The Girls' Room

The only before picture I have of the girls' room is from when I first walked through the house.  So here's their room about a month before we bought the house:

That's a queen sized bed - it's a smallish room.  The previous owners sure loved their orange!

We painted the walls and had the carpet replaced before we moved in.  Girly-A had been sleeping in her crib-turned-toddler-bed, but I didn't think we really needed to set that up again, so she just got her mattress on the floor for a few weeks  months. :)  The girls had a big double-wide dresser in here at one point, but I knew it wasn't going to work in the long run - too big for such a small room - so I trucked it downstairs and the mess finally motivated me to get going on my grand plans to modify our bunkbeds. 

 So here it is!  It was clean one day for about a minute, so I took pictures super fast.  :)  I chopped the legs down on the bottom bed to make the whole thing lower, and built a new footboard for the top bed for easy access.  The headboard on the top bed is the original, tied into the bottom bunk in the back corner and a leg-extension there by the window which goes down to the floor and is screwed to the bottom beds' frame for extra stability.  [Nice run on sentence, eh?]  The little reading lights are from Ikea.  I had to drive to Utah to get them, but it was worth it. (j/k - I was there for my brothers wedding, not Ikea's lighting options!)

I made the stair case bookshelf out of scraps in my garage.  Ugh, working with scraps is obnoxious.  But at least it's free!!  The kids helped with the painting:

 We painted the shelf, attached it to the bed and filled it with books and stuff.  Girly-A gets the top bunk and loves it.  :)  See??  Remember the balusters in the living room?  I made that little round table for K-lady with one of them.  It's pretty useless - kind of wobbly and too small for much.  But it holds the chalk for the chalkboard. :)

The wonky tree is a vinyl set from Target - I modified it as I put it up to make it go over the chalkboard; hence the wonkiness.  The chalkboard was a cheapo mirror from a Family Dollar - chalkboard spray paint was a big improvement.  And that's K-lady's reading nook next to her bed, taken over, as usual, by stuffed animals.  

We bought them a new dresser - I actually bought new wood furniture.  And nearly choked on the price tag for a cheaply-built-MDF dresser.  But it fit the space, and I don't like building drawers.  They scare me.   

The butterflies were cut out of cardstock w/ the cricut.  They were attached w/ glue dots, but the changing humidity made them fall off -- it was kind of funny to see 'dead' butterflies all over the floor, window blinds and bunkbeds.  I got out my little hand staple gun and made sure they wouldn't fall off again.  A nice headache for the next time we decide to paint. :)

The best part of the room?  Definitely the cute girls who share it.  

Home Sweet Home

 Almost a year ago we closed on our house!  I thought maybe it was time to show you around the place.  So we'll start with the living room, shall we??  I'm a sucker for before and afters, so that's what I'm doing here.

Here we are a day or two after we closed.  Previous owner had left us a few treasures and a lot of messes to clean out, but this is mostly what it looked like when we closed.  This is the view from the front door (the white door in the orange wall opens to the garage)

And the same room from the opposite side (now you can see the front door behind the half-wall-with-balusters).  We decided to start the process by tearing out those half-walls.

 What does a can of vintage Grapette have to do with the living room???  This is what we found in one of those half walls!  Our very own time-capsulized blast-from-the-past some thoughtful construction worker left for us to find 30-some years later.  :)  The soda was long gone.

Goodbye half walls, goodbye orange wall! 

 Goodbye popcorn ceiling!  Hello newly painted every single surface in the entire house!  Hello electrical fiasco moving the 4 switches that had been on that half wall!

 And whoops - I missed a few steps of the process.  Then we ripped out the carpet, kitchen flooring & little square of entry tile, repaired the subfloor (did you know I can fit an entire sheet of 3/4 inch plywood in the back of my swagger wagon and close the tailgate?!  I have to scoot my drivers seat as far forward as possible, knees hitting the dash, but it can be done.)  Then we started installing the new wood floor through this room and the kitchen.  Then we moved in before we finished installing the new wood floor.  It got done eventually....

 So here's the official afters - the view from the door...

 the view from the other side....

 a naked family tree - I'll get some illustrious ancestors names on there someday....

 It is good to be home!  :)

I love my Cricut!

I got a Cricut for Christmas, and have been playing with wall paper stickers. I've been wanting to do some of that darling vinyl lettering forever, but I've been paralyzed by the endless options and the uncertain future - how long are we going to live here? Will that be reusable in the next house? Am I going to hate it in 2 months?
So this solves my problem! Cute, fun, and oh so removeable! (DISCLAIMER: I actually do cook, and even enjoy it, when I'm not pregnant. But I thought my husband would appreciate the truth and humor of this particular statement at this time in our lives!)