A Baby Room

If you asked me what I’m most excited about right now, I’d probably tell you decorating a room. There is something so fun about taking a room that you were never really happy with and making it your own. Or someone else’s own.

Our spare bedroom has always been intended for child #2. For the longest while, we just kept the door shut because it was this hideous dark blue/dark gray color, and the previous owners had this lovely habit of painting the ceiling the same color as the wall.

Once Emma got a “big girl bed” for Christmas this last year, we moved her baby furniture into the spare bedroom. It was funny to see it look like the beginning of a real room, but it still wasn’t right. It just felt like a dark cave with a crib in it.

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You can see it in the real estate picture above. It looked good enough for buying a house, but obviously this is not in my color palette.

As soon as we heard that the baby was probably a girl, I was excited to start painting. Now, if you know me, it really doesn’t matter what gender my child is; I’m probably going to paint the room a neutral gray/beige or light aqua blue. Because that’s what I do.

I decided to go a bit out of my normal and pick a minty color. Yes, I know. CRAZY. 😉 It may look bluer depending on the monitor setting, but it’s got a slight minty feel to it.

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Peter was very quick to run out to Lowe’s, buy paint, and start getting rid of that dark cave. It took him four coats of white paint, but the cave is gone forever! He also added a nice ceiling fan.

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This room below was kind of my inspiration for the baby’s room. I loved how colorful it was.

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I found an adorable banner at Babies R Us and decided to buy it. I figured if the baby ended up being a boy, I’d just return the banner. It has a similar blue-ish color, some coral, green, and brown. This was perfect because a lot of Emma’s crib sheets and hand-me-down bedding stuff is in this color scheme as well.

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For the walls, I created some custom art in Photoshop and printed them. These colors pretty much give me the option of adding any color to the room, and it will fit in. The middle picture is a song that I sing to Emma at night before bed, and she absolutely loves it so it seemed appropriate to welcome baby #2 with this song as well.

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I am hoping to get one or two crib sheets to add to the mix, but other than that, we really don’t need one of those big, fancy bedding sets. I realized just how little we used most of the stuff inside the bedding set for a year. You’re only allowed to put a sheet on the bed so all of the other bedding doesn’t really get used until the baby is at least one year old.

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I also got four really cute organization bins from Target in the dollar section. They were $3 a piece and are pretty nice quality. I will post more pictures as I start to clean up the room. Right now, there are about 9 million bags of baby girl clothes that I have to sort through and organize.

Home Improvement Project – Shelves

We have a nice 3rd floor loft in our bedroom that we have been trying to figure out since we bought this house. It is a pretty sizable space, and you have to walk up stairs in our bedroom to get to it. There are these 2 cute windows, and each window has a little alcove which is about 30″ wide and 6 feet deep. So the question (for years) has been, “What do we do with these little window spaces?”

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We have tried putting sheer curtains in front of them, so we could hide junk behind them, but it just wasn’t working. For Valentine’s Day, Peter decided he would build me Valentine’s shelves. Yep. Ok, they’re really just shelves, but they were built with love on Valentine’s Day.

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I also went to Joann’s Fabric and bought some cute, trendy fabric to create little curtains for the shelves–that way we can store a bunch of stuff underneath and it still looks nice. And our 1-year old won’t be tempted by things if they are covered up.

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They look really nice, and I am very happy with the usable space. Now the next project is to make the same little curtains for the changing table, so I can hide the diapers, wipes, and other stuff under there.

Baby Organization

Babies involve a lot of stuff, which means your house becomes a mess. So what to do? Buy a billion bins at Target!

Now most of these tubs are actually for my husband. After having a baby for 2 days, he came down the stairs with his hair all disheveled saying, “I can’t find a single thing in the baby’s room!” Then the next day, he tried to put clean clothes away, and they were just all over the place :). So I used my teacher labeling machine to label lots of tubs. Since then, I haven’t heard him complain about not being able to find things, and everything has ended up in the right drawers. Yay!

A planter to help contain all of the stuffed animals!

A cute tub to store diapers, antibacterial hand  stuff,  thermometer, diaper rash cream

A tub to store all swaddles because my husband can’t ever locate these things

A tub to contain the billions of socks

The changing table/dresser

Everything we use at night

My husband doesn’t ever know what is in each drawer :).

A tub for the boob juice

Posters and Turnips

I made a post a while ago about some posters that I was thinking of printing. I decided to go ahead and get those puppies printed. I am pretty happy with the way they came out, too! Disregard the price tag stickers on the picture frames.
It was much cheaper to go to the local camera store and have these 11X14s printed as matte pictures rather than having them printed at Kinko’s as posters — $5 each versus $38.95 each. The picture frames were $7.99 from Garden Ridge, and we spray painted them white to match with the curtains and white trim. Yahoo! Still cheaper than similar things I’ve found online like this.
Turnips Fries – (before baking)
On the eating front, we always get turnips from our local Farmer’s Market and then have no idea what to do with them. Peter is always determined to take the vegetables I don’t like and turn them into something tasty. It just wasn’t happening with turnips…until I found a recipe for turnip fries! Yes, fries. When you eat them while they are hot, they are pretty convincing as French fries. I would highly recommend them if you are curious or needing something to do with turnips.

Turnip Fries Recipe:
4-5 turnips
2 tbsp of vegetable oil or olive oil
1/3 cup of parmesan cheese (the kind in the green can)
1 tsp of onion powder
1 tsp of garlic powder
1 tsp paprika
1 tsp chives (optional)
sprinkle of ground pepper (optional)

1. Preheat oven to 425 degrees.
2. Wash turnips and then cut into “steak fries.”
3. In a bowl, pour oil and mix with turnips. All fries should have a light covering.
4. Add in cheese, onion powder, garlic powder, paprika, chives, and pepper.
5. Toss all fries, so they are covered in the mixture from step 3.
6. Spray a sheet with cooking spray and spread fries onto sheet evenly.
7. Cook for 20 minutes.
8. Eat soon after (–I like them while they are still hot) and enjoy!

Turnips have less calories than potatoes.
Turnips have less carbohydrates than potatoes.
Turnips are higher in calcium.

Stuffed Animal Organizer

So maybe I’ve been Pinterest-ing a little…but what a good way to organize stuffed animals! They always seem to fall off shelves and take up space on flat surfaces. Tada! Thanks, Peter!

By the way…if I knew that blackout fabric was this cheap, I would have totally made my own blackout liners for the white curtains we just bought! Just wanted to write about this in case anyone is reading and doesn’t know this either :).

Owl Love Discounts!

I just wanted to share that ModCloth.com is having a deal right now where if you sign up for a new account, you get $20 your order of $50 or more. (Here is the referral link if you are interested: http://sharethelove.modcloth.com/a/clk/4r1Lcc)

This was very exciting news to me, because I’ve been wanting this owl lamp but didn’t want to spend $56.99 on it. Now my order was $40, which makes me not feel so bad about it. Yay!

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Plus this fulfills my need to buy something for the baby’s room. Now I feel accomplished. This child will have a lamp.

Rachel’s Bridal Shower

My future sister-in-law’s bridal shower was today, so everyone was running around like crazy trying to get things in order. There was TONS of food (as usual), cute decorations, wonderful guests, and lots of laughter.  I hope Rachel had a good time and enjoyed herself. Here are some of the details of the day:

  

Guest Room Re-Do

I’ve tried several times to rid myself of my love of blue, but I am never happy with the final product. I tried painting my bedroom green, so we could do the “earth tones” look with magentas, greens, and browns. Bleh. I hated going into my bedroom. Even though it looked presentable, it just wasn’t me.

I tried doing maroons, golds, and yellows in the guest bedroom, but I never really felt that the guest room was anything to be proud of.

Once I realized that blues are just really calming to me, I decided that it’s my house, and if people want to say, “Wow… that girl sure likes a lot of blue,” then so be it. Because you know what? I am the one who has to live here and has to try to destress here. So blue it is!

Here are some befores of our guest room:

Today I decided to paint the room a new, cool color that has a slight blueish hue to it. I also repainted my picture frames, shelves, and mirrors. Here’s a sample of what is to come!

Evercare Pet Hair Sweeper Review

We adopted Lennon, the Australian Cattle Dog mix, because we wanted a pup, and she was just too adorable. White and brown hair, white stripe down the nose, white socks, 2 different-colored eyes, peed out of excitement when they put her in the little room with us. She didn’t move from the puppy fetal position for about 20 minutes, but then eventually she crawled into my lap. I was sold.
Lennon needed a friend, and I have always been a “everyone needs a friend” kind of person. We found a newspaper ad that said someone was selling a litter a black lab mix puppies. On our trip to the seller’s house, we soon realized we just had to adopt a puppy from them, because leaving a dog there would just be cruel. They were drunken, sloppy people who were amused by feeding the puppies beer and screaming at them. The puppies were all well-behaved and cute, and Peter really seemed to fall in love with Lily, her one white foot, and her whiny nature. 
Now that you know the background, you can see that it never occurred to us that having 2 dogs with different -colored fur would be a problem…until about a day later when the light tiled floor was covered in black hair and the dark wooden floor was covered in white and tan hair. And since then, our floor, clothes, couches, car interior, etc. are all covered in hair of one color or another. Lennon’s hair is the worst–it is like little needles that are impervious to vacuum cleaners or lint brushes.
Just as an example, here was my dark brown carpet with Lennon’s white hair before.
Today I decided I would try one more thing–the Evercare Pet Hair Sweeper–and I am seriously glad I spent the $7.99. It cleans the black and white hair up sooo well! I cleaned my sofa, the front seats in the car, my ottomans, my coat! 

After a swipe of the Sweeper, here is the carpet after. Yahoo!

Yay, now I don’t have to look like the only person in a business meeting with a suit covered in dog hair!

IKEA: Part 2 (with some sneak peek pics)

We decided to go for it and ordered IKEA furniture online. They make you pay a shipping fee, but let me just say that, with our small cars, it would have taken at least 2 trips to get the stuff anyway. So we saved on gas money, food, and time.

Peter was going to go to DC on a work trip, but things got a little crazy with the weather, and it ended up being cancelled (–I know some dictionaries say it’s spelled, “canceled,” but I am of the phonics rule that if you have a syllable with a short vowel sound, when you add -ed, you need to have a double consonant. Ex: sun-ned, rub-bed, surpass-ed [has 2 double S’s at the end already, so you can just add -ed]. You get the idea. I’m an English nerd). Therefore, we didn’t end up getting the panels and coffee table. We are still debating the coffee table, but we found an alternate draping for our window nooks.

The bookcase that was going to go horizontal over the desks is absolutely way too heavy, so that is just not happening. We have another idea for it.

You can see the gray wall color we picked and the new door handle that we added to our tiny, minidoor.
Now we won’t bang into a doorknob all the time. Yay! The white trim makes such a difference. LOVE IT.

We searched high and low for a cute, white, minifan.
The loft has an angled ceiling, so a regular-sized fan just won’t do.

This is my joyous couch. I will let my dogs on this one. For $150, it’s not too shabby.

Here are some sneak peaks.