Guest Blogger: Kelly from A View Along The Way

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We're having a great start to our vacation! And I am so happy to have some guest bloggers who are graciously helping me out this week! Please welcome Kelly! I'm a huge fan of her blog and her style. Her office is amazing. Yay for Kelly! And if you pin any of her gorgeous pictures please please please go to Kelly's blog and pin from the original source!! Thank you!

Thanks so much for letting me crash your beautiful blog today, Jenny! Think of all of us when you're relaxing and vacationing! I'm Kelly and I blog at View Along the Way about DIY home decor projects, and how we're fixing up our gross ol' foreclosure to feel more like a home. It's not always pretty... and it's definitely not always easy... and it might never EVER be finished... but my blog is a little peek at the View Along the Way.
Here are a few projects we've taken on to try to make this crusty ol' place start to feel like ours. 1. DIY Upholstered Platform Bed and Headboard I saw this beauty over on Jonathan Adler's website and it was a measly $2500.

Yikes! That was over our budget by oh, about 90 percent. So we got to thinkin'...

and got to workin'...

and came up with this, for under $300.

I love that our bed was a project my husband and I made together. You can see the full DIY upholstered bed tutorial here.

2. Office Makeover. We have this room. This empty room.

After we bought the house, we removed the popcorn ceilings, added some crown moldings and new (DIY) hardwood floors, and left it this way. And it has sat there, empty for THREE AND A HALF YEARS, until we finally got to work making it functional for us. (Speediness is probably not our strong suit.) My handy husband built this built-in bookshelf wall:

And we JUST found this new (to us) desk from craiglist:

And now we finally have FUNCTION. I can tell you this for sure: function > no function. You can quote me on that. We still want to add some DIY lighting, a rug, art and window treatments, but I'm loving it so far.

3. DIY Curtains Let's just put it this way: no one has ever asked me to sew something for them. I am TERRIBLE and have not the slightest idea what I'm doing, ever. So my first attempt at DIY curtains was just to paint these pre-made panels I picked up:

(You can see the striped painted curtain tutorial here.) But then I started getting cocky. Started thinking that I would never have to buy curtains AGAAAAIN!! Because I learned how to sew a straight line, even if that "straight line" is not usually actually straight. So I got to work sewing these lined back-tab curtains for my master bedroom:

And then for my daughter's nursery:

I posted on how to sew lined back-tab curtain panels here. Are they perfect? No. Are they CLOSE to perfect? Um... also no. But they are functional, and they sure are cheaper than custom curtains! I'll take it! We still have a LOOONG way to go to make our house the way we envision it, but I'm having so much fun on the journey, and I hope you'll join me!

You can subscribe to the blog here, and follow me on facebook, twitter or pinterest. Hope to see ya over there!

Days of Chalk and Chocolate