How Electricity Ruins Everything

Well, I promised you that I would be back today with an awesome addition to our laundry room. Unfortunately, my plans have been thwarted by dumb electricity. I mean, who needs electricity in the laundry room? Don’t we all wash our clothes on a washboard?

Basically, the area where I planned to drill in some screws is apparently filled with electrical lines. Or so says my stud finder. I’m still hoping that it changes its mind, but no luck so far.

Let me just tell you about my plans because I still think it’s a cool idea and maybe someday America will lose all power and I will finally get my chance to achieve my dream. One can only hope…

A few months ago, I saw this very cool home at Brick House that had this clever solution for hanging up clothes sans closet.

Pipes! I loved how industrial this looked and I knew it would be a great solution for our laundry room (not).

Later, I stumbled into this adorable nursery at Apartment Therapy and gasped (in my mind only) when I saw this photo:

Pipes, painted coral and gold, holding up curtains? SO COOL.

I’m sad just thinking about it. I tried moving it in different configurations and using two different pipe sizes, but I just couldn’t find a way to make it work and have it look good. I’ll find another way to hang up wet clothes, but I’ll also have to find another use for my pipes and floor flanges.

(I also have a third pipe. Bigger than these two and just as useless.)

My cool clothes hanger was supposed to be installed below the small cabinet on the left:

Oh well.

I’ll need to find another use for my pipes. Perhaps they can become legs for my jewelry cabinet, a la Brick House’s dipped legs.

Fortunately, a little elfin worked very hard to cheer me up today.

Birds in the Sky… or the ceiling, whatever.

Just because it’s been quiet around here doesn’t mean we’ve not been busy! We are making good progress on the laundry cabinets and that thing is ALMOST DONE after so many touch-ups and additions and adjustments. I hope to show you what they look like by Thursday!

For now, I wanted to show you a sweet addition to the nursery that was made by my mom. Here’s the first clue:

Yes, she’s looking up with a puzzled expression.

It’s a bird mobile!

My mom did everything, from sewing the birds to gluing on the eyes to cutting down the branches (bought from Hobby Lobby) and hanging it all up on the mobile. Since she did everything, this is not a tutorial but more like a “Look, how cute! And I didn’t even have to do anything except hang it up!” thing.

The colors she chose are perfect – bright blue/teal, yellow, orange, with touches of black and white.

Janella is in love.

She stares at the mobile when she lies down in her crib and tries to grab the birds when we hold her too close to it.

Yes, a bird is missing a branch. The cats did it. Tala is my number one suspect.

Since our goal for 2012 is to make the house FUNCTIONAL, it’s okay that the nursery isn’t 100% done even though Janella is almost 9 months old (how did that happen?). This nursery is definitely functional. It’s a happy place for all of us. Janella sleeps like a… well, a baby in there.

But I do have some things I want to finish up in there after we complete our laundry room and office to-do lists. For one, we bought three large canvases for that wall behind the crib and Nick is planning to paint a world map on them. I can’t wait for that!

See you Thursday for the laundry cabinets reveal, right? It’s a date, right?

Friday Randoms

Another day, another week, another month. Every time I stop and realize that it’s Friday, I’m amazed at how fast the week went. And then I realize that I haven’t even blogged anything or done anything that could fill out a complete blog post.

Hence, I’m trying something new here. Friday randoms, where I stop and look around and groan at our slowpoke process at making this house our home. Here goes!

The first thing I’m going to do after I finish this blog post is to order this pendant light for our living room:

I am so excited! I will have to put away a few months’ of spending money to get this, but I know it will take our living room to the next level. I’ve been looking for the perfect light fixture for that room since I wrote this post.

I’m still plugging away on the laundry cabinets… well, I should be honest and say that I’ve abandoned the project for two weeks now. I keep on saying, “It’s too late into the day now, I will do it tomorrow, I WILL!” and then I don’t. It’s the last lap around the track, but when you’ve run 1,000 miles, the last lap is the hardest.

I will finish it this weekend. I will. I WILL.

After all, the cabinet frames have been completed since April 11.

Poor, patient, and lonely cabinet boxes. I’m sorry, guys. You’ll be reunited with your beloved doors soon.

Remember the art I want to work on for our master bedroom? I have several large pieces of plywood in the garage waiting for me to get started on it, but I wanted to experiment on a small piece to make sure that it will look good. So far, I’ve sanded it, added wood filler, and primed it on one side. Next, I will add gesso on both sides and see if the primer is really necessary.

Once that little project is done, I will update you all and hopefully have a tutorial on how to do DIY art on plywood!

Back to the laundry room – we haven’t put up the art that I made on the wall because we wanted to experiment with templates first and see what layout would look the best. I originally thought we would have the four frames in a grid (two on top, two at bottom), but it didn’t look right with our short ceilings and the second row was too close to the floor. We realized that we were planning to remove the door anyway (to bring in more light to the game room), so we could use the whole wall and line up the frames, side by side.

Looks great! We will put them up this weekend. I hope. Sometimes weekends have a way of fooling you on Fridays into thinking that it’ll be long, productive, and full of events. And then on Sunday night, you look up from your laptop when you’re sitting on the sofa and realize you’ve done nothing all weekend. No? Just me? Okay.

Oh, we used wrapping paper to serve as our templates to determine the location of our frames. It worked very well!

Our girl Janella loves strawberries. At the end of a strawberry eating session, she looks like Dexter, according to Nick.

Janella is working on her crawling. She’s not there yet, but she definitely can move forward towards something she wants. However, you need to put the right thing to entice her into crawling/lunging forward. Put a toy in front of her, she will give you a blank look. But if you use a necklace, a working phone (somehow she knows the blackberry I give her is broken), a camera, or a leather purse, you’ll see her move with determination.

I found some redness on her knees, so I told Nick we needed to buy baby legs. But I read in this fun book that I could just cut up some old socks and put them on her legs. I tried that with a pair of argyle socks that I never wear and they look mighty cute on her legs!

I’m gonna cut up more socks now. It takes 3 seconds to do – my favorite kind of DIY project.

Oh, and do you see that cute white/gray/yellow pillow in the photo above? Nick gave that to me for my 30th birthday. Love it.

Last AND least, I’m eating this greek dip right now. It’s really good and aside from lots of chopping, it’s ultra easy to make. I mean, if I can make it while entertaining a watermelon-eating baby, anybody can make it.

The end. I wish you all a great and productive (or lazy, that’s good, too) weekend.

The Case for Baskets

When I was preparing for the baby’s arrival, I knew that we would need baskets and boxes and all that stuff to corral ALL THE BABY STUFF but I didn’t exactly understand just what the STUFF would be, so I couldn’t just go out and start buying random baskets.

Instead, I waited and gave it a few months. It was worth it, because it helped us figure out exactly what to buy and what to skip. I’m not done yet and I know the STUFF will increase as Janella gets older, but this is a good start for us.

Come and visit, why don’t you. Check out the nursery closet…

First – the clothes! Janella is six months old and obviously doesn’t fit in her newborn or 0-3 months clothes, but still fits in her 3-6 months clothes. Yes, she’s a thin one. 50% in height, 10% in weight.

The green box (from IKEA) on the right is filled with newborn and 0-3 months clothes. The one on the left is pretty much empty and waiting for the next batch of t00-small clothes. These little cute boxes do the job! No need for huge plastic bins. For now.

Janella’s stash of toys were getting out of control, so we found a couple of spots around the house to keep them contained. These two cute purple mesh baskets were found at Home Goods and they store toys that Janella isn’t currently playing with (we rotate out toys).

Okay, back up a little to re-enter the nursery. This little picnic basket with teal stripes were picked up at Target and holds all of Janella’s cloth diapers.

I know what you’re thinking. A picnic basket?! But it is the perfect solution because I wash these diapers almost everyday and it’s hard to empty out the dryer with a squirming baby in one arm. With the picnic basket, it’s easy to just pick it up by the handles, dump the diapers in it, and transfer it back into the nursery. Plus, it’s cute and it will still be useful when I’m done with diapers. When will that be, by the way? I wonder…

I can’t move on without telling you about the colorful bag you see in the basket. It’s called a wet bag and it is an ESSENTIAL item to have if you use cloth diapers. It’s waterproof and seals in all odors. I can’t imagine using cloth diapers without these bags. You can find them at Amazon – we have three of this.

Okay, now turn your head a little to the right and you’ll find a cute green laundry basket with a cute baby in it.

I have a confession to make: Janella’s not always in it. So, the basket isn’t always this cute.

Nick found the basket at Target and brought it home without consulting me. I was two weeks postpartum… It was a risky endeavor but he did a good job. It’s the perfect size for all of Janella’s tiny clothes and when it’s full, it makes a full load.

Lest you think that I’m some kind of organized guru with 1,000 baskets that hold all kinds of categories of stuff, let me show you what it looks like under the daybed in the nursery. (I haven’t told you about the daybed, have I?)

Yep. Time to get some more baskets. I’ll measure the space and put the measurements in our iPhone to help us find the perfect baskets that’ll fit in there perfectly. For now, just don’t look under there. Thanks.

Since we spend a lot of our time in the living room, it’s where we store the majority of Janella’s toys that she plays with these days. For a while, we just dumped them in a corner or in a baby swing, but that got annoying fast. We realized that we had two old teal ottomans that were holding random things like old letters and blankets, so we emptied out one and chucked in all the toys in there. (I want to reupholster them, but you know, later.)

It’s perfect.

At least, for now. The time will come when this little ottoman won’t be able to contain all of her toys. It will be a sad day…

The other ottoman is residing in the weird space between the TV set and our side table.

It feels like wasted space. The space is actually bigger than what it seems like in the photo above. It would be great if we could fit in a chest under the window that holds blankets, toys, etc with a soft cushion to sit on. Something like this:

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If you’re looking for baskets, boxes, and that kind of stuff, some great sources include IKEA, World Market, Home Goods, and sometimes Target.

There’s a couple of green baskets at Target that I’m itching to get my hands on but I’m waiting for them to go on sale. Will I win? Or will I lose when they go out of stock without going on sale? I don’t like this game.

So. That’s the story of how I got my act together and organized everything. And by everything, I mean only a few things. I guess I need to buy more baskets and boxes.

Before I leave, I want to say a heartfelt THANK YOU to all of our family and friends for the gifts and hand-me-downs that you’ve given to us. You’ve been amazing and we’re so grateful. XOXO

Iowa is Awesome

It’s awesome to us because that’s where my family lives right now.

It’s also where we’ve been over the past week.

Janella met her favorite cousin, Lily Kate, for the first time. I say she’s her favorite because Janella always stares at her and smiles when she sees her! Aw!

I tell you, there is nothing cuter than a 3-year-old fawning over a 5-month-old like an old lady.

And Janella also met another cousin, Joseph Jr., who is only seven months older than her. It was so cute watching them meet for the first time. Even though they didn’t really seem all that interested in each other… But that’ll change before we know it.

I’m really glad that Janella has two great cousins living somewhat nearby (if you consider 14 hours “nearby” but it is to us, with all of our other family living on the east coast).

It was also really nice to finally see mom’s new/old house. I love that house – it has SO much potential.

They’re getting a whole new kitchen installed soon, which will be SO exciting. I forgot to take before photos while I was there, ugh, hopefully mom takes a couple of great photos so I can share it with you all.

Our spring break was awesome… and awesomely long, since Nick got an extra week off due to electrical problems at the school he works at. He’ll have to make up for these missed days, but it was really nice to have TWO weeks off!

Now we’re back home. Nick said that the time at Iowa was a really nice vacation for him, since I wasn’t pestering him to mow the grass or to put up the curtains or some other home-related stuff.

Well, Nick, vacation’s over. Put up them purple curtains STAT!

Pretty Painted Vases, Part 2

I should probably explain my absence for the past three weeks.

Janella learned how to flip to her stomach and that resulted in days and days and days and days and days of sleep deprivation on my part, but now she is 100% happy sleeping on her stomach and I am 95% okay with it. Maybe 85%.

So. Where was I?

Ah, yes. The painted vase project.

The good news? The paint was easy to remove.

After peeling off the huge globs of paint, I was able to remove the rest with a damp paper towel.

So you can see that the tape on the vase didn’t work out… but in some parts the tape really did work. You can see some crisp lines here and there. I think that tape COULD work if you had a lot of space (e.g. a bigger vase) to maneuver and press the tape on the glass harder than I was able to.

Once the vase was free of the paint, I just poured in some new paint and followed all of my tips. I tell you, I give great tips. The painting of this vase went beautifully and it dried much faster than the other vases did.

(Ugh blurry photo) Boring, maybe? But still pretty!

Since I still had several more vases looking forlorn, I tried another paint trick.

A few weeks ago we stopped by West Elm (aka Heaven on Earth) just to look around (and pick up a few cute things, of course) and I thought this vase was cute:

I told Nick, “Hey, what do you think of this? I could attempt this with one of our glass vases!!”

Nick chuckled to himself with one eyebrow raised and then gave me a little shrug and stuck out his bottom lip (the international facial expression for ‘maybe or whatever’) and walked away with Janella. The nerve…

I made this, and Nick loves it. Elisa for the win!

I just poured in a little of the paint – enough for it to slide down the side, but not too much that it’ll drip all over the place. But the paint was a little too thick so it moved way too slowly for impatient little me. And the stripe turned out to be triangle-y.

I’m waiting for it to dry before doing the other side to reduce the likelihood of drips – and I will try thinning out the paint with a little water. That should work.

OK! Enough about vases! But wait. I want to bask in the glory of “I FINALLY DID IT AND IT LOOKS PRETTY” so look at this Expedit set up with my “new” vases.

Can you spot all the painted vases? I also experimented with a painting technique from this tutorial (see the green vase on the right, second row) but it didn’t really make for a pretty result.

I enjoyed playing around with the styling of the expedit! It gave me a few minutes of relaxation in between Janella’s cries today. It’s still very visually cluttered, but it is so much better than what was there now. I “shopped” the whole house to try to fill out the expedit and now I know exactly what we need for it. We need some white things (see the closet light cover on the bottom right, ha) that pop, five baskets to line the bottom to fill games with and reduce visual clutter, and a few colorful frames here and there of our favorite people.

I’m also SLIGHTLY considering spray-painting some of the game boxes. That’s a little crazy, maybe?

Now you can go! And I promise I won’t disappear for three weeks again. Unless Janella learns how to stand on her head or something…

"HA HA! I have PLANS for you, mom! HAHAHA!"

Janella’s First Tooth!

Come on, Janella, let’s show these nice people your first tooth!

Open your pretty mouth, dear…

No, no, don’t bite my finger. Open wider!

Your tongue is very cute, yes, but not what we’re looking for.

There we are!

Now you can go back to chewing on Sophie.

That was last week. As of today, she’s the proud owner of two teeth! Geez!

What’s next… will she be begging me to use makeup next week?

Something new, something old, and something blue…

They’re here!!

Our new washer and dryer are here! Beautiful, front-loading, WHITE machines. Love them. Washing clothes has become fun again! (I wonder how long that’ll last…)

We got them on sale, almost 50% off, thanks to Black Friday. American consumerism, I wuv you.

Our washer broke unexpectedly, so we had to get these new machines. And we sold our dryer on Craig’s List for $40. It was noisy and old. We’ll put that $40 to use in the laundry room.

With the new washer and dryer, our plans had to be tweaked a little. I measured everything out and also measured our cabinets. Since our three cabinets are in three different sizes, I had to think about how to arrange them.

One cabinet is 36 inches long with two doors, one cabinet is 18 inches long with one door, and one cabinet is 24 inches long but only 21 inches tall (the other two are 30 inches tall). So I played with all of the possible arrangements (see the drawings along the right side of the paper).

Originally, I had planned to push the washer and the dryer apart on two sides so there would be space in between for our cat litter. But when I looked at the possible cabinet arrangements, it made more sense to have the empty space on the left side.

Then Nick came up with a great solution for the cat litter (more on that later… want to see if it works out before sharing it with you all), so I changed our plans. We’ll put a small shelving unit there to hold our dirty towels and sheets. Something like this, maybe.

You can see what cabinet arrangement I picked by the very obvious circle. I think it makes the most sense and the door and knob arrangement is the most pleasing to the eye… at least, to Elisa’s eye.

We have plentyyy of space next to the machines, so the next step is to either find an unit to fit in there or make one ourselves. We’ll see…..

Right now, I’m working on sanding away the drippy paint from the cabinets. I’m relieved that I don’t need to buy paint stripper – the sanding seems to be working. I’m not worried about sanding away ALL the paint – just the bumpy parts.

Whoa – how’d that picture of Janella get in here?

Two of the cabinets are sanded down and smooth and ready.

OK, I’d better go and sand down the last cabinet. And prime. And paint. And put them up on the wall. And buy the knobs. I’ll probably only enjoy the knob buying part.

Janella – Week By Week!

We loved this idea of weekly photos with a different background every time, so we did the same but with a twist: we wanted to make sure that every background was meaningful and told a small part of Janella’s story.

She’ll be 7 weeks old tomorrow (WHAT?!), so here are the six photos we’ve taken so far… (Well, we actually took like 3,231 photos, but who’s counting?)

Week One

Background: Hospital blanket that she came home in.

Week Two

Background: Towel that dried her up after her first bath (what a disaster that first bath was…)

Week Three

Background: A darling knitted blanket from Janella’s great grandpa.

Week Four

Background: A purple fur blanket that’s on our bed. We’re co-sleeping… for now.

Week Five

Background: The curtains in Janella’s nursery.

Week Six

Background: The orange shag rug in Janella’s nursery… which was also my very first rug purchase from when I lived in my very first apartment.

That tutu is actually sized for 12 months, so it’ll be fun to see her grow into it. That blue bat is something we bought at Pecan Festival, which is a popular festival in Austin. And if you know Austin, you know why we got a stuffed bat instead of, say, a stuffed teddy bear.

I spent an inordinate amount of time last night looking through all the photos I had of Janella on my laptop. She was born only seven weeks ago? And she looked like that? She was that tiny? Amazing.

Laundry Room: Painted! What’s Next?

Thanks to Dad Vita (Nick’s dad), the laundry room is painted! Thanks to Mom Vita (Nick’s mom), the laundry room is spotless! (Please ignore the cat litter in the picture – we have plans for that)

We love the color and we love that it cost us only $2.00 even more.

What’s next? Oh, just a couple of things.

We got this light from IKEA on sale for only $15. It’s a little long, but it works for us because we’re short people not freakishly tall. However, I am still on the fence because I do think it can get in the way when transferring clothes from the washer to the dryer. Plan B for the light is for it to reside in our closet bookshelves.

But the gray color, eh. I want a yellow light! I want to spray paint it yellow. Help me to convince Nick. Hey, Nick, I’m not pregnant anymore. I can do the spray painting from now on. Cool?

Check out our linen shelves. I can’t call it a linen closet when the shelves are so slim and there’s no door, so linen shelves it is.

I asked Dad Vita to not paint the whole thing because this is my vision:

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We’ll lengthen the shelves so they’re flush to the wall (more storage!) and paint the insides either black or a dark gray. With some trim and cute weaved boxes, it’ll be a linen “closet” I can finally be excited about. I hope we can tackle that soon!

Next to the linen shelves, we’ve got a long wall of nothing. Except for that pretty blue color.

We got four Ribba frames and they’re waiting for me to add the symmetry art I made a while back. I had planned to print them at a local Kinkos and ta-da! But that didn’t work out because of corporate greed. I am one of the 99%! Ah, I will discuss that later, but basically it will be much cheaper for me to just paint it instead of getting it printed. Later, later. Soon, soon.

This wall next to the washer is empty and sad as well.

A friend (Erin!) had this genius idea of putting a fold-able ironing board on the wall, so when we (Nick) need to iron, we (Nick) could just pull the board down and iron away instead of lugging it to the game room. But would we (Nick) appreciate the fact that we (Nick) won’t be able to watch tv (ESPN) while ironing? Hmm, I will need to think (ask Nick) about it.

I LOVE our cats but HATE the cat litter situation. The cats use the litter box just fine, but they track the litter bits everywhere and the laundry room is supposed to be a place where things get clean, so it just doesn’t make sense to have the cat litter there. But there’s nowhere else in the house to put it! So, I want to design something between the washer and the dryer so that it houses the cat litter AND prevents litter tracking everywhere AND is covered up with prettiness. I hope we can achieve all that.

Dad Vita also painted the ceiling… in our usual light gray color. I feel bad for the next owners of the house – they probably will hate our light gray ceilings because most people like white ceilings and grumble about painting all the ceilings. Sorry.

I told Dad Vita that I could tape the ceiling off for him, but he gave me a Look and said that he could cut in just fine. I laughed and said, “Our walls aren’t like your flat walls in Pennsylvania. Our walls are textured and it is impossible to paint in a straight line.” He said something to the effect of “Watch me.”

Well, he was right. His painting job is perfect. Too bad most of the rooms in the house are already painted or I would have postponed his plane ticket back home and asked him to paint everything. His trick: paint the wall paint and let it spill over to the ceiling, and then go back and remove the spillage with a wet tiny brush. Genius. And I can’t believe that it worked.

So. That’s where we are with the laundry room. The next step is to tackle these cabinets.

I will need to sand off the old paint (bad drippage), if possible. I hope I won’t need to buy paint removal chemicals.

Only if this little cutie will allow me to finally tackle this project.