A New Year and a New Life (so to speak)

It's been a while since I've had the chance to blog here, and it's for a very good reason. It's because we welcomed our first baby to our lives on December 7. Yes friends- we welcomed our sweet Evangeline Ruth and life is indeed sweet.

~Eva at 11 days old~

Life certainly has changed drastically here in the Deng household but truly, it is a blessed change. I admit for the first 6 weeks of her life, it seemed as if life came to a screeching halt that basically just included nursing, crying, nursing, nursing, dirty diapers, nursing, and more nursing. O yah, and pumping. (sorry if that's t.m.i.- too much information)

However, now that she is 3 months old- oh man it is just amazing. Eva is quite the little person now- able to coo and squeal, and almost laugh, smile, and kick her little legs in excitement. It's precious.

As if that weren't a gift enough, since she is sleeping better at night (for the most part) I have been able to resume little projects here and there around the house. Which is fabulous, because it just adds a sense of normalcy and as you know- I love projects.

One project in particular that I wanted to get done was the foyer. First I wanted to put privacy lining up- so that when I nurse Eva in the living room I can do so without worrying someone walking by (especially at night) could see in. And the second was painting the foyer!

The privacy lining was so worth it and definitely a great decision. It still allows light to come in but offers an eye appealing solution for some privacy. A win-win if you ask me.

So without going into too much detail- I'll just simply show you the difference.

Before:

After:

When we got home from the hospital- I realized quickly that the open windows just weren't going to cut it. So I came up with a quick-fix of hanging up some curtains on hangers over the windows.

See Exhibit A:

Oh man- that was rough looking, but it worked. Not eye-appealing at all, but it did work... (Shwew I'm so glad those are gone).

Muuuuuuuch better.

On to painting.

I knew I wanted it to be a similar shade of the gray that we did in the living/dining room but I knew I wanted to take a risk (for me) and go darker. We have lots of natural light that flows into the foyer and with the huge white bookshelf that constitutes 2/3 of the banister, I knew we could go for it. 

So we did!

We tested 3 different shades of gray:

(however in this picture it looks like 4, but that's just because I painted the same color twice- the top and bottom one are the same.)

Can you guess which one we went with? 

Numero dos! We felt it was the right amount of contrast (aka it was dark enough) and it held a similar tone to the living/dining room color. And we were definitely not disappointed.

Josh snagged a few of me, err I mean the foyer, in progress. 

And here my friends is the final product:

Yup! Totally what we wanted~

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.

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.