Monday, December 13, 2010

And now the reveal....




Today I finally finished William's room. Down to getting all the baseboards/door frames repainted. I realized yesterday that almost everything in there was done on the cheap, so I'll fill you all in on that as we go. The theme is Paddington Bear, whom I thought everyone had heard of. Apparently not. Paddington is a British storybook character and it was later made into a tv show on BBC. I've never seen the show, but I liked the books when I was a kid.


First is the crib. I managed to get this crib from Walmart on sale (more than $75 off) for $115 including shipping. For those of you who are pregnant and will have to buy a crib, Walmart by far has the best prices, and they have awesome sales.



The whole Paddington Bear theme came to be when I ran across this crib bumper at Goodwill for a whole dollar. I couldn't pass it up. I made the crib blanket and crib skirt to match, bought some sheets at Target, and whalla- crib bedding set.

Next is the mobile. This, I found on ebay. I could only find one anywhere on the internet. I think I paid $3.75 for it. They had a buy it now on there for about $15, but I bid on it instead, and got it WAY cheaper.


And here is the kite and clouds. The perspective is off in this picture, but you get the general idea. I made this to match the kites on the crib bumper. I spend about $2 at Michaels to make this. A couple of dowel rods, 4 sheets of styrofoam, some ribbon out of the discount bin, and some yarn that I found at Goodwill. Oh, and I used some paint to paint the long string onto the wall since I didn't want to use an actual string and cause a choking hazard. It's harder than you would think to paint a string onto a wall...especially when it's textured. The clouds I painted on with some watered down acrylic paint, and a sponge. Oh, the mobile is hanging by a rope I made from leftover ribbon from the kite. Everything matches perfectly.


This is the dresser/changing table. The dresser I found a thrift store, and repainted. It took me awhile to figure out exactly how I wanted it, but I'm happy with how it came out. The changing pad and cover came from a childrens consignment store...the wipe warmer, hamper, and diaper pail I did get new. Wipe warmer and hamper were just the cheapest I could find, and the diaper pail is the same one Noah has which I highly recommend. It's the Diaper Dekor Plus. I has its own refill bags that you're supposed to use, but a tall kitchen trash bag fits it just fine and they're a whole lot cheaper. We're had some pretty nasty diapers put in there, and once that little flap closes, we don't smell anything.


I think that no room is complete unless there is something on the walls. Wall art however, is expensive. Picture books, are not. I found a Paddington picture book online for $8. That's more than I would typically want to pay for a book, but I really wanted pictures for the walls, and just ONE actual Paddington print was at least $30. So, $8 for a whole bunch of pictures was worth it. I have to admit, I felt like I was doing something wrong when I was cutting up that book...



The pictures came out really cute. The picture frames are all from thrift stores, or I already had them, and repainted them to match the room.



These are what I'm using to put diapers in, and hide stuff that isn't so pretty...like noise machines. I got them at Michaels for a few bucks each, but still used a coupon. I painted them, and beat them up (Noah helped with that part) and then made the little kites out of leftover big kite materials to tie them into the room a little more. Josh says the boxes look like they've been sitting in a barn for 20 years. That was the goal. :)


This is one of my favorites. At the beginning of the Paddington books, he has just arrived in London from "Darkest Peru" and he's found by the Brown family sitting in Paddington train station, on his suitcase, with a tag that says "Please look after this bear." I wanted to use the travel part of the story somehow in the room. Making an end table out of an old-style suitcase is how I decided to do that. I found the suitcase in an antique store here in Old Town Clovis, bought some table legs, braces, and spray paint at Lowes, and an endtable was born.

The lamp was another Goodwill find, and the lampshade was on clearance at Ross.

The glider was Noah's and moved into William's room. The name on the wall was kind of an afterthought because I decided this wall was too bare. It's one of my favorite things about the room now. They sell wooden letters at various craft stores, but why would I want to go buy them when I could make them?


I cut the letters out of a big piece of cardboard, from the box the crib came in, and then covered them with burlap. Lots of staples were involved. Then I used the kite yarn from Goodwill to make the hangers, and some macrame cord, which I also had bought at Goodwill to hang the letters from, and to make the little bows at the top.



I found this on ebay. I think it was $1.75. Cute, eh?


The light fixture that was here when we moved in was awful, and I decided that it had to go. So, I ran down to Walmart and found this. It's the cheapest one they had, but it works really well in the room. I put it up all by myself. ;)


Lastly, is the little trike. My grandpa made this many moons ago, and I managed to get my mom to let me have it. It really has nothing to do with Paddington, but it's antique-y looking, and that's just the perfect sized spot for it, so that's its new home.

Hope you've enjoyed the tour. I had a lot of fun making everything, even though it took a heck of a lot of time. Totally worth it. :)

Catch a Glimpse Button






freckled laundry

Dressing up a bathroom


I recently finished working on the first phase of "let's make a presentabe guest bathroom." Phase two, will include repainting the baseboards, which should be done soon, and repainting the cabinets under the sink. Not sure when that will get done. Someday I'll probably decide I want a new shower curtain and bath rug since the ones we have are stained with who-knows-what, but for now, it's what we have.

Here is the before picture-


Yes, that is an automatic hand dryer....and the old-school soap dispenser. I really have no words. I have no idea why that was there in the first place. There are so many strange things about this house that at this point I just kinda go with it. Anyways, both of those little gems had to go. As cool as it is to say that "my house has a hand dryer," I think I'm perfectly content to say "my house USED to have a hand dryer." The hand dryer now resides with our friend Andrew who took it down for me. For some reason he wanted it. Eh, whatever floats his boat. I managed to get the soap thing down, by just taking out a couple screws. I painted, hung a picture er, window, put up some curtains, scraped some grout, put in a new toilet paper holder, and towel bar, caulked around the bathtub, and it looks so much better. Yes, I scraped grout. For some reason someone not in their right mind decided to put down new grout in the tile without taking the old grout out. Therefore, the new grout kept chipping out making the floor look awful. So, I decided that there was no reason for the new grout to be there when the old stuff looked better anyways, so I got down on the floor with a putty knife, and an hour later, we had no new grout. Here is our after picture-


The red thing on the counter is there for Christmas, but in general, this is what it'll look like. I'm thinking there needs to be a picture or something above the toilet. I'll have to go through my stash of pictures in the closet and see if I can find something that works.


No more hand dryer! Instead there's this old window that I picked up at a thrift store. It already had a mirror in it, which I thought was pretty nifty, so I just painted, distressed slightly, and put in our picture of the wild horses on the beach at Cumberland Island. Josh and I went to Cumberland Island for a camping trip with our youth group while we were "dating" and we got this picture. Now I finally have the perfect place to put it. Here's a close up of my window.


I thought the window needed a little somethin', so I put the little curlycue doo-hickies down at the bottom corner. That's my limited painting abilities, right there. So anyways, that's our bathroom until phase 2 is done. Adios!






Saturday, December 4, 2010

What, a new post!? ...and a few random references.

It's been awhile, eh? I'm not sure I've stopped to sit down since we moved last month, hence the lack of blog posts. If only I could post without actually sitting down at the computer....

We're mostly unpacked now, and almost everything has been painted. I still have a second coat of paint to put on part of what has been dubbed the I-Don't-Know Room, the kitchen cabinets need to be painted, and there's another bedroom left to paint. Oh, and touch-ups on the baseboards. A higher priority than all that is getting William's dresser/changing table painted, but I have to wait for Josh to help me bring it inside. Josh is out of town right now, and therefore unable to help me bring it in, so this is the first time in a long time that I've been forced to not do anything during one of Noah's naps.

My latest project has been painting the fireplace, which I just finished about an hour ago. When we moved in....oh boy. It was pretty awful. Just ugly, ugly, ugly. After we made the offer on the house I started looking up ways to paint bricks, and then proceeded to tell Josh that I was going to paint those awful bricks ASAP after we moved in. Josh, being the trusting guy that he is, said, "Ok. What color?" "Well....I'm gonna make them look like brick. Just different." "Uh...ok." Then last week as I was putting on the mortor color he goes, "That seems like a funny color for that." "Well, the bricks aren't going to be red." "Oh, ok." So, without further ado, it's time for "Silly Songs With Larry"- the part of the show where Larry comes out, and sings a silly song.

Before



After


Pretty drastic difference. I showed Josh the "before" picture a few days ago when the fireplace was only half done, and the only thing he had to say was, "Wow. We bought that?" Hehe. :)
So, a little research, about $30 worth of paint, a whole lot of time, and slight artistic ability, and we now have a pretty fireplace. It even makes the wood stove look a little better.

I've also done my first of what will be many caulking jobs, mostly replaced a faucet (I ran into a road block that I haven't gotten a chance to fix yet), and learned how to replace light fixtures, which I'm now a pro at after replacing 5 of them. Still a couple more left, I just have to find a few wall fixtures that I like.

Noah is doing well. I don't think he realizes yet exactly how is world is about to be changed. He knows what a baby is, and when I ask him if he wants one, he says "yes," so we'll see how this goes. At least he doesn't shake his head "no." (He doesn't say "no" yet.)

He's been talking more lately, which has been nice. Maybe we can put off the whole speech therapy thing. We'll see. In the last week or so he's added "help" and "juice" to his vocabulary. It seems like there were a few more, but I don't remember what they are right now. He's also been trying to say a lot more words when I prompt him. Like, this morning, he wanted some of my tea, so I had him say "tea" before he got some. Yes, drinking hot tea at the age of 2. A little weird, but what else is new?

He's also thrilled to have his very own backyard. Every morning he gets up, eats breakfast, and then asks to go outside. Doesn't matter how cold it is...if it's cold out, he finds his coat and hat, we get him all bundled up, and out he goes.

William is...well, making me giant. Every time I go out somewhere it seems like someone is asking me if I'm having twins. It's not my fault my hips are so stinking narrow and all baby has room to do is go out. Two weeks from Wednesday is when he's scheduled to make his appearance. Hopefully we'll have everything ready for him by then. Josh is betting he comes earlier than that, so we'll see. As of last night, my hospital bag is packed, and last week we went and registered at the hospital where we found out that Noah officially will not be able to come and visit me and his new baby brother. *tear* Stupid flu season. I'll have to go a whole 2 days without seeing my favorite oldest child. Oh well, I'm sure Daddy and Grandma will take good care of him.

Well, until next time, goodnight, sleep tight, auf weidersehn to you.....