Happy Holidays! If you are new here, welcome! I am thrilled to have you stop by today for my very colorful Christmas home tour. Our home is very colorful all year round, so you'll find just about every color of the rainbow in our holiday home tour. But rest assured that our red and teal living room and our orange and gray family room are in completely separate areas - different floors even. As I lead you around the house, if you find yourself wondering how all of these colorful spaces fit together, you can take a quick look at the
renderings of our floor plan.
I am linking my home tour up at
Jennifer Rizzo’s Holiday House Walk Link Party. So many amazing tours to see all in one place! And I am participating in the Very Merry Christmas Home Tour with over 30 other talented bloggers with gorgeous homes. You'll find the links to those tours at the end of this post.
Ok. let's get started. The front doors seem like a logical place to being the tour. I haven't yet finished decorating the porch {check back for that next week}, but I did get the wreaths up on the front door. Our doors are extra tall, meaning that those over the door wreath hangers don't work for us. Instead I hang my wreaths using ribbon tacked into the top of the door.
Come on in and let me show you around!
ENTRY & LIVING ROOM
Just inside the front doors, you are greeted by our entry table straight ahead and our living room to the left. Above the entry table, you would normally see painting {a DIY that I plan to repaint soon}, but for Christmas, I decided to wrap the canvas in a giant, black and white print featuring the lyrics of "White Christmas" that I designed and printed at FedEx office.
I am loving black and white stripes this year, and you'll see that theme continue through the main floor. You may also spot our elf, who made his first ever appearance at our house this week. So far, the boys love having him visit.
I am also having a lot of fun with the new lamp that I bought at Target this fall. For the fall, I filled it with corks, for Halloween I wrapped it in cobwebs crawling with plastic spiders, and for Christmas, I filled it with red and silver ornaments. Next to the lamp sits my favorite photo from my boys' visit with Santa last weekend.
To the left, our entry area opens into the living room.
One of my go to ways to decorate for each season is to swap out the pillows on my couch. For Christmas, I used the same teal sweater pillows that you saw in my Fall Home Tour, but this time combined them with a red snowflake pillow {Target}, a black and white sweater pillow {HomeGoods}, and white and gray fur pillow {Target}.
On the coffee table sits a tic tac toe board that I bought at Z Gallerie several years ago. During most of the year, it holds teal and white Xs and Os. Since we have two young boys and have to keep our coffee table styling kid friendly, I've been having fun switching up the the tic tac toe pieces with various seasonal items. For the fall, I painted small, plastic pumpkins silver and gold. And for Christmas, I picked up these cute red and white, large plastic ornaments from Target. Fun for the whole family!
Next to the tic tac toe board sits our silver, tree shaped Christmas card display. I filled the display with red and teal scrapbook paper to dress it up while we wait for cards to arrive in the mail. You can read more about that, and see what it will look like when it's full of cards here.
In the background, you'll also notice that we have two wreaths hanging on the inside of our frosted glass front doors, which mirror the placement of the wreaths on the outside of the doors. {Read how we hung these back to back wreathes}.
I continued to add pops of red to the other side of the living room, with snowflake pillows from Kohl's on the Barcelona chairs and red orchids.
The floating photo shelves in the corner give a purpose to that shallow, formerly awkward inset {read more
here} and provide one more place to tie in my seasonal colors. A couple of red candles and a few red snowflake frames really pop against the silver frames that fill these shelves year round. I can't get enough of how cute each of our boys were on their first Christmases!
Our television hangs above the Barcelona chairs, but a wide frame helps disguise the tv and make it look like a piece of art. For the holidays, I created a CD of photos to display on the tv, allowing us to enjoy some of the amazing lighting displays that we saw while visiting Madrid at Christmas a few years ago.
I have a collection of beautiful glass ornaments that I need to keep safely out of the reach of little hands, but that I still wanted to display during the holidays. I hung them in the two high windows in the corner of the living room where they shine in the light {read about the
ornament window display, or get more
tips for child-proofing Christmas decorations.
KITCHEN
Around the corner from the entryway, you enter the
kitchen. Our kitchen is decorated in teal and blue throughout the year, and I again added pops of red. The kitchen is long and thin, with our kitchen table at the near end, and a sitting area and fireplace at the other end.
I just love these red, metal Christmas trees that I picked up for half off at Hobby Lobby! They are stylish, but durable - perfect for a space where our boys play often. The ornaments in the bowl are also kid-friendly, as they are plastic and can withstand some sorting and dropping.
Just like our living room windows, the windows in our kitchen got dressed up as well - but this time with
hanging felt snowflakes rather than glass ornaments.
Looking back across the kitchen table to the other end of the kitchen, you see our sideboard with curved glass shelves displaying some of our blue glassware.
On the sideboard are sits a metal Christmas tree candle holder that I bought years ago, but that I recently discovered looks even better displaying small ornaments rather than candles.
At the end of the counter is the
kitchen mudroom space that we created, which, for Christmas, has two teal pillows with silver snowflakes.
I created a simple "Countdown to Santa" calendar on our kitchen chalkboard wall.
Each night, we will X out one number on the calendar up until Christmas Eve, then we will unwrap a Christmas book with the corresponding number to read before bed that night. I can't take credit for the Christmas book advent idea, but it's a tradition that I am so excited to be starting with our boys! They were so excited when they saw all of the books wrapped up on the entry table. Some of the books are new, but many are ones we collected over the past couple of years. We'll reuse the same books each year, updating a few each year as the boys get older and outgrow some of the board books in the collection.
Finally, the
main floor powder room got just a touch of Christmas decor in the form of a snowflake hand towel and a fabric Santa.
BASEMENT FAMILY ROOM
I love the teal and red color combo on the main floor, but the basement is decorated year round in gray with pops of orange and white - so we stuck with these colors for our family room Christmas decor as well. While these are certainly not traditional Christmas color, I really think the tree is gorgeous. And best of all, our Christmas tree is completely
baby and kid-friendly!
Nearly all of the ornaments on our
baby-friendly Christmas tree are made of felt or fabric, and nothing is breakable or sharp! This was an absolutely must with our two young boys, especially since the tree is located right next to their play area!
I strung up my
DIY chalkboard banner above the play area, with a little reminder that Santa knows if you've been naughty or nice. A few large, sparkly snowflakes from the dollar store help to dress up the wall.
Looking past the tree in the other direction, you see our fireplace with a bright orange feature wall above.
I have had that white feather wreath for years, and I still love it just as much as day one. The space above and aroundthe wreath felt a bit empty, so I hung some smaller dollar store snowflakes from shimmering ribbon. I also added some icycle garland to the mantle to complete the snowy scene.
That orange wall becomes a perfect backdrop for my collection of DIY Christmas trees and painted Christmas trees that I created last year!
Our stockings are hung by the chimney with care, and my DIY stocking monogram pins make sure we know whose is whose. It wasn't intentional, but I think it's fun that our initials spell ABCs!
We spend most of our family time in this room, and at Christmas it's a cozy place to curl up and watch movies together on the couch!
HOME OFFICE
Also in the basement is a bedroom that we use as our home office. This room is designed around displaying many of our travel mementos. Next year, I would like to put a full size tree in here to display the our travel themed ornaments and those that we have collected from around the world. But this year, I simply put a small tree on the corner of the desk to display the easy
DIY travel map ornaments that I made a few weeks ago.
How great is that wild rug? I just received it from ShawFloors for participating in a contest, and I love how it ties the room together!
KIDS' ROOMS
Before I wrap up our Christmas home tour, let's make two more quick stops on the second floor. Our boys are both very excited for Christmas this year! In fact, my older son told Santa that the only thing he wanted for Christmas was a big Christmas tree. We decided it would be a lot of fun for each boy to have their own small tree in their rooms, and we got a great deal on 3-foot prelit trees for only $13.50 each at Target.
Let's start in the
ombre striped nursery, where 18 month old Cooper is waiting to greet you at the door with a cheerful HO HO HO!
Cooper's little tree is decorated in brightly colored animal ornaments made from yarn and thick corrugated paper.
I also framed a photo of Cooper chatting with his pal Santa, which he absolutely loves having in his room!
We spend a lot of time sitting in the chair in Cooper's room reading books, and these days, it's mostly Christmas books. While shopping at Target a few days ago, he latched on to a little red HO HO HO pillow in the dollar section, so I bought it for him to sit with while reading books.
Down the hall in Beckett's room. He was thrilled to pick out his ornaments and put them on his very own tree in his
menswear inspired bedroom!
His tree is also filled with mostly animal ornaments - most made from felt. The lion ornament is even made from brown herringbone suiting fabric identical to the trunk in his bedroom.
I also framed Beckett's Santa photo for his bedroom, and it sits along side his wooden calendar where we are also keeping track of the Christmas countown.
Beckett has in his room the Fisher Price record player that was mine as a kid, together with a collection of records, many of which belonged to my parents when they were kids. The collection included a couple of Christmas records, and I was able to find another one at our local thrift shop.
Beckett and Cooper have really been enjoying listening to these Christmas songs and stories while playing together, and I love that they will grow up knowing what a record is!
Thanks for joining me for our Christmas Home Tour! I still have lots more Christmas projects to share throughout the month, and I'm always decorating or organizing something, so if you like what you see, please join my email list {in the top right corner} so that you never miss a post, or follow me on Facebook, Instagram, and/or Pinterest!
CONTINUE TOURING...
Want to see more Very Merry Christmas Home Tours? There are five other fabulous bloggers sharing their home tours today {you'll find links to their posts below}, as well as more than 30 bloggers opening their doors throughout the week.
Blue i Style {you are here}
Addicted to DIY
Special thanks to Carrie of Lovely Etc. for hosting this blog hop! Be sure to visit
Carrie's blog for links to all of the other home tours throughout the week!
Labels: Christmas, Christmas Tree, decor, decorating, home tour, interior design, seas
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