The {Mostly} Finished Big Girl Room

Well here it is! The "Big Girl" room is finally done, save for a few small minor decorative details. OK, so yes that basically means it's only painted. But if you recall, that was my main goal for now. It may have taken a little longer than originally planned, but if you consider a handful of unforeseen snags in addition to working around a toddler who uses that room, I don't think I did half bad.

Just as a quick refresher, we started with plain walls. I added a board & batten wall treatment that I assembled myself, and then painted. I'll give basic tutorial info with each photo.

First things first, I went to Lowes and had them cut a 4'x8' sheet of MDF into strips. I asked for 8 strips 4" wide, and about 20 strips 2" wide x 39" tall. Lots of tutorials for this project that I've seen online were very reassuring that Lowes will do all of your cuts for you making your project a breeze. Ok, well as I was standing there after showing the kind gentlemen my diagram of how I wanted the 4'x8' sheet cut up, I noticed a sign that stated, "The first 2 cuts are free, for bigger jobs we sell saws in the Tool Department." Eeek! I felt horrible. The guys were super nice though and didn't even charge me. My advice though: don't go into Lowes assuming that they're happy to make 692 cuts for you because they're really not supposed to even if they will :-/  

I began by mitering the bottoms of my 2" vertical strips so that they weren't a blunt square edge where they met the baseboards. Then I went around the room and measured out where each one would go. This is when I did my leveling and just made a simple pencil mark on the wall so that when it was time to do the application it was pretty quick and easy (I did double check and re-level at that time though). Once that was done, I applied the strips to the walls with some adhesive (like Liquid Nails) and 3 brad nails each. Then I placed the 4" strips horizontally across the tops of the vertical strips to make a chair rail-like border around the room. After all the wood was applied I used wood putty and a molding caulk to fill in any gaps.

I used Lowes zero-VOC paint + primer in a semi-gloss white for the woodwork and below. I gave all the woodwork a first coat of paint since it was completely unfinished to start with. Then I did a second coat over everything with a roller.

Then of course, all that was left was to paint the top half of the walls in our mixed paint color. I also used the zero-VOC paint + primer for that and had Lowes color-match it to Sherwin Williams' Open Air. It looks plain blue in this photo, but it's actually quite turquoise.

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Here are some photos once the room was reassembled. You'll notice the lack of 'finished' details. Try to keep in mind that I'll be adding a bedskirt to hide the trundle, a coordinating quilt, and valence over the window. Since her absolute favorite color everything is PINK, I'll be doing all of those accents in varying shades of pink.

We're also still using an Ikea end table to pile some of her favorite bed time books on, for now. We'll be replacing that this week with the Ikea spice-rack book holders of Pinterest fame for a nice thin profile (as you can see, its a small space so maximizing is important). We'll also add a bean bag chair or other type of cozy seat to make that a perfect little reading corner for her.

Our girls' rooms, side-by-side!

So there we are! 

And the baby-prep to-do list continues :)

Big Changes in the Big Girl Room

Things are coming along quite nicely in Carsen's big-girl room and it looks like we'll be finishing it up right on the 8-week mark (Tuesday)!

So far we've bought wood, cut the pieces needed for the wall treatment, and applied them all the way around. Next up we need to sand some edges, fill in any gaps in the woodwork and walls (since neither are ever perfectly straight), and then paint. I'm anticipating the wood needing two coats of primer + paint, and the walls taking one. We have the white paint we'll be using on the bottom half of the walls but the color matcher at our Lowes has been broken so we haven't picked up the mixed paint which will be going on the walls above the woodwork. The color we're using is called Open Air by Sherwin Williams (swatch below). I'll give details on how we did the wall treatment in a later post!


Paint will be going up over the next couple of days and then we'll just have textiles, decorating and accessories left to do in there. While important, I feel like I can get those things done over time without an imperative deadline. She has bedding on the bed and shades on the window, they just aren't necessarily related to the new color scheme.

Say tuned for the mostly-finished product in a few more days!

Appliance Delivery!

The long-awaited and twice-postponed day of our stove and dishwasher's arrival finally came around. It was setting up to be a pretty hectic day. I was going to be here with C and my nephew who you may have read about here. J had a meeting at 1:00 and the delivery window we were given was between 2-4, a.k.a nap time. I could only imagine the delivery guys showing up at 2:00 on the dot waking C after a fraction of her nap, me managing both babies (who would naturally be hysterical) by myself while trying to calmly talk to the kind delivery persons. Luckily the stars aligned who am I kidding? God had mercy, and J's meeting ended in time for him to beat the delivery guys here, nephew ended up staying home, and C didn't stir during the entire process despite her bedroom being right above the front door which slams (and try telling delivery people not to let your door slam while they go in and out of it no less than 43 times).

It all went very well, but as with any story there is good news....

The stove looks fantastic :D

My pan sat so perfectly flat on it!

Yes, I marveled at the hot oil resting in the center of the pan. If you've ever cooked on wonky coils you can appreciate this.

Our first dinner- lemon pepper chicken was delicious!

So that was the good news. And here is the bad news...

Somehow I missed the memo that Best Buy neither installs your new dishwasher or hauls away your old one. Sad face. So we're in for a little DIY adventure with some friendly assistance from the interwebz. J is definitely not the classic sitcom husband who thinks he knows what he's doing when he doesn't. He is happy to admit that a project is beyond the scope of his toolbox. So while we're willing to give it a go ourselves, if things start going south I'm happy knowing that he won't insist that we forge ahead or "put a little duct tape" on something. If it doesn't work out we'll just reassemble things and call in a pro. But hey, if it's do-able (and from the instructions it seems to be), then we'll give it our best shot. I shall return with an update!

Moving Right Along

As the painting portion of the Great Kitchen Upgrade of 2012 comes to a close, it's time to start piecing the room back together at least enough to make it functional. It probably won't last long since our stove and dishwasher are due to be delivered this coming Thursday and our tile still has to be put down. Not to mention, I plan to start painting our cabinets as soon as I'm finished painting walls around here (whenever that might be ;)

So once we got the hutch moved out, we regained something like 20 square feet along that side of our kitchen. Our table had formerly been kind of floating out in the floor mostly because the hutch was on the wall. Without the hutch my original thought was to place the table's longer side on that wall with a bench against the wall instead of chairs. Since I had finally finished painting I was excited to see what this arrangement would look like. 

Please ignore the horrible lighting in all of these pictures :D

Sadly, it wasn't as perfect as I'd imagined. There were a couple of issues. One was the fact that this chair couldn't slide out. We use that mini fridge for beverages and we love it, but there's not really a better place in the kitchen for it than in that corner, which interferes with the chair when the table is placed there. We also have our pile-o-tile at the opposite end of the table, so once that's on the floor we'd also be able to move the table a foot or two in that direction. But for now, this arrangement isn't going to work.

The up side was that it left pretty much a dance floor in the middle of the kitchen! Also, the dog crate is officially gone. Fear not though, the little guy seems to be adjusting just fine :)  

In the long run that vast dance floor will be taken up by a peninsula so it's going to make sense for the table to be long-side-against-the-wall. We're planning to take out that skinny cabinet there beside the dishwasher and add 2-3 cabinets in its place. The new ones will be facing 90-degrees to the left to create the peninsula. With that in place, we'll want the table to mirror the length-wise orientation so things don't get too crowded.

Meanwhile, I decided to place the table short-side-against-the-wall. All chairs slide out.......

.....and we still pretty much have a dance floor at least fit for a toddler ;)

Moving right along, I've started on the stairway/upstairs hallway which is the last area of the house that I'm painting (for now). Since I can't reach the top of the wall on the lower end of the stairway (that'd be why the paint stops 3/4 of the way up the wall), we need to borrow a bigger ladder from a friend. Please also disregard the atrocity that is our 1987 light fixture. We have new ones waiting to go up :) 

And while the stairway is kind of one big wall, the hallway itself is full of doors and odd angles = lots of cutting in. 

I'm sure you can imagine I'm really excited to paint between these door frames-

I did buy a tiny paint brush with hopes of being able to get in those tiny spaces with it. I guess we'll see how it goes. Thankfully I was able to get all the cutting in finished in one shot, so my goal today is to knock out the rolling. I can't even express how ready I am for our walls to finally be finished ...and for paint supplies to be out of sight, but mostly for the walls to be finished :)

Drywall Repaired!

I finally finished repairing the three corners of our drywall that had weird cracking issues going on. If you've ever had to repair drywall corners, you know it's not a simple or enjoyable process. It actually sounded initially like the type of project I would love but it got old quickly. There's something I find satisfying about spackling (I can't even explain it, it's just who I am), so I figured this would be like a gigantic spackling project and I would just love making it all smooth and perfect. If only it were that easy. Drywall compound is a lot thinner than spackle because it's meant to be applied it several thin layers. Then there's like a 24-hour drying time between layers, and I just didn't have the patience for that. I was working at 10:00 pm after C was in bed for the night and I mostly just cared about covering up the stupid mesh drywall tape (it is now on my list of enemies). Not only is drywall compound difficult to work with but you also can't just sand it with some sandpaper like you do with spackle. It gets sanded with a wet sponge - as made clear on the container. Actually, the container was pretty scary and recommended a mask and avoiding creating any dust from it (hence the wet sponge). So if there are imperfections in your application, the wet sponge is not sanding them away. The results are less than perfect, but good enough for me for this house. Is that terrible? I took some pictures on my phone but they're not much to share - it's just the corner of a wall. You can't even tell what you're looking at. The significance of it however, is that I can now start arranging things the way I want them to ultimately be. The table can now go against that wall freeing up lots of space in the middle of the room, and the dog crate can be officially retired. It has been in the middle of the floor as well, so it seems like a good time to just move it out of the kitchen instead of nestling it back in it's little corner. So, while corner repairs themselves aren't super exciting, having them done means another step in the process of getting this kitchen completed!

So... what's next? Our stove and dishwasher are being delivered next Wednesday - woot! We'll finally have all 4 appliances the same color. Before then, I just need to finish painting one wall in the kitchen and get behind the stove and refrigerator. We still don't have an official install date for our tile :( But the weather is getting really nice, and I'm hoping to get started on painting our cabinets once we make the transition to consistently warmer temperatures. I'll need to use our deck outside so it has to be warm enough for me to do that.

In other news, our baby is cuter by the day. I need to do a big update post on her before she officially turns 2. I can't believe that milestone is upon us already! She and I spent the morning outside. We had to meet up with someone who bought our double stroller (I had bought it on craigslist when I was babysitting and decided not to hang on to it). Our meeting place was so close to this little park near the airport that we decided to go watch some "hairplanes" as C calls them.

There were daffodils in full bloom :D

"Bye bye hairplane! Bye bye!"

Mommy & C

We had a great time watching the "hairplanes" and running around. There is a playground there and a bike/walking path but C mostly just wanted to run around. She found some pine cones which I'm fairly certain she's never seen before. She spoke to an elderly gentleman who was taking a break from bike riding and he thought she was pretty funny. And finally after about an hour and a half we left, mostly because I needed to pee. We came home to some beans & rice for lunch (I made my version of a burrito bowl with some romaine, salsa, cheese, and avocado) and she has been snoozing soundly for over 3 hours. I am so in love with today's weather and I can not wait until we can consistently have outside time every single day! You might recall we were a bit house-bound this time last year since I was babysitting my nephew. I had the above-mentioned double stroller, but taking a walk is only so exciting day after day. I'm so anxious to be able to go out and do fun summer outdoor things whenever we want this year, even if it's just splashing in the wading pool at Nana's! 

Stay tuned for a dedicated update post on C as we approach her 2nd birthday, and of course more on the kitchen as it comes together. What have you been doing with the spring weather? Outdoor fun? Home improvement projects? 

Kitch-in-Progress

We're moving right along in the kitchen. I wish I could say I've got my drywall cracks all sealed up, but I don't. I do however have a good number of things out of the kitchen and a pile of cash in my wallet instead!

I've been selling things with great success and the kitchen is looking much better for it. The hutch I hated is finally gone for good (donated) and I've been able to shove things around to make the room a little more functional while we're still in the process of improvements.

Saggy old hutch, covered in stuff. I used to have cook books on the somewhat-empty shelf, but pared down my collection and put them in a cabinet in preparation for giving this monstrosity the heave-ho. To the left of it lived our mini-fridge where we store beverages and a 12-bottle wine fridge. To the right of it lived our pile-o-tile and the dog's crate. These things together took up the entire 10.5' wall, pushing our kitchen table that much further out into the middle of the room and basically sucking up 30-ish square feet of our kitchen.

But alas, the hutch is gone :)

Clearly we still have the pile-o-tile, but that is being scheduled for install in the next few weeks so it's fine there for now. I haven't been able to bring myself to take the dog crate out either, mostly because he loves it and hangs out in there so much. I feel like it would be the equivalent of bulldozing his house. I don't want him to feel like I've totally eliminated a space for him in our house, but we really don't have another place on our main level to put his crate. He doesn't stay in it when we leave the house anymore, so it's just his little hangout. Anyway, I plan to move it, just not yet. As for the junk all over the table, it's mostly displaced items waiting to find their new home in the rearrangement of things and/or waiting to be sold/donated. That's just a detail that I don't have time to worry about right now.

My plan is to center the kitchen table on that newly-open wall with a bench along the wall instead of chairs (when the tile and dog crate are gone, it will fit nicely, it's only about half the length of the wall). I'd like to put a nice piece of art up above the table and then some open shelves on either side of that where I can put some books and other decorative/display items. This should make our kitchen look really huge (it is the entire back third of our house) and leave plenty of room for me to add a peninsula beside our dishwasher where our cabinets currently end. It's too close to our sliding door to leave an over-hang for bar stools, but having the extra counter and cabinet space will make it more than worthwhile. We decided not to do that right now because we're not doing our countertops right now, and we definitely want the peninsula in place at the time we install new counters.

Some of the other things we've recently bid a fond farewell, adieu, good riddance to:

Football-shaped crock pot. A gift we never once used. $20

A set of 3 very pretty casserole dishes that took up TONS of cabinet space and again, we never used. $30

A spice rack full of spices I never used. I realized one day that all the spices I do use are in a cabinet, so why keep spices on the counter and in the cabinet?? Just get rid of the ones I don't use. $20

A non-working wine fridge. It stopped staying cold one day (a long time ago) and someone was willing to take it off our hands. Wohoo!

So the process continues, but we're moving right along. I'm really excited to be sending so much stuff out the door to folks who can actually use it. It's going to make spring cleaning so much more fun! There's just nothing easier to clean than a nice empty room :)

All It's Cracked Up to Be

Ah, home ownership :)

I've gotten the majority of the kitchen painted. Yay! The current speed bumps we're working around are some drywall cracks. There are three and they're all in corners. Two of them in fact are on either side of the semi-wall between our kitchen and dining(play) room. The third is along the same side of the house, in the back corner of the kitchen. We have similar cracks on our second level as well, but that's a different project!

I think the problem is really that the walls were just not done properly. We've long suspected some water damage on this side of the house (all along our far left wall). When we first bought the house one of the conditions in the contract we presented was repair to what was obviously water damage on that wall in the dining room. The upstairs bathrooms are right above the dining room and kitchen on that wall and whenever water is running upstairs you can hear what sounds like dripping if you're on the main level. We have yet to see any visible damage from said dripping and are honestly just too paranoid to open up the drywall and investigate. All of this is to say that I'm pretty confident that the walls along that side of the house have been repaired/replaced since the house was built. At that, they were not done very well. It's possible that the owner prior to us (we're not exactly sure how many there have been, but the house was built in 1999) repaired/replaced the drywall only when they were ready to sell. The entire house was spray painted - poorly - all one off-white color in a flat finish (which hides imperfections) and I kind of doubt anyone lived like that.

It appears to me that in some spots drywall tape may have been used without any drywall joint compound. In other places it looks like compound was used without tape. To be honest, it doesn't even look like drywall tape. I don't think I'd be at all surprised if it turned out to be blue painter's tape. Gah.

 Dining(play) room -- clearly some tape, but what kind?

 Corner just on the other side of the wall from the photo above. Also some visible tape (see that wavy spot?). This makes me wonder if it's painter's tape and not actual drywall tape which should have been scraped down onto joint compound then covered by joint compound. I think that's just tape with paint over it!

The back corner of the kitchen (so, damaged left wall of the house meets back wall of the house). I can't even tell if there is any tape here. The crack is directly in the corner with no visible tape edges.

So we're going to pick up some tape and compound and get those corners patched pronto so that the painting can finally be finished! I can't wait to put the kitchen back together. It's pretty much a nightmare. On the bright side of that, I have sold a bunch of stuff we don't use/need anymore and made about $100! I'm just using the cragslist-like board that my school district has and listing stuff on there. It's nice because I can meet people at the schools where they work and not have to worry about strangers coming to my house or going to their houses. Plus you have to pass a background check to work for a school system and that makes me feel better too (not saying there aren't any weirdos working in school systems, I've encountered a few of them myself).

Also, our appliance delivery has been pushed back to March 14. Apparently Best Buy didn't properly account for the number of appliances they would sell during their Presidents' Day sale. But we have a dinner meeting tonight with our architect and tile guy! Hopefully it's all good news and we'll have a tile layout and possible install date by the end of the night. Hooray for some progress :)