Blue and Yellow Curtains: A Recycling Project

When we first moved into our apartment, I made curtains for every room. Our Guest Room/Random Everything Room was painted light yellow (the same color as the Back Bedroom in our current house). My two favorite colors are yellow and blue, and I chose a cute yellow, blue, and white striped material for the curtains. The valance I made out of a solid blue fabric.

When it came time to make the Back Bedroom into B's Bedroom, I decided to save a little money and re-use the striped curtains. I hate to waste things, and those curtains were only used for the 2 years we lived in that apartment. Since then, they'd been sitting in a box (yes, we still have unpacked boxes).

I wanted to change things up for the new curtains, so they weren't exactly the same. Plus, in our apartment, the windows were two very large windows side by side, whereas B's Room has two smaller, separate windows. After a lot of Pinterest-ing and drawing on graph paper, I finally decided on a valance with two straight hanging curtains on the sides. Rather than having a solid blue valance, I decided to make the valance and the curtains both out of the striped material, with stripes of the solid blue. I used up every single last piece of the old curtains!

It took me 3 days to take apart the old curtains, but it was totally worth it! Plus, I didn't have to buy anything new! I even reused curtain rods from another room!

I love love love how the came out! It makes the room feel so much more homely. And B, of course, loves them!

The Baby's Room

At the beginning of March, we added a new occupant to our home... our son B. Luckily for us, the carpet was installed in his room a mere 3 days before he was born, and his crib and other furniture were put together and set up only 2 days before.  Talk about cutting it close!!

The last week before he was born was a whirlwind of renovating. Here I was, 9 months pregnant, and tired exhausted all the time. Add on to that two soon-to-be first time parents who were going crazy trying to make sure everything in the house was perfect and that we had every single thing we needed, and it was a crazy week. I had a list of everything that had to be done before the carpet installers came on Friday. Paint touch up, caulking, cleaning, paint the ceiling, new electrical outlets, etc. As long as I managed to get one thing done during the day, and R got one thing done at night, we would be ok. And what do you know! We made it! Friday came along and everything was perfect and ready for the carpet.

The carpet went in without any problems and looks great! As soon as the installers were out the door, I was starting to move baby stuff in! The planner in me had been freaking out! The baby could come any day now, so I had all of his clothes and blankets washed and folded in the Guest Room. His changing table was put together. The dresser was painted. All I needed to do was move everything in. That Friday night was so fulfilling! I was waiting until after he was born to do some decorating, but my plan was to sew the curtains the following Tuesday (although, then he decided to change things up on us and I ended up in the hospital on Tuesday, and he was born that night!).

A "New" Floor and a Fun Discovery!

Tonight we ripped up the ugly blue wall-to-wall carpeting in the Twilight Room. Yuck. Good riddance! Blue is one of my favorite colors, but this rug had to be one of the most obnoxious things in the world! Especially when combined with the maroon, pink, and black that was on the walls when we bought it. Ick.

Our original plan for the room was to rip up the blue carpet and have someone come in and install new wall-to-wall carpeting, in a much more neutral color... off-white or a light tan or something. A couple years ago, R peeled up the carpet in the closet and discovered (sadly) that there was plywood underneath. It's a little strange that this is the one room in the house with wall-to-wall carpet, but we've found evidence that part of the room used to be a bathroom, so we assumed that the original floor must have been damaged by water or something.

Tonight we went through a wide range of emotions. When R started ripping up the carpet, he discovered that underneath 3/4 of the room was 2" wide maple flooring. It is in dire need of refinishing, but hey, it's better than carpeting! It'll look so much nicer than carpeting, in that it will somewhat match the rest of the house.

This new discovery was exciting for oh, about 5 minutes, until R got to the door and the 2" flooring ended and plywood began. The 2" flooring ran the whole length of the room except for 18" in front of the door. Still trying to be optimistic, we decided we'd just buy new 2" flooring, weave it in there and stain it all to match. Problem solved. Until we kept going and the plywood went all in front of the closet and into the closet and all along the back wall, about 3' into the room. Ugh. There was too much plywood for it to make sense to take it all up and install new 2" flooring. So we're back to let's just leave it and get new wall-to-wall carpeting.

While R was rolling up the carpet, I realized that the plywood/2" flooring was still about 3/4" taller than the floor in my office. So the plywood was on top of something that was level with the original flooring in the rest of the upstairs. So out came the crowbars. Underneath the plywood was flooring that matched and lined up with the flooring in my office. We got so excited! Who wants 2" flooring when the original wide board flooring is underneath!?! We kept going, tearing up a couple strips of the 2" flooring, to make sure the wide board flooring kept going. It did. That's also when we discovered this:

Between the 2" flooring and the original flooring are old newspapers from December 1942! So far we've found The New Britain Herald and The Hartford Courant. Some parts of the papers are really fragile and thin, and since we didn't know they were there, they got ripped. We're planning on being really careful in the rest of the room so we can keep it all.

There was also a hole in the floor, which we're planning on patching using some flooring from the attic. It's about the same size as the patched hole in the Guest Room floor, which we've guessed used to be a vent that brought heat into the Guest Room from the Dining Room after the GR fireplace was removed. Since the Twilight Room doesn't have a fireplace, we're assuming that there was another vent in here to bring heat into the room.

Another weird coincidence.... we were discussing the blue carpeting while R was tearing it up. When we moved in and I vacuumed it, it reacted like a brand new carpet would. I commented that it was like it had never been vacuumed before... like it had just been put in. When we were tearing it up tonight, I told R to be on the lookout for a sticker with an install date on it. My guess was 2008. Turns out I was right. Not only was it 2008, but creepily, it was March 6, 2008. Our baby's due date is March 6, 2013, exactly 5 years later. Creepy :)

Emptying out the Twilight Room

The Twilight Room is soon to be renamed "?'s Room". We decided to keep the Guest Room as a guest room and turn the back bedroom into the baby's room. When I painted the room almost two years ago, I painted it a light yellow. Yellow's my favorite color, but I also figured it would be perfect for this room because it's the smallest of the bedrooms and I intended it to the a future baby's room, and yellow goes with either a boy or a girl. It's a little bit of a stress reliever now to not have to worry about choosing a paint color and painting a whole room! Especially this room which was such a pain in the butt!!

In the fall I started slowly emptying the room. I hate piles and stuff just thrown places, so I wanted to relocate everything slowly, finding a place for each thing, not just piling it all in another room. I moved Madison's chair, my bookcase full of sewing supplies and some other small things into the Guest Room. I had to rearrange all of the furniture in order to do this, but I actually prefer how the room looks now. It looks so much bigger now that it has all of this extra furniture/stuff in it! All of R's books for work got moved into my office, along with a bookcase, and a neighbor of my parents' gave us this desk, which I put in the Dining Room and filled with all of the office supplies which had taken over the Twilight Room's closet. R's computer got moved into the Guest Room, but it won't be there for long because he's planning on getting a laptop soon.

It's crazy how much stuff ended up in this room that we hardly ever used!

Not So Scary Anymore..

This is actually a project I finished over the summer, but I finally just took pictures of it this week. Between work, other projects and a LOT of cloudy days, I had an excuse every day for months.

You'll remember from earlier posts that this is the room we've dubbed The Twilight Room. When we first viewed the house it was completely empty, except for two Twilight posters. And the walls were a beautiful striped montage of black, magenta, and purple, with a lovely bright blue carpet. Just delightful.

R claimed this room as his soon after we moved in. He took the desk that the previous owner had left and that's where he had his computer. He doesn't use it much.. maybe once or twice a week. The room wasn't really a priority. We have the guest beds set up in the Guest Bedroom, and R didn't really care about the scary walls (which by this point were primed, but you could still see the stripes peeking through).

However, this spring, I was attempting to organize all of the remaining boxes upstairs and realized that I could empty the majority of them if only I had somewhere to put my excess office supplies. I had boxes and boxes full of art and craft supplies, pens and pencils, notebooks.. etc. Plus a bunch of random stuff like our winter coats (downstairs coat closet isn't very high on our to-do list), all of my gift wrap, and what I call my memory boxes (basically plastic boxes filled with mementos). As I was sitting on the floor amid all of this stuff, I realized that I had a huge closet in the Twilight Room, sitting there basically empty.

In April and May I got to work on the closet.. not as easy as you'd think, seeing as it was covered in hand prints.

Once that was done, I started filling it up. That didn't take long. But I managed to unpack almost every box left in the Guest Room! Plus all of the boxes that I had accumulated in the Twilight Room.

The walls weren't that bad. Two coats of the light yellow paint, over two coats of Kilz covered all of the stripes. There are still a couple spots where you can see a little raised line (whoever painted the stripes taped off the lines and there are some spots where there's a raised line of paint along where the tape was), but only if you look really really close. The trim and windows were a pain because the paint was so dark and I was painting it white. I'm still not 100% done with the doors... they're taking an obnoxious amount of paint!!

Over the summer I moved in some furniture I had in the Guest Room. We got R's childhood bed and I had to rearrange the Guest Room, and all of the furniture didn't fit any more. I moved in his old bookcase and  Madison's papasan chair. We also have an old filing cabinet in here that was left in the house. It's broken and not very eye-pleasing, but it's too heavy for me to move out of the room, let alone down the stairs, so it's staying in here until it bothers R enough to move it (it'll be here for awhile).

In the fall I bought some Ikea curtains for the room. The next time R went to use his computer, he was like "What is all of this? What happened to my office? There are flowery curtains and stuffed animals in here!" It had definitely gone from being his room to mine.. My craft supplies take up one whole wall, there are stuffed animals on the shelves there and on the puppy's papasan chair.. there are flowers on the walls and curtains and there are pink stripped tie-backs on the curtains. His wall does have a nice panoramic view of Fenway (I said, if this was my room I definitely wouldn't have hung THAT up!) and all of his books and CDs and This Old House magazines, etc. by his computer still :)

The room still isn't completely finished (what is in this house?). I haven't painted the ceiling yet and we're planning on getting a new carpet soon. I plan on painting the ceiling and touching up the base trim when we get the new carpet. I also need to finish the doors and install the re-painted hardware.

**Picture disclaimer** I broke our camera. Our good, fancy camera. So these pictures are blurry and not the best (after waiting so long to take them you'd think they'd at least be good!). Sorry.

Madison's corner of the room. It's her favorite spot to sleep.

All that's left of R's space in the room

Bought these frames and pictures at Ikea for a total of $3.  I spray painted the frames black to match everything else in the room.

Curtains from Ikea with ribbon tie-backs. I spray painted the existing curtain rods black.

A Hodgepodge of Work

June has been a very busy month for us. Nothing huge got completed. We did do a little bit here and a little bit there though.

Every weekend since Memorial Day has either been filled with family obligations, rain or very humid weather. So really no change on the back sidewalk, other than yesterday. I spent a couple hours in the afternoon digging out the grass in the area where the sidewalk will be.

I finished painting the Twilight Room... I just need to get in there and take some pictures now. It rained for days after I finished painting it so I used those days to move some furniture in and unpack some boxes.. which means it's now a mess and not ready for pictures.

Yesterday morning I spent about an hour weeding our front walk. It's something that kept getting ignored because everyone knows to use our back door, not the front. So the sidewalk has been unseen and forgotten. It looks a lot nicer now... like someone actually lives here. I'm too embarrassed to show a picture of what it looked like before! Yea, it's nothing special now and will be replaced sometime in the future, but at least it's not overgrown anymore. While I was weeding I did get to enjoy a little show. I heard a ton of sirens at the end of the street and a couple seconds later about 15 state police motorcycles came down the street, followed by about 10 EMS motorcycles. Then about 50 (most likely more) more motorcycles came down the street. It was a huge motorcycle parade. Not sure where they were going. One guy's motorcycle broke down right in front of our house, so he and a bunch of his friends were out there for awhile trying to fix it. In the end another guy came and loaded the bike into his truck.

We've also been working on the drywall in the Kitchen (good rainy day work). Because everything is so un-level in the house it's tough to work on the drywall... do we make it straight or do we keep it un-level like everything else? The sanding is the worst thing in the world.. sanding takes place on the weekends, but during the week I need my Kitchen to cook in. Which means that I have to move everything out of the Kitchen on the weekends and then back in on Monday morning. It's getting old.

We also finally chose our Kitchen floor, which is exciting! Hopefully we'll be buying that soon!

I've also been busy doing some unpacking. And by unpacking I mean filling up the Twilight Room closet with all of my office stuff. I came to the conclusion yesterday that I don't think I'll ever in my life need to purchase any pens or pencils.. I have more than enough for a small country.

We also discovered why the Kitchen fireplaces turns into a waterfall every time it rains. Turns out the cover over the chimney broke during the winter and has a huge huge hole in it.

Hand Prints and Lemonade

Today was the first nice day in about 2 weeks. It has been raining and cloudy every.single.day. Which has been good and bad. Good because I sit down at my laptop and work all day. Bad because I haven't been able to get any painting in.

I decided to paint the Twilight Room closet because it is a huge closet where I could be storing all of my excess office supplies, which are still in boxes. It took me almost all morning to clear out the boxes from the area, and then clean the closet (vacuuming and Clorox wiping). 

I then put two coats of Kilz 2 Primer on the walls, door, shelf and ceiling. I used two coats because the dark colors of the hand prints showed through very clearly through only one coat. And there were hand prints everywhere! The Kilz also took care of the weird smell that the closet had (I'm assuming it's from being shut for so long).

Once that dried, I painted the shelves, trim and ceiling with my favorite white paint. For the walls I used Benjamin Moore Lemonade, which we had leftover from our apartment painting days (same as the other rooms... paint calculator told us to get 2 cans, we didn't even use half of one can). I normally would have painted closet walls white, but I had more yellow paint than white, so I figured I might as well use it. It means that if we ever change the wall color I'll have to paint the closet as well, but hey, it's yellow. It'll cover easily. It wasn't easy painting a 7' tall, 23" deep closet, with a 14" shelf and a lightbulb hanging down from the ceiling. My neck and arms were killing me by the end of the day and I was covered in paint.

I was very happy with how it came out. The yellow looks much better here than it did in the apartment. Less neon-y. And it definitely looks a lot better than the hand prints!

The Twilight Room

Our third bedroom has been nicknamed the Twilight Room. When we first viewed the house, it was completely empty except for 2 Twilight posters and a Panic at the Disco poster. I'm really into Twilight (not fan obsessed like some people though), so I said it was a sign. All of the other rooms were easy to name, but "Bedroom 3" or "Other Guest Bedroom" doesn't sound as good as Twilight Room, so the name stuck.

The room was occupied by a tween girl before we bought it. She painted the room to fit her tween-y tastes. The doors were purple and black, the trim was pinky-maroon, and the walls were purple with thick black vertical stripes. And the wall-to-wall carpet is bright blue. Scary. My mother-in-law called it the Beetlejuice Room and said it scared her.

 

This weekend R's sisters came to visit and see the house for the first time. They were itching to paint. Since I didn't really have anything that needed paint, we decided to have them put primer over the purple, maroon and black, to calm the room down a little bit. What a difference it made!

The room is a decent sized bedroom (smaller than the other two, but those two are abnormally large). It even has a pretty large closet. For now the room is going to be used as R's office and extra storage, and in the future it will be a baby nursery. I'm thinking of painting it yellow, for two reasons. One, we already have the paint leftover from the apartment, and two, when it's a baby's room, we can just keep it yellow. One window faces east, the other faces south, so it's actually very bright in this room for most of the day.. I can't imagine how bright and cheerful it'll be when it's yellow!