Etsy Shop to Know: Whitney J Decor

There's something about beautiful pillows that can just make a space come to life! I'm a bit of a pillow junky, I have tons of them stashed in the linen closet. It's hard for me to part with a pillow whether I'm still using them or not. So to save a bit of money I've begun to use pillow covers. 

I received these beautiful pillow covers from Whitney of Whitney J Decor, a zebra pillow cover and two black pillow covers. I added them to my home office sofa and it gave the exact look it needed! 

The Living Room: A Lesson Learned from Paint Drama

Has this ever happened to you? You see something that needs to be fixed, come up with what you think is a grand plan to fix it, put said plan in action, and then realize that you made it worst than it was before you started?

Yeah... that was me this weekend. To give you better context of what happened let me tell you a short story. About a year or so ago I found some oops paint for about $30. It was a 5 gallon container that covered pretty much my whole downstairs except for one wall and two other smaller areas. I went back to get the paint matched but no matter what they tried it could not be matched. So... I just went with the almost matched paint and put it up. After painting the wall I immediately hated it. I tried to deal with it by hanging curtains and alot of stuff on the wall... but even that didn't help.

Fast forward to this weekend.. I had had enough of that wall. The match was awful, it looked horrible in pictures and I was tired of looking at it.  The back wall just was not matched up enough for me. In the grand scale of things, was it small, yes, but I felt I HAD to fix it. Here it is before:

My favorite feature in my living room is my striped wall. So I headed out to the store to get some paint.  I thought it would be near impossible to match the darker shade so I figured I would match the lighter shade on the striped wall. Yeah, bad idea. Here is what happened. 

See that wall behind couch, It was bad ya'll..It dried to a gray-blue color,  just terrible. Not sure where I got the idea to get that paint color. I honestly had no plan, I just picked a color at random and figured I would update the stripes. Brandon said it looked like white-out. He was right :( 

I went back to the drawing board. I am one of those lazy and impatient persons who will not buy paint samples, so I took some paint card booklet. I ripped out some of the chips and put them up against the wall. That was my process. Much more planning that the first time and it paid off. I also decided I would match the darker color and not the lighter.

After another hour of work, I had the perfect match and was feeling much better about life. I ended up going with Causal Khaki from Behr. Luckily, it is a perfect match so no more trying to figure out about oops paint matching. 

I learned a serious lesson in patience..... 

THERE ARE NO SHORTCUTS. This small yet powerful lesson can be applied to ANYTHING in life. You can't shortcut your way through things, well maybe a little, but in general, you have to do the proper planning and proper work if you want the proper results.

Not only was this an extra cost to buy more paint, but it also took up time that I could have been devoting to other things. 

It reinforced what I actually already knew: Prior Proper Planning Prevents Poor Performance... It's so true ya'll!

Anywho, all is back well with the world, I'm feeling much better about the color and happy to move on from it and get my living room completed!

So tell me, what lesson have you learned from home that you can apply to everyday life?

Creamy Spinach + Mushroom Pasta

I'm a huge pasta lover, I could eat pasta every day. I swear, EVERY. DAY. Recently I have been on the search for recipes to try. The older I get the less I can stand the taste of fast food, so that means I have to cook more. Everyone in the house is loving it, and I admit, I feel much better not eating as much fast food.

I ran across this creamy spinach and mushroom pasta on Pinterest. This was a healthy take on pasta from Diethood.com.

I'm going to refer you to her site for all the instructions: HERE.

One thing I will say is that my taste buds has not fully converted over to being healthy, so this recipe was a little too healthy for me. I need a little grease and fat, but still the taste was good. My family ate it up so that's usually a sign for me.

I def see myself adding this recipe to my menu with some small tweaks, such as using chicken broth instead of veggie broth and also adding grilled chicken. I also love sauce so I'll be making double the sauce that this recipe calls for.

Now here's a little secret, I starts a new page on Instagram following this Pinterest Recipe trying experience. You can follow that page HERE or search: www.instagram.com/thepinspiredkitchen.

If you try this recipe from Diethood, tell me your thoughts!