Ze Nursery!

So it's been a little while, but that's because things have been crazy busy around these parts. Getting ready for a new born is no small feat, and I have a new respect for moms who've already done this.

This past month or so has just been filled will preparations for our little girl and it's been a good mixture of nervousness and excitement. Overall though, it's now just excitement that we are ONE week away from her due date. That being the case, I am EXTREMELY happy to announce we have finished her nursery. (however, I do recognize that me being the little decorator/tweaker that I am, there will be changes from where it's at now. But that's what is fun! A room is always transforming, just like the people who come and go in it!)

Anyways, without further ado- here is the big REVEAL of our little girl's room. Ready friends?


When you walk in the bedroom door this is what you are greeted with:

OOhhh little girls~

And now for all the fun details-

I found something like this on Pinterest, so I modified it a bit and LOVE the end result.

Directly underneath the frames is this cute little cube organizer filled with all her goodies, topped with a precious pink corduroy bunny~

Over by the window, I made this picture/scripture artwork from scrap wood that we had around the house. I'd been praying about what verse to put up in her room, and this one is one of my favorites~ 

The verse is: "Luke 12: 7- Indeed, the very hairs on your head are all numbered. So don't be afraid; you are more valuable to God than a flock of sparrows."

 These two snuggling birds are my favorites.

Directly to the left is her crib! What a lovely gift from Josh's parents. Above it is a mobile that is made completely out of paper cranes my Mom made as wedding favors for our wedding! I love that we were able to include something so sentimental for our little girl to stare at as she drifts to sleep.

Just a little close-up.

Behind her crib is a mural that I painted on the wall with a shade lighter than the wall paint. In case you're curious: the wall color is called 'Lavender Lace' by Behr & the mural color is 'Graceful' by Behr. 

And lastly, turning back towards the door, we have her dresser ( a $25 yard sale find!)/ changing station that simply needed a little paint job (I 'white washed' it in a light grey paint) and some adorable pictures taken by a dear friend on the shelves above.

Oh yah, and I couldn't resist the urge to take a picture of her little winter jacket hanging on the back of the door! Ah I can't wait to bundle her up in it!

 So dear friends, that is her room! What a joy and blessing it was to do it, and I can't tell you how neat it was for God to provide for it! Between gifts given and simply pulling things from around the house, the total cost was minimal! He even provided a gift card to cover the cost of the rug! We are SO incredibly blessed and I can't wait to bring her home~

Just a Taste~

This month has officially been deemed, 'Baby Month'. We are having two showers thrown for us by friends and family, and we're also going full steam now at getting her room ready!

Just two days ago we finished painting the nursery and here's just a little sample, if you will, of what is to come!

I love Painting!

So if you remember a few posts back, I mentioned here at the end that we were prepping for another project. Well friends- if you spotted those paint swatches on the wall then you probably figured out that we were painting our living room/dining room/ and hallway! After weeks of deliberating over which grey we finally picked one (Silver Sateen by Behr in case you wanted to know) and it felt GREAT to paint!  Something about picking out our own color for our living room/dining room/ hallway in our first house sure makes you feel like an adult! It was great.

So to keep this short and sweet, let's just get to the befores and afters!

Befores:

And drumroll please, the Afters:

In case you are very observant, you probably saw this picture:

now added in the dining room area! The space needed something different than the last Venice piece and I have been meaning to blow up this fabulous picture from our wedding. I ordered it through posterprintfactory.com and was VERY impressed with them. The quality is great, but they actually messed up my first order by not printing it in black and white. When I called to ask for them to fix it, they apologized immediately, said it was their fault and they would have a new copy out by the end of the day! Well not only did they follow through on their word, they let me keep the first color print AND they sent a 2nd color print in the new shipment. I'm guessing there's some new person on the production side of things and they messed up, so they just sent me the extra copy anyways. Who knows, but now I have 3, 20 X 30" copies of this fun picture!

And here is another fun change to the dining room since the first before was taken. I'll do a short little blurb on this another time.

Facelift, part 2!

Are you ready for this? Oh man, cause this is one exciting update for me to write about! As previously mentioned, in this post, we've been doing a little 'beautification' project. And as promised, here is the update/finished product.

When we bought our house, we knew she needed lots of updates... one of them being her exterior. She's been neglected to say the least, and well- we're just not fans of the whole 70's motif we have going on. So for a simple, (read: inexpensive) update we decided to paint the shutters! That way we could break up the monotony of brown, brown, brown, and more brown. Let's just say I'm MORE than thrilled because with fall approaching (aka. after the colors have faded) we'll have even more brown surrounding our house, so adding a pop of color I hope really helps liven things up.

First, we laid out a bunch of cut-up cardboard boxes to help cover the ground so we didn't up with blue grass. And fortunately since we've just recently moved- there's no shortage in supply of cardboard boxes in our house.

From there it was pretty basic- lay out the shutters, grab and shake a can of spray paint, and go at it. One thing I read and found particularly helpful is to do light, even coats- keeping in mind that at least two coats will be needed to cover the surface adequately. I found that by doing this, our end result was smooth, consistent, and exactly what I was going for. So just a thought.

After one coat- here you can see what I'm talking about with needing another coat.

I tell ya- reading the label on the spray can is the most effective thing you can do. I realized that a second coat could be applied as early as 20 minutes after spraying the first, but also definitely needed to be applied within 24 hours of painting them. I also realized that for 6 shutters, only 5 cans were needed since roughly it was just a little under 1 can per shutter for 2 coats.

Waiting for all of the shutters to dry enough before applying the 2nd coat.

Unfortunately it began to drizzle while I was waiting, so in a frenzy I leaned them all against the house (don't worry the backs were dry so no blue paint got on our white painted brick). I had to wait until the next day to get the second coat on but like I said, the can said 'within 24 hours' so I made sure to do that, and I am really happy with what we were left with.  When I did get to paint them the next day this is what I found waiting for me on one of the shutters-

Who knew we had so many fun bugs around our house? Wait did I seriously just say that? 'Fun' + 'Bugs' in the same sentence... I must be coming down with something. (In case you don't know... I HATE bugs. I am scared of them and they're scared of me (or rather me when I yell for my hero-husband to come save me from them. aka "squash it squash it!!! Now flush it down the toilet so it can't come get me again!"). *Don't worry, no bugs were harmed or killed in the process of this project*

Alrighty, enough stalling from me. Here is the final product:

Before:

After:

Mm hmm. Ain't she a beaut? Much more cottage-y for sure, and definitely a nice break up of the brown! And for under $20 bucks  (5 cans of spray paint at about $3.50 a piece), totally worth the cost for a good facelift.

Hooray!

Ahhh... So Peaceful.

So friends, the house updating just keeps going and this past update was one of my favs! This past Monday and Tuesday, I have been painting our master bedroom and let's just say it is the best before and after by far! I must apologize though because about a 1/3 way through the process I realized I didn't have any good before pics of the room.. Oops… so I snapped a few of the unpainted (& messy) side of the room. I guess better than none right?

SO this is sorta what the room looked like before- minus the whole mirror on the bed thing, the bed & dresser pulled out in the middle of the room,  and the overall state of chaos. I promise our bedroom doesn't normally look this disheveled on a day to day basis.... wait, actually let's back up even further, here is our room the day we closed on the house:

And here it is moving day:

Now let's actually look at it after the wood floors  were installed, and post move-in day, but mid-painting shall we say:

Each stage has been actually quite the improvement and let's just say this last was totally worth all the little 'hiccups' along the way. What hiccups are those? Well, to start as I was sitting on a stool bending over to trim around one of the socket covers that wouldn't come off I realized I was probably putting my head right into the freshly painted wall above me. YUP! I did… I looked at the wall and saw all these crazy squiggles from where my hair had brushed it and knew I was in for a fun look in the mirror. This is what I saw:

Let's just say I wasn't really hoping to add to my ever increasing grays so quickly- so I went ahead and washed that janx pronto.

Moving on, once I got to a good stopping point I had to leave to go to the grocery store to make my friend Dana  a meal I signed up to take since she & her husband just had their first baby boy a little over a week ago! I wrapped up my brush, roller, and paint pan and left not thinking twice about any of it.

When I got home, our cat Pepper (oh yah I haven't introduced Pepper- another time) greeted me looking VERY guilty and sorry. I didn't know why though…. yet.  After putting away the groceries I went to the bedroom just to look at how the paint was drying. It was there I saw these:

  

yes friends those are paint paw prints. Peps somehow found a way to stick her foot in the 95% covered paint pan. Why? I have no idea. I managed to paint the entire living/dining room without her even being remotely curious, but not this time. Fortunately, since we have laminate hardwood floors the paint came off just with a wet rag. Shwew!

Then yesterday, I finished this sucker off! And boy does it look pretty! I even managed to get the whole room back together and hang new curtains I got from TJ Maxx! Overall I am so pleased with the result because it actually came out the way I had envisioned in my mind- which is very satisfying because so often it doesn't quite work out that way.

Now I would say the room is a blend of peaceful and romantic, calm and welcoming. All very good combinations for a bedroom I think.

Facelift, part 1

So while most of our projects have been focused on the inside of our house, we took this past Saturday to venture outside and tackle one that we hope brightens the house a bit. See our house, as much as we love it, needs a LOT of TLC....especially on the outside. It was a rental home before we got our hands on it and let's just say it's been a bit neglected in terms of aesthetics and all things eye-appealing. Then add that it was built in the late 70's and hasn't been updated much since then- and yah, well you get the idea.

SO what did we do you ask? Well...

we decided that we'd paint our shutters! Right now our exterior consists of two colors- white and brown.... LOTS of brown: the siding, the stucco, the trim, the fascia, and the shutters. But not for long!

In order to get to the fun part of painting we had to do a little prep work- you know, take the shutters off the wall, sweep them off, rid them of all the DISGUSTING spider and caterpillar nests on their backsides, wipe them down with a wet rag, and then finally- paint!

Basically this is what it looked like:

Oh yah- we umm, tried to wait for this couple to finish their biz-nass but moved these stick bugs with a stick so we could continue on in our project. 

Once that was taken care of we unscrewed and took all the shutters down.

We cut open and laid out some cardboard boxes to spray on.

Used very 'official' tools to de-bug all the backs of the shutters. (I'm referring to the obliging stick, not the power tool =P)

 Exhibit A: All the nasty spider and caterpillar nests on the back of the shutters.

 (Ewww eww gross gross... sorry still creeps me out)

(look at them all!)

Once all the critters were off, we swept and wiped off the shutters too.

TA DA! All the prep work was done and it was time to paint!

Tune in soon for the painting and finished product shots! We're still in the process of deciding if we like the paint color enough to continue with spraying or to change the color. =)

Our New Foyer!

So about two weeks ago I blogged about our changing foyer soon to be complete with a built in bookshelf! Well friends the time has come for the big reveal!

It took a little bit longer than we expected, but then again, what house project doesn't!? The results though are SO worth the wait and extra effort. At least I hope Josh feels that way since he did a lot of the grunt work. ;)

The difficulty came when we realized the floor was just a touch un-level/sloping, and unfortunately the bookshelf was slightly uneven as well. As luck would have it (not that I believe in luck, but I can't think of another transition phrase), they both were leaning the same way so unfortunately one's off-ness did not fix the other.

This is where Josh's grunt work came in. What did we do to fix the problem? Sand, sand and more sand. Yup. Josh sanded the tar outta that shelf until it was level when placed on the slightly unlevel ground. I'm so grateful for a hard-working, non-flustered, dedicated husband. See when kinks come up in our projects, Josh is calm... hardly anything ruffles him. I on the other hand, get all tense, flustered, and am easily overwhelmed. Perhaps it's when things are out of my comfort zone that I have the hardest time trusting, but yet that's exactly what I need to do. Josh and I are a great team, and we've solved many little bumps along our home improvement way. So I need to trust that he is more than capable and together we can come up with a good solution.

I didn't take any pictures of sanding but oh well.

So are you ready friends? Here is the big reveal!

Here is the foyer before we even moved in:
(Here we're measuring in preparation to build the bookshelf!)

Mid-progress- after we've ripped out the carpet, the old rickety banister, and installed new floors:

And finally: NOW!

Of course there are still more changes to come- staining the railing, hanging a 3rd picture in the 'walks of life' series, perhaps a collage of photos on the other wall, & painting the foyer;  but we are SOO happy with the results! It feels wonderful to have thought up an idea, planned for it, seen it built, and to finally embrace the end product!  I love being a home owner with Josh and wouldn't want to do this whole adventure with anyone else! 

Now onto continuing my current project... give you a hint- the preparation for it is in this picture (and no it's not hidden in what we affectionately call 'the tool bar'):