with this one …

[and her stained upper lip]

and this one …

[and her always full mouf]

and this one …

[and her growing number of gray hairs]

and this one …

[and her infected ears and nose that just cost us a boatload of money]

and this one …

[and his recently-acquired beard]

and these new floors and painted walls …

[in our master bedroom]

happy Friday, everyone!! I hope you all have a fabulous weekend. xxo

ps – GO DAWGS!!

I would like to paint the wall of our kitchen / living room divider with chalkboard paint.

The wall wraps around a little more, but you can’t really see it at this angle – but then it stops so you can go into the kitchen. It’s about 4 feet tall and has a counter all around the top of it.

I think it would be totally adorable and the perfect height for our girls to color on.

Ken does not agree with me, because it’s a shared wall and it’s in a high-traffic area of our house.

So … help us decide.

By the way, I asked Ken if I could do this poll, and his exact words were, “I don’t care.” So … don’t think that he’s strongly against it or that we’re fighting about this or anything. I wouldn’t blog-poll about something serious. ;)

I’m going to go ahead and tell you that I’m only photographing half of this room. Because the other half is my office, and it still needs some work. Whoo boy does it need work.

I’m also going to tell you that the walls are actually a yellow’ish green, but I am pretty awful at white balancing. And I didn’t feel like fixing it in Lightroom.

I want to hang one or maybe two more hoops of fabric on the wall – I let Emma choose where to hang them, and I didn’t realize we were going uphill.

I also want to put their names on the wall somehow. Wooden letters? Vinyls? I’m not sure, yet.

I just noticed that I forgot to clean/straighten the shelf above the square bookshelf. Meh, later.

Basically, everything has it’s place, now. Before, there were a lot of things that didn’t have a home, so they would just get tossed willy nilly. But I’m already having a hard enough time getting her to pick up … if she has to ask where everything goes, it will never stay clean.

(from top left going r-l: books, basket of small princess dolls & changeable clothes, set of beatrix potter books, 2 shelves of strawberry shortcake stuff, interactive Dora, melissa & doug magnetic dressup dolls)

I am just really really happy with how it all looks, now. And I’m hoping that giving Emma a more organized system will keep her from getting overwhelmed, as well.

(from top left going l-r: tools, plastic farm and zoo animals and trees and fences etc, cupcake makers for the sand, basket of my little pony & accessories, basket of dora and diego figurines and accessories, green box of blocks [these could be put away b/c she never plays with them], canvas tote of stuffed animals and babies)

Granted, I know for a fact that it won’t stay this way 24/7, but at least it should be easier to clean up at the end of the day.

I know most of you have seen these pictures, but here is what I did this weekend.

before:

after:

So super cute, right?

Ken’s had this bed ever since I’ve known him, and I was never a big fan of it. But since Emma’s been sleeping on a mattress on the floor for a few months, we felt it was time to finally give her a bed.

We have been shopping around for months, but neither of us could justify spending money on a new bed when we had this one stashed in a back bedroom. Ken didn’t care what it looked like, but I really didn’t want to put it into Emma’s room the way that it was originally. So when I came across this blog, I fell in love with that color and decided to do the same.

Three cans of Rust-Oleum Painter’s Touch Ultra Cover 2x in Apple Red Gloss later, we had a bed everyone loved.

Well, Emma originally wanted purple, but I talked her into red.

And then she didn’t want it painted at all. And then she wanted a new bed. And then she wanted to sleep in Lucy’s crib. And then … well, she’s three. This went on for a while.

But I painted it and she loves it, so there.

I love winning.

Spent almost all day organizing the home office / playroom.

Including an hour devoted solely to figuring out how to print unprintable labels, but Excel came through for me.

Stacks of paper all over the floor (and a peek at my current desk chair … yoga ball)

Totally worth it …

Then, I tackled Emma’s toys, but since she can’t read, I had to come up with a better way to let her know what goes in each box.

She has given away BAGS of toys lately, so we’re left with mostly little collections, which makes organization pretty easy.

It’s been a busy few days, and I just haven’t found a spare moment to blog. I guess I should be blogging about what all we’ve been doing, but I really need to be cleaning out dresser drawers since we sold our bedroom furniture.

Mmmm-hmmm. Sure did.

I love Craigslist.

My selling it almost brought us to one of these moments …

… but it’s all good, now.

Pregnancy hormones are FUN.

So are almost-three-year-olds.

I need a really really long nap.

ps – we went to the Riverbanks Zoo in Columbia this weekend to scope out some stuff for the photowalk. I’ll post more about that later.

So remember how I said that we’re a family that doesn’t flip out over dirt and messes? Well, sometimes, it does bite you in the butt. Like when you have cream-colored chairs in your main eating area.

Side note: what do you call the area that’s NOT a formal dining room but not really a breakfast nook, either?

Anyway, my grandparents passed down this table and chair set to me when I moved into my first apartment … 10 years ago. Wow, I can’t believe that was 10 years ago. And it’s been my & our main eating table for that long.

The area doesn’t look like that anymore, though – there’s a light wood buffet on that wall under the painting, and the coat rack has been moved. And we’re going to replace that ugly brass light one of these days.

It’s a beautiful set (I love light wood), and I’m not going to replace it anytime soon. But the two chairs with off-white fabric were getting pretty yucky from spilled spaghetti and about 472 other different foods that never come out.

So I’ve been wanting to re-upholster them for a while, but it’s always been at the bottom of my “home improvement to-do list” – until I ended up with this fabric from Maine Cottage.

Now, I can’t let this post go by without telling you about the 90% discount I got on this fabric. I bought it at our local Garden Ridge and paid $5.99 for 2 yards. They have tables of 2-3 yard cuts of home dec fabrics for $5.99 – I’m assuming they’re just leftover cuts from furniture manufacturers. Finding anything good is like going to the thrift store, because you have to dig and dig and dig, but I’ve grabbed up a few cuts here and there just to have in my stash.

I was thinking about using this fabric in our bedroom, and I wanted to know if there were any coordinating fabrics from the designer. So, I looked up the designer that was printed on the selvedge and discovered that it was manufactured by Maine Cottage. And cost $50/yard! That’s a very average price for high-quality home dec fabrics, so I was shocked to find that I luckily grabbed it up for $3/yard.

I decided not to use it in our bedroom, because I don’t think polka dots is really the look I’m going for. Then I thought about the fact that the manufacturer uses it to cover furniture. And that’s when I decided to go ahead and use a little bit of it to re-upholster the [insert name of area here] chairs.

I didn’t do anything fancy – I just took off the cushions, covered the existing fabric with the new fabric, stapled it to the bottom of the cushion, and screwed them back onto the chair. Easy peasy!

I LOVE it!! I’m going to throw some lime green accents on the table and make it a fun little eating area. And then when I finally get around to painting our kitchen yellow, the fabric will still match perfectly.

The only thing I regret about this whole experience? Now, I want a lot more Maine Cottage fabric, but I can’t afford it!

There are two things you should know about our house …

1. I’m constantly changing things around. I’ve had my office in about 12 different locations since I moved into this house. I’m currently wishing I could put my desk in front of the window, even though I know that the late afternoon sun shines right in my eyes when I do that. Anyway, I change my mind a lot. I read that people with a lot of disposable income overhaul their interior design every 5 years. That sounds like Heaven to me.

2. We are not shy about dirt. Emma plays outside every day, the dogs practically live outside during the day, Emma jumps on the couch and chairs and bed with her shoes on, she eats snacks on the couch, we eat a lot of our meals in the living room (but we’re working on that), and we’re just generally not overly careful with our messiness. So while I would absolutely LOVE to have a white couch, I know that would never ever ever happen. And also? Our cushions end up on the floor at least once a day for optimal jumping from couch to floor.

All of that to say, I decided today that I wanted different throw pillows for our couch, and due to our nature as a not-going-to-have-President-Obama-sitting-on-our-couch-anytime-soon kind of family, they had to be washable.

But I’m not a fan of washing pillows, because 9 times out of 10, the washer gets imbalanced and slings water all over the laundry room.

Enter removable throw pillow covers!

I sketched something out in my handy dandy moleskine, and the rest was easy!

I just used some pretty green dandelion’ish home dec fabric I bought on sale a long time ago, and it took all of about 15 minutes to make it.

The back is just some white home dec material I bought for a project way back when I overestimated yardage like crazy. I thought it would be cool to do a contrasting stitch on the “hems” but then I remembered … I don’t sew straight! Oh well. At least it’s just for us.

I decided that I needed to use smaller measurements so it can be a more snug fit on the pillow, but other than that, I like how it turned out.

I made another one last night, and if I had more pillow forms, I’d make about 20 more.

Or maybe I’ll just make 20 more and put them in Etsy? Hmmm …

The best part is that I can take the cover off, throw it in the wash, iron it a little (oh, who am I kidding, I don’t iron) and then put it back on.

And then I can change them out every 2.5 months. Weeks. Whatever.

I’m here to say that we are making a lot of progress on the front room / playroom / home office remodel. It is taking fifty forevers due to a week of rain, the DAYS it has taken me to painstakingly paint my HUGE desk (one coat primer, two coats paint), and finding just the right accessories.

So … remember before?

You can see more painting/flooring only pictures here.

This week, we finished the flooring, installed the base molding, bought and hung a new curtain rod and curtains, bought a new floor lamp (since it is a formal sitting room in our house plan, there is no wiring for an overhead light, so we’re dependent on floor lamps), put up some vinyl wall art, and moved Emma’s toys back in.

Okay, imagine the desk top attached to the two trusses – that’s the only thing I have left to paint.

So much has changed already!!

Ken and I are both really loving how it turned out, and I just couldn’t be happier to have absolutely NO carpet downstairs. Our Roomba is in floor heaven.

I still have a lot on my to-do list, though …

* finish painting desktop and move office back in
* get pictures printed & framed to hang
* paint large bookshelf that will go in that back corner on the other side of the desk
* thrift/re-purpose small desk chair
* install crown molding
* install wooden blinds

I’m still not sure what art we’ll put in there. I don’t currently have anything that will go with the whole color scheme, so I’m thinking I’ll just get some pictures of Emma printed and hanged across that back wall. And then perhaps a vinyl mural of some sort behind my desk? I change my mind so many times, I’m afraid to go with permanent fixtures.

Now that I’ve spent all of this time and money in this room, Ken has decided to make himself a man-cave in the garage. Hey, as long as it’s a project that gets the garage cleaned out and organized enough for me to park in there, I’m all over it!

So I haven’t been online much the last few days, because we are finally tackling one of our biggest projects yet!

Office / Playroom

This room has been through many changes. First of all, it’s supposed to be a sitting room. But since we’re not 80 years old or living in the 1800′s, we decided that a sitting room was not really on our list of priorities.

Instead, we have turned it into an office / playroom.

But due to E’s allergies, she had a hard time sitting on the carpet without getting an itchy rash.

So we decided to put down laminate hardwood flooring. By the way, we use laminate flooring pretty much everywhere, because the only true hardwood in our house that’s in the front hall and dining room looks absolutely terrible after only 6 years. Gauges and scratches and tears. I’m sure there’s hardwood out there that can withstand daily use from a toddler and two dogs, but frankly, we can’t afford it. So far, laminate hardwood has really exceeded our expectations.

We’d also love to be more eco-friendly and use bamboo, but I’ve heard it’s really soft, and I can only imagine what it would look like after a few years.

We ended up finding a great deal on some flooring a couple of weeks ago, and that was that. I decided that since we were going to clear out the room to install flooring, I might as well paint the room. This is also the first room you see when you walk into our house, so it needed a little pick-me-up.

And a huge clean-up.

Picked out a color in record time and started painting on Saturday. The great thing was that I didn’t have to worry about spills since we were going to be ripping up the carpet later.

I went with a spring green – it’s actually called “sour lime” – and it’s fantastic! Bright, cheerful, peaceful. I’m really really happy with it.

I finished up the painting on Saturday night and we started working on the floor Sunday afternoon.

Out goes the nasty, stinky carpet — the very last piece of carpet downstairs!! *happy dance*

And in goes the hardwood.

Our little helper was right there the whole time. Right THERE. The WHOLE time. Talking. THE WHOLE TIME.

Can I paint?
[while I was on the ladder] I will climb up and save you!!
Can I paint?
Can I have your tea?
Did you do this? Great job, mommy!
Can I paint?

But we are far from done.

Still need to finish the last few strips of flooring, put down the base molding, put up the crown molding, put down the floor-to-floor transitional molding, paint my desk and bookcase, move everything back in, hang pictures/shelves/etc., hang curtains, and find a decent floor lamp that doesn’t break the bank but doesn’t look like crap.

Phew. I think I need a nap.