Home & Garden

This is my second trip to the Edmonton Home and Garden Show in the last two years. This year felt a lot bigger than the first year I went and honestly, we were too tired to explore the show completely. There were lots of interesting booths (would you believe my best purchase there was a bra?!) and I got a lot of information having to do with renovating our bathroom and that was really the main point to going. Anyway, here's some pictures of stuff I liked.

I liked the use of the orange as a semi-accent wall. Maybe they did that just because of the way the space was and they wouldn't do it like this in a real home, but I kinda like how the colour doesn't take up the whole 'accent' wall. 

I also liked the silhouette on top of the colour. That would be so easy to duplicate and you can pretty much paint any ol' picture there that makes you happy (my first choice wouldn't be a city scape that's for darn sure).

They did the same thing over in the dining room, but I was mostly loving the simple dining room set. You can get that sort of thing anywhere (note the mismatching chairs and bench -- love the bench) and paint them a unified colour (love the grey) and then you have a really great and unique set that probably didn't look anywhere close to being a set when you first purchased it.

The outside patio for this mock house was pretty great, too. I'm not in love with water features, but I like the patio (I would prefer paving stones or gravel to poured concrete, though) and the stone planters and I just think that having a nice little spot like this to sit is a lot more useful than having a huge lawn where most people don't really do anything on it other than mow it every week (I'm hugely antilawn. What a waste of money, time, energy, resources...don't get me started).

Loved this kitchen! Another thing I'm kinda against is upper cabinets. You wouldn't believe how much more open and bright and spacious a kitchen feels without them. There are a lot of new storage systems now that make the idea of upper cabinets seem like such an old and outdated idea. These cabinets were not only beautiful but they had storage systems in place for dishes and hip-bump opening mechanisms and...oh sigh, they were grand. There was even something for Idle Husband in here. I don't know if you can see, but that very last black tile on the backsplash housed a hidden t.v. I know IH would have been drooling.

Lastly, I really wanted to catch the boys from Home Heist, Colin and Justin. The first half of their presentation was great and it was kinda exciting to see them up close, but then they got into before and afters from their previous shows and how to buy furniture cheap, and that's when I started to lose interest. Boys, cheap's my middle name, I don't need you to tell me about the inside deals they have in the IKEA clearance section. I only go to IKEA to check out the clearance section. Anyway, we left early so we didn't talk to them after, which was ok with me since I'd been standing all day and just the thought of standing through another 30 minutes of presentation wore me out.

Anyway, that was my little stint at the Home Show. I came away with a lot of free goodies (four boxes of parchment paper, hellz yeah!) and some more reuseable bags, plus oodles of reading. Oodles of reading I'll probably never get to...meh. I got to spend a lot of time with mom during this and we haven't had a shopping day together in forever, so really, for that reason alone, I couldn't have asked for a better day.