Woman in Real Life

Bedroom ideas for a teen boho neutral look, with a coveted platform bed from Wayfair

It has been interesting seeing the changes in my daughter's design aesthetic as she matures. In some ways I think she has followed a pretty typical path. She started out with this very pink bedroom with lots of flower wall decals and other flourishes, plus beaucoup de stuff - toys, wall art, accessories and a Justin Bieber poster. As a 10-year-old, she decided on purple walls, a simple desk and more fashion-focused decor. You can see that version of her room in this earlier post.

About a year ago, we began to transition her bedroom to a teen girl's look - with a comfortable mattress, neutral bedding and tributes to her musical interests, in the form of a guitar and a ukulele mounted on the walls. Her most coveted item to get the minimalist boho chic vibe she sought was the popular platform bed. (I've seen many a gorgeous bedroom on Instagram featuring all styles of platform beds, from those made at home from pallets to more elaborate, store-bought platform beds.) We turned to Wayfair Canada to source the perfect platform bed. We have found so many beautiful home decor items there in the past for our home, and Wayfair has a remarkable variety of platform beds on offer too.

If you are anything like me, there are several areas of your home that could use a little organizing, a little refresh, a little pick-me-up, a little bulldozer... Organizing your living space, even with tips from Marie Kondo fresh in your mind, can be an overwhelming task. The only thing to do is take it one small step at a time.

*This post is sponsored by Wayfair.ca. All opinions are authentic and my own. Thank you for supporting the awesome companies that partner with Woman in Real Life.

As back-to-school time approaches, I'm looking forward to returning to my regular work-from-home routine. I'll miss the easier days of summer and the warm weather outings with the kids, but I also crave the renewed sense of focus that fall brings. You might have noticed my reduced presence on the blog and in social media. That will change! In preparation for a productive fall of freelance writing and blogging, I gave my home office a lovely overhaul, with the help of Wayfair.ca.

Six blog posts. Five weeks. A completely different dining room. I'm not going to say it's been easy. Spare time was hard to come by. And I picked up a cold at dance competition this past weekend (tight quarters in those dressing rooms!), so I'm writing this with itchy eyes and tissue in hand. But our One Room Challenge dining room makeover is done! And we love our new dining room space. We might actually eat in there now. (Or at the very least, not pile random items on the dining table.) Let's have a wee look at the before and after pics to see how far we've come.

The "Before" - this room is long gone now!

It was glorious to have a whole weekend to dedicate to our One Room Challenge dining room makeover this past weekend. No sporting events to take the kids to - just uninterrupted painting and installation time. (Okay it wasn't entirely uninterrupted - that would be impossible - but we got in a good stretch of work hours.)

It's One Room Challenge week 4, and we're getting to the point where we can really see how the dining room is going to come together. The mood board is one thing, but real life results can look a lot different. Fortunately we are loving how the dining room looks so far.

In last week's update, I told you how we managed to get a bit of work done over the Easter long weekend. Unfortunately this last weekend we were out of town from Friday to Sunday for my son's basketball tournament. That's the job when you're a parent though, right? I'm sort of glad in a way, because I think it's fitting if I can show you how we managed to make over our dining room in just five weeks while still conducting our regular business, like work, tax preparation, cooking, cleaning and parenting. The blog is called Woman in Real Life after all. And real life means you don't often have a lot of spare time for diys and decor.

Thankfully this past weekend was a 4-day weekend for us, without any activities to shuttle kids to. We did dog-sit a large puppy and attend two Easter dinner parties, but there was at least some free time to work on our dining room makeover for the One Room Challenge.

That's a good thing, because we are at week 3 (out of 6) already! Seeing as week 6 is the reveal, we have three weeks left to go. Where are we at with it? By last week, most of what was accomplished was painting. From there, we planned to move onto wallpaper, picking a paint colour for the secondhand china cabinet and installing some of the mouldings.

The weeks fly by quickly, don't they? Especially when you are renovating a whole room in just five weeks. It has already been a week since the launch of the spring One Room Challenge. You might recall from my first post that we are making over our dining room to create a more sophisticated space that coordinates with our newly renovated foyer.

We progressed fairly well considering that we're doing all the work ourselves and both my husband and I were busy with other things every single day of the week. Things like our regular work and orthodontic appointments and then an entire weekend taken up by our daughter's dance competition (me on duty for hair, makeup and cheering on) and our son's basketball tournament (he on duty for driving and cheering on).

Over the past few days I have used muscles that I'm quite sure I had never used before. Not for a very long time anyway! My husband had been installing our beautiful millwork from Metrie whenever he had a spare moment or two over the last few weeks. You can read more about that process and our paint choices in this post.

Then I heard there was an opening in the Canadian Bloggers Holiday Home Tour this week and I thought, "Why not?" As in, why not finish installing the trim, painting the walls and trim, buying and hanging artwork, accessorizing and doing a bunch of little Christmas diys in one short week? Good thinking, right? My husband would definitely not have made that choice. But I kindly made the decision for both of us. So we put up our wallpaper feature wall on Friday night and we worked all through the weekend. Despite my sore muscles, I'm really glad we did! I have to say I truly love our new foyer space.

We are planning a few "weekend warrior" style renovations for our home over the next six months or so. While we are currently working on our foyer makeover, I have also been thinking about how we can overhaul our laundry room on a budget. The laundry room is on the first floor of our house, which is convenient, but it is tiny. Like a tiny box...with three doors in it - one to the garage, one to the house and one to the outdoors! We're thinking of stacking the washer and dryer to free up some space for built-in storage and seating. And we'll likely put some rustic wood shelving over the sink.

We have lived in our current home for 9 years. When we moved here, the kids were 3 and 5, still just little tikes really. We moved from a decent-sized, semi-detached house to a bigger, detached home with plenty of space and storage. (And then we proceeded to fill that storage up, but that's a story for another day.) Over the next couple of years, we installed hardwood flooring throughout the main level and we painted most of the rooms. (The previous homeowners liked clay and ochre colours. We were going for something lighter and brighter.)

I know I'm not the only parent who dreads one thing about back-to-school time - namely having to prepare healthy, appealing lunches for the kiddos five days a week. Wayfair challenged me to come up with a fresh spin on school lunch. I knew immediately what I wanted to do - vegan sushi rolls!

There are many meals we disagree on in this house, but sushi is never one of them. We all love sushi rolls with a passion. It may seem like an effort to make your own sushi rolls, but once you get the hang of it, it's really not so hard. Make a gigantic batch for dinner, getting each family member to roll their own, and you'll have enough left to pop into your bento box the next day.