I love cooking...

It's one of my favorite things to do. I can make amazing Asian food, I can whip up Italian bread in less than two hours, I make the BEST dinner rolls. I've had several people tell me I make the best cookies they've ever had. I recently made up a recipe for a peanut butter chocolate pie that is really easy, really quick, and basically tastes like...heaven...in my mouth. I can take almost any recipe that I want to and make it delicious the very first time, even if I make some changes to it according to our tastes (or if I'm missing an ingredient).

But...I can't make pancakes. Seriously, I stink at it. I make them every week or so to try to get the trick, but it's not working very well so far. They taste fine, but man are they UGLY.

I think I need to fix the butter problem (the recipe I use melts the butter, and when I mix it in, it always hardens so there are chunks of butter all over my batter), and use lower heat. But in using lower heat, I need to be patient. I'm not very good at being patient.

Maybe I'm just too impatient for pancakes.

Our Bedrom: Before and After

We always have several projects going on here, and this is one I've been working on for a while. We got a couple of Lowes giftcards and quite a bit of cash for Christmas, so this is what we decided to do.

My bedroom is very important to me. It's my escape, my "safe" place, my quiet place, and most of all, my place that is only for me and my husband, no kids allowed. I mean, sure, they go in there sometimes, but generally, it's off-limits. Why? Well, because I guess even though I THOUGHT I was going to be a super-attached parent, and breastfeed for two years, and cosleep forever, and all that jazz...I'm not. I'm just not. There's really no other way around it, I suppose. I'm an attached parent in that I listen to my kids, I rock them to sleep, I cuddle them, I give them attention and hugs and kisses...but at bedtime I get selfish, and I want time without children. So naturally I wanted my room to be a sort of "haven" that I can really relax in. Our whole married life we've never had a nice bedroom. I've just never decorated it the way I wanted and made it look really good. I knew I wanted something that was romantic, clean, bright, and simple.

Okay, enough chatting. Here are my pictures.

The first thing I did was paint the walls. I painted them when we first moved in, twice. And I still didn't like the color. It was okay, but it was far too blue (I wanted gray). It actually looks more gray in the "before" pictures than the "after" pictures here, but gray is a very, very deceiving color, as I've found. It never looks the same in pictures, and it also never goes on the wall the way you expect. But I'm really happy with how it is now.

After the walls, I painted the floor a dark, glossy brown. It looks awesome compared to the old, worn floor. I moved the dresser inside the closet and painted the pictures. We made the molding ourselves for $15. YES. I can't believe how expensive molding is, even for really plain, boring stuff. So I much prefer ours. The curtains are made from $5 Walmart sheets and $5 Ikea sheer curtains. In total I think it cost me around $25 for the curtains, plus lots of work. I had to do a lot of sewing and trimming to get them just right. I was worried about doing floor-length curtains in my room, but I actually love how it looks!

 The closet was kind of a big deal - even though it just looks like I put a curtain up. I painted everything (I had never painted the trim there, how sad!) including the inside of the closet and the door. I also removed all the old paint from the clothes rod and the door knob, and put new hinges on. It's amazing what little things like that can do. The people that worked on this house before us didn't do a great job. All the hinges and doorknobs were painted over and everything was just a mess. I'm slowly getting it all cleaned up and looking nice.

I love this room so much!! I'm so glad I was able to do it.