Stairs

Yes I've done it again, been missing from blog land for a very long time.  I will hopefully be able to share the reason with you soon, once all of the final details are in place.  A little hint...... I was asked by a dear friend of mine to join her in a venture that we are both super excited about.

Apart from being busy working on the above I've been busy at home trying to make the foyer look more welcoming and fix the mistakes made by the previous owner.  For those of you out there that live in a high ranch, split or what ever they may call it, you will know how hard it is to decorate.  When you walk in our front door you are greeted by a staircase going up or one going down.  This is normally separated by some kind of half wall or banister.  The previous owners of our house decided to cut down the half wall, I assume to put in an open banister, the only problem being they didn't cut the wall in line with the stairs.  This left us with no way of putting in a banister.  Mr ASL decided that we needed to cut down the wall before we could figure out the rest.

The stairs prior

This was a big job and after measuring and marking Mr ASL was ready to bring out the circular saw and the reciprocating saw and start cutting.  He decided that I should be out of the house for this part so I was sent to visit with our lovely neighbour Karen.

I gave him about half and hour before I returned to the house and when I walked in I was greeted with this....

I told Mr ASL what a good job he'd done and that I was surprised there wasn't too much mess......at this point he smiled and told me to look upstairs.

This is what I found........

Yep dust everywhere!!!!!!

It took me 3 hours to clean the 1st floor of our house, the dust was everywhere, it even managed to get into the bedrooms.

The next part of the process was to cap of the newly cut wall and paint the stairs, we tried to sand and stain the treads but they where just too damaged and unfortunately oak veneer not solid wood.

Looking better already

Painting the stairs was a very long process which involved us having to walk all the way around the house for almost a week. I used porch paint on the treads and semi gloss white on the risers. I will post later on the fun
we had installing trim and a gallery wall.

Have a great weekend.

Very Very Tired

It's 3.30am and this is our 3rd night without sleep, my little mighty mouse has a severe case of Strep and we are still waiting for the antibiotics to kick in.  The poor thing spends more time coughing than sleeping.  We have tried everything to alleviate the pain but not much is working so I'm pretty sure it will be back to the doctors in the morning.

I hope you all enjoy the rest of your Easter weekend.

For the Love of a Tufted Sofa

Hi all I hope you've had a wonderful start to the week, mine was ok apart from waking up this morning with a cold.  Typical in this household, we managed to get through winter with just a few sniffles and the first sign of sunshine and both mighty mouse and myself are sick.

Never mind it gave me an excuse not to start sorting out the basement which had been my plan for the day, instead I was able to catch up on reading some of my favourite blogs.

But enough about that I'm here to share with you some of the sofa's that I've been looking at and some of the rooms that have been my inspiration.  I am hooked on tufted sofa's, I think they are just beautiful and make any room look classy and elegant.  Mr ASL doesn't feel the same way, he doesn't like tufted sofa's at all. 

I have a vision of what I want our living room to look like.

Image Via Decorpad

Image Via The Cross Design

Image via Eclectic Revisited

I like that the first image has more of a retro take on the tufted sofa and I love the pops of yellow and gold. The second image is probably my favourite although I think I would change the art above the sofa to maybe some black and white equine art which is another thing I love right now.  

Mr ASL was a sweetheart and bought me a horse painting for Valentines Day. I love it so much and will share it with you when it's been framed.

The third image is more of a casual look and I could see myself snuggled up on that sofa with a good book.

The sofa's that I have been looking at for our living room are as follows

Chloe Sofa from Macy's

TJMax sofa from Jordans

Sofa from Decor Rest

My first preference is the Chloe sofa from Macy's I love everything about it and the price is fantastic but unfortunately they will not ship to Canada.  So I'm left to choose between option 2 and 3.  I like option 2 because it's a more modern take on the tufted sofa but in regards to comfort it's not quite there so that only leaves me with option 3 the sofa from Decor Rest.  While this sofa is not the tufted gem I had hoped for, it's very comfortable and Mr ASL has agreed that he can live with the small amount of tufting on the back.  I will be ordering it in gray. As  Mr ASL put it, this sofa has a little bit of what he likes and a little bit of what I like....the perfect compromise!

Which sofa would you choose?

Update

Wow I can't believe that it's been seven months since my last post, Christmas and New Year have been and gone without so much as a peep from me. My New Years resolution was to try and post at least 3 times a week but as you can see that hasn't happened.

For those of you who have visited before you will see that over that last couple of days I've been making some changes to the layout of A Second Look, I thought I'd give it a new look for a new year. I have added a page called Our Renovation and as I sort through the photos of the progress I will put together a post but also link it to the new page.  That's the plan now I just have to get my brain to come up with some interesting things to blog about. I seem to get blogger block a lot lately thus the lack of posting if anyone has any suggestions on how to get the creativity flowing I would love to hear from you.

I hope everyone has has a glorious spring day as we have, it actually reached 15 degrees today but alas we are back to the rain tomorrow, but for now here are some beautiful images of spring.

Image Via 

Image Via