Nursery Revealed

It's taken a few months of here a little, there a little, but I feel like the baby's room is "complete" for now. I still would like to work on some somethings for the walls, but for now I'm done.

Here are all the things that happened to make it all happen. 

The room before the makeover.

Sam painting the new stripes.

Getting ready to paint the changing table and crib.

Awesome duvet covers I purchased on clearance at Target,  just before I had finalized the room colors.
I figured I'd take them back if I chose different colors, but I didn't.

One twin ($5.98) made a pair of curtains and the pillowcase was exactly the right size to be the cover of the changing table pad. Half of the other twin made a curtain for the closet "door." Super awesome bargain!

I made a couple of crib sheets by following this easy tutorial here.
I also made an easy, adjustable crib skirt found here.

My mom picked some fabric for a quilt about the same time I picked the room colors and turns out they all coordinate perfectly. She thought I'd want something brighter, but the muted colors of the quilt are perfect. I love them!

Now, here it is all together:

My mom did a great job on the quilt. And the rug is from Target. It's awesome.

View of the closet. And the cutest little elephant that my mom has owned since I was little.

Target just happened to have a whole line of coordinates that tied in perfectly with the chose color scheme-the duvet covers, the rug, and the lamp. I heart Target, in case you didn't know.

My friend made this cute butterfly mobile. I love it.

The cherub art was purchased by me in France about 9 years ago. Glad it finally gets some good use.

See the pillow case covering the changing table pad?

I also made some basket liners out of extra fabric from the crib sheets, crib skirt and quilt.
Before the baskets just had a true pink color, and they bugged me since everything else was yellow, teal, or poppy red.

I love the room! I have a few more ideas for things for the bare walls--like a mirror lower to the ground like we have in Winston's room, and some wood letters spelling the baby's name (to be determined), and maybe some other fun crafty things with some leftover fabric I have. We'll see. But I love walking into the room. It's so bright and cheery. It's only missing one thing... When, oh when, will this baby come?

Uh-Oh! We've Seen This Before

Sometimes it is no fun having to be responsible--and by responsible I mean a homeowner.

We came home to this mini flood and a small fountain in the grass.

I kind of freaked out a little bit. Who could be happy about a mini fountain in the front yard that means no water to your house? Again? Even Winston was mad that he couldn't take a bath; he had a hard time understanding how/why the water was broken (doesn't water just always come out of the faucet?). But thankfully I paused enough to realize it really isn't the end of the world.

Let the digging begin.

I was ready to call some repair man--the last thing I wanted to deal with was this. But thankfully Sam always reacts more calmly than me when it comes to things like this. He wanted to try to fix it first, because if he could why spend the money on an expensive repair? True, true. So I went away and sewed some little projects (great therapy, bytheway!) while he went to work digging and digging. He's still working on it now, but I bet he'll have it fixed soon...we'll just have to wait 24 hours to turn the water back on...

All Work and Still Some Play

Sam went back to work today. I guess it's always a bitter-sweet thing. It's crazy to think that another whole summer has vanished into the memories of our past.

Last week Sam finished another project in the house. As he was doing so,  I started listing the many, many projects he completed this summer.
- Installed 2 doors and one door frame.
- Painted said doors and the baby's room.
- Moved furniture and junk from one room to another to another.
- Put together new furniture and baby's furniture.
- Took out old shower door and installed shower curtain.
- Seeded large sections of our back yard.
- Planted and weeded our garden (I helped with that, too).
- Painted baby furniture & other stuff.
- Hauled in 2 truckloads of dirt and leveled a large section of our backyard.
- Ripped out a large section of soggy, flooded sheetrock.
- Installed a light in a hallway that never had a light.
- Installed a new faucet and garbage disposal.
- He even mowed the lawn a few times. Bwahaha.

Hooray for a teacher's summer vacation!

I'm amazed that even with all the work, he still managed to get in almost three weeks of camping/fishing trips and numerous trail-running excursions. (See his blog here for more on those adventures.) No wonder the summer went by so quickly.

As for the latest project, here's what he did.

Winston's closet went from having wanna-be fast track removable metal shelving that really didn't make much use of the space (didn't get a before photo, unfortunately) to something like this:

Sam remembered to grab a photo before he did any more work.

All complete.

Now Sam has redone or added to every closet (except one) in our house to make the most of the space. For example, he added another shelf to the top of our coat and linen closets because we didn't need a 4-foot space above the last shelf. This has really helped make better use of otherwise wasted space.

I have learned by watching Sam that adding shelving to closets is probably one of the easiest home improvement projects. I think I could even do it all by myself (but I'm happy to let him take the lead). It's helped us get rid of dressers--we now just use the space in our closets.

I've also learned that Winston has way too much stuff. I'm trying to sneak things into the donation box without him noticing...

7 Months + Baby Quilt Top + Icky House Mess

The calendar is crazy. It can't really be the beginning of August...

Now, don't be deceived by how small my tummy appears in this photo. Sam told me the other day to lay off the beer (it looks like I have a beer belly).  Har, har, har...

It's much harder to get a good belly shot than it looks. Either my hands are positioned right and my face looks icky, or the lighting is weird, or something else. Oh well.



Not much progress in the baby's room as I would hope to share with you right now. I still feel like I'm getting back in the groove of not being on vacation or youth conference or cleaning up a house mess (wait for that story). But, my mom did help me with a baby quilt. We finished the top fairly quickly, and while she was away I only had to unpick like 2-3 times. That's pretty good for me! :) Now all we have to do is quilt and bind it.

I got the pattern idea from pinterest. I'm really a fan of big, simple lines on quilts. I like showing off fabric and the clean, crispness of big blocks. Plus, it's simple. And I'm not a sewer, so I need simple.




So, when we returned from Baltimore, I stepped in water. On the carpet. In the basement. Not a good sign.

We apparently had a leaky faucet that leaked out under the sink and into the vent beneath it. It went into the vent and came out the ceiling in our basement onto the carpet beneath it (but not a huge spot, thankfully). It also got between the tile and the floorboard in the kitchen and caused all kinds of icky mildew on the tile grout. It also dripped straight down through the floor and onto the clothes dryer and floor next to it (that was the easiest part to clean).

Icky floody-ness, ripped out by Sam.

Luckily I kept the warranty paperwork on the faucet (we put it in new when we bought the house 2 years ago), and good ol' Home Depot gave us full refund on it. We used it to go towards an up-graded faucet.

Sam cut out all the wet sheet rock.
Then he installed a light in that hallway while it was apart,
and put it all back together again before carpet
cleaning people came.

Also luckily we have been building a home repair fund, thanks to the information I learned while attending college (studying family finance and housing) and teaching home ownership classes (it's recommended to save 1-3% of your home's value in its own little "home repair and maintenance fund" to have a source to pay for a leaky faucet, or a new roof, or whatever).

We bought a new garbage disposal while we were at it.
Sam is really glad he's not a plumber by profession.

It was nice to know we had money put aside and I didn't have to fret about getting the tile cleaned and buying a new faucet. Instead of worry and concern, I felt great relief.

Nesting Projects, Phase 1

I mentioned in my last post that I've hit a nice nesting phase. I didn't get pictures of everything, unfortunately, but work we have been doing--I assure you.

While I may be the mind and imagination behind the projects (and the maid for preparing and cleaning up), the real credit is due to Sam, who is very willing to put together, move around, paint, etc., etc. How grateful I am for him.

In addition to a bunch of yard work (thanks, also to my brother Brian for his help getting the 2 truckloads of dirt!) and installing of a few doors that we never had downstairs (for under the stairs and a spare room; thanks to Sam's brother Isaac for help framing one of those doors), here's some of what we've been up to the last couple of weeks.

In our house, we have four bedrooms. Sam and I sleep in one, Winston in another. The "blue" room was basically a dump place for home office materials, craft stuff, and odds and ends. The "orange" room in the basement is kind of an exercise room, a place where Sam teaches his trombone lessons, and also a smaller sort of dump place (sigh). Taking some of the principles from the Joy of Less book, we did some rearranging and throwing out. 

The blue room's main contents went from this (ew, it was messy!):

to this fabulous little cabinet in the living room:

We now have much easier access to printer, shredder, office supplies, etc., since we always have our laptops in the kitchen, anyway. Other items we chucked, are selling on KSL, or moved downstairs to the orange room (which has also had some rearranging/dejunking, but needs more).

And now, the blue room is Winston's room. He loves it.

It hasn't been that long since we re-did Winston's old room, but we still weren't completely in love with it. We decided we liked the blue much more than his green, so the green room gets the makeover for the coming baby. Winston's old room used to look like this:

And changed into this:

I can't wait to show you more once we get the baby furniture, curtains, etc., all put together. I was inspired by all the pins on my pinboard. Still hunting for ideas for wall decor to minimize echoing and add cuteness. Here's a sneak-peak of fabrics I bought for a quilt and curtains:

I love the trend of using vinyl lettering for quotes on walls, however I will be more careful next time I 
go to put it directly on the wall. (Will it stay there indefinitely? Or will I be re-decorating?) The Pinocchio quote on Winston's green wall had to come off, but it's the same color as his new room, so I had to do some thinking about how badly I wanted to keep it. In the end, I carefully peeled it off, and placed on a board to hang in his new room. It was maybe not worth the effort...the letters are big for a small board; I preferred it directly on the wall (see white board in is new room photos above).


This was the last part of the quote before I removed it. It made me laugh.

But, wait, that isn't the end (I told you we've been busy!).

As nice and bright as these glass shower doors were, they were in the way, and not tall enough to keep water from spraying out when Sam showered.

We changed it to this:

And LOVE the added room provided by the curved shower curtain rod. I didn't realize how much those doors really were in the way!

And lastly, we added a little addition to our living room decor. My brother and Sam found a big painting while driving by a garage sale and bought it to add to my nephew's bedroom on his blessing day as a big joke to my brother and sister-in-law. But I actually liked it. The frame was a nasty black brown and gold with major painting chipping off, but the colors of the painting go really well in my living room. So I wouldn't let them give it away and kept it for myself (much to their dismay). I didn't grab a photo of what it looked like, but little bit of spray paint on the frame and a few sheets from the lint roller on the print made a big difference. 

Our living room went from this:

To this:

See--the painting is kind of cool. Especially for $2.

It's fun to see how all these projects came together. I worried a cabinet-type desk would be too bulky, but it's nice to condense everything into it instead of taking up more than half of a bedroom.

 I can't wait to see how the baby's room comes together. More projects related to that coming soon.

Kitchen Storage Project

We have a to-do list of home improvements that only keeps growing. There's so much we want to do, and yet so little ways to fund such projects. It's been two years since we moved into our home, and this past week I crossed one of those to-dos off the list.

If you recall, while renovating our home Sam closed off an entrance to our kitchen and built a pantry in its place. We didn't have the refrigerator at the time, but when we purchased it we realized we should have brought the pantry out further. Oh well. Not worth the re-do.

I've been trying to figure out how to best maximize the space between the fridge and the pantry, knowing that I wanted a cabinet above the fridge, but didn't want it randomly floating with a gap between fridge and pantry. In addition, a few months ago my grandmother gave me her china, and I needed a place to store it. So, after some looking around, I think we came up with a great solution.

I hated seeing the clutter above the fridge, and wanted a way to maximize the storage space. 

The shelf down the side also freed up some counter space, and allowed Winston to have easy access to his dinnerware.

Aww! Look at all that fits in there! (China is tucked way back on top shelf) More fit than was ever on top to begin with.

We had some major frustrations with the purchasing of the cabinet. Let's just say that although we've been a huge fan, we are done shopping at IKEA. For real. They even offered us a gift card for the complications, and we turned it down. We're that serious. But that's behind us now.

As with 99% of the home improvements, I need and/or want Sam to do them. One of these days I'll learn to just ask him and step away. I'm not a very good on-looker of this stuff. I always have unnecessary thoughts or advice to throw in. One day I'll learn I only sometimes know what I'm talking about in regard to these things. My role should be limited to plan a design, research cost, save money, and shop. I'll leave the rest to Sam.

But Winston loves to be in on the action.

Room Makeover (because it's been a whole year!)

A little more than a year ago, we finished multiple projects in our home, including Winston's room.

The green in his room is not what I was expecting (more spring-green instead of the grass-green; I learned from this new project that the difference is likely because the sample was satin and darker than the semi-gloss of the same paint--good to remember for future painting projects). I've been planning other things ever since we finished. But I was definitely DONE with painting for the time being.

One year later, I was ready for a change. So, up went some tape. We measured and marked about four places down the wall for each tape strip to do our best to make the lines straight.

I originally had planned for less green, but decided I didn't want to tape twice. We taped with a thin painters tape to allow thin green stripes between the colors.

Then, we painted over the edge of the tape to seal the edges, so that if any paint seeped under the tape it would be the color we wanted to be under the tape. This was a HUGE time saver and made the stripes more crisp. This technique works well when taping anything--ceilings, moulding, walls of different colors, etc.

Then we painted the other colors (which happened to be leftovers from other rooms in our house).

We removed the tape and Ta-Da! Pretty awesome--with only a few smudges.

I then took a tiny paint brush to fix the obvious smudges. There are others I couldn't really fix easily because of the bumpy texture of the wall, but you really can't tell unless you step really close. This took longer than I thought, but sealing the tape made it less than it would have been otherwise.

We decided there was too much green space, so we taped again to paint more dark blue. My sister-in-law suggested doing light blue, and we agreed. After some debate with paint samples, I decided on one that worked well (and all we needed was the small sample bottle--$3, baby!).

We painted some more, took down tape, touched up the few smudges and--Ta-Da! It was easier than I expected, and I am excited to play more with tape/stripes/paint in the future.

We took this opportunity to take down the crib and remove the changing table (sniff, sniff! My baby is no longer a teeny baby!) and purchased a new big bed for our growing boy.

Now Winston's room looks like this (taken at night when the lights play weird with the green...)

I have some fun projects up my sleeve that pinterest has fine-tuned. Hopefully within a few days weeks, I'll have something to show for those.

Until then, I can't believe how much space a twin bed takes! For the first second another time in our house, I feel like we need more space!  :)