Happy Easter

I love before and after pictures.  This one makes me laugh.  My friend's mother-in-law gave her this bunny and she almost trashed it.  Thankfully, she got the idea to paint it instead.  Now I wish I had an ugly bunny box to paint!

I'm Wilting, WILTING!

The other day I was bored (why on earth I had time to be bored I have no idea), so I read through some of my old posts and came across a picture of my plants during much happier days.  I thought it was so funny, I gathered them up for an updated family picture so you could see how they have changed...

2010

2013

Maybe they would be doing better if I could remember to water them more than once a year?

Improving Home: The Girls' Room, Final Before and After

I forgot to show you one of my favorite things in the girls' room.  My seven-year-old daughter's best friend gave this to her for her birthday last year:

If you don't know what it is, it's a picture of a temple, where we as Latter-Day Saints aspire to be married.
 

And this is another piece of artwork that my daughter finger-painted in kindergarten.  I think the art teacher at my daughter's school is amazing.




If you've been around this blog long enough to see the "before" picture, you'll know that it was posted a very long time ago.  Here it is one last time:

Before

After

And now I say GOOD NIGHT to the girls' room!

Glow-in-the-dark stars

Improving Home: The Girls' Room, Corner Four

I thought this day would never come.

The girls' room is crossed off my list so I can begin the boys' room. Would you like to see what we put on the walls?

The cross-stitch was done by little young me when I was ten or eleven. I nailed it up there with straight pins. My seven-year-old daughter painted the rainbow (but I think she was six when she did it) with a little artistic advice from my sister and me. Originally I was going to paint a rainbow, but I have very little talent for painting. It was my best friend's idea to have my daughter do it.

Best. Idea. Ever.

I can't remember if I told you the story about finding flower posters that match the wallpaper trim on AllPosters.com. Oh yes...I did. Here. Anyway, the frame on the left carries a few more of the flowers painted by Anthony Morrow. The butterfly on the right was painted by my oldest daughter when she was in kindergarten.

My daughter would not let me get rid of the huge kitty poster, so I cut them out individually to make a collage above her bed, which I like much better.

Okay, now for what we put on the beds:

I'm sorry, but this is my favorite stuffed animal/bug. I don't know which makes me happier, his face or all those feet!

These bears look like a big sister and a little sister who love each other, don't they?









I bought two black travel pillows like this at a yard sale for a buck a piece.

Then I took the leftover material from the dress I stole the valance bow from and hand-sewed it onto the front of one.

For the other one, I sewed on a couple of old iron-on flowers I've had in my craft box for ten years and some rick-rack I've had for almost as long.




I have never claimed to be good with a camera.

And lastly, the under-the-bed part was bothering me because it looked like this:

So I did this:

I know it's wrinkled, but it still looks better than the pajama crates (that's what we call them). Hemming all of those strips of material (left over from the bed skirt material I used to make the valance) and then tacking them to the bottom of the bed was a lot more work than you might think, but I'm glad I did it.

And I'm glad it's done.



The tally? I don't remember the exact prices of everything, but I'll give you close estimates:

The blanket and stuffed animals were gifts.
$10 art posters
$2 for 2 foam poster boards from Dollar Tree (just so you know, this curled when we painted it)
$4 paints
$200 bunk beds
$100 mattress (the other one is the mattress my husband slept on when he was a kid!)
$1 frame from a yard sale (spray-painted black)
$2 travel pillows
$36 for two bedspreads on clearance at K-mart
$1 yellow afghan from D.I. (second-hand store)
$40 for ten plastic crates from Family Dollar
$500 to replace the stinky carpet with vinyl...but now I can't remember if that was for both rooms or just one. I'll get back to you.

Add that to the $187 from the rest of the room and you get $1,083. I don't think I added the cost of paint anywhere, so I'll say the room cost about eleven hundred dollars. I'm looking forward to seeing if I can spend much less in the boys' room!

Improving Home: The Girls' Room, Corner Three

I am not completely done, but I do have another corner to show you.

This is the lamp I bought at a yard sale for $3. It had a funny square lampshade with ribbon roses glued to it that I replaced with a cream-colored lampshade from Kmart for $7. It was an improvement, but still so plain.


Although I was going for plain because there is so much going on in the wallpaper, there was still something not right for me about this lamp. I was deLIGHTed when the light bulb turned on in my brain and said, "Glue some of that lace from the valance on it." So I did, and I loved it.


But then the peachness of the main section was bothering me. I planned to paint it pink, but then I got another idea that I am so excited about...mostly because I'm lazy: I taped some scrapbook paper around it.


I like the lamp so much better now, and I'm happy with the price.

So, for the tally. We were at $134. Now we add $10 for the lamp, $25 for the CD player, $10 for the toy kitchen (another yard sale), $5 for the picture frame, and $3 for the trash can = $187. As I said before, the table and chairs were free. They are not fancy by any means, but this is a table in a kid room: it's perfect.










So there you have it. Corner three. Unless I'm doing something crazy like giving birth, I hope to have the final corner ready by tomorrow night.

Improving Home: The Girls' Room, Corner Two

Did I mention the deadline was midnight?

Did I mention the deadline was just for the next corner?

The valance is finally done! I'll show it to you and then give you the long explanation of how it came to be:

First I looked and looked and looked for a plain yellow valance. Finally, I gave up and bought a yellow bedskirt from D.I. (a thrift store) for $1 and sewed a valance out of it. The only problem was, it looked like this:


I hated it. I was thinking it was going to be so easy to just use the bedskirt as it was...but then I realized the lining wasn't gathered like the front. Also I didn't like the white top. That was when I decided to crochet a top from some baby yarn I had that was the exact same color. I was happy that it also added some texture. Then I stole a cute pink bow off a hand-me-down dress that had an ink stain on it. Years ago, I salvaged this lace from some old sheets (I just couldn't throw it away). It was a little too white, so awhile back I used some Rit dye to make it cream-colored.


Then, I sewed that entire crocheted piece on by hand, both top and bottom.

Basically, what I'm saying is I spent WAY too much time making this valance. Hopefully it will seem worth it after my poked fingers heal. And at least I only spent one dollar.

Oh, and guess what I found in the window track when we were hanging the roller shade? The foot to my sewing machine! And did you spy that I painted the hands on the clock? Now I can see what time it is from across the room.

So, the price of corner number two: I don't know what I paid for the laundry hamper: maybe $15? The bedskirt-turned-valance was $1, the roller shade was $6, and so was the flower pot that came from Big Lots. This adds up to $28. Everything else was either gift or hand-me-down (the figurines, table, chairs). Tally: $106 + 28 = $134 so far.

There are only a few things left to do in this room, but my dishes are piling up.

So, I'll see you Sunday maybe?

Improving Home: The Girls' Room Before

Now that I have only about a month left before the baby comes, I'm starting to panic about all of my unfinished projects.

REMEMBER THE NURSERY?

Before we get to that, I'd like to show you what we did with the girls' room.

It started out like this:













I wrote about my joy at removing the carpet here (and let's just pretend that it hasn't been a whole YEAR since I started working on the nursery because that's just sad).

The wallpaper was still in good enough condition that with some creative arranging of posters and pictures, we could keep it until we are ready to redecorate the room (which may be never at my speed).

This was how my girls began their new lives in a pink room three years ago. The posters were a miracle. I looked for posters on allposters.com: something to hide all the nail holes. I never would have believed that among the thousands of flower posters I would find an exact match to the wallpaper trim, but I did! The picture of Jesus with the children is an old favorite that I have had since before I married.

So we could have been happy to let this room be, but as the girls have grown (my three-year-old has long since outgrown the crib), this room has become more complicated. Tomorrow I will show you how it went from a room with one bed, one crib, and one changing table, to a room with bunk beds, a table and lamp, a dresser, a reading spot, and a corner kitchen.

The word "tomorrow" may be relative, but I will try!

Redo of the Do

You know how sometimes you see something or someone in a photograph and you notice things you didn't see before? Like the pictures that showed me, to my horror, that when my hair was pulled straight back into a ponytail, I looked like I had bald spots on the sides...For a long time after that, I wore my hair down only, but eventually I learned how to part my hair just right to cover my sparse spots, even with a ponytail.

So after I posted this picture here, I noticed that it was all looking a little tacky.

After thinking about it for awhile, I remembered I had another pot that would look better. It wasn't even in use because I could never find a plant small enough to go in it. I also had to re-cover the phone book because I got a new one and it was smaller.

Now I can't decide if it's better or too matchy...

Improvising Improvements

There is a room in my house that the plants and I like to pretend is a sunroom. For awhile, I've been looking around for some plant stands, but everything is either too busy or too expensive. Yesterday, I took matters into my own hands after window shopping online for more than an hour.

I dream of this room becoming a game room/study/library, hence the game theme in the arrangement. Both the trunk boxes come from my childhood: the puppy box was a place to keep my treasures when I was little, and I used the green trunk when I lived with my second family. The puppy box is topped with my husband's childhood checker board. I thought of covering the sides of it too, but I just couldn't do it!

The hat box used to look like this:

It was pretty, but it never really fit anywhere in my house, so I covered it with some of my husband's old playing cards, and put the Chinese Checkers game on top. I'll keep my eyes open for something a little taller to replace the polka dotted tin, but for now, I'm happy with it and I think the plants are too.