Let there be light (and air!)

I’m very overdue on this one…but as part of our house prep that we’ve been going through, we finally bit the bullet and decided to pick a light for the kitchen.

As a recap, when we moved in, the light over our dining table looked like this:

Gorgeous light…this light drove me crazy every.single.day.  I thought of ways I could give it a makeover, but at the end of the day, I just hated it.  After (months) of grumbling, Steve thought he’d show me, took down the lamp and put up a single electrician’s bulb.  Joke’s on him, it bothered me way less than the offending light and so for the next 11 months, we had this beautiful light fixture in our kitchen.

We are decor trend setters over here in Omaha…feel free to copy our style.  Anyway, once Melissa picked a date and time for the baby shower, I decided we could class it up for company and deal with the light situation.  We searched and searched and tried several different light fixtures and couldn’t find anything that we liked that gave us enough light and looked good.  In the middle of our search (and Steve hanging and taking down multiple light fixtures) we discovered that it was actually wired for a fan.  We decided that might be the way to go.  We settled on this fan from Hunter and waited until one of Menard’s famous 11% back sales.

Installed it and SUCCESS!  It was enough to persuade me that the single bulb in the ceiling was SO 2011.

There you have it.  No more hole in the ceiling and we now have some top notch air circulation in our living room/kitchen.  Hot dang, we’re moving up in the world!

The Magic of a Good Coat of Paint

No matter how many rooms I paint, I still can’t get over what a good coat of paint can really do for a room.  We tackled the nursery and it looks FANTASTIC.

Before:

Progress:

That’s right, no more giant N on the wall or jarring red paint assaulting your senses.  Just a lovely calm, soothing, gray.

Before:

Progress:

I’m so excited to start getting things put together in here now that we have it all painted up and ready to go!  As for what we used:
Trim color:  Valspar Frost
Paint color: Valspar Porch Gray  (color matched to Behr paint+premium eggshell)

To cover the offensive red, we used Kilz Premium.  It worked like a charm.

All around, we are SUPER happy with our decision and love how it’s coming together.  I wasn’t sure if I was going to pain the crib or not, but now that I see it in the room, it really pops with the color, so i think it’s staying its original finish.  Hope you all had an equally productive week!!  Can’t wait to share more (as we get it accomplished of course.. )!

The Aerodynamics of Airplanes

Our nursery is not very glamorous right now, in fact, it’s the least blogged about room in our entire house.  I know I’ve written at least 3 times the blog posts about bathrooms.  As a refresher, this is what we are working with:

Giant red N on the wall, gold/white ceiling fan and some poorly painted red paint.

We are planning to tackle the wall colors/trim situation very very soon (like, this weekend soon), this post however, is about the white and gold situation in the middle of the room.  We are ceiling fan people, I know fans are not “in”, but I’m all about function and in a 2 story house, we need a ceiling fan.  I looked around a bit and determined that any fan that I could remotely consider attractive is about $200.00.  I took to Pinterest for some alternatives and found a fabric fan makeover from Jennifer at Dimples & Tangles.

I happened to have the following things on hand: spray paint, fabric, mod podge, and an ugly (but perfectly functional) fan.  Steve also made the poor decision once upon a time of teaching me how to take down light fixtures and fans.  Muahahaha my plan was hatched.

I got a bit way layed as I stood in the nursery with my step stool and screwdriver trying to remember if I was definitely supposed to take the blades off first, or if I needed to take the light part off the bottom first.  We had a conversation that went a little something like this:

Me:  So, out of curiosity, if you are taking down a ceiling fan, would you take off the blades first or the light part?
Steve: Depends, usually the light part would come off first.  Which fan are you taking down?
Me:  Not necessarily any fans, it’s just a curiosity question.
Steve: Yeah right, are you taking down the nursery fan?
Me: maybe.
Steve: What are you going to do with it?
Me:  This really cool thing I saw online, I’m going to give the fan a makeover and it’s going to be awesome.
Steve:  something about the aerodynamics of balancing a fan, airplane wings were definitely mentioned, and something else about not bubbling the fabric.
Me:  Yeah, tons of people have wrote about it online and nobody said their fan wobbles, so I’m sure it’s fine.  I have a good idea of how it’ll work in my head.
Steve:  …….yeah………I better just take it down.

So once the fan was down, and Steve was fully convinced we’d be buying a new fan before the baby arrives, I took off to the dining room to get working on my plan.  As part of our “compromise” with me being able to paint the fan, he gave me stern warnings about the implications of paint in the fan motor, so I grabbed my painters tape and settled in for a little prep work.

Here is the gorgeous goldness that was the “before” picture.  It probably wouldn’t take me very long to tape, but we were watching 21 Jumpstreet while I was doing this, so it somehow managed to take the whole movie.  I would guess if I had not also been watching Channing Tatum…I mean, a high quality cinematic production, while I was doing this, it would have been 30 minutes tops.

Basically, there is a filter that protects the motor and it’s under all those little holes.  I taped all the little holes, the motor parts, and the electrical for the light.  I originally picked a bright blue, but made a last minute switch to navy after holding my fabric choice by the various blue choices.  I headed outside to my “studio” and once again made the neighbors question what on earth goes on in this house.

While the paint was drying, I came back in and got to work on the fan blades.

I had originally gotten 1 yard of the green giraffe print but I wasn’t really sure how I wanted to use it.  Once I decided on my fan plan, I was dying to dig into the giraffe print.  I laid out my 5 fan blades and had fabric left to spare.  If I had started with this plan originally, I probably would have only needed a half a yard or so, but I’m okay with the leftovers.  I got it on sale for $4.00 a yard.  I just laid out the blades so they were all going the same direction and traced.  If I had a lined pattern, I would have been really careful to line them up, but since it didn’t matter, I just stuck them on and went.

I cut them the exact size of the fan blade, you don’t want too much overhang because you won’t actually wrap it around the edges of the blade at all…this will mess up the aerodynamics and cause the fan to wobble.  (See, I did learn something from my mid-day lecture…)

Once I had my fabric cut, it was mod podge time.  I didn’t take any pictures of this because I was on a roll, but basically, apply mod podge to the fan blade, be VERY VERY generous and be sure to coat all the way to the very edge.  Then, I laid down my fabric, smoothed it so it fit, and applied a layer of mod podge to the top.  I took an old credit card and used it to completely smooth down the fabric.  From there, I applied a second thin layer of mod podge and let it dry.  Rinse and repeat for all blades.

After the blades were dry, I needed to recut the holes for the fan blade arms to attach.  I took a utility knife and carved out the holes very carefully.  I also went around the edge of the fan and cleaned up any excess that was bigger than the fan blade.  Again, gotta keep those aerodynamics in mind…

Then, after lots of thin coats of spray paint and anxiously waiting for my pretties to be done, it was time for the best part — the reinstallation.  Steve decided it would be in our best interest for him to do it…I guess accidentally electrocuting the baby would be a bad thing.  Pregnant women — don’t try this at home.

After some excited pacing around by me, it was up and I LOVE it.  I reused the same “globes” it came with after a failed trip to Lowes to see if there was something I liked more.  I am probably going to cover up the white parts of the fan pulls, but I wasn’t sure with what yet, so I left them be for now.  I did spray paint the pull chain blue.  Remove the red wall in your head with a nice soft gray one and it will look even better.  Want to see it closer?

The best part?  Not even a hint of a wobble and Steve was shocked to call this project a success.

So for $4.00 for fabric and $3.50 for a can of Navy Rustoleum, I have a brand spankin’ new fan!  This project took a little over a half can, so I can use it for some other nursery things that I have up my sleeve.

and that’s all folks, a nursery project done and in the books!  Now I have to stop staring at my work and go to bed…

(and for my mom who wonders if this will make you nauseous when it’s turned on, it looks like a green blur, so I think baby will have a nausea free experience in the nursery)

Anybody else tried to make over a ceiling fan?  Now that I know how easy it is, the other fans in this house don’t stand a chance…

Linked up to A Bowl Full of Lemons.

Mulch, Mulch, and more Mulch

We did something last weekend that was REALLY over due…we FINALLY tackled the outside landscaping!  If you remember from last year, we had to rip out all of our landscaping because of the vole situation and then took the rocks out and had a minor dirt related disaster.  So, a year later, the voles are definitely gone and it was high time we added some curb appeal to our house.  We called in reinforcements.

First, a refresher of where we left off…

We literally had a blank slate to work with.  We didn’t follow a scientific process to pick our plants, we pretty much wandered around the “full sun” area of the landscape center and picked out some thing we thought looked good.  When planting day came, my mom and I set off to get the plants.  Our first stop — Walmart.  Sounds crazy, but I’ve had pretty good luck with their garden center in the past.  They didn’t let me down!  From Walmart we picked up: Begonias (an annual), Pink Drift Groundcover roses, Coral Groundcover roses, and Coneflower PowWow’s.  We spent about $75 for 17 plants.

Next up, we headed to Lowe’s where we grabbed 2 Wintergeen Boxwood’s and 2 Golden Globe Arborviate’s.   Both were listed as “full sun” and we wanted something that would be green year round in our front landscaping.  Mulch was on sale, so we got a ton of mulch and some landscaping fabric.  All told, we spent about $250 at Lowe’s.

Finally, it was off the landscape center to pick up some hostas.  They ran us about $80 for 6, and 3 truck loads of dirt for $75.  Factor in the $18.00 we spent to buy edging last winter, and we at $488.  Our mental budget was $500, so we were perfectly on track.  Now it was time for the fun party, prettying the yard up!

While we were out running errands, Steve cleared the rock out of the front beds.  After living with the rock out front for a year, we really like the look of dark mulch and the river rock is currently waiting in our driveway for some lucky craiglister who feels like shoveling a load of rock into their truck.

First thing’s first, we needed to figure out where everything was going to go.  My niece loved this part so I let her have at it and she rearranged the plants to her liking.  We settled on all of the coral roses in the bed to the left of the step, and the pink roses and cone flowers in the bed to the right of the step.  We put a boxwood and an arborvitae in the back and then got started digging.

We laid down new landscape fabric and then dug our holes.  Pretty simple and not overly time consuming…

While we were digging over in the front, Aiden was helping Uncle Steve dig some rocks out of the side of the house.

Kyla planted all the rose bushes by herself!  That’s 9 roses bushes!  The kids were a SERIOUS help and it went so much faster having the extra sets of hands.

Front planted, we moved to the side of the house.  This is pretty shady, so we went with hostas.  As you can also see, we made good use of all of our edging and defined out a nicer bed than was there before.

And now through the power of the internet…

The lilies were a last minute addition to the front bed from the backyard.  Kyla did not approve them in her landscape design, after adding them, I agree with her.  I’m going to take them out and put in 2 more cone flowers.  Otherwise, finished front left bed!

The front pots were already planted, but they were in full bloom and oh so pretty, I had to take a photo of them anyway.

Front right bed, yes, I very clearly like pink….  roses in the front, cone flowers in the middle and then the boxwood and arborvitae in the back.

Finished hostas, I love the greens with the dark brown mulch!

I planted some strawberries in the back garden bed…it’s been excruciatingly hot as of late, I’m not positive they are going to make it, but we’re trying are darndest because I really want a big strawberry patch!  (and yes, I know the ground is cracked, I took this before I gave them their evening soak.  They had been watered in the morning, it’s just been that hot and dry around here…come on rain!)

Back of the house mulched and edged.  I couldn’t decide on any plants I really loved for back here, so for now, it’s just going to stay pretty as is.  We edged and mulched under all of our trees too (and that’s where the begonias went).  I think it makes the yard look more finished.  This fall, we’re going to overseed to try and get some better looking grass going back here!

Otherwise, that’s all for now.  We still have a few things left on our plan — including landscape the back electrical box area, it currently overgrown and crazy and add a paver walkway around the house.  Not sure those are  both going to happen still this summer though, for now, this pregnant lady is hot and tired of working in the heat!!

So there you have it, our mulch fest!  Anyone else with landscaping on the horizon?  I’d love to see landscape pictures since I’m so uninspired on my own…

Peel and Stick

Haven’t done a laundry room update in awhile, so I thought it was probably time!

We tackled the floor last weekend!  Wooooo Hooooo!

(Also I may have discovered Instagram and forgot to take this picture with my real camera too…)

Steve has finished the mud room bench!  We brought it in (it’ll still get painted) so we could fit the tile around it.

Finally, we were ready to go.  We measured out a perfect angle in the center of the room, made our chalk lines, peeled off the cover on the back, and then got ready to stick.  Once we got started, we were on a roll!  Peel, stick, line up, stick.  Super simple.

Our favorite way to make sure they were good and stuck?  Some sweet dance moves.

We need to get the threshold and the trim in, but here’s a fairly accurate picture of the color of the floor.  It plays off of the paint fabulously.

We brought the sink in so we could get a feel for what the space will feel like.  The bench will be white and we’ll have the mudroom built up.  So far, we really love it and are excited with how well it’s coming together!!

So, once we were stuck, we needed to seal it up before we could move the washer and dryer back in.  We decided to seal to help keep the floor cleaner and keep junk from collecting in the seams between the tiles.  We bought a kit at Lowe’s, followed the directions, and it was pretty simple.  Be sure to wear a respirator mask for this, it’s REALLY stinky.  You can find it in the vinyl tile at Lowe’s.

It’s hard to see the difference, but you can see the unsealed lines on the left are white looking while the others and filled in and glossy.

The only other thing we added?  A new light fixture!  I’m kind of obsessed with it.  I love the geometric shapes of it and it provides quite a bit of light.

All in all, I’m happy with the progress we’ve made so far and can’t wait to get the mudroom section painted and installed so we can get this room wrapped up.  It looks SO much better already!

Anyone else forgotten to update their blog lately?  Play with stickers?  Stand in your laundry room and admire how pretty it is??  do tell!

Unexpected Spring In Our Step

This post was planned (in my head) to have a lot different title…alternate titles — how to clean up a flood in your basement from a frozen sprinkler line or how to dig up your whole yard to find broken sprinkler pipe…but in a SHOCKING turn of events, we turned on our sprinklers for the first time ever (we didn’t ever feel like messing with it last summer, so we just left them be) and they worked.  Not only did they work, but the book to program them was still sitting on top of the sprinkler system box and all the sprinkler zones were labeled.

Who cares about lottery jackpots…we feel like we already won the jackpot and no creepos are going to be asking for their share of our winnings.  See how optimistic and springy I’m feeling today??

and our glorious sprinklers in action….ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!   (and you’ll notice some new grass seed by the sidewalk, we’re going to attempt to actually have a lawn this summer, stay tuned…but so far, we’re off to a good start!)

In the absence of a “how to”, I decided to share some pictures of our spring outside work instead.  We started the sprinkler testing process in the first place because our front yard desperately needs some love…it’s basically dead.

First up?  Rake up the dead stuff.  Full disclosure — I took a nap and woke up to find the following picture in the front yard.  I had no part of this process.

Hindsight (I’ve been told) would be to never rake the front yard my hand ever again but instead rent a power rake.  Lesson learned for ya’ll.

Adding to our springy feeling, we have some gorgeous tulips growing out front (thankfully, I kept these bad boys alive until they bloomed out, green thumb win)

We have a long ways to go (tons and TONS of landscaping), but we’re excited about our progress so far and can’t wait to get the rest of the landscaping under way!  Anybody else had a sprinkler victory?  Getting started on landscaping?  Loving the weirdly warm weather??

Laundry Room Report

We’re making progress…we’re at the slow part because each coat of dry wall mud needs to dry 24 hours before it can be sanded and recoated and we have put a LOT of mud on the wall to get everything all even and squared away…we’re in the home stretch on that, so you know what that means!  Paint time!

After some consulting with my paint book, I selected Martha Stewart Tidewater.  I decided to get a sample of it when we were at Lowes so I could make sure it was the blueish/grayish/greenish I was picturing in my head.

LOVE IT.

It looks a little more toothpaste-y in this picture than it is in real life, but I still like it.

I’m hoping to get started painting this weekend…we’ll see how our attempt at ceiling texture goes though first.  Hopefully more exciting news on this front coming soon

The Olive Office

Our office needed some paint and I needed something to do to amuse myself while Steve worked on mudding the laundry room.  A match made in painting heaven.  I quickly selected on an olive green tone from True Value my paint book and set off to Lowe’s.  I can’t remember the exact hue and I lost the swatch somewhere along the way…helpful, I know.  I’ll let you know if I find it.

Before:

and after:

It needs white trim and a spruced up fan, but I’m loving the green.  Much MUCH better for an office than dirty baby pink walls.

Anyone else randomly decide to start painting while their S/O does dirtier home improvement projects?  Have you went olive recently??  Realize you forgot to publish your Thursday blog post on Thursday?  I’m ready for the weekend…

Sink Hole

Last weekend, Steve and I decided we needed to get out of  town for a bit.  We headed up to Minneapolis to explore (and of course, check out Ikea).  We had a sink picked out that we were hoping would work for our laundry room.  I also had a long list of picture frames and other accessories to help get our house feeling more pulled together.

We got to Ikea and were greeted with this sight in the marketplace:

Yeah…apparently they are doing some renovating of the marketplace.  Quite the let down to this girl…so, we didn’t pick up any fun things to decorate with.  Boo.

They DID have our sink and cabinet in stock though (I checked that before we went), so we brought this lady home with us:

Our new sink love is the LILLÅNGEN from Ikea.  It has a very slim profile and as a bonus, comes with 2 hooks to hang towels on and has a small shelf inside to set hand soap on.  While we were there, we also spotted a faucet that complemented perfectly:

GRUNDTAL faucet from Ikea.

We took our purchases and headed home…where we got started with the worst part of buying ANYTHING from Ikea…

Luckily, we weren’t missing any pieces, we didn’t get in any fights, and we got it assembled in under an hour.  Win.

Here it is sitting in our laundry room.  You can see the outline of where the old sink was…this really helps you get the scale of how much smaller this is than our old sink.  We have a bit of an interesting situation since our hot and cold water pipes come up through the floor instead of out of the wall like usual, but we’re brainstorming ways around it.  Details to come once we are at the sink installation point…

Anybody else have the  LILLÅNGEN sink?  Embarking on an European/American plumbing conversions anytime soon?  Sink stories to share?  Let’s start the week off on a good note

Sketch It Up

We’ve been plotting and scheming our grand master plan for the laundry room.  We had some ideas floating around but with our clean slate, we needed a way to visualize our plans.  We sketched out some ideas, heck, I even drew what I was thinking on the wall…about that time we realized we were being incredibly silly.  They make technology for this people!

So we downloaded Google SketchUp and Steve nominated himself to learn how to use it.  Google actually has some great tutorials on how to use SketchUp and after watching some of the videos, it’s on my “to learn” list too!  It seems reasonably easy and endlessly helpful.  After several drafts and brainstorming, here is what we are thinking…

We’re going to do some built ins around the washer and dryer.

There is a small shelf for laundry detergent and fabric softener.  The bar on the left will be for hanging clothes and the staggered bars on the left will be used as a drying rack for clothes we don’t want to hang on the hanger to dry.  The storage on the top will be mostly decorative since it’s 8+ feet up and I can’t reach it without a stool, but we’ll definitely have some pretty baskets up there to look at.  We tried the sketch-up with out this extending to the ceiling and it didn’t look as custom as this does.
In addition to the built ins for the washer and dryer, we’re also going to build out a mudroom area.

This is a rough drawing and we are going to add some hooks to this as well.  We’ll store our shoes in the cubbies under the bench and have some bins for mittens/etc in the upper cubbies.  You may have noticed the sink, we built that off of specs on the ikea website.  We wanted a small sink that was close to the wall for this room.  We’re hoping that once we see it in person, it won’t look super “bathroom-y” and more “cool slim functional sink” instead.

Here it is with the walls/doors included.

We are planning to do the bench and built ins in white, the floor was the closest we could find to our actual tiles and the walls will be a really really light gray.  I’m still brainstorming accent colors for the room, but since it’s a beige box right now, I still have some time.

A view from above:

and yes, those are the dog bowls you see there, got to make sure to account for that!!

I’m so excited to have a plan and Google SketchUp was amazing in helping us visualize our brainstorms.  Now that we know how easy it is, we’ll be doing this for our future rooms as well.  Best part?  It’s completely free to download and use.  Anyone else ventured into SketchUp land?  Did you find it as fun as we did?  What do you think of the laundry room redo?