After ten days in France, I am back, refreshed, and seriously inspired. Here is a photo that I took off of the balcony of our last hotel in Paris. To see more photos and a run down of the trip check out my Greenroom post here, and there will be more to come soon.

Image taken by Me

After seeing a few Ikea Hack makeovers here and there I decided it was time I tackle my own. There are a couple of great other examples Here and Here. I have been looking for the perfect bed side tables for a while now and haven’t been able to find anything, so when I saw this post on design sponge I figured why not give it a try. Here is my before and after.

And here is what I did:

1. First, I bought two Rast three drawer chests from IKEA (one for each side of the bed).
2. I assembled all of the pieces but left the drawers to the side (also, don’t put the drawer pulls on yet).3.) Then primed the fronts of the doors and then painted them in a high gloss white.
3. I then prepped the body of the nightstand by sanding it lightly with a fine grade of sand paper and then rubbing it down with a clean dry cloth to get all the dust off.
4. From there I started staining! I did 1 coat, let it dry 5 – 10 minutes and then rubbed off any excess stain that didn’t soak in. I then waited an hour and did another coat, following the same process. Then waited another hour and did one more coat. The longer you let the stain soak in and the more coats you do the darker it gets. I used Minwax stain in Dark Walnut.
5. After the final coat of stain I let the pieces dry for over 24 hours.
6. When the pieces were fully dry, I gave them two coats of varnish (letting the varnish dry between coats).
7. I then screwed in my drawer pulls. I bought mine from anthropologie.
8. Finally, I put the drawers in and voila! Two beautiful nightstands for basically peanuts.

Sorry for the not so hot iphone photos.

Here are a few pics of Rupe and I enjoying the Smilebooth at Hitched in Palm Springs.

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In January Style Me Pretty came out with their first ever Digital Magazine covering the top 20 weddings from 2010. I feel SO honored and giddy to no end over being included in this round up. Check out page 84 here! Or see the original SMP post here.

Thanks Abby & the Style Me Pretty team for putting this amazing magazine together.

Here are a few shots of our Smitten Studio thanksgiving.

Photos: Smitten Studio  Pictured: Bea & Sarah

I’m loving this whimsical display font, lady rene. That hand drawn type gets me every time. Designed by Laura Varsky and digitized by Alejandro Paul.

Images: YouWorkForThem, Smitten Studio

Holy… it has been an entire week since I have posted! Sorry… I got the case of a HUGE, nasty, I can’t do anything cold. However it gave me plenty of magazine time I picked up the October issue of Elle Decor and immediately noticed the logo switch. Inside there was a small blurb about them trying out the 1989 version of the logo on a portion of the covers of this months issue. Did you get the old or the new logo on your copy?

It looks like they tried it out online last month as well. You can go here and vote.

I think I still prefer the current logo. Although, I do like all the space that the 1989 logo leaves for the image. Which one do you like?

Images: Elle Decor

Todays Magazine Monday comes from Weddings Magazine UK. Yours trulySmitten Studio were featured in the August/September issue. Here is how the full spread turned out.

To see more images of this wedding and Smitten Studio press, see it here, here , here and here from Abby at Style Me Pretty and here from the always amazing photographers, Jessica Johnston.