Master Bedroom: Before and After

I've had a big project going on the last 1 1/2 months. Almost 2 months now, actually. Our bedroom! I have been sort of dying to do our room since we moved in over a year ago, but I kept putting it off because I could NOT decide how I wanted to decorate it. I looked on Pinterest for ideas like nobody's business, but I couldn't find a single thing I liked. But finally I found some inspiration on Houzz and decided what sort of look I wanted.

The first thing to go was...the POPCORN!! Last popcorn ceiling in the whole house, in case you missed my earlier post about it. Yayayayay! I'm a bit excited to have it gone.

Then it was just painting and decorating. I am absolutely in love with how it turned out. Check out the pictures...before pictures first, of course!

I'm not sure what was going on in this picture. Perhaps I was on a ladder? Anyway, I hadn't put much thought into decorating our room, as you can see...

See that lonely little picture on the wall? I painted it. It's pretty bad because I am not good at painting, and like I said, lonely. Poor little guy.

That TV was sitting in our room, mostly hooked up, for months. We used it - wait for it - one time. I guess TV watching is not our #1 desired bedroom activity. Apparently. ;) It's now in storage.

Ready? Here's the after:

I painted the walls a light blue, and stenciled the curtains, as I wrote about in an earlier post. I made the three smaller bed pillows from thrift store clothes and stuffing.

I made all three of those sunburst mirrors. One with shims, one with bamboo skewers, and one with popsicle sticks. The candles and holders I got from IKEA, the painting is my own, and the lilies I got from Joanns. My favorite here is probably the mirrors - I needed something big but not too visually overwhelming for that area, and I think they work perfectly! I made them all for under $20.

This gallery wall took me quite a long time to do. I bought a whole bunch of random frames from IKEA, put them together, and then added some other things to fill in the holes. I do love how it turned out, but I probably had to fix 20 holes in the wall before I was finished. ;)

Most of the little things on the nightstands I already had, but Will found that owl for me at Target and insisted we get it (I don't mind...haha), and I found that cute little clock at Salvation Army.

I lucked out with this pattern I found in the home decorating section of Joann's. It was one of the very last things I added, but somehow the colors just...WORKED. The green matches my painting and the throw on the bed, and the blues work with the painting and the walls.

Just another shot of the bed. I originally had a grey throw on the bed, but then I realized that half the room looked black and white. It really needed a pop of color, so I got this at Joann's on Black Friday and I think it pulls the lilies, painting and throw pillow from the chair all together with the bed.

Whew! It was a big project but so much fun. It took me so long because I cannot envision a room, buy what I need, and put it all together. I wish I had that talent. I have to do bits and pieces and "build" it until it's just how I want. This room makes me so happy!!

Kitty!

So...we went to PetSmart the other day and saw a WHOLE bunch of adorable little kittens that just came in from a shelter where they were about to be euthanized. Or at least, that's what they made it sound like.

We got kitten hungry. We love Luna soooo much that we decided we needed another kitty.

Meet Lily. She's 3 months old, very lovable and a lot of fun. Also, very sharp claws. She enjoys climbing up my legs, sleeping in my sweatshirt hood, and attacking everything.

She especially likes "helping" me with my craft projects.

She gets along with Luna great, but we had to separate them on Sunday because we noticed a funny patch of skin on Lily, and I took her to the vet on Monday to get it checked out...and it's ringworm! Joy joy. Luckily not a big deal, it's just sad that we can't play with her as much yet. It should clear up pretty quickly, it's already looking better after only a day with the medication.

We are very excited to have her, she's a sweet little kitty and I'm pretty sure we're going to love having her around.

I think I will be a crazy cat lady when I grow up.

Curtains, curtains!!

I've been on a curtain...rampage, or something, the last few days at my house. It started with my bedroom, which I'm in the middle of redoing, and it has spread to other areas of the house. I wanted black and white curtains for my bedroom, and unfortunately, I could not find any that I liked. Actually, I found one that was okay but it was $80 per curtain, and I need 3 of them. So instead I decided to make my own, and even though I think I spent, or will have to spend about $100 on supplies it's still cheaper and I'll get exactly what I want rather than "I suppose that would work."

I read a few blogs about doing this and they all said it's a ton of work and you better make sure you're cut out for it before you take on a project like this. They were right. :) I don't think anyone should take on this project unless they have lots of patience for tedious work and really, really care about their dang curtains.

I bought some cheap(ish) curtains at IKEA and had to whiten them a little bit because I realized when I got home that they were a bit yellow-y. So I used white-wash and a little bleach (not mixed together...) and that worked alright. I hemmed them, and then I painted a stencil pattern on. I got the stencil at Hobby Lobby for about $8, and it worked pretty well, but oh my goodness it was so much work. And no matter how careful I was, I got little leaks and drips and things, so it's not exactly perfect...especially the edges! And don't even ask me about doing around the grommets. :) The first section I did over the grommets was okay, then I moved the stencil over to do the next section and DOH! Don't do that! Wash it completely off first!!!! I read online that people didn't wash the stencil off between sections, just kept going and it was fine, but I think they're crazy or I fail, because that was a terrible idea. I could do a maximum of two sections without washing but only if there were no edges, no seams, no grommets, etc. And I STILL got lots of little leaks. I tried spray glue but it only lasted for one section and it left a nasty residue on my stencil. If there was maybe a washable spray glue that would work, but I have never seen anything like that. And adding another step in there might kill me.

This is me putting a pan of soapy water underneath the curtain to spot clean where I got black smudges galore. It actually worked really well to get the paint out! Phew!!!

I hung this one up and I love it!!!!! You will have to wait until the room is finished to see it... :)

I also decided to *finally* change the dining room curtains. I have despised the short little red curtains in there since we moved in, but I am the absolute worst at hanging curtains rods, so I was putting it off forever. I discovered that Will is actually really good at hanging curtain rods, so he's now my official curtain-rod-hanger. I refuse to ever do it again.

I just put white curtains in the dining room. I was thinking I would match the fabric on the kitchen window treatment, but when I went to Joann's to buy like 6 yards of it, they had...none. It was discontinued.

Can I just rant for a minute here please? This has been driving me NUTS lately. Will and I are on our way to being completely out of debt, so that means I have to be careful and stick to a fairly tight budget. So I give myself a little money every month to work on the house, and sometimes I do part of one project but don't finish it, in order to be responsible and finish the project the next month, or when I have the money. But it happens EVERY TIME! They discontinue what I need. Or I put off buying a sweater that I want so bad, and save up my babysitting money till I have enough and then...it's gone. :'( It seriously happens to me ALL. THE. TIME. In fact just last night I went to Costco to buy a dress for Kaylee I've been eyeing for a while and waiting until I had the money for it, and - you guessed - gone. Not just her size, but every single dress they had. So, so, frustrating. But I refuse to give in to consumerism and buy whatever I want when I want it. I REFUSE!

Anyway, moving on.

So the curtains are white for the dining room but the grommets were bright silver and my rod is black. I literally lay awake thinking about this one night, and I decided to...paint the grommets. Yep. Call me insane. It actually worked really well and was very easy! The only downer is the curtains are no longer washable, which could be a problem since, well, they're in the dining room, and Ben likes to splash things like chocolate milk and spaghetti sauce. We'll see if spot cleaning will work or if I'll have to come up with something else.

Sorry the pictures are not the greatest, I took them in a hurry with children tripping me the entire time. I'm loving it so far, I want a new chandelier but I'm happy with the progress. It lightens up the room to have the white curtains and doesn't the window look way bigger now? It's amazing what a difference you can make with where you hang the curtains.

Now I'm trying to decide what curtains I want in the living room, but I am really struggling with those. I want to change them soon because they're about 7 inches too short and look ridiculous, but I simply cannot decide what to put in there. It doesn't help that I'm planning on getting rid of all of the furniture and starting over, so I don't even know the colors that will be in there. I'm considering making more stenciled curtains because I am so in love with how my bedroom one looks, but I honestly don't know if I have the energy to do that. Hmmm.....decisions...

Halloween 2014

I have to admit that I was kind of a Halloween "Grinch" this year. I didn't even consider the kids' costumes until 2 days before the ward party, I didn't dress up at all (never do), I only put up one Halloween decoration in the house, and we didn't even carve pumpkins. Or do anything with pumpkins, for that matter. One of my favorite Halloween traditions growing up was carving pumpkins - it was always so messy and fun, and roasting pumpkin seeds and sliming/being slimed by my brothers...good times. But somehow it doesn't seem as much fun anymore. 1. We actually have to PAY FOR the pumpkins, not just pick them out of our enormous pumpkin collection in the back yard. 2. The kids are still way too young to carve. 3. I am very lazy. (I have been working on decorating the house, and changing all the silly things that have been bugging me forever. AKA lazy.)


This year Kaylee was going to be a Baninja Fairy Princess, but unfortunately we couldn't find her ninja mask, so she was just a fairy princess (I almost wrote farty princess, oops. I don't think she would appreciate that). I probably could have just made a mask for her, but as I just said I am very lazy. Funny thing is, we actually had a ninja princess come trick-or-treating to our house. I guess it wasn't quite as original as I thought. She also decided for trick-or-treating she didn't want her wings so she was just a princess.

Ben really wanted to be a dinosaur. I looked for a dinosaur costume and when I couldn't find a good one that I liked and could afford, I decided to make one. The day before I needed it. And then I found a monster costume for $8 and said "Forget it Ben, you're going to be a monster!" and he did one of his loud, epic growls so I took that to mean he was totally fine with it (he was).

We went trick-or-treating to quite a few houses on our block and around the neighborhood. The kids had a great time! I'm still struggling to get Kaylee to always remember to say thank you, and Ben....well, it's a good thing people thought he was cute because he would randomly grab handfuls of candy out of people's bowls (at the houses passing out candy) and I would have to run up and stop him. I think he may have been a little over excited. Every house we went to he would look at me when we left and go "Get more candy??" By the end his bucket was so heavy he wanted me to hold it.

When we got home, we dumped the candy out on the floor so we could see what they got. Luna was very excited about it, especially the little chocolate eyeballs that rolled around on the floor and the tootsie-pops. I still don't know what to make of her obsession with tootsie pops. ?? Funny kitty.

Well, that was our Halloween this year. I'm just happy that the kids got lots of chocolate. ;)

Our trip to AZ

We took a road trip to Mesa, AZ to visit Will's parents...and to ditch the kids for a few days. It was a really great trip!! It started and ended a little rough (I'll get to that), but other than that it was really fun.

In order to take less days off, Will decided to work a little bit on the way there and on the way back. For work he has to do quite a bit of (fairly close) travel, and it worked perfectly to just add it into our route. At least, we thought so. ;) We also had the grand idea to spend more time in Vail to catch the pretty trees and take a few family pictures. It was sort of our only chance so we tried to make do. We were planning on leaving Friday morning, but Will's meeting at work went extra long and we didn't get out till almost noon.

We didn't exactly do "family pictures" it was more like
"okay quick everybody smile okay good we're done let's go!"

I knew my kids tend to get carsick at times, but I wasn't really expecting how bad it was...and only 15 minutes into our drive!!!! I have never been more grateful to be prepared - I brought a box full of baby wipes, disinfecting wipes, paper towels and grocery bags. I mean, don't get me wrong, it wasn't HORRIBLE, but let's just say I was truly questioning whether it was carsickness or a stomach bug (it was definitely carsickness). Oddly enough, we stopped at a gas station to change everybody and clean up the car seats, and we ran into someone from our ward at church, who just happened to be at the same gas station two hours away from where we all lived. I may have sobbed to her a little bit about how awful this was, and how I didn't know if I could do it, and she was a wonderful moral support and helped me feel much better. Turned out she deals with car sick kids a lot too. Thank goodness for not being alone! We gave the kids some Dramamine and kept on trucking. It seemed to work, because they weren't sick again.

Anyway, now that you all have the loveliness in your head, moving on.

Five years!

We got to Will's parents' at like...2am. We just drove straight through because the kids went to sleep, and we honestly just wanted to get there as fast as possible and get them out of the car. It was a long drive but not too bad, after we got the kids tummies settled down. We stayed there for a couple of
days and then Will and I took off to Lake Havasu. It was our 5-year anniversary, so we wanted to do something special. We stayed at my parents' condo that they rent out sometimes. We slept in, took a lot of naps (I forgot how nice it is to just lie down and nap when you feel like it!), went swimming, explored the waterfront shops, rented a wave runner, and

Pretty blue Lake Havasu...
from the car window

basically just enjoyed some time without our dear, sweet children. It was wonderful. Wednesday was our anniversary, and we went to a restaurant called Shugrue's. It was AMAZING. Granted, Will and I do not splurge on going out to eat very often. In fact, I think in our entire marriage this was our most expensive meal. They put us in this little wing all by ourselves, 3 sides were windows and out of one side you could see the London Bridge, and the other two sides the sunset. It was raining, (yes, in the desert) and sometime during our meal, a rainbow appeared out by the bridge. To really understand the significance of all those things, you have to know us pretty well, but let's just say those little details made it super special to us. It was perfect!

Rare snuggles with Ben

After our little getaway we headed back to Mesa, and stayed for a few more days. We all had a great time hanging out with Grammy and Papa! Kaylee got to do lots of little arts and crafts activities, which I know she loved, and Grammy does not skimp on giving the grand kids chocolate milk. Yup, my kids were in heaven! We went mini-golfing too, which was really fun. The kids...struggled...but they had fun, so all is well. One of us (actually three of us) accidentally hit our ball into the stream, and when Ben saw that he decided it looked like fun and threw his own ball in. What a goof!

For the way home we cut the trip in half and stopped at a hotel. I can't decide if I prefer that or not, because it actually seemed to take longer that way. Less miserable, yes, but longer. And still miserable. Hmm...

Luckily the kids did okay on the way back except for one episode - I gave them Dramamine right when we were leaving, but I don't think it quite had time to kick in. Too many mountains! So again we had to stop and change and clean up and....ugh..........so glad it's over.

We stopped in Telluride for Will's work. While he was working the kids and I went and took a little walk along the creek there, and enjoyed the beautiful fall colors. It really was gorgeous. Our entire trip was full of the most beautiful autumn mountains you can imagine!! I wanted so badly to take pictures but I accidentally left my camera on and the battery died. Oops. I got a few with my phone but nothing spectacular - just to document our adventures.

I'm glad Will's work was in Telluride. The pictures don't even remotely capture how pretty it was!

Terrible week...but productive weekend!

Last week was a long week for us. You know when you have times that are just "off" and you're all sort of cranky and tired, and nobody feels normal? That's been our week. Will had to go up to Vail, CO for work a couple of times and those are always kind of long/rough days for him with everything he has to do. Thursday was a birthday party for Kaylee's friend, but for some reason (my brain wasn't working??) I thought it was on Friday so I got the kids all pysched up but then realized we totally missed it. I thought the kids would never stop crying! I took them to Chick-Fil-A with the same friends to make up for it, but we're still sad we missed it.

On Thursday Will's truck started acting really weird, overheating like crazy and shaking all over the place. On Friday morning we took it in to the dealership (he has some deals there for free diagnostics and oil changes) and...the engine was shot. Due to a leak in the radiator it overheated so much that it cracked a cylinder and the entire engine would have to be replaced. UGH. So Will got it from the shop to about 4 blocks from our house when it totally died and we had a guy come out to tow it/scrap it for us, and of course we got barely anything for it. So lame. I wish we would have sold it last year when we were thinking about it!! We're still down to only one car (which I'm not worried about, it shouldn't be a big deal), and we would have made so much more money on it if we'd done that. Oh well. Life goes on! And I'm really, really glad it didn't break down when Will was up in the mountains in the middle of nowhere. It was good timing, considering.

That night we were still all sad about the truck, and we got some texts and emails from our bank warning us about a possible fraudulent charge on our card - which it was, luckily we have that all taken care of. It's just been kind of a stinky week for us! We're glad it's over.

We had a really good Saturday, however, and we made even more progress on our front yard. Our neighbors think we're insane with how much we're out there working. Last weekend we finished a few little things and we got grass seed planted. Our new grass is growing in now, we bought some more roses and a Japanese Maple, and we finished our little rock area for the trash cans on the side of the house. We're very happy with how everything is turning out so far. Our new tree lost its leaves pretty early, but we're not worried about that - transplanting is always tough.

Yay, little grass seedlings! Grow grow grow!!

 

I don't know if you can see the Japanese Maple or not. It's just to the left of the big bush there and looks like a little purple haze. It's VERY tiny, and it's never supposed to get very big. We love it. We have all four rose bushes that we want, now the question is, can we keep them alive?? The one on the middle left looks pretty bad, it had a hard time this summer. It's doing okay now though and I think it'll be just fine next summer. The summers here can be a little tricky because they'll go from really wet to really dry all the time, so we have to watch out for that. Also, I apologize for the trash in front of the garage. I was too lazy to move it...

One of our neighbors walks by our house with his dogs fairly often and every time he does when we're out there, he tells us how awesome our yard looks. He says he's been in the neighborhood for 20 years and it's never looked better, which I don't know if I completely believe because it's just...not that great yet, but hey, I'll take it!! Nothing like some nice compliments for a bit of motivation.

Stumps, trees and bicycles.

So, remember my last post about landscaping and everything we're doing? Well, we got a few quotes to grind out that stump in the front yard. We were completely 100% planning on having someone come out and do it. It was just too big and solid. But you know what? We HATE spending money on labor -- apparently. On Saturday my husband decided we were getting that stump out, by ourselves, by the end of Monday (Labor Day). On the outside I was all "Okay! Sounds good!" and on the inside I was more like "Ummm...right...." because we'd been picking at this thing for a while and not getting very far. But we actually had the entire thing out by 10am on Monday! I dug, he chopped, and we just worked non-stop till we got it out. It honestly wasn't nearly as bad as I expected. The roots were enormous, but they were pretty shallow, which made all the difference. The first picture here we'd already gotten out more than half, so this is not a "before" picture.

The first thing Will did was take an ax to the middle of the stump and dig out as much as possible where it was rotten on the inside. Then he had to separate the root sections on the main part of the stump till we were working with a few different pieces.

And it's out! The pictures do not do it justice. That thing was a BEAST.

As soon as we had it out, we cleaned up and dug a giant hole for a new tree. We went to a little tree farm near our house and bought a pretty little (okay, not so little) Honey Locust tree. It just so happened that about 30 minutes after Will came home with the tree, the missionaries came over for dinner. We didn't plan that at all. ;) After dinner, the elders helped us get the tree out of the truck and set into the hole. It was a LOT harder than any other tree we've planted (read: bigger), so I'm extremely glad that we had the elders there to help. We wouldn't have been able to do it otherwise. We've always just bought little saplings before, but this time we wanted something that was already a decent size.

Now all we have left is to clear out the rest of the rocks, level the ground, put in grass, and do something around the tree like bark and bricks, or whatever we decide to do there. That sounds like a lot, but we're almost done with the rocks and the rest shouldn't be too bad. I don't think.

In other news...

We gave Kaylee a scooter for her birthday, because she'd been begging for one for months. Then we had a friend in the ward who gave us her son's old tricycle, and she much preferred that. Unfortunately, so did Ben, and nobody wanted the scooter, but they both constantly fought over the trike instead. So I sold the scooter to a second-hand store and we bought her a little bike instead.

She struggles with getting-going and stopping still, but she's pretty much got the hang of pedaling. It will definitely be a while before I'm willing to take off the training wheels though :) No rush there. She always tries to stop by leaning back, like she's on a horse or something. It's pretty funny, but I really hope she gets the hang of pedaling backwards to stop soon, so she stops crashing into people and things!

Ben cracks me up on this thing because he can't quite reach the pedals, so he just pushes himself along with his feet. He really gets going on it! The first time he went down the driveway (which has a slope to it) he went FLYING and ended up in the gutter, which was a little scary but he was fine, and now he's got the hang of it so that he can go down that fast and still stop on the sidewalk.

This is basically what the kids do the entire time we're working out in the front yard. Back and forth, back and forth. Oh, and they're extremely friendly to every neighbor that happens to walk by. Sometimes too friendly...but they get to pet lots of dogs and talk to a lot of people, so it's good.

Landscaping, landscaping...

We have so much to do and it is slooooow going! Our main focus on the landscaping right now is our front yard - obviously because it's the most visible and we're tired of being embarrassed and hoping our neighbors don't hate us too much. ;)

We love our little stepping stones we put in, however, we haven't done any planting because we didn't get them in till July - and at that point it's not really worth it to plant flowers since they'll die soon, and the bushes/trees we wanted to wait till fall for so it's not as hot. So now it looks like that except with a lot more weeds...next spring we should have it pretty much done, I think. Any suggestions for good, hardy ground cover to go around the stones??

This is the other side of our driveway. It looked okay this spring, but then the weeds came. HOLY MOLY. I honestly don't remember what it looked like when we moved in a year ago, but I don't think it was quite this bad. We weeded a couple of times but it was completely fruitless, the weeds would grow back in a matter of days. And see those weeds back by the fence? Yeah, they were like 5-6 feet tall.

So this whole area needed to be redone, which is a huge chore because it's all landscaping rocks. (And weeds.) We considered redoing the rocks and putting in new landscaping fabric, but we changed our minds because 1. We hate rocks. 2. We didn't like how it was driveway - rocks - driveway with our neighbors. We wanted something green to soften the look. (Other than weeds.) So we're probably going to do a tree and grass, maybe some bushes too but I don't know yet.

Ew, I get grossed out just looking at that old picture.

This is how it looks right now:

Every morning I try to go out and work on it a bit. Today I shoveled/raked up 4 more wheelbarrows full of rocks, pulled out the last two of the old peony bushes, and pulled out most of one of the huge roots. We're going to hire a tree company to come out and remove the old stump, but the rest of it we should be able to do okay ourselves. We've made a ton of progress, even though sometimes I go out there and just feel sad about how much rock is still mixed in with the dirt!

This is the huge pile of rocks in our back yard that we've moved from the front yard. (It actually looks a lot smaller in the picture.) They will be under our deck, whenever we get around to building it. In other words, we're going to have a big ugly pile of rocks in the back yard for a long time. I really dislike it, but oh well. I'll deal.

Project #2: Kid's picnic table

Yes, yes I know - how creative. A big picnic table and a little picnic table. But I thought it would be cute and nice to have, so a little picnic table is the next thing I made from the deck wood. The kids even helped me put it together! (Actually, they helped me with the big one too, but I didn't get pictures.)

Everything set up to put the seat supports on!

 

They loved putting the carriage bolts through the holes, tapping them down with a hammer, putting on the washer and nut and then tightening it down as much as they could. Usually Ben ended up making the nut fall off rather than tighten it, but he gave it a good try. ;)

And there they are enjoying their new table!

Kaylee's Birthday

Kaylee's birthday was on Thursday! She's now 4 years old. Sometimes I think about how she's 4 now and go "Wait, when did that happen?" and other times I think "You're only four? Haven't you been around forever now?" Haha! Interesting how that works.

She's a funny girl, cracks us up all the time. She's still an AWESOME big sister to Ben - of course, she does the usual pushing/hitting/grabbing/tattle-telling that any sibling does, but she really watches out for him and you can tell she really cares about him. She loves animals, reading books with Mom or Dad, dressing up, building with Duplo's, being outside, helping Mom or Dad do almost anything, and watching movies.

She's a very happy to have an Elsa dress.  She practically lives in dresses. We had a little Frozen party for her - nothing fancy, because we don't know enough little girls to go all-out. Maybe some birthday we will though!

Here is her birthday cake I made. My cakes are NEVER up to my expectations, but it turned out cute at least. I always have these grand ideas that....sort of turn out....

I think she had a great day, and we're so happy she's part of our family!