I joined in over at View Along the Way to link up our little family room revamp.
and then over to Homemaker on a Dime to share a few of our bathroom transformations.
Saturday, September 17, 2011
Join in
I am totally out of the blogging loop these days! In some ways I miss it but it others it has been liberating not to feel like I have another part time job when I should be rolling around on the floor with my babies! That being said my friend Dana over at Make Them Wonder has recently posted about the Roomspiration Blog Hop and it got me motivated to join in. It is always fun to see all of the great and usually thrifty ideas that all you creative ladies come up with! So I had to join in. Go take a look. Peruse through all the before and afters grab some great ideas with us!
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Wednesday, September 14, 2011
Baby "Stage"
Oh baby! Ya see this picture that totally doesn't do this room or bedding justice? When we had E 3 1/2 years ago I wanted to forgo the pink route and use some bold colors and lots of pattern. Well I don't know that we ended up with "lots" of patterns but we did end up with some gorgeous fabric in some bold colors. I was lucky enough to have my mom offer to sew some bedding so we spent a couple of hours at JoAnns one day playing with fabric. That sounds like fun doesn't it? I miss doing that..maybe soon I will have a project that forces me to go rummage around a fabric store.
Now this pic is even worse..I can't believe I didn't get better pics of this room when it was tidy and cute. You see that tree there...Well before there were(or before I knew there were) vinyl wall decor options all over the place I decided we needed a tree on the wall like the one in a pottery barn catalog. So the hubs graciously spent a few hours spread out over a few weeknights to whip this baby up. It turned out great! Don't laugh when I say the poor hubs learned the hard way that you should not attempt to draw on a wall with a sharpie if you EVER plan on painting over it with white paint. Lesson learned and many coats of kilz later it still looks good. The sharpie is still showing its ugly face in a few areas but we decided not to care a long time ago;)
Now enter good photography! The lovely Miss Tanya of Cozy Impressions Photography has done a series of photographs to capture our last two babies 1st years of life and she does it well!
Look at my sweet E! Our first girl! She really was an angel baby..We had such a hard time with our first born that she probably would have seemed "easy" no matter what she did. Sorry bud..you will probably always get a bad baby wrap but you know you are loved;)!
Here is a better pic of the tree too. Didn't hubby do a nice job. I am pretty lucky to have a guy that doesn't mind helping me achieve a girly goal when I need him too. I am just to much of a spaz to draw a tree.
O.k. so the point of this post is really to document a few things we did to "stage" the house to put it on the market.
Obviously that second picture probably wouldn't have wooed buyers to come take a peek. The truth is I felt like I was staging the house most of the time we lived there. I say that because we were constantly de-cluttering, putting things on craigslist, donating and just organizing so it didn't feel like we were being taken over. Yet we still always felt like it was so easy to start drowning in stuff every time a birthday or Christmas would roll around. For that matter also any time family would come to visit..wink wink momo and ya ya.
One thing we did was try to make the shallow closet in the girls room work better for us.
Enter: A quick trip to target for a closet shelving system. It was fairly inexpensive(don't remember how much) but I wouldn't have bought it if it wasn't! This gave us a place for some cubby "baskets" and shelving for all of those little shoes that you accumulate when you have two little girls.
We also added a lower rod and raised the original one so we could have one for each of the girls. Bitty baby's stuff on top and E's down low where she can reach and help momma by picking our her own outfits. Which she is actually pretty good at! Score!
One thing I have a attempted to do in the kid's closets is always have a labeled box in the floor so if in the "heat of the moment" which is the battle of getting dressed each day we could toss anything that didn't fit just right anymore into the box. It isn't a fool proof system but it helped it not to just get tossed here and there(like in the laundry to be washed 162 times even though it was never worn).
I still use a bankers box in little mans closet but purchased these pink doosies for the girls closet because I think it looks cleaner and of course keeps the bugs out!
O.k. now as usual I am going to back track because you might think I have totally forgotten what room I am posting about if I don't. In May of 2009 we found out we were getting a new little surprise in our family! We were not expecting or planning this so after the shock rocked us for a bit and we found out we would have another chica in the house I started thinking pink! After all I didn't want to regret never playing with a pink room because I am typically not drawn to it so I took the opportunity to soak it up anyway. (that is where you either do identify with my illness or not;)
I was perusing around baby's r us one day and came across this bedding set for I think $70 ! That is pretty good for a crib set as far as I 'm concerned. It was pink and simple and I could totally see it working with the green tree wall that bitty baby would be inheriting from her big sis.
Then I came across these party poofs at michaels and got to use my 40% off coupon so I literally spent a few dollars for a nice contrast to our outrageously pink wall! I wanted to tie the walls in with the bedding a bit and this is what we did. I probably wouldn't do it again but we definitely were not going to repaint it.
Bitty baby needed a window treatment so again to Target we went and ended up mixing a couple of different styles of curtains in order to cover up the whole length of the window. If I did it again and wasn't in a hurry I would have done something a little different and definitely hung them higher.
Ok back to staging...We previously had this little changing table # for E's room. Turns out this was way less handy than using a dresser as we had for little man's room. I just found it hard to organize and then there was all that wasted space around it that could be filled up with storage!
So knowing that we needed more room for the girls clothes(all we had were those 3 little drawers in that red dresser in the second picture in this post) I started a very long craigslist search for a decent and cheap white dresser. Does anyone else think craigo has gotten competitive? You really have to be on the ball around here to get anything good. This wasn't as cheap as I wanted(150.00) but it was the best thing I could find at the time. So hubby went to a sketchy area with a defense plan and got our baby girls clothes some new digs.
To balance it out a bit I brought some green from the tree wall to this side of the room with this little guy. Again from Target..I swear I don't buy everything there. As a matter of fact I try to avoid the place because it is too easy to spend $$ on un-needed yummy stuff.
Now enter more good photography(not mine but a local real estate photographer we hired in preparation to hit the MLS).
It is clean, uncluttered, simple and staged. I sure wish we had gotten around to replacing that boob light but oh well it won't be our random boob for much longer. I know most realtors would probably suggest we repaint to so we don't turn off potential buyers but we just don't have time so here's hoping someone will love it or be willing to do their own thing!
Linking to the parties at:
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Sunday, August 7, 2011
Our casa journey...to be continued.
Wow have we been talking about this for a loooooong time! Four 1/2 years ago we decided we had outgrown our first home(1st misconception) and decided to build one that was bigger and way too pricey.
This (below)
was our first home!
Our baby! She welcomed us not so warmly to Austin but we grew to love her after many tears, lots of sweat, and in the end she was a true gem that we were sad to leave. We will never forget all of the long late nights of sanding, hammering, ripping down and building back up.
Here is my father in law helping clean up after I sanded some of the walls in the Master.
Our friend Brent drove 5 hours to come stay with us and help us out. He even bought us a reciprocating saw! What a sweet friend! We definitely needed it and I am sure he was thinking "I will never get out of here if I don't go buy them one" Just kidding he just has a big huge generous heart!
Oh and the kitchen...We lived without one for almost a whole year. Yep we washed dishes in the backyard and guest bathroom. I have yet to post about that transformation...I 'll get to it one of these days!
Here are hubby and his brother putting up the new sheetrock
Here is hubby applying the slate back slpash tile..Side note...it is not wise to do the backsplash before the countertops are in! We learned that one the hard way. We were younger, dumber, and anxious to get her done!
Oh and of course we had to work in some play time before all of that. Yes this is all out of order but you get it..I know you do! Seriously demo can be fun!
We have mostly fond memories of sleeping on an air mattress in our first master bedroom cringing at the thought of HUGE roaches crawling over us at night. We actually even had one get up on it's hind legs and run after hubby one night. FREAKED us OUT!
Ok. Enough about our first love....
The hubby had a new job that we thought would help us afford to move up a bit (2nd big, big, huge misconception). and we knew we would make some decent $ when we sold our first house. This was 4 years ago and decent homes were flying off the market quick. From the get go I think we were both nervous about taking on such a big mortgage but we continued to move forward because the truth is we are just thrifty and big purchases make us ill every time they come up. Heck I once lost a whole nights sleep when we ordered a dining room table that was $400 and the next morning I confessed my upset stomach to the hubby and called and cancelled it. He built us one instead and the truth is we may have only saved a $100 but it made us feel better;)!
Why spend your hard earned dough when you can build it was our motto!
During the whole process we took lots of pics of the model home that would be like ours. You can see how the builders win you over with all of their finishes and decorating tricks! As I look back at these today I realize how much my taste has changed. Don't get me wrong it is a nice house my decor preferences have just changed.
The floor to ceiling 2 story stone fireplace you can see on the right had me at hello...
Upon entering the front door you saw this...
This was a little catwalk to the master
Formal dining
Cozy office
Love me some 8 foot doors
It was very open..almost too open. I had an inkling it would be a very loud house. Of course now as a mom of 3 I know that even the smallest most closed in places are very loud.
Open hallway to the bedrooms
Looking down from the gameroom
Kids rooms all model homeish
Looking towards the gameroom
Master
Master Bath
Here is my man hangin in what we thought would be our game room. We are not sad about this..It is really o.k. We know there was and is a plan for us!
the view of the fireplace(I mean the living room) from the kitchen
This is exactly how my pantry looks
So that was the model home..
Here was our house in progress...It was fun and overwhelming all at the same time
We would stop by after work(scrubs and all) and check on the progress with our little buddy!
Checking out the back
We probably would have been fine but the thought of potentially ending up house broke was heartbreaking and it was taking the fun out of it! At the time our son was probably about 7 months old. A couple of months before the house was to be done we found out he would be welcoming a sibling into his world much sooner than anticipated! Learning this helped us seal the deal (or unseal it I guess). We decided to pull out of the process of building. Thankfully the builder gave us our earnest money back and we decide to continue on with moving yet to a home much more in our comfort zone. So after spending way too much time making decisions about floor plans, picking out finishes, and making trips out to see the building in progress we were done.
We put our first love on the market, she sold in 3 days, we paid off our very disappointing business loan(whole other story but thankful we could pay it off) and moved on! To be continued........
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