Hi Y’all! Happy Monday!! Today I’m so giddy to introduce to y’all a new feature that I’ll be bringing to the Emma Loo Blog from here on out! I’m going to try (try my hardest, that’s for sure!) to post to the blog EVERY Monday for what I’m going to call “Marriage Mondays”.  I’ll be posting everything from living the Newlywed life to personal things like our adventures, our house updates, and a little bit of everything having to deal with our everyday life.

In a way, I wanted y’all to get a little bit more insight on who “Emma Loo” really is and share some of my life moments with you! (I feel like I’m saying that whole spiel  of “True Life….you think you know…but you have no idea” Hehe!) So things may get a little personal here and I may or may not break out some of my sappiness to y’all every now and then.  It’s a place where I’ll be sharing date night ideas, my latest decorating trends that I’m obsessed over, or possibly sharing some of my favorite kitchen recipes as I’m trying my hand at this whole “domestic housewife” thing.

SO…for the VERY first “Marriage Monday” blog post, I thought I’d share with y’all just a little update on one of the places that I love the most — our home! We’ve been working extra hard since we’ve moved in after our wedding to make our house feel more like a home.  We’ve been hanging picture after picture, rearranging furniture, picking out window treatments and don’t even get me started on my love affair I have with a gallery wall.  I’m working on getting our house renovation blog posts pulled over from my other site (heytherehinson.com) so y’all can see the infamous “Before & Afters” of the house transformation…but for now, here’s just a quick little updates of what we’ve been doing inside the house! We’ll start in what JoAnna Gaines calls “the heart of the home” — the kitchen.

Our kitchen is SMALL and where it lacks in size…it ALSO lacks in natural light.  The wild woman in me wants to take a sledgehammer and bust out a couple walls and do the whole demo-thing (it looks like so much fun on TV!) and open up our kitchen and make it bigger.  We’ll get to all that one of these days.

As for our kitchen updates: I chalk-painted the kitchen table, but then realized how much time & work (& coats of paint!) it was going to take to paint the chairs….so I’m currently in the market for some new-to-me ones.  I’m thinking a simple cafe chair or upholstered ones.

I found this really cool wooden box thingamagig at Hobby Lobby on super-super sale.  I honestly didn’t know what to put in it, but soon figured that coffee mugs would fit perfectly and ever since, I have started quite the collection!

Now, onto our front formal living area. I decided to move a bookcase in this space and just “try it out” for right now. I don’t know if I’m in love with the bookcase right now, but it sure beats having to buy & build custom built-ins! 

In our den, which is the room we’re in the most…I moved a pair of bookcases which were cluttered and just an eye sore and an IKEA media cabinet which I didn’t really care for.  We moved everything into new rooms and put the media cabinet away in storage.  I then moved my 6-foot long white dresser out into our den and sat our TV on top of it.  We even took out a drawer to put our media consoles in.  We bought one of those CD binders for all of our DVDs and stored them away in one of the drawers.  There is SO much room to store everything TV-related and make everything out of sight.  With such a small space in our den, I was happy to make everything more simple next to our TV, clear out some of the messy-looking clutter in the room, and now the room feels a lot bigger.  We’re currently shopping for a new flat panel TV to hang on our wall, so until then, I’m not going to even worry about decorating around the TV.  Do y’all have any suggestions for TV brands? We’ve just been going to stores and looking at which TV looks the best on the floor. We need all the help we can get.

Our bedroom is my oasis in our house.  I just love our master bedroom and it makes my happy every time I go in it.  As for the updates to our bedroom, we’ve hung three of our wedding pictures in 16×20 frames above our bed.  I found these frames at Belk’s back in the late summertime at $6 a piece! I had to buy them!
When I moved the dresser that was originally in my bedroom into the den for the TV center, I needed to find something else to store my clothes, as well as provide storage for my jewelry AND we wanted to have a TV in our bedroom to watch only movies on. (We decided against cable in our bedroom, that way we don’t watch TV in our bed too much!) So I moved one of our bookcases that was originally in the den into our bedroom, put one of our older TV’s on it, and stored my jewelry and other important things.  I also found a huge 5-drawer dresser at The Southern Marketplace in Indian Trail, and it was for a great price of only $200! I brought the dresser home with me and couldn’t have been happier! I just LOVE it because it looks great AND it stores everything WITH space leftover!! A whole drawer left over! On top of the new dresser (which reminds me of the dresser in ‘Beauty and the Beast’ doesn’t it?!) I placed our Hinson sign that Phillip gave me as part of my wedding gift, a couple sticks of cotton which I got while on Jen+Eric’s engagement session, and a vintage alarm clock.  

Inside our guest bedroom, I decided to hang an old schoolhouse blackboard and wrote “be our guest” in cursive on the board…(going along with the ‘Beauty and the Beast’ theme, I guess!) The curtains were a gift from the previous owner (I had fallen in love with them while doing a walk-thru before we bought the house!) and the bed was my old bedroom furniture.  I simply adore this room & I love how bright and cheery this room is!

For our master bathroom, I bought this shelf unit from The Southern Marketplace and hung it over our toilet.  It stores hand towels, wash cloths, and toilet paper.  I even decided to display some of the original 1960’s wallpaper that was in the bathroom when we bought the house.  Although we didn’t keep the wallpaper up (…it had glitter on the wallpaper, y’all) I wanted to pay homage to the original bathroom decor, so it’s framed and in its rightful place.

As for my home office, the space that I’m in 85% of the day…it keeps morphing about once a month.  I change this out or move this around…it’s a never-ending process.  I love my office! Only thing I want to do eventually is reupholster the chairs that are in there and organize the closet better so that I can have more storage space and room to do my arts & crafts inside the closet.  For now though, I’m super happy with the way the office has turned out! It’s my happy place!

I always get emails and questions about two main things in my office: 1.) the monogrammed chair and 2.) the lamp.  Well, for starters, the monogrammed chair is just a white leather chair I picked up from Office Max and stuck a large 8″ vinyl monogram sticker on the chair.  It hasn’t come off or even started peeling once…so far so good.  The brass lamp was a Goodwill find, and believe me, I ALWAYS see brass lamps at “The GW”.  I bought this particular one for $4.99 and purchased the shade from Target.  I have another lamp sort of similar to that one that I plan to put on the other side of the desk, but I’m still in search of the perfect shade for it. 

If y’all have any questions about anything or need to know where to find some of the things listed in this post, please don’t hesitate to ask by commenting below!

XO! -Emma Loo