just my type

little projects

Tom is gone tonight, at least until 2 or 3 this morning, for baseball.  Whenever he's gone, I end up staying up WAY later than usual.  So I'm trying to be productive tonight... fueled by two cans of Cherry Diet Coke... I put dinner in the crockpot for tomorrow, made a big batch of minestrone for lunches this week, and finished cleaning up my weekend project.  I need to get myself to bed but it's been awhile since I blogged again so here's a few pictures of the little updates I've been doing around the house.

I got a magnetic board from IKEA awhile ago, thinking I'd put it up for Max eventually.  While I was waiting to decide where to put it, I came across this post from the image is found and thought: duh.  Why don't I steal it for myself?  I mean I always steal good ideas. :)  So I ordered a couple more magnet boards and magnets and put them over our desk.  I think it'll be awesome because I'm SO bad at getting my shots printed... this will hopefully inspire me to place some orders and then when I change them out, I can pop them into an album (another thing I'm SO bad at).  Also, it really bugs me that our monitors are not even... I need something to prop that one up...

I need a few more pictures to fill it up.

I didn't leave Max out in the cold though - I put some magnet boards in the kitchen for him too.  We can't stick stuff on our fridge, so this is where his Leapfrog magnets live and will be a little space for his artwork.

Max likes... and is learning his letters... I've been meaning to write this down so I remember; he knows O, M, A (says them when he sees them - O is definitely the fave) and is working on a few more.  He knows what M-A-X is too. :)

Yesterday (well, I guess it would be Saturday now), my parents came over and I put them to work.  I've been wanting to FINALLY re-decorate our bathrooms.  Now that we've been here, ahem, over a year.  First up was what we call Max's bathroom... but I guess, is the main bathroom in our house.  It used to look like this:

Our countertop is greenish and I didn't really know what other color would go with it, but I didn't like the color of the walls before (not to mention the border).  Finally, this is what I came up with:

Very light blue-green.  And hi, by the way. :)  What do you think, does it work?  We have a skylight in this room, so it's pretty bright, and feels a lot more clean and airy to me now.  I replaced the light fixture and all the other hardware (cabinet pulls, towel rack, hooks, toilet paper).  I'd like to replace the faucet with something more modern too.

The pictures are ones I've taken on vacations... Catalina, Jamaica, Belize.  I had them made into canvases.  They make me happy. :)

Next up: our master bath... and the last of the dreaded flowered border... eek.  I think I'm going to paint this a light pinky/purple shade (sounds gross, but I think it'll work)... I wonder how many coats it's going to take to cover up this loveliness. 

 

I better get to bed and pretend I've been sleeping for hours before Tom actually makes it home. :)

so i have a lot of paper

I actually had a pretty productive day today.  After we got home at around noon, we had lunch, and then Tom and Max took naps.  I proofed wedding pictures, read the paper, planned meals for the week and went to the grocery store, built a fire, made chicken wild rice soup for dinner, packed the leftovers for our lunches tomorrow, did some laundry, played with Max, helped Tom with bathtime, baked a loaf of banana bread, and then there was this beast...

Our dining table. :)  I swear we get ten pounds of mail a day and on top of that I'm getting packages of Christmas cards from my photo lab, my prize from Anne's giveaway (yay!), and Christmas gifts we're giving (... and maybe a little something for myself from *cough* J. Crew *cough*).  I have this problem where I can't throw out a Pottery Barn catalog until I look through it, even though I'm pretty sure we get an average of 1.8 per week and I would probably score a 95% if there was a quiz (what is on the wall above the red and white bed? A MONOGRAM).  And even though my little eyes should be going nowhere near a Pottery Barn catalog right now, nor any of the twenty other catalogs we receive each day.  So I have this little problem with mail overall.  It sort of accumulates.  I really need to go to greendimes.com and try to weed some of this stuff out... do I really need the American Girl catalog?  I mean my Samantha doll is waiting in my parents' basement on the off chance I ever have a girl child, so we're pretty much set, thanks.

Anyway, I realized I never posted a picture of our new chandelier (and maybe our new rug?) so I thought I'd do that, AFTER I cleaned the table, but then I had to post the before shot too, to keep it real and all that.  

And here's the WAY before shot, right after we moved in... posting this makes me feel like I've made progress on my house a year later (I have made barely none in reality, but, LOOK!  We had white walls).

And now, table cleaned up. :)  The chandelier is from Pottery Barn, I have liked it forever and it finally went on sale.  The rug is from The Company Store, and looks a lot better when it's light outside.  Unfortunately it's only light outside now for three hours a day so this is what I have to work with.  I'm thinking maybe roman shades for the windows?  I don't know what other sort of treatment would work with our setup.  I still need to do some hanging/arranging, and I'm still not sure what (if anything) I should do with those cutout spaces above the walls. 

Any input is welcomed.  I'm going to eat a piece of banana bread and look at some catalogs. :)

one thing down, a lot to go

Looking back at my goals for August, I didn't do that well.  I spent money, I didn't lose five pounds, didn't make a photo blog, didn't do my hair every day.  Yeah, I pretty much sucked at the goals.  I'm going to move some of them to September.  But I did manage to finish one thing - our photo wall in our living room, which also happened to be #1 on my 101 in 1001 list.

So, yay for that. :)  Other goal for September: blog more! 

In other exciting news... Max is finally starting to walk!  He started taking a few steps at a time on Monday, so obviously we went to Target to buy more tapes for our video camera... hopefully I can post some video soon. :)

101 in 1001 - painting our bedroom

Our bedroom is finally finished, which is the first item I'm crossing off my list.  I just have a few things to clean up, and maybe another picture or two to hang.  But, most of it is done. 

Let's remember the room as it was when we moved in:

Ahhh, the memories.  Ew.

This is the room now:

We took the border down and painted, obviously.  The ceiling has molding now and I painted the middle a metallic bronze (it looks much different/better in person, I think).  The ceiling fan had to go. 

Here's a wider shot.  I swear, why does bedding always look SO much more wrinkly in pictures?

These are some of my favorite wedding pictures.

I was saying in my last post how I love invitations and all that stuff.  I planned my wedding invitation for years.  I knew long before I was even engaged what I wanted it to look like.  Seriously... I am such a loser.  I wanted it to be very classic, and very formal, our parents' names and 'request the honour of your presence at the marriage of their children' and all that.  And it was SO PLAIN, but I loved it.  And it hangs in our bedroom. :)

It feels good to have the bedroom done.  I feel better when my bed is made and my room is relaxing (purple ceiling = not relaxing).  Unfortunately, our adjoining bathroom still looks like this:

Mark my words: one day I will live a life free of floral borders.  This may be my next project.

my happy wall

I finally finished another (small) house project... getting some stuff hung up in our kitchen. :)  My lord, I'm estimating that at this rate it'll take me five years to get this house put together.  Anyway, this was just a quick little one-night project, but it feels good to have it done.

Our fridge is not normal, it's fronted with cabinets.  Therefore I can't put anything on the fridge.  And therefore I was twitching.  I used to have a whiteboard calendar on our fridge at our old house, by which I ran my life because I'm anal like that.  And when Max fingerpaints me a picture eventually, WHERE WILL IT HANG?  This needed to be remedied yesterday.  So now, thanks to Pottery Barn, I have a whiteboard calendar and chalkboard (both of which are also magnetic).  And you can bet that I'm going to write things on that chalkboard and calendar like 'Max's violin lesson' and 'tea with Jane 2pm' and 'sailing with the Smiths' (am I the only one that obsessively reads the Pottery Barn peoples' chalkboards?).  Not really... our whiteboard actually says 'baseball in Aberdeen, South Dakota.'  We're very upper crust like that.

The board on the right is also from PB but we've had it for 3-4 years. It's a mess... our favorite pictures, my half-marathon medal, Christmas cards, thank yous from weddings we've been in, baby announcements, postcards from vacation spots.  Someday maybe I'll clean it up a bit... but right now it makes me happy. :)

Ahhh, (somewhat cluttered) organization.  I feel so much better.

what happens when you don't blog all week

My husband has been hogging the computer lately.  Okay, he's been doing some work on the side and that gets priority over blogging.  So I shouldn't say he's been hogging it.  We have two computers, and I COULD post from my laptop, but I don't edit photos on that and posts with pictures are just more fun, don't you think?

So.  I'm trying to remember what I've been doing all week.  Tuesday night I brought Max to the Y for Water Babies.  Oh my god.  It was HILarious.  I'm pretty sure he loved it and I'm pretty sure that I was more worn out than he was after driving downtown parking walking carrying backpack and giant baby up and down parking ramp stairs getting us both undressed and into the pool getting us both out and trying to dry us off get us dressed again and back home.  It was nice to get out and do something together though.  And it was funny.  There was a total of one other baby there.  The teacher would say something like 'Okay!  Let's all grab a kickboard and practice kicking!'  And I would think 'YEAH RIGHT.'  And Max would try to eat his rubber ducky.  But I think he did kick a few times.  I'll have to grab a shot of him in his swim trunks next time... too cute.

Today was the first game of baseball season so Tom was down at the Metrodome all day, and I listened to the online broadcast from 11 until 4 which made my workday go by really fast.  They won their first game and lost the second one in extra innings... but they were playing the 17th-ranked team in the country, so, not bad.  Tomorrow he leaves for Florida until March 9th.  Loser.  To get there he has to ride the bus with the team for 27 straight hours, but I'm pretty sure I'd do that for a week of sunshine right about now.  My sister and my parents are going to keep Max and I company so that will be nice.

I snapped some pictures of the house today.  The pictures suck, but never mind that.  Some before and afters:

Behind the couch will go some of my pictures, when I get off my lazy butt and get them framed.

Dining room: new light fixture, a rug.  The shelves will stay but I'm planning on getting different frames and stuff to put on them... just threw those up there for now but I'd like a lot more white to brighten it up a little more.

I would like a new light fixture here too, and I want to replace all the cabinet hardware... the bright gold isn't really working for me.  I don't think the green looks like it does in this picture.  I don't like it very much here.  It's better in real life.

Anyway, the house feels more comfy to me now.  Instead of just feeling... white.

In other news, Max is baffling me lately.  Well, first, not so baffling, he actually started to crawl, OFFICIALLY crawl I mean, over the last couple of weeks.  He'll still bust out a good army crawl though just to keep it real.  After watching my nephew crawl around, watching Max cracks me up.  Ryan crawling: picture a gazelle.  Max crawling: picture an elephant.  My child does not crawl, he LUMBERS.  And he TOTALLY gets this from me.  My husband says I am the loudest walker ever.  I stomp.  Max stomp-crawls.  Hear that?  That's us coming your way.  Anyway, back to the baffling, he has eating issues all of a sudden.  I think it was last week or the week before, he'd gag and then puke at least once a day when eating.  And it didn't seem to matter what kind of food it was - really pureed, not pureed, whatever.  Now this week, he isn't puking anymore, but he doesn't like eating either.  He doesn't want to be fed with a spoon, he throws his finger foods.  I don't know if it's just a phase, or what.  I also think he's teething more, only, holy crap he has eight teeth already, which ones come in next?  Eye teeth?  Maybe that's bothering him too.  And then, he's sleeping like a banshee, today he took a FIVE HOUR nap.  And was in bed by 615.   Usually he does a 1.5-2 hour nap both morning and afternoon, then he's been staying up until 7-730 and sleeps until 630 or so when it's time to get up.  So he's always slept a lot, but, dang.  That kid is a puzzle to me right now, I just hope he's not getting sick.

He has this baseball toy where there's a ball on a tee, only it's on an arm and when you hit it it spins around.  He can't use the bat yet, but I taught him how to hit the ball with his hand.  We showed Daddy when he got home, and I have not seen him get that excited since the Twins were beating the A's in the 2002 ALDS and he jumped so high he hit his head on the ceiling.

It eventually ends up like this, of course.  Spitball anyone?

Hope everyone has a good leap day. :)

house pics part three

So, in my last post when I said maybe I'd get sick after everyone else?  Um, YEAH.  Tom is finally better, Max is getting better, and I spent last night getting up every hour to throw up.  And spent today on the couch.  But I'm actually feeling a little better already, so hopefully my entire weekend won't be a waste.  Anyway, there's not much else to post besides the rest of our house pictures.  And it doesn't require much thought on my part... which, I'll be honest, after this week is a very good thing.

So, this is downstairs, the back wall of our family room.  We have a walk-out to the backyard.  The plan is to get a new desk here and probably a bookshelf.  I'd love to get one of those armoire-type desks where you can close it up and not see all the mess we usually end up with on our desk. 

This is the rest of the family room.  Please disregard... well, everything.  It was basically a disaster at the time.  I actually like the color down here so we'll probably just leave it.  The fireplace is awesome... hopefully we'll be building a ton of fires next year, because it's vented to our kitchen and bedrooms, so it warms up the whole house.  Which would save us a ton of money.  Hopefully at some point we'll get a new couch (this one is my parents' old one and it's seen better days).  The thing on the right is our old entertainment center, which is going to my sister.  We just bought a new bookshelf that will go on that wall instead.

This is the bookshelf, from Crate & Barrel:

We got it yesterday and last night before I got sick I put part of it together.  I love it!

This is another favorite part of the house... outside the family room is a hot tub.  We've actually only used it once, because we had to change the water, get the right chemicals, etc, and you have to wait until it's warm enough out to do it.  We finally got it done though and it's supposed to be warmer this weekend, so hot tub here we come!

Next to our family room is the laundry room... and I swear, this picture makes the pink look tame. :)

And this is the third bathroom, which I actually like and will probably just leave as is.

From there we have another level down which is where the third bedroom is.  Like I said, it's far away, which kind of sucks if we have another kid.  It's a nice guest room, though, and guests can have that bathroom above to themselves.  That door to the left is an unfinished sauna... which would be AWESOME to finish someday... WAY far down the road, but nice that it's there if we want to.

This is the other room downstairs... the previous owners had a pool table in here.  Now we have our extra moving mess here. :)  Unless we get a pool table anytime soon, it'll probably just be a playroom/exercise room for now.

And this is the last bedroom.  Just a guest room for now.  For awhile. :)

That's it.  LOTS of projects to do, once everyone is recovered. :)  Anyone else want to post pics of their rooms?  I love looking at this stuff... I think I'm becoming addicted to Rate My Space. 

house pics part two

So.  The whole family is at home today.  Max threw up a couple times on Monday.  We were switching him to a different formula and figured it had something to do with that.  But then yesterday, Tom started getting sick and Max threw up again (all over me... not my favorite parenting moment thus far).  Then this morning Tom's mom called to say that both she and Tom's dad are sick, too.  Apparently I'm immune to this bug, or I'm just going to be lucky enough to get it after everyone else.  Anyway, I stayed home today to take care of the boys.  Tom can barely get off the couch without throwing up.  I think Max might finally be getting better... he's kept down two bottles and some applesauce so far.  Let's hope.

To take my mind off all of the sickness around here, let's discuss my purple bedroom ceiling.

But first, a picture of our entryway, because I forgot to take one for the 'main floor' post.  Oh, I should mention that I was going to wait to take these pictures until my house was cleaner, and then I figured, when is that going to happen?  And also, like, who cares?  So, disregard the crap that will be laying everywhere.  Here's the entryway, complete with big massive not-quite-my-style bright gold chandelier that as God is my witness, I will someday replace:

Upstairs.  Here's our bedroom.  Disregard our wrinkly duvet cover, I just pulled it out of the dryer after it sat there for about three days.  Now.  I guess, if you want to get technical, the ceiling isn't really PURPLE, it's more of a PLUM color.  The carpet isn't actually that bad.  It's more of a brownish-purple, so I'm thinking if you don't have a matching ceiling, flowered border, and Grecian draperies, it might be okay.

We have this window seat that I really like.  There's storage underneath.  Disregard the fact that we still have not unpacked from our trip that we returned from over a week ago.

This is our bathroom, which is off to the right of the bed up above.

And, we even have a matching border in the bathroom!  The countertop is sort of a gray and pink granite mixture.   I'm not complaining about the granite, I mean, it's really nice.  But if you're going to pick out something like that, something that you expect to last, wouldn't you try to go with something more neutral than pink, something that would allow you, if you so chose to at some point down the road, to paint your walls some color other than, well, plum?  These are the things I wonder.

This is Max's room, which is next to our bedroom.  It's a little dark but he was napping and I couldn't risk screwing up his nap for the sake of a picture, heaven knows I haven't done that before!  He has a window seat too, and the same carpeting.  His room is basically the same as it was at our old house.

This is the main bathroom, or what we refer to as "Max's bathroom" because it's right across the hall from his bedroom and where he takes his baths.

And that's it for upstairs.  One thing I really don't like about this house is that the third bedroom is three levels below ours.  So if we have another baby, Max is going to be WAY far away from us.  Which will probably really suck.  But I guess we'll worry about that when it happens.

So it's about time for me to start a project, and I think it's either going to be Max's bathroom (which will be easy, there's not too much to paint) or our bedroom and bathroom.  Does anyone have a tray ceiling in their house like that?  I've read that to make it 'disappear' you paint the whole thing white, otherwise, you can highlight it by painting just the slanted parts the same color as the walls.  At any rate, I don't think I'm going to leave it that dark plum color.  Any ideas?

house pics

I finally snapped a few pictures of the new house.  Before we begin, please disregard any leftover moving mess, cheesy Christmas decorations, and baby paraphernalia.  Thank you.

First, the living room.  I didn't take a picture of the front door, but, it's off to the left here... so, you'd walk into the front door and this room would be to your left, make sense?  There's our little Christmas tree... eventually we did get the top half. :)  I want to paint this room... actually I want to paint all these rooms, they are basically one big room though so I'm kind of nervous about picking a paint color.  I don't like the color it is right now though... in these pictures it looks white or even a light tan color, but it's really kind of a light... I don't know... flesh?  Yuck, flesh is kind of a gross word.  I think it's boring and it doesn't seem very warm to me.  Not that I have to have warm colors... almost everything in our old house was painted blue or green... but I don't know, it just seems impersonal or something.  It doesn't help that we don't have anything on the walls yet, I guess.  I sort of want to put a huge canvas or something behind the couch.  The other wall has our entertainment center.

Next to the living room is the dining room... that railing on the left is in between.  Again, I think we need paint here.  Maybe that wall on the right can be an accent color?  And eventually, a rug might be nice.  And we'll probably put family pictures on the wall.  You'll notice we don't have shades or curtains anywhere; we can't see any neighbors, so it really doesn't matter.  We do have shades up in our bedrooms, but, there aren't even any shades in the downstairs bathroom (that is on ground level).  Don't worry, I'll be putting something up in there.  And I think it would be nice to have something in these rooms too, even if it's more for looks than anything.

So this is standing in the living room and looking towards the back of the house... the kitchen is back there.  The staircase on the right goes up to our room and Max's room (the other bedroom is downstairs).  I need to figure out something to put up in those spaces above the dining room wall.  The previous owner had fake plants up there... but I'm not all that big on that, so... I was thinking maybe I could find some cool looking pottery or something... some sort of sculpture type thing... hmm.

Coming around the corner from the dining room... the door goes out onto our back deck.  You can see why I love this place for pictures.  SO MUCH LIGHT.  All north and south facing windows.  Now I just need to wait for the days to start getting a little longer... so it's actually light out some of the time when I'm home.  I swear, for the first two weeks we lived here, I didn't even see the place in natural light.  Gotta love winter in Minnesota.

The kitchen (this was taken from up above the stairs on that landing area).  Another thing I love about the house is that the heat is in-floor.  My feet are always cold so it feels wonderful.   And, bonus, if you leave your clothes laying on the floor, they're nice and warm when you put them on.  Not that I ever do that.

And this is the deck off the kitchen... and part of our backyard... where the mini baseball field will go someday!

I'll take pics of the upstairs and downstairs too, but they are less unpacked than the main floor, so I'll get to that later.

So, do you have any fabulous decorating ideas for me?  I think the first thing we need to do is paint... because I feel like I don't want to get too much stuff up on the walls, curtains hung, etc and then have to take it down to paint anyway.  If you have any ideas, I'd love to hear them!

packing up

Well, our house is officially sold.  But we haven't officially bought one.  Both inspections were on Monday.  The lady buying our house had a list of things she wanted us to fix, either that or take two grand off the purchase price.  Tom and I didn't want to drop the price that much, but said we'd fix a couple of the things, and take $500 off (which is supposedly to cover a new garage door).  The other things are putting a new threshold on the front door (which  my dad is doing for us) and fixing the leaky faucet in the laundry room (which my dad did already and cost us a whole 59 cents).  Included in the sale is all of our appliances... and a shovel.  She actually wrote on the purchase agreement that she wanted a shovel.  I don't even think we have a shovel nice enough that she would want it?!?  Our realtor said that she'd buy her a shovel herself and put a big bow on it for her. :)  Anyway, when we told her what we'd be willing to do, she signed the papers, so we're official on that side. 

The inspection at the new house went great, for the most part.  The inspector found some long vertical cracks in the roof though, and said we should have a roofer come out and take a look at it.  Well... all of the roofers around here are extremely busy due to a huge hailstorm we had in the spring, and it was the holiday week, so we're still waiting to hear something on that.  The house is only six or seven years old, so the roof SHOULD be in good condition.  So something is wrong there and we need to figure that out.  Like, tomorrow, I hope.

So, we're packing... because if all goes well, which we're assuming it will, we're closing in less than three weeks.  That leaves two weekends between tonight and moving day, both of which we have plans for already because after all it is December and there's always a million things going on.  So we sort of feel like we need to pack NOW.  I remember back when I moved a few times in and after college... moving into the dorms, back to my parents' house for the summer, into our on-campus apartment, into our off-campus apartment, and then into this house.  And it always SUCKED.  And that was before I owned bedroom furniture, a full set of china, and many large unwieldy plastic items made by Fischer-Price.  I keep looking around wondering how it's going to work this time.  It's going to make for one very interesting holiday season, that's for sure.  Anyone have any tips on moving or packing?

Not much else is going on.  New blog header... I was able to go through some pictures this weekend, finally.  Other than the packing, I got to spend the whole weekend with Max, which was wonderful.  He was so happy all day long, napped 1 1/2 or 2 hours morning and afternoon... just a good couple of days for him.  I realized tonight though that I hadn't left the house once all weekend long, and I needed to get out.  Tom called his mom and she was nice enough to come over while we went to Outback and had dinner... and then stopped at Dairy Queen on the way home... I need to start eating a little bit better.  Tomorrow. :)