Warming up our home - Catch up edition

We purchased our house in October of last year and we've been slowly trying to make it the home of our dreams.  So far the past 9 months, we've made our home functional, but it lacked warmth and some color. I've lately been on a mission to change this since I'm also on maternity leave. I wish I had known that I'd be blogging about our home decor journey because I would have done a better job taking "before" pictures.You'll quickly see that even though I said that I wanted to add some color, I still gravitate to black, white, and grey! Everything's still a work in progress, but here is what we've done so far:

Kitchen Decor

I've been staring at the wasted space above our kitchen cabinets and decided to add some decor there. It's also functional because the basket holds our excess spices.

Speaking of spices, I've been super annoyed at how cluttered my cabinets are so I purchased a metal magnetic board and some magnetic spice jars. I simply mounted the board on the inside of the cabinets with mounting tape. So far it's holding up. I need to purchase more jars because I have a ton of spices I still need to organize.

Entryway

We have a small entryway and we don't wear shoes in the house, so we always have a clutter of shoes near the door.  It drove me nuts so we got the Hemnes shoe cabinet from Ikea to create an entryway as well as to hide the shoes.  I was worried to lose space in our already narrow entryway, but with this cabinet, we actually gained space by putting our shoes inside. They also happened to have the color in a dark stained grey which matched our kitchen cabinets perfectly. I love the way that it looks now!

The hubby's step-dad drew this picture! How cool that we get to show this off!

Living Area

Our living area looked so boring and I felt like we needed lots of help to warm it up.

We went to Home Goods and bought a mirror and some stuff to add to our coffee table. And with that, it made our home not look as boring!  The walls are still a work in progress, but we're super picky about what we put up. So until we find the perfect thing to add to our walls, we'll stick with this.

Our media center also needed some love, so we decided to buy the Lack wall shelf from Ikea to place above the t.v.

We removed the antenna and mounted it behind the t.v. Don't mind the kids' mess!

We bought more plants and frames from Home Goods (I swear I live at that store now!) and now all we have to do is add some pictures to the frames.

So that's where we're at. Hopefully we find art pieces or something else that we like so we can finish these rooms up. It's been fun playing interior designer and I can't wait to see our progress!