Living for Pretty

Celebrating all things pretty, happy and inspiring. From renovation stories, to recipes, decorating, parties and little life lessons, you’ll find a little bit of everything here.

Welcome Baby and 6 Tips for Your DIY Fresh 48 Photos

Readers, meet Philip Oliver! “Pip” was born in late March in 2020 during a nationwide shutdown.

Because of coronavirus, it was just me and Billy at the hospital. I had booked a photographer for a Fresh 48 session, which are photos that happen in the hospital in the first day or two of life. I loved the idea of capturing our first moments when we became a family of three.

A week or two before I went into labor, the hospital changed the visitor policy to include only the “birthing partner” (dad, in our case) and no one else. No grandparents, aunts, uncles, and no photographers. We were scared of further restrictions and not even having my husband there (a few hospitals in New York had taken that step based on positive cases), so we felt lucky to have each other.

Luckily we packed our camera, and we managed to get some sweet photos in between the nurses popping in.

Pip is such a light in a dark world and he grows and changes every day. Below are some of the photos from those first few days and our DIY photoshoot plus some tips for you to capture photos of your new family!

Fresh 48 Photo Tips

  • Take pictures of the room, of the view. These things will add to the memory years later
  • Take a lot – I didn’t spend too much time checking to see if I got ‘the shot’ – so make sure you have 20 different ones to choose from
  • Ask a nurse to shoot a few of you together – we didn’t do this and I wish we had! It’d be so nice to have a picture of the three of us
  • Coordinate your outfits. We packed light blue clothes.
  • Zoom in on the details, their toes, fingers and eyelashes
  • Take photos before baby gets there (there can be a lot of waiting) and of course after!

We are so happy to be Pip’s mom and dad and loving our little family. Sending love to all the pandemic mommas and women expecting during this time. You are so strong!

Master Bedroom Coffee Station

What’s the one thing that makes your morning instantly better? Coffee. It’s the reason a lot of us are able to roll out of bed in the morning. But in our house the time between eyes open and coffee in my mouth was just too long.

We have been long time french press coffee people. The coffee is delicious, it’s one less countertop appliance sitting out, and I managed to score a beautiful silverplated gem from an online auction that ‘sparked joy’ whenever I looked at it.

But since we moved into the new house the french press coffee joy has turned just a touch sour. Because french press coffee is a process.

  • First you heat up the water on the stove.
  • Then you pour water into the french press.
  • Then you wait 3-4 minutes.
  • Then you press.
  • THEN you enjoy.

This was all good and fine when our kitchen was located in between our master bedroom and our bathroom. It was natural to incorporate the french press coffee process into our morning flow–inbetween showering, dressing and primping.

Now in our new home the kitchen is a set of stairs and three rooms away. And having to consistently go back down the stairs for each step in the process grew tiresome. Then the solution came to me after watching Architectural Digest’s Open Door videos of Jesse Tyler Ferguson’s house.

The home’s interior designer, Peter Gurski, calls this the gentleman’s cabinet. It’s got one very important, not-to-be-overlooked feature: a coffee station.

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15 Free Art Downloads

With the holiday un-decorating commencing, the bells and garlands come down and the everyday decor goes up. The change of the seasons is the perfect time for a refresh, but with the Christmas budget hangover I know I’m not the only one feeling the lack of cheer in my bank account.

Luckily, the Metropolitan Museum has a lot of their collection available to use, download, share and create upon. Below are just a few of their 406,000 images of artworks that have caught my eye. Click through to learn more about the the piece and download.

The Third Duke of Dorset’s Hunter with a Groom and a Dog
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addictive banana pudding

I’ve grown quite addicted to Metropolitan Market’s banana pudding. It feels like every weekend I’m finding a reason to pick up a delicious cup. But at $4 a pop for a small serving, I couldn’t keep it up. I decided to experiment with replicating the recipe at home. I studied the ingredient list: pudding mix, vanilla wafers, bananas, heavy cream, and the secret ingredient – sweetened condensed milk.

It tastes just like at the store, a rich, creamy banana pudding. My taste buds are so excited that I unlocked the secret, my waist line, not so much.

Ingredients

  • small box banana pudding mix
  • 14 oz sweetened condensed milk 
  • 1/2 cup water 
  • 2 bananas
  • heavy cream for whipped cream 
  • 1 box vanilla wafers to taste
  • a few tablespoons sugar
  • vanilla extract
  • heavy whipping cream

Directions

  • In large bowl, combine sweetened condensed milk and water. 
  • Add banana pudding mix; beat until well blended. 
  • Chill 5 minutes.
  • In a large bowl, beat heavy whipping cream until stiff. Add sugar and vanilla to taste.
  • Fold in half of the whipped and add sliced bananas.
  • Layer pudding mix, whipped cream and vanilla wafers in a serving dish. 
  • Garnish as desired (in my case salted caramel sauce!)

our cozy peach bedroom (reveal)

We now have a few key elements in place in our bedroom, which means it’s reveal time. Our bedroom is tiny at about 10′ by 10′. It’s big enough for a queen sized bed and small nightstands, that’s about it, folks.

In my opinion, the bedroom only needs to function for two things, sleeping and dressing. Well our bedroom fits a queen size bed perfectly, and the closet (almost as big as the bedroom!) has plenty of room for clothes, storage and dressing.

The wall color is Ecru by Benjamin Moore – and it’s just perfect. It can appear white, but has a pretty peach tint that makes you feel all cozy and cocoon like.

The brass lamp bases were a garage sale find last summer ($3 for the pair!). This season we will be hunting for matching nightstands, with drawers for storage, and I’d love to find an inexpensive platform bed with more storage underneath. I wouldn’t be opposed to fresh new bedding either, or at least a new throw pillow, or two.

Our curtains were another smart move (if I do say so). We bought the fabric to use as tablecloths for my bridal shower, much like the headboard fabric. Love it when things can be used twice!

frames, ikea + thrifted // lamp shades, target // headboard, project here // duvet cover, macys (old)

our DIY upholstered headboard

Like most of our projects in our house, our headboard has been on our to-do list for months, and we finally finished it. We actually did the first cuts back in October, but lost steam before we got any fabric on it.

I’m not going to do a tutorial, because, let’s face it, there’s a zillion of these tutorials out there. In fact, I don’t know who would buy an upholstered headboard, when you can make one so inexpensively. Hundreds of dollars were saved, people.

The shape was inspired by this bed on Glitter Guide. I’m really happy with the end result, but the shape drove us mad. We are apparently really bad at geometry and we didn’t have a compass on hand. We ended up re-cutting and trimming here and there a few times to get it symmetrical. The fabric was originally bought to use as tablecloths at my bridal shower. Not a coincidence, if you’re buying fabric for a one-time-only event, try to think of ways you can reuse it. I love the colors, it fits perfectly with the soft peach color on our wall and the grey adds a bit of masculinity to it, maybe? I may be fooling myself there.

Tutorials we found the most helpful:

Our supplies:

  • Wood
  • Batting
  • Carpet pad (this was left over from carpeting our basement, we added it in for another layer of cush)
  • 1 inch foam
  • Fabric
  • Staple gun and staples
  • Foam adhesive spray
  • A few hands (I’ve seen tutorials on people doing this single handedly, I recommend recruiting help if you have it)
  • Nailhead trim
  • Suggested : A compass is you have curves
  • Liquid nails (we used this to attached the extra wood pieces to make it thick) 

One of our roadblocks in getting this project to the finish line was a disagreement in how best to add a thick edge. I was dead-set on using Kristin’s method from the Hunted Interior. My dad, who has a construction background, thought wrapping fabric around a thin piece of bendable wood and attaching would work. However, you need wood trim in order to use nail head trim, which was the plan. Once that was decided, I just had to convince Billy to do the extra legwork in cutting out the headboard shape for what would be the second time. If we were to do this again, we’d attach the wood first and make the trickier cuts only once.

A few in progress shots:

Our extra wood to make the edge a bit more substantial:

One layer of carpet padding, because we had it:

Then we spray glued the foam on and put the final layer of batting:

And finally, we wrapped it in fabric and stapled it. (sorry no photos). And measured the line for nailhead trim.

There is a specific hammer that you’re suppose to use for nailhead trim, but for this one-time project, I didn’t feel like spending the money. So, we wrapped our hammer in some of the scrap fabric – and it worked great! A note on the nailhead trim, we ordered several trim kits, but the colors were never right. First I ordered Dritz in silver, but we have a lot of brass in the room, and I wanted to pick up those metal tones. So, we ordered the Dritz nailhead in brass – the ‘nails’ were the perfect color, but the strips were a bright brass, like gold. That would not work! I finally found some in a “french natural” and it was exactly what we were looking for.

And the finished product!

Does’t the fabric look great with our paint color? I’ll be sharing some more bedroom pictures with you all on Wednesday, stay tuned!

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