Starting the Nursery

Our kitchen renovation continues. I knew it would take awhile but I've been getting antsy. Not having a working kitchen sink will drive a person batty. So because I needed to see measurable progress somewhere, I decided to start the nursery.

Prepare yourself for lots of pictures of argyle. I don't necessarily want a theme for the nursery, but I thought argyle would add a nice touch to the room. My inspiration came from Pinterest. See here. So cute, right?

 

First a quick "before"picture. When we moved in to the house this room was super colorful. Very rainbow-like. We ultimately painted it a light khaki color, ripped out the carpet and installed hardwood floors. It was a huge improvement!

 

Fast forward back to today. We picked a neutral khaki color for the walls figuring that this room would one day be a nursery and khaki is gender neutral. Now that a boy is expected to occupy this space it was time to choose some accent colors. We decided on some safe blue and green, plus a small touch of orange.

 

The first step was to paint an accent wall. I gave in to gender stereotypes and picked the blue.

 

Next up was starting the argyle pattern. I decided to add the design to two of the walls. A lot of this design was really just an exercise in math and geometry. I pulled out a level, tape measure and pencil and started sketching out the design. Since our ceilings are 9' tall I went with a design of four diamonds, each two feet tall.

 

After taping the outline of the diamonds it was time to add color. Things went pretty smoothly up to this point. And actually quite quickly too! Thank you Frog Tape.

 

Then things got a little more tricky. It was time to paint the stitch pattern that overlaps the diamonds. I considered free-handing it but decided that it would look much cleaner if I taped it out. Talk about tedious. So more measuring and more taping. I used a lot Frog Tape for this step. A shameful amount actually.

 

Thankfully, things got easy again once the taping was done. Just a few swipes of white paint. And as annoying as it was to tape everything out, I'm pretty sure this was the easiest way to do it. My semi-steady hand would not have produced such clean results without the tape.

The white stitch definitely brought the whole design together. When it was just colored diamonds on the wall I was a little nervous. It was reminding me too much of a clown or circus theme. But argyle is so much more classy haha.

I finished up the design on the second wall the next day. (I needed to regain my patience for the taping.)

 

So now at least the painting portion of the nursery is done. Hooray for progress! There are still some things I want to do in the room, but this was a good start. And now back to the kitchen...

Recliner Cover

This is a story about an old, red recliner and a paint tarp. We inherited the recliner from my grandfather after he passed away some years ago. It has gotten a lot of use since then. Specifically, Meatball has gotten a lot of use out of it. When we lived in the townhouse we kept the recliner in the office. We are pretty certain Meatball would spend his entire day sleeping there while we were at work.

Since moving, Meatball seems to have lost his affinity for the recliner. I don't think it gives him the view of the neighborhood he was used to. And he's decided to upgrade his sleeping spot to the living room sofa. This put me on a mission to clean up the recliner and give it a new life.

Enter the paint tarp.

It's probably been at least a year since I pinned this amazing recliner slipcover on Pinterest. Realizing my limitations with the sewing machine (i.e. I barely know how to use it) I knew I wouldn't get identical results but liked the idea of cover. Plus, by using a paint tarp, if the project was a major fail I would not have wasted a ton of money.

This is about the time when I thought I was getting myself into a one weekend, maybe two, project.... and it turned into the longest project ever. I've concluded I can spend months working on a painting but have very little patience for sewing.

I wish I could say I have some good advice on how to approach this, but I really don't. My technique was to pin a section, then sew. I started with the back of the chair, worked my way to the arms, then the seat, and lastly the footrest. To get the individual pieces to hug the chair I used Velcro. I used Velcro because I didn't want to make the cover permanent. I wanted the option to wash if needed. Agony. Pure agony.

I honestly can't remember if what's pictured here was one or two weekends of work. It's sad, I know.

Eventually I got to this point. I really loved the idea of the pleated bottom edge but decided it wasn't worth the effort. Not to mention, I'm no master seamstress. So I went with a simple straight edge.

After many, many hours my recliner started looking close to done. It's not perfect but I think it does the job for now. If we ever want to recover this we might just have to splurge on a new chair. I'm never doing this again.

Ignore my wrinkles please! It had just been through the wash.

Hey look, it reclines.

Now onto more productive projects, I hope.

Gallery Wall

House projects continue to consume our time. I'm sure it will be that way for awhile! Over the holidays we finished painting/hardwood flooring the bedrooms and also squeezed in painting the hallway. There wasn't much time to enjoy the fruits of our labor before moving on to the next project: The Wall.

We've been itching to tear down that wall ever since we first saw the house. It separates the front living room area, which gets glorious sunlight, and the family room/kitchen area where we spend most of the time. The wall just isn't necessary since we aren't the type of people to have a formal living room. So that continues to be a work in progress. Although the wall is down now we still need to clean up the edges.

Among the chaos I thought I'd find solace in finishing a room... the hallway. If you can count that as a room. The hallway starts at the front door, takes you through the house, and drops you off at the bedrooms. Just painting the dingy walls and getting rid of the gold fixtures made me extremely happy.

Now up near the front door the hall opens up into..... a large standing area? The space is really unnecessarily large. I guess it's nice for welcoming guests. Sure, we'll go with that.

I knew I wanted to do a gallery wall someplace in the house. They're all the rage right now. You'll just have to trust me on that. In our old house we used the wall along the staircase for this. Since we no longer have a staircase I had to find another spot. Enter unnecessarily large space in the hallway.

I credit this next idea to someone else... probably something I saw on Pinterest. Instead of just hanging pictures randomly I cut out pieces of paper to plan out where I'd hang my frames. I thought this would be terribly tedious but it actually wasn't so bad.

My Christmas poinsettias are still going strong!

The tedious part was hanging up the frames. Why do 4x6 frames need TWO wall anchors? It just adds an extra step of hanging to use a level. So annoying.

I'm not sure how much time this actually took me, but I gave myself a Sunday to casually work on it. So there we are. A lot of the pictures are kind of random- most of them seem to fall in the category of art or pictures from our trips together. For example that picture in the middle left. Yes, the promiscuous one. That was a piece of art we picked up in Portland. It was done by a local artist and if you look closely the drawing is made up entirely of small numbers. It's pretty neat.

Zoom out a bit and here's our new entry area.We tried to make it functional. Now when people visit they have a place to hang their coats.

Speaking of that coat rack. I'm pretty into it. I picked it up on Amazon. When not in use it hangs as an inconspicuous wall sculpture/art. The hooks flip down to hold coats as needed. So clever.

Garage Glitter

We've been in the new house for about a month and a half now. Of all the projects we decided to tackle first, it was the garage. Who doesn't want a nice looking garage?

This project started with a gifted box of leftover RustOleum Garage paint and lofty dreams of transforming the garage from the dirty, bug graveyard that it was, into something... clean. We would paint the floor, paint the walls, and then put up some nice shelving and organize. And then we realized that all of this would be easier to do before moving in all of our tools and usual garage items. Like they say... there's no time like the present.

This is what we had starting off:

Obviously, the serious issue was the bugs.

So we pulled out the Shop Vac and did some heavy cleaning. The transformation had begun.

Here are a couple more before pictures as we started to paint.

Multiple weeks later we were done. Yes, multiple weeks, all for a garage. We spent a weekend prepping the walls. A weekend painting the walls. Weekends started to blend together. Then the floor had to be cleaned with a warning label-ridden concrete cleaner.

Finally, we got to the point where it was time to paint the floor. Mike painted while I sprinkled the glitter (or as Mike calls them, more plainly: flakes). This was the highlight of the project. Picture me tossing these flakes in the air like I was showering someone with rice at their wedding. It was a great time!

After some drying time and what seemed like entirely too long to be spending on a garage..... we finished. Hooray! We haven't parked the cars in here yet, but we'll get there.

  

Another one of my favorite features is the black trim. I've always wanted to try out black trim but have never been brave enough to do it inside the house. So we did it outside. Eventually we'll add some trim around the windows too. Details matter!

 

 One last picture of the glitter:

Of course since finishing, the stinkbugs have emerged in full force. We are trying our best to keep the infestations to a minimum. But it's difficult. They are some tricky little fellas...

Garden Update

Can I be honest? I enjoy having our little garden. But there comes a point around late summertime when the garden creeps me out a little bit. The plants start to get unruly. The tomato plants get huge and take over the yard. And then there's the bugs. I hate bugs. And spiders. I hate those too.

This past weekend while I was out watering the plants I was noticing how nice the garden was looking! The plants are still small enough where they are remaining in their designated little areas. No crossing of boundaries. No dead veggies in the yard. You know, that sort of thing.

Okay, the lettuce looks a bit crazy Yet plentiful!

 

This year we also tried spicing things up a big with a trellis. A trellis for green beans! Those little vines amaze me- how they manage to find their way around.

And just for completeness here are our potted herbs. Recall we went the potted plant route for easier access. I'm pretty happy with that decision. Meatball has also finally learned to not eat the herbs, so that's a plus.

Herban Garden

We had some intense rain this past weekend. It just so happened that said rain downpoured shortly after we had just transplanted our seedlings to the garden. We were nervous for our seedlings. They are not very big. And they look fragile. But turns out they are surprisingly resilient.

Green bean sprout

We are coming up on a week later, and everything still looks alive. Hooray!

To celebrate my blossoming green thumb I decided to make some herb labels for the potted herb garden. My seed packet labels (shown here) got drenched, soggy, and not pretty. Turns out I've had a packet of small wooden garden stakes sitting in my craft room since last year. Keeping things simple, I painted them white and labeled with my trusty patio paint.

I was going to spray on a quick coat of sealer for added protection but quickly got lazy. The stakes cost me probably about a $1 plus change, so the less time spent on this little project the better. Frankly, I won't mind if they only last me one season.

I'm all about function, and they have one job.

Confession: that mint plant was the one plant we bought this year. That's why it looks so hearty next to the small sprouts of basil. It's a crazy variety of mint: orange mint! We haven't tried it yet, but I'm pretty excited about it.