Bubble Paint

Leo and I are home together on Wednesdays. I love that I get some extra time with my little man. I usually try to plan something fun for us to do, whether it's an outing, or some type of play experience that we haven't had before. 

I spend a lot of time perusing Pinterest to come up with simple and fun ideas. I came across the idea to make bath time finger paints the other day. Leo does a lot of painting at school, so I thought he would enjoy this. I can't seem to find the source for this recipe, and there are many other recipes for bath paint using shaving cream or corn starch. But the one I read used baby powder and baby bubble bath. 

I had both of these things on hand, so I figured why not. I had purchased an enormous bottle of baby powder when we were preparing for Leo's arrival when I felt like I needed supplies to be ready. I didn't realize that using talc based baby powder has fallen out of favor, so it was great to find a use for this huge bottle (well, aside from helping to remove sand from our legs at the beach—try it, it works!) I read that you can also use water, but the bubble bath adds a bubble element, which sounded fun. I just mixed the two together until I had a consistency I was happy with. 

My goal with this blog is to try and share new fun things, without harping on making the process look perfectly beautiful. So, while a lot of other recipes show a beautiful rainbow of paint displayed in a muffin tin, I rummaged through my Tupperware drawer for three small containers, and kept it simple with the three primary colors. A few drops of food coloring was all it took. 

It was a big hit. Leo scooped every last drop of paint out of those containers, and then he filled them with water and dumped them out a few times. Nothing like a multi-functional toy, right?

Then & Now: The Office

Continuing along with our tour through the progress we've made on the house in the first two years, which very well may take until we've lived here for three years to complete, here's a look at our office/guest room. It's a very bright, sunny room with the nice double window that looks out over the front yard. That's one reason why we chose it for the office instead of the nursery, thinking that the room in the back corner would ultimately be better for nap time. And since this room now needs to serve double duty as our office and space for guests, it's nice that it's the bigger of the two other bedrooms in the house. 

As you can see, when we moved in, this room was that lovely pale yellow, just like every. other. room. in the entire house!

Here's what it looked like after we added our new desks last fall, but before we got rid of the yellow. The light wood looked lost against that awful color.

But it pops nicely against the bright, cheery green we chose. 

Here's a reminder of the old hand-me-down tables we were using as desks before we got the new ones. 

And another angle of the Ikea solution that replaced them. 

This is what it looked like before we managed to fill the open shelves up with stuff.

Here's the other window in the room that looks out toward the side yard of the house. We had quite a conglomeration of metal storage shelves, and big clunky and rusty file cabinet, all of which drove me a bit crazy with their mismatched feeling. 

After we installed the first batch of new furniture from Ikea, which included file cabinet and new white shelf under the window, we still used the old metal shelves while we waited to sort out what the closed storage solution on the wall was going to be. You can see from this photo that this room serves a lot of purposes, and really needed some help!

Here's the current solution, with the overhead storage cabinets now containing most of the crafty stuff, and giving us some more open storage above (which admittedly, still needs attention!) We were able to design a solution that fit perfectly around my old couch, which had been living in my mom's basement since I moved in with Greg six years ago. The couch blocks some of the shelves in the corner, but we're using those to mostly store the linens and pillows for guests. The back cushions come off the couch very easily to allow access to those shelves, and to turn the couch into a twin sized bed. In addition to that, the top cushion can fold forward onto the floor creating a queen sized mattress on the floor. It turned out to be a perfect solution for a flexible office guest room. 

And, since I don't have any now shots of the closet wall, here's a reminder of what that looks like. You can see from the first photo that there is some wall space to the right of the closet. You can get the slightest glimpse of a ledge inside the closet, behind that wall. Because our house is a split level, that ledge is actually the ceiling of the coat closet half a level down by the front door. It drives us a little bit crazy that there is a whole bunch of storage space, just waiting to be utilized. We have talked about opening up that wall, above the height of the ledge to create an open shelving solution of some sort, perhaps to house the TV and the printer which now live on metal shelves in front of that space. Who knows when we'll get there though. 

So, to recap...

What did we do?

• New desks, rolling drawers, file cabinets, wall shelves, wall mounted cabinets
• Added the couch
• Painted

What's left?

• Real window treatments, to replace that paper ones that are still up, and badly needed for privacy. We'll probably go with wood blinds like the ones in the master, but in in white instead. 
• Bust through the wall next to the closest as described above
• Paint the trim, and touch up the paint in general
• Add a modern closet system to maximize storage inside the closet
• Get rid of the white plastic drawers under my desk (mostly containing my make-up which will move to it's new home in the dressing table in the master)
• New light fixture
• Hang art and a magnetic white board
• Organize the open storage on top of the wall cabinets
• Split system air conditioner to serve both bedrooms on this level

Then & Now: The Master Bedroom

It's time for another installment of Then & Now. This time featuring the master bedroom.  It was a pretty blank pale yellow canvass when we moved in.

For some reason, I never take shots looking back toward our wall of doors. Probably because that's where we hide the mess, hanging from various over the door hooks, which pretty much keep our closet doors from ever being completely closed, and because I'm not entirely satisfied with the shoe storage solution that we have going on. So, this is just a reminder at what the wall opposite the windows looks like. 

Lastly, a before and after on my dresser solution that we replaced with a nice new grown up bureau. We ended up using my old maple chest of drawers in Luigi's room. It had been dinged up over the years, but is very well constructed, and should last a lot longer, so a fresh coat of paint did it justice, while I got to benefit from a solution that finally complimented the rest of the room!

So here's the breakdown...

What did we do?

• Refinished the floors
• Paint (Greg and his brother would both argue that I should have left the sloped portion of the wall/ceiling white instead of purple. I hold firm that I made the right decision. I think it would be especially weird behind the armoire to have a high contrast line between white and purple)
• Window treatments - both wooden blinds and curtain
• New bureau
• Refinished my Gram's dressing table
• Reconfigured Greg's closet to allow access into the attic (not shown)
• Lights added to both closets (not shown)
• Insulated the storage eaves (in the eave behind the dresser)
• Added the old sage green recliner from the living room with a new red slip cover. (It's now Siegfried's favorite place to sleep at night.)

What's left?

• Carpet. Probably carpet tiles in a few areas. Greg doesn't love carpet. I don't love carpet covered in cat hair, but I also don't love putting my feet on a cold floor in the middle of winter!
• New light fixture. Ceiling fan maybe?
• New finials on the curtain rod (try not to notice that the ones up there are blue!)
• Paint the trim, and touch up all the paint
• Shoe storage solution, perhaps built-in along the outside for Greg's closet
• New upholstery on the cushion at the dressing table
• New bedside lamps
• Art on the walls
• Very long term: bump up the eaves storage to create a master bathroom and walk-in closet

The Hallway

I promised a few shots of the finished hallway/landing after our day of painting last weekend. We love it so much, we keep asking ourselves why we didn't just do it when we painted the living room on the first place. 

Above, a view from the landing, looking down to the living room, and up to a glimpse of purple in the master bedroom. 

Another shot looking into the bedroom. 

Now, standing at the door to the bedroom, looking down into the green office. I'm really loving seeing all the colors in the house framed by each other. 

Lastly, there is one spot in the office where you can look out the door, see the teal in the hallway, and a little sliver of the purple in the bedroom beyond. Yup, I'm happy. 

Green

This weekend, we painted the office. As Greg's friend Eric asked while they chatted on the phone..."Purple, or green?" Well, I guess it's good to be known for something.

Here's a before shot in case you forgot what that awful yellow was like. 

It became even more awful after we bought our new office furniture last October. We decided to go with a mix of white and light wood (birch according to Ikea.) Isn't it amazing how much better both the white and the wood pop off the green?

Of course, before a room looks finished, there must be chaos. We moved a lot into the other bedroom, but pushed the desks and TV shelf into the center. It's always handy to have a raised work surface for painting projects as well.

While we were mobilized for painting, we thought it was a good time to finish off the hallway. When we painted the living room  a year ago, we weren't sure if we wanted to carry the teal blue all the way up the stairs. It didn't take us long to realize that it was the right decision, but we had so many other projects in front of us, it took until now to get back to it. 

Greg had to use our tallest ladder to reach that very farthest corner above the stairs down. Yes, he did climb up and balance himself right over the stairs. I wish I had gotten a picture of that. At least, the way the ladder was wedged in, it was highly unlikely that it would go anywhere. 

And now, a few more after shots, and a little more about the furniture we bought. 

Here you can see one of the two desks we bought. Love back above for the rest of the second. They are basically two variations of the same style. The one above has a cabinet and a drawer. We added a little shelf under the window, mostly so I could stash some stuff on the top of the desk and Ziggy would still have a place to sit by the window. We got two sets of drawers on wheels that we can move around,  stash under the desk, etc. 

I'm so in love with how the white shelves look against the green. Now, I just have to find a way to disguise the largely unattractive stuff that Greg likes o put up there! I also have a plan for hiding our router, modem and back-up drive. I just need to get to it!

The last pieces we got were a filing cabinet and an open shelf to go next it. The filing cabinet still needs drawer pulls. Right now we're using two of my belts to get the drawers open. We still have some more storage to buy for the wall opposite the big window. We might be getting that this weekend! Maybe sometime after that, I will actually get the room all cleaned up and get some nice photos. We shall see. But I think it's all coming together little by little.

Now, I think I will leave you hanging a few more days to see how the hallway turned out!

It's Purple

I know you're all shocked. The color we settled on for the master bedroom is a lovely warm shade of purple. It's a Sherwin Williams color called Kismet, which I found especially fitting since this was the name of my thesis design that I was working on when I met Greg. He helped me come up with the name.



I'm loving the way the color looks with the wood and the bed spread. I am also working on getting some more orange in there for Greg through some accents. The coasters on the nightstand on the left came back from Africa with my sister in law. I found some orange baskets to coral the random items that tend to gather on top of our night stands and dressers. And, I'm trying to gather up some of the more eclectic, international feeling items we have in the house, especially in brown tones, an you can see in the vase. We have a great carved wood dragon that will end up in here eventually as well, as soon as we resolve our dresser/dressing table issues.


Here's what the room looked like in progress. Greg was at work the first day. He moved the armoire for me before he left. I did the rest. I was quite proud! I washed the walls, taped, and moved all the furniture. I think it was well into the afternoon before I opened the paint!

There are a lot of doors in the room, so it too quite a bit of tape!

One of the features I'm most excited about with the new color (aside from the color of course) is that I painted the sloped part of the walls. Greg did not agree with this choice. He sees the slope as the ceiling. But, I see it as the wall. I think it makes the room look taller. And with the darker color against the white ceiling, we would have some really weird shapes created if the slopes had been left white. 

I finished the first coat of paint that day, but was out of energy, light, and time do do the second coat. Thankfully, Greg was around to help with that the next day.

Now, the next project in here (well, aside from a dressing table waiting to be painted, and a never ending search for a larger dresser) is window treatments. I can't stand these roller shades for very much longer. So boring! I also need to peel off the foam that was sealing around the air conditioner, and paint the blocking white to match the trim. It's there for the air conditioner as well, and we found in our last house it was just easier to leave it here, and paint it, than to reinstall it every year.



I've got some samples for wood blinds to look over. I'm thinking of a darker wood to complement the furniture. I really like the flexibility of blinds, but the cats are notorious for bending the slats of vinyl or metal blinds when they try to sit in the window which is why I am looking into wood. Well, that, and they just look better. Then, I would like to accent the sides with a drape. It probably won't close, because I want it long, and Greg won't want it to overlap the radiator. I'm thinking an deep orange would look quite nice with those other orange accents we have going on.