The Way YOU Are- The Adventures of Skinny Mini Kiki

For today's The Way You Are post we get a special treat. My dear friend Chantale has opened up her home to let us all get a peek inside. She is one of the most encouraging and selfless people I know. She is always emailing me encouraging me and making me laugh. If you have not checked out her adorable blog The Adventures of Skinny Mini Kiki, please do so. She has the cutest family and her home is so gorgeous! Thank you Chantale for doing this, I know you are a busy Mama!

Chantale's favorite spot....

Leah, thank you so much for asking me be a part of your new The Way You Live series! I'm really honoured but scared silly too because you've posted some amazing interiors from some amazing people already.

You've asked us to show a favourite part of our house and I have to admit, the one room that stole my heart when we were looking for a new house 3 years ago is our now office/playroom. However, this is not the room that I want to showcase today. 1. Because it is always a work in progress and 2. Because it is in constant toy mess. lol. What I wanted to share with you and your readers today is our dining and living room. Our home has an open concept interior layout where the living, dining and kitchen areas flow into each other. I love open concept homes! The open airy feeling makes you feel welcome as soon as you set your foot over the front door threshold. We held off decorating and buying new furniture for years putting all our efforts into making our home child-safe and just enjoying being a family. However, the last 2 years we've been slowly removing all the child-safe gates, protectors etc and looking around for new furniture and updating our decor. What was especially hideous in our home was the dining room table and chairs. We inherited an 80's white stained oak table almost a decade ago and while it was serviceable, it looked horrible. Even after I had it sanded down and re-stained (which took me about a week to do myself), it was an eyesore and we were unable to have too many sit down dinner parties with it (it sat at maximum 6 people). I had even put up a bamboo screen behind our living room sofa to hide the dining room from sight.

After a long period of looking and not finding what we wanted, we finally contacted a furniture craftsman to create our dining room table and it turned out beautifully! It is scaled to our dining room perfectly and seats up to 10-12 people. Perfect for family gatherings and dinner parties! I found the antique windsor chairs online and I love it. Our furniture craftsman even took our old Ikea cabinets and stained it to match our new antique chairs and table! I love how the rooms flow now with tons of light filtering in from our windows. We've also been adding in new artwork on the walls and one of my favourites is the Miles Davis poster we purchased when we took our 5 year old to see the exhibit at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. I've also been finding new home decor stores opening up around my neighborhood and have been buying new accessories for our home. One of my favourite purchase has been a chrome ceramic owl!

Apart from finally getting a beautiful dining room table, our whole experience of having our table custom made has turned out to be a wonderful collaboration between my husband and I and the furniture craftsman responsible of making our idea come to life. In fact, we have started a company together called Mtl.Folio (www.mtlfolio.com) and we now create custom crafted wood furniture for a wide variety of clientele! Our business started a few months ago and has slowly picked up steam. Slow is good in the beginning as it gives us a chance to do a check balance of what needs to be improved upon and what we're doing right. So far, we've been garnering business through word of mouth and we're loving it! And to think.. it all started with a search for our perfect dining room table! Our home is by no means a Kelly Wearstler signature interior but it's our home and one that is warm and inviting. I hope you enjoyed a glimpse of it.

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