Finished nursery

Part I of our nursery makeover took us from nasty beadboard and blue walls to a neutral and blank slate.

We've spent the last few months making and adding little details and decorations. We wanted to continue the hot air balloon theme and add some subtle color without going overboard. Check it out!

We really struggled with what to do with the curtains ... everything we tried seemed to overpower the room. We ended up repurposing curtains from the downstairs living room and we're happy with the way it makes the window feel finished without being over the top. 

We did add some tie-backs using leftover fabric from the bunting. I was surprised by how easy these were to make. If you need the tutorial, it's here - just adjust the size. I doubled what she had listed because I wanted thicker ones and I'm glad I did.

Hans added some shelves inside the closet and I'm so glad for the extra storage space! And yes, I realize that's a lot of pink clothing. No, we don't know anything, we just have friends who recently had twin girls and sent us a box of all their newborn clothes. 

I couldn't find a crib skirt I liked and they're shockingly expensive! I really loved the bumper that went with our bedding set, but we had already decided not to use bumpers. But it was cheaper and cuter than the crib skirt, so we bought it and decided to put it UNDER the mattress, instead of above. And I really love how it looks there! 

Our frame gallery! I made the "child of god," "places you'll go," and "dream big little one" prints and bought the other three off etsy. The frame will eventually hold baby's going home onesie, which is currently packed in my hospital bag (it also has hot air balloons on it!) 

This was easy, just took forever! I had fun picking out the fabric. I actually made two of these and we were going to cross them over each other, but it was too much. So I have an extra if anyone wants one :)

I am particularly proud of this mobile - it was a project!! But I'm so happy with how it turned out. Hans helped,  of course :) You can buy the pattern from Craft Schmaft, or off etsy.

Thanks to the Schadalees for the giraffe - he matches perfectly! And I finally found this turquoise lamp at Home Goods. Gosh, I love that place.

The only thing missing is that we plan to put the baby's name on the wall above the crib... once we figure out what that is :) Come on baby, we're ready for you!

Baby bathroom makeover

We haven't touched the second bathroom since.... well, ever. But certainly not since the boys moved out. Really, I just kept the door shut and pretended that room didn't exist.

But with baby on the way, it was in dire need of a makeover. Check out the before pics:

This project took me a while - there was a lot to do! And I'm proud to say that I did most of it myself (at 8 months pregnant) because Hans had his hands full with some problems in the garage and with our heating unit. So I tackled the list:

• sanded down the dried up wallpaper glue and puttied up a bunch of holes
• repainted with Glidden Water Chestnut - I wanted something nice and neutral since I planned on putting a lot of cutesy, colorful things in it
• replaced towel bar with towel hooks (just plain, brushed steel ones for now... I'm looking for some cutesier ones)
• replaced curtain rod with a rounded, brushed nickel rod for extra room
• replaced gold, exposed bulb light with brushed nickel fixture
• scrubbed like it's never been scrubbed. no offense boys, we love ya, but that room was DIRTY. I know Parker tried to clean it a couple times, but it needed some intensive treatment. I really expected to have to try several products and make several attempts on the black nastiness growing in the shower.... but to my great surprise and pleasure, I used a Clorox bleach pen on the grout and caulking, left for half an hour, came back and wiped it off and it was gone! I'm huge a fun of those pens now.
• added all the baby stuff! I actually saw this whale collection at Target two years ago and fell in love with it. we'd always planned on not finding out the gender, so I knew gender neutral would be happening and I figured... why not just get it now? It's been sitting in our linen closet for two years and I finally got to pull it out and put up the cute shower curtain, towels, rug, trash can and other bathroom accessories. Only thing is that I discovered I'm missing the matching hand towel and now I can't find it anywhere :(
• and the painting! I saw it on Pinterest and thought it'd be easy enough to re-create. I don't really have a tutorial necessarily (sorry, Laura!) but I do have some details about how I made it if you want to give it a go.  I used 8x10 canvases from Michaels - they were sold in packs of two and the packs were buy one get one free (total cost: ~$5). Picked up three cheap acrylic paints for about a buck each - a navy, a turquoise, and a baby blue. I printed the picture (greyscale, fast draft, cropped to match an 8x10 canvas) and then used leftover graphite paper from another project to trace. Then it was just painting! Since it's going in the bathroom, I did top it with a coat of polyurethane for extra protection.

I think the only other thing we want to do in here is some sort of shelves or medicine cabinet above the toilet for extra storage and maybe frame the mirror, but otherwise it's cute and clean and ready for baby!

Nursery update

It's time for a little nursery update! This has actually been several months in the works - we didn't realize what a project it was going to be.

Previously, this bedroom was blue with white beadboard around the bottom (er... white-ish. It was very yellow!) But the odd thing was, and I don't know if you can see it in the bottom picture, the beadboard didn't go all the way around. It was like whoever put it up just never got around to finishing. And the beadboard that was up was pretty dirty, nasty and ripped up. We weren't sure whether our best bet was to try and repair the current beadboard and finish off the last wall, or tear it all off all together.

We tried to find matching beadboard at Home Depot to finish it off, but alas, couldn't. So down it comes. Much to our horror, we discovered it wasn't sheets of beadboard that you can just pop off. No no... it was individual slats of wood. That took the wall with it as it was pried off. This left the walls pretty ripped up.

So we had to attack it with joint compound. A couple layers worth. It was messy and nasty and took forever, but helped repair the walls. Then we tried to paint it... but the bottom half of the walls just looked too... smooth. Showed every little stroke we'd made with the compound. It wasn't pretty.

Our solution? This guy. Well, four cans of this guy. Hans did this one on his own since we figured the fumes weren't good for baby. We probably could have used a couple more cans to build up to a good level of texture, but it was expensive and smelled bad and we just wanted to be done at this point. It got the job done, at least.

And here we are! Several months, lots of elbow grease and many many hours later, we have a soft, gender neutral nursery.

Source list:

Bottom half of walls (and chair rail): Glidden Cafe Latte

Top half: Glidden Muslin White

Door trim, as well as the brand new crown molding and bigger baseboards: Glidden White on White

Crib: Graco Lauren (we found it cheapest from Walmart!)

Nightstand: Pottery Barn Outlet

Glider and Ottoman: Craigslist

Dresser: Ikea (Hemnes)

Shelves: Ikea (Lack)

We struggled with how to arrange the furniture in this room. Because both the dresser and crib are rather long, they take up a lot of wall space. And the glider  needs to be fairly far from the wall so it has room to rock. Everything we tried was not working, so we decided to nix one of the two closets and turn it into a little reading nook! We removed the doors, painted the inside, added two shelves and (not shown in this picture) added spotlights to the inside of the closet for easy reading. Now we have so much more room in the nursery and a cozy spot to sit with baby.

Now it's time to decorate! I can't figure out what to do for curtains and/or a bedskirt... I'm debating trying to make something myself. And we have tons of wall space to fill! I'll be working on that over the next couple months - for now, it's nice to just have a calm, clean blank slate to work with.

New kitchen day

A few posts back, I mentioned our awesome deal score at Home Depot on appliances. Well, today was D-Day... delivery day!

They are so beautiful I keep going into the kitchen to stare. And so you can enjoy the shiny, too.... a few before and afters!

Before and After: We picked this model for the oversized oven window 

We also love that this one has a convection bake option and all digital controls

And it has a fifth burner - woot!

And the new dishwasher... Also a Maytag. 

Our old dishwasher was so old that the prongs were rusting in the middle and breaking off (you can count three missing in this pic!) I also hated the utensil basket in the middle of the bottom tray - it took up too much space. I like that the new model has a utensil basket that can move around. And no agitator that comes up through the bottom of the middle tray!

And top controls that don't show when the dishwasher's closed :)

The kitchen when we moved in 

What a difference it makes!

Now please excuse me while I go stare at my shiny some more :)

Lightened up hallway

Remember when we said we'd never paint stripes again?

We lied.

I love how our bathroom turned out. It's one of my favorite paint projects that we've done. But... it's our bathroom. So no one gets to see it but us.

So we decided to do just ONE more stripe project (famous last words, right?) We rationalized that this one would be easy because it was just one, straight wall.

And really, it wasn't bad at all. It took two coats of Valspar Honey Milk, because we were going from that icky dark to a creamy off white. We used a chalk line to mark off the stripes... we measured the wall and subtracted inches for the new baseboards and crown molding and then divided by how many stripes we wanted. We also discovered that the left side of the wall is a full inch taller than the right side of the wall. Way to go, home builder. We made the stripes parallel to the ceiling, figuring the discrepancy would be less noticeable along the baseboards.

I love what a difference crown molding and big baseboards makes. And white trim. I've said it before and I'll say it again... what were they thinking with that dingy color?

Bookcase makeover

After this weekend, the guest room is a little more "done" (if "done" is ever achieved...)

We had moved an Ikea Billy bookcase from the office into the guest room. Its pine wood didn't exactly match what was going on in the rest of the room.

So we took it out back and gave it a good coat of white spray paint. We used Rustoleum Satin because it has a paint and primer in one and going from wood to white, we felt that was necessary. It took four cans of spray paint.

Then I found a tablecloth at target that I loved, so I staple gunned it to the backboard of the bookcase.
Before:

After:

I was super excited because I also found a lamp matching the tablecloth! Then we scored this great side table at the PB outlet during their Memorial Day sale.

We love the PB outlet, but they really need to change their tagging policy. Each piece of furniture has a sticker somewhere on it that has the original price (which is never what you pay) and the bar code they scan. Then, they have these hard tags that they tape onto the item that show the current price. But the thing about taping these tags on... they don't stay on. In the side table aisle, I don't think we saw a single piece of furniture that had a tag still on it, and we saw several lying on the ground. We picked one up that had the same price and took it and the table to the register. The girl scanned the barcode and we paid and then she was like "Oh wait! This hardtag doesn't match this table."

"But it's the same price, right?"

"Well, yes, but if it doesn't have a hardtag then it's been sold. Or someone is about to buy it. They took the hardtag to reserve it."

"But none of those tables had hardtags and there were hardtags on the floor. Isn't it likely that they just... fell off?"

"Yes, but we don't know, so we can't sell it to you."

Hmm... that doesn't seem like a good system. At what point do they go around and put the hardtags back on and discover that none of those tables were sold and they probably missed an opportunity to sell it because the dumb tape didn't stick?

She did a return on the table and refunded our credit card, and then I think she felt bad, because she sold it to us again. I was angry (not at her, at PB) and I know she could tell and I think she just wanted us to get out. We ended up walking out with a super cheap table because when she did the return/refund, she gave us back too much money (which we told her!) and then we paid for the table as we were supposed to.... so she actually gave us an extra 10 percent off.

I'll take that. But seriously, PB, change your stinkin' policy. Or get better tape.

Guest room makeover

For the first time in quite a while, we're finally roommate free. We've seen Paul, Edgar, Parker, Blair and Camille all come and go in the past year+ and while we've loved having them, we're loving being on our own, too.

Now that it's empty, that room finally got a much needed makeover!

Here's the before, bare windows, dingy trim and pale yellow walls.

In progress:

And now:

We went with a grey paint (It's Behr, but I can't remember the color name! We're in trouble if we ever need to match it...)

Hans added crown moulding and 4.5" baseboards and we painted the doors and trim Glidden's White on White. While I was away in SF, Hans also added the 2" faux wood blinds from Home Depot. He's such a good boy. The curtains and bedding we just happened to have left over from other things, both from Ikea.

We're really happy with how the room is coming along. I'd like to add some pillows to the bed, find some good night stands, and figure out what to do for a headboard. Oh, and that Ikea bookcase is getting a good coat of white paint one of these days.

Pantry labels (and download)

As I continue my cleaning and organizing project, the next step was the pantry. It's already pretty organized since I got these OXO containers a few years ago. But I saw this thing on Pinterest with dictionary labels and loved it, so I decided to give it a try. It comes from an Australian blog, The Painted Hive, and she gives a pretty great tutorial on how to do it, as well as some free downloads.

And here they are!

Here's what you need:

inkjet clear waterslide paper (mine from Amazon here)

clear acrylic sealer (This one, but I got it from Michaels)

printer

bowl of water

containers (mine are Oxo Pop)

labels

The original blog posts her labels for download. I had to remake them to fit my containers - I had to make some of them smaller. I also needed some things she hadn't made labels for. So here are mine if you want to use them:

Click to enlarge and save to your desktop. These are 2x2 inch labels

Click to enlarge and save to your desktop. These are 4x3 labels.

Here's what you do:

1. Once you have the design the way you want it, flip it horizontally so you print the mirror image.
2. Print the design onto the glossy side of the paper.
3. Before the ink dries, spray on a decent coat of the sealer 
4. Cut out the image. Try to cut a nice square because it does show up once the label is on
5. Fill a little bowl with hot water. Doesn't have to be boiling, but pretty warm.
6. Immerse one label (only do one at a time!) in the bowl, design up. Keep an eye on it... as soon as you see the transparent film start separating from the backing, pull it out of the water. The hotter the water, the quicker it happens. The instructions I used said 30-45 seconds... that was way too long. The transparent film had already curled on top of itself and it was ruined. In really hot water, it took less than 5 seconds. In warm water maybe 10. I only got 2-3 labels done before the water was too cool for the backing to separate.
7. Quickly flip the design onto the container and place it where you want. Gently (VERY gently) peel the backing off. You can slide it off, but I found that the ink smeared more that way. Wet your finger and use it to smooth all the air bubbles out.
8. Leave it to dry for a couple hours (otherwise it'll rub off!)