Home-a-fying my house part 3: Dining area and PAINT

During our first Tax season living in our house Rusty was concerned about me. I never saw him and was literally stranded with Conner (we only  had one car at the time) all day every day, so he encouraged that I do something non conner related that interested me at least once a day. So I took that to mean design our house!! He thought that was a great idea to keep me busy!

So when I told him I wanted to paint the whole house he just looked at me with a face full of horror. (remember, HE wanted me to do this) Then he proceeded to ask me exactly WHAT was wrong with our walls now. The answer: They're BORING! then I showed him my brilliant idea and even he admitted that it would probably look a lot better. 

My brain storm sketch of the dining area.

So nearly 2 years later On Pioneer day it was finally happening!  we painted painted painted all day long. Rusty was a champ painter helper! But he did say that I'd better love this color because he's never doing this again. And I agree. It was quite the pain. the color is wood smoke by glidden.

we even made sure we took every...er...safety precaution available. (cough) I will say though while I probably shouldn't recommend standing sideways on a ladder over a giant stairwell I DO recommend that little red cutting in thingy. Best dang $2.50 I've ever spent in my life!

yay for TV. I don't know what we would have done without it!

 Since I'm a big old fan of compare and contrast, here is our main part of the house just after we moved in followed by the redo!

The Kitchen

BEFORE

AFTER I got the house all cleaned up for its photo shoot and as soon as I came back from getting my camera this was happening. Sigh. Oh well.

The TV Room

BEFORE



AFTER And we totally planned to have a white accent wall. It wasn't at all due to the fact that that monstrosity we call a TV cabinet weighs 1000 lbs. (give or take?) and we couldn't move it. Nope not at all. I still need to hang curtains and a few other things though. my never ending project.

The Dining Area

My personal fav!

BEFORE That's CONNER, not Soph in the highchair. just fyi





AFTER It might have taken 2 years to finally hop to it but it's SO nice now that it's done! I couldn't be happier!





I'm not sure what's cuter, my new gray walls or that little girl right there!

Home-a-fying my house Part 2: Living Room

From the time we moved in I have always hated my front room. It was boring, had crazy miss-matched furniture and I never wanted to be in it. So I wasn't. It was a big fat waste of space. No it was conner's toy dump actually. He named it "Conner's big house" and it was always like his personal play room.

 I have always wanted a fireplace. Not to keep me warm and cozy, although that's a nice perk, but because I think they are pretty! When we were looking for a house I tried to find one that had one in it but when we finally found this house I loved it so much the lack of fireplace was not important enough to be a deal breaker.  But after a year and a half of my ugly living room I decided it really needed something. A focal point. It had none.

The design school student in me had to get out of my brain what I wanted onto paper so I sketched out my plan and eventually (like almost a year after I sketched) after deciding whether I wanted to make one or see if I could buy one went online this past January and found this fireplace cabinet of my dreams on amazon.com (my very favorite place to shop. I might single handedly keep them in business)for I think a pretty reasonable price! (you know me, if it isn't the cheapest way to go I won't do it!) It came in busy tax season so I'm proud to say that I built it all by my lonesome! I'm so handy. It helped a lot, but I still wasn't IN LOVE with my room and needed to do a lot of work

So back in the beginning of June we painted the room our nice glidden wood smoke gray color. It was the first room we did as sort of a test room to see if we wanted the rest of the house that color (which we did :) ) Since we painted I felt like I could finally hang up curtains and finish the room. yay! I still have a little work to do like figure out what to put IN the fireplace (since I can't put fire. that would be a bad idea) paint the mirror...some color, and figure out more pictures etc. but it is a vast improvement!

Sophie's New Best Friend

 

Conner at Sophie's age. (10 months)

When Conner was little he was the worlds worse nurser. Ok, maybe not the WOSRT because he  actually would if he had to but for the most part he was a bottle lovin fool. I think he was just too busy and had too many places to be to sit and be attached to me for 15 minutes. I remember I would have to chase him around and physically hold a bottle in his mouth while he crawled and played. I was able to breastfeed him until he was about 10 months but by then we were just both done with trying and I was frankly sick of pumping for my whole life so I made the executive decision to do formula for the last couple of months.

One the opposite end, from day 1 Sophie has loved to nurse. And after the crazy nurser Conner was it was so nice to have a baby to cuddle with and eat and bond and blah blah blah. And not having to worry about pumping and cleaning bottles, etc. was kind of nice. In fact, she loved to nurse so much that I was seriously worried that if she had it her way, she would nurse until she was 3. or older! She'd be one of those kids who walks up and says, with words not baby sign language, that she was hungry and then have at it. So if you would have told me just a month ago that by now Sophie would want a bottle of formula over, well, ME! I would have laughed in your face. Actually, I would have bet $1,000,000 that you were wrong and THEN laughed. Well if I would have done those things I would probably be being stalked by a scary loan shark right now because it's TRUE!

I got pretty sick for about 3 1/2 weeks last month. It started out as a cough and I thought I could just deal with it and it would be gone in a week. Well a week later it was worse and I had no voice, and when I did have a voice I sounded like a 25 year chain smoker named Thelma down at the diner (no offense if you are named Thelma and work at a diner) After 2 weeks of this I thought I should probably go see a doc. I haven't been to a doctor for being sick since I was probably in elementary school so I was really excited that I started to get better on my own. But just when I was feeling lots better it started to get worse again :( So I went to a doctor and he said I had bronchitis. Hooray! He gave me some antibiotics and some giant cough medicine and sent me on my way.

She likes to eat with her feet up. I find her all the time just chillaxing with her ba ba.

During that time a combo of the medicine I was on and just being sick in general made my "well run a little dry" "The supply was not meeting demand" if you catch my drift.  And we all know that little miss can't really afford a couple of days while I tried to build it back up, so I supplemented with formula. The first time she tried it she looked at me with this look like "What is the crap? What are you trying to pull on me?" as she drank. But as time went on she decided that it wasn't so bad. In fact, it was a whole heck of a lot easier than getting it from mom. Now, unless she's really tired and can't fight back, she want's nothing to do with "me". So now that I'm feeling better and no longer on medication I could work hard and pump, refuse her bottles, and fix my broken milk machines but why? She's going to be 1 in less than a month and a half (I KNOW! my head is spinning just as fast as yours) so why work so hard when I'll just have to wean her as soon we get everything back to normal?  So even though formula is sooooo expensive and despite the fact that I am single handedly threatening her intellectual future, I have decided to pretty much stop nursing her.  Bright side though, I think she might be eating more since she's been on the bottle so that might just help with  Operation:FATTY!!

Home-a-fying my House part 1: The Entry Wall

 

Golly we've been busy this summer! I don't mean with family vacations and such, which we HAVE been busy with. I'm talking home improvement busies. It seems like we (by "we" I mean "Me" I'm pretty sure Rusty had no problems leaving our house as it was) have so many projects lined up! Many of you know we were lucky enough to be able to buy a brand new home. Which is awesome! It wasn't built in 1962 with cinder block walls and didn't have giant ant colonies living in the floor boards and didn't smell like anything except new when we moved in. It was (Is) SO nice! My only complaint is that it was built by a big giant housing company that just busts them out cookie cutter style and it was just kind of boring with its plain white walls all around and such. I've been planning and designing since we moved in a little over 2 years ago and finally my visions are coming to light! Since there are so many things we've been doing and I only have little spurts of time to blog I'm sure there will be lots of little posts to show how we have been making this house our HOME!

Part 1: The entry wall
I've posted a few pics on FB but here's how I did it!

 



Ok, sorry about the crazy family pic but this is really the only one I could find that shows the entry in all its boring glory.



I felt like I couldn't really do anything until I painted. And since it too 2 years to paint...well. anyway here is just after we painted. After months of paint swatches on my walls we decided on "Wood smoke" by Glidden. Since the lady at Home Depot said our kids will no longer die from paint fumes we painted at night while everyone slept.

 

Yay DI frames! I got pretty much everything I used at the DI (thrift store) for $.75-$1.00 each. I laid out kind of a plan so I had somewhere to start from. Then took them all out back and gave them a white spray painty facelift. I even painted the matts where needed.

Then  I traced all of the frames and cut them out of paper to make sure of the placement. (I had to tape papers together for larger frames) I left this up for about a week and tweaked it because I'm a crazy perfectionist.

Tada! Painted my $8 DI table, printed some pics with my photo printer and hung them up. Tip: I marked on the paper where the hangy thing on the back of the frame was so I could put the nail in without moving the paper. It makes for exact placement of the frames!

So there ya have it! I did all of this during nap and quiet time (since my 3 year old has made a movement to abolish naps) and all of my shopping for things with both kids in tow. So if you think "aaa I can't do anything because of kids. bwah!" You CAN! It just takes longer!