tables...

I think my Grandma enjoyed watching someone love her old books as much as she does...She's had some of them for over 80 years!

I hope everyone's having a fabulous week!

House Tour...Nantucket Style!

Everyone likes a good house tour now and then, right?? Well the other day while in Victoria we went over to my Aunt and Uncle's house for a salmon BBQ dinner (actually my Dad and Uncle caught the fish on a recent fishing retreat they had gone on a few days before). It was nice because nearly everyone on my Dad's side of the family lives in Victoria so we were able to see them all, it was almost like a family reunion!

My Aunt and Uncle live in one of my all time favorite houses and I only WISH I had before pictures because they originally bought this place for the property and not the very small fixer-upper home that existed. Shortly after they bought the place they tore it down to the bare bones and built a new dream home onto it! It was actually featured a few years ago in a local magazine...wish I could remember the name of it off the top of my head!

My Aunt did have some help from a local architect with the design but she has amazing taste and I know the Cape-Cod/Nantucket style was all her idea! It's like East Coast meets West Coast!

I kinda sprung it on my Aunt that I was taking some pictures for my blog and so she didn't have any time to tidy... so I kept the photo tour short and limited it to only a few of my favorite rooms...although they are all beautiful!

I love their painted risers and the huge round knobs on the railing!

I dream about a home one day with tons of windows and light like these ones!

I love the nautical style in their home...very East Coast! Their home is filled with galley windows and the smell of ocean air!

I'm even in love with their door LOL

The round and oval windows are my favorite!

Heck I'd even settle on living in their garage :)

As if I could love their home even more??? Well take a look at what's across the street...

Yes, they own a little piece of the perfect view :)

I hope you enjoyed looking at their home and their style!

Postcard From Home

We had so much fun painting these past few days and we couldn't have asked for better weather!!! Especially considering rain is the typical forecast in Victoria! We had 5 days in a row of gorgeous blue sky!!!

Besides painting a few of our own furniture items, my mom had asked if we could paint a few of hers too! She had two of these pretty end tables since Jess and I were small and I couldn't wait to colour them white!!!

Here is what they looked like after a little white LOVE! And I must admit how much I loved getting to play with my Mom and Grandma's antiques again.

The paint colour we used was a white with a hint of pale turquoise! We decided to just lightly distress these guys too!

I just LOVE the lines on these pretty tables and the light paint just made them so much prettier!

I feel kinda bad admitting this but I actually tried to convince my Mom to give these to me LOL...I'm glad she insisted on keeping them though...I can go find my own!!! The hunt is half the fun!

I hope everyone had a super fun weekend!

Journey Home

This week Nathaniel and I took a much needed trip back home to Victoria. We decided to take the truck and drive the 15 hour journey so that I could take along my air compressor and a few other items that could never fit in our carry-on if we flew (although the flight would have only taken us just over an hour to get home).

The drive from Edmonton to Victoria is beautiful and it reminds me how pretty this country is. These are a few pictures of the scenery we saw as we drove through Jasper...

This guy was HUGE! I'm amazed at all the wildlife we saw on our drive. We saw Elk, Rams, and even a young black bear! I only wish I got a photo of the black bear but he crossed the road as we were driving in an area where there was no place to pull over.

This guy was a major daredevil walking down the road in the oncoming traffic lane....we drove very slowly beside him so traffic would notice and he eventually left road!

I know I'm in Victoria when I can smell the ocean, my heart starts beating faster, and I feel at home again...

It's beauty still amazes me...and each time I come home I grow more and more in love with this place...

I can't wait to share more of our trip home. We were SUPPOSED to leave today to come back to Edmonton but our house sitters were so very kind and said we could stay a few more days! Victoria is overflowing with Antiques and so Jess and I did a marathon of furniture transformations and I'm over the moon with how they turned out! Let's just say when we do drive home our truck is going to be full to the brim with new treasures!