just my type

baby sister's room

So we moved Max into his new room about six weeks ago.  For the first couple of weeks, he kept getting out of bed in the middle of the night and coming up the three flights of stairs in the dark house to get to our room.  We decided to put a gate across his open door and after a night or two of that, he started staying in bed all night every night.  Well, almost every night.  He still wakes up every once in awhile (last night for some reason, I think he was up four times?) but most nights he sleeps through and doesn't get up until we get down there in the morning, or he calls for us ('Mommy!  Daddy!  The sun is up!').  He is pretty proud every morning to tell us that he stayed in bed.  The sunset/sunrise lately has been right around when he needs to go to bed and get up, so we got really lucky with the timing.  Now the days are getting shorter and shorter so we won't really be able to use that anymore, maybe we'll have to teach him how to read the clock. :)

Anyway, he still calls his room 'Max's new ROOM!' and will show anyone that comes over to our house.  He also likes to see what's going on in 'baby sister's room'.  I just finished it up.  When we moved in, it had dark purplish-brown carpet with light brown walls, and Max's nursery stuff didn't look to bad with it, so we just left it alone (this is a dark picture, but you get the idea):

Early this summer I bought this bedding from Pottery Barn Kids because I loved the little birds.  I wasn't sure if we'd be able to get new carpet, and really the light brown color was the only thing that would work on the walls with it, but I figured I could make it work somehow if I had to.

We did end up getting new carpet (I'm really glad) and I painted the walls a light green color... this is how it turned out:

I really like it. :)  I ended up making a lot of the stuff myself, or having it made for us.  I bought a light pink silk curtain for the room to see if I liked it, but I ended up thinking it was a bit much so instead I got these plain white valances from Target and sewed a pink ribbon on them.  Then I used the light pink curtain to make a couple of pillowcases for the window seat (the window seat is supposed to have a cushion on it, but I have to get that reupholstered because it's still dark purple to match the old carpet).  I painted the birds on canvas and made the mobile out of felt, then made the bird on the bench with the leftovers from the mobile.

I used Max's old Minnesota Twins mobile for this... so it plays 'Take Me Out to the Ball Game'. :)

And my paintings... which look pretty childish, but hey they match the bedding. :)

I had a seller I found on etsy that does custom vinyl wall art make us this - inspired by the little birds too.  Her first initial will go in the center of the leaves, I just didn't put that part up yet.  I had her make the letter out of a woodgrain vinyl, but now I'm not sure if it would be better to just go with white... I guess I'll see how it looks. 

One of the best parts is that I mentioned to my friend Carrie that I didn't buy the quilt that went along with the bedding from PBK... and then as a baby gift she had her mom MAKE us this quilt:

Totally awesome, I like it way more than the PBK one. :)

I still could use maybe one more thing for the walls... that would go above her bookshelf there on the left, or at least sit on top of it and fill in that space a little bit.  But otherwise I think all it needs is a BABY... hopefully soon!

max's quilt

I've been wanting to sew/quilt for awhile and even brought my mom's old sewing machine (which is about 25 years old probably) to my house months ago.  My mom used to sew a lot, I used to help her cut patterns for our clothes when we were little, and my mom and grandma both quilt (I blogged about our wedding quilt here).  So I've used a machine and made a few simple projects myself.  After checking out my mom's old one, I decided to just go to Target and buy myself a new (cheap) one.  I figured it would be more than enough for me because I wasn't doing anything fancy. 

I was inspired by Susan (she makes the CUTEST stuff!) and followed a link from her blog to some simple baby quilt instructions.  My mom and I (well, mostly my mom) made Tom a t-shirt quilt a few years ago out of some of his old baseball t-shirts, and I had the idea I wanted to make one for Max too - except, a quilt out of his old baby clothes.  So I cut 4-inch squares out of his old onesies and sleepers and sewed them into a new blankie for him.

Max already has a blankie he's pretty attached to, and honestly I don't even know if he'll use this one, but if not then I'll just keep it to myself because it reminds me so much of him as a newborn and these cute tiny clothes he wore. :)

I wanted to do this all by myself and I managed (with a few phone calls to my mom - and I think she might have cut my binding strips while she was over one day).  It probably took me about an hour the first night I worked on it just to figure out how to thread my machine and the bobbin... :)  And it's definitely not perfect, but I'm happy with how it turned out.  Now I'm starting a quilt for the new baby, which should be much faster since I sort of know what I'm doing, and easier since I'm just using regular cotton fabric... cutting the squares has only taken me minutes as opposed to what felt like HOURS. :)

One quick picture of Max today, too... he got a sucker at the credit union and he was thrilled.  And STICKY!

ETA: My quilt squares were 4" and binding was 2.5".  I made it 8x10, but that was totally random - I ended up with way more squares than I needed and probably could have made it bigger, but wanted to keep it small and use the same colors.  Some of his newborn onesies, I could only get two squares out of, but a lot of items I could get 3-4.  After cutting the squares (just used a 4" square ruler and rotary-cut right out of the clothes), I ironed interfacing on the back since the fabric was stretchy unlike regular fabric.  After attaching the batting and back I machine-quilted 1/4" out from the seams, and then machine-quilted the binding to the front and hand-stitched it to the back.

That being said, here is the tutorial I sort of followed, and here is Susan's original post!

the big boy room

Max's new room is finally ready.  I just put up a few last things while he's napping and thought I'd post quick before the weekend since I've been slacking on the old blog this week.  I'm pretty happy with how it turned out.  Originally we thought about doing a Twins baseball room (of course), and I've had an idea FOREVER for his bedding for that.  But Tom kind of talked me out of it and told me we should do that when he's a bit older.  So we went with cars and trucks, which he loves, although there's still quite a bit of baseball in there. :)  But it should make it really easy to change stuff out when he gets a little bit older and we eventually do the baseball room if that's what he wants.

Here it is from the doorway... kind of hard to get a picture of the whole room.

His bed.  The letters used to hang from ribbons above his crib.  That isn't actually a red pillow (yet), I just wrapped the leftovers from his curtains around another one to see what it would look like.  I have a lot of fabric left over so I think I'm going to make him a couple extra pillows/cushions.  I couldn't even find a bedrail here, I had to order one, from WalMart, no less. :)  The stool is from IKEA.

The quilt, from The Land of Nod... their stuff is expensive but it's SO NICE.  I'm also thinking about getting something more car/truck related for above his bed on the long side... maybe something like these??

I still need to bring all his books down from upstairs, so I staged his bookshelf with some toys. :)  The poster he's had in his room since he was born, I think from The Land of Nod.

This is the toy chest my dad made him for Christmas.  Sorry about the weird lighting in all of these pics... it is a gray day here and I had the overhead lights on, plus the window light.  So I think every picture looks different color-wise... but you get the idea.

I got him a new dresser (from IKEA) and I am pretty excited to have a lot more space for his clothes... they are a lot bigger than they used to be and the 1.5 drawers I've been using in his changing table upstairs just aren't cutting it anymore. :)

A place for his artwork and some pics.  The lamp and shade from Target, but I copied a Pottery Barn Kids lamp and did the baseball-stitching on the shade using some leather.  The baseball mat is one I found at PBK when I was shopping for baby bedding, and the art hanger is from The Land of Nod.  Still need a pic for the tiny IKEA frame. :)

And, a growth chart.  This idea came from my Pottery Barn Photos book, which I LOVE... so many cute ideas in there for photos.  This is behind his door, and stuck on with 3M picture hangers (love those things), so I'm hoping that he won't destroy it even though it's right at his level.  We'll see how that goes.  I was looking for an antique ruler on ebay until I remembered that my Grandpa Ole was a woodworker and probably used these... sure enough my dad had a whole cigar box full of them.  

That's it!  He'll be moving in next week, and then it's time to start on the baby's room!  I could have only a little over seven weeks left to go, and seeing how fast I move on this stuff, I better get cracking. :)

Gotta run for now and get ready for the weekend.  Hope everyone has a good one!

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.