A baby and two puppies. What could be cuter?
(Our neighbors Jon and Jeff are the new owners of these two).

Royal Facelift

We have been busy working on our living and dining rooms. We have wanted to do this ever since we moved in, but finally got around it. We painted the walls and put up crown molding. We still have the foyer to complete, but hopefully we will get around to it in the next month or so.

This picture is to illustrate that the new color is in fact different than the original. Kind of hard to tell in the pictures. The color of the rooms was a khaki that is the same color that was in every room of the house when we bought it. We are slowly repainting every room. After we painted the living and dining rooms, we painted the already primed poplar with a white that was color matched to the other trim. After painting half of it we realized they had mistakenly mixed it with a pinkish tint to it, so we had to return it and and have them remix it. Second time was the charm. We put up both crown molding and also a baseboard molding upside down so it had a 2 inch reveal on the bottom for more impact.

Steve and our friend and neighbor Ryan put up all the crown one Saturday. Ryan has a lot of experience with home improvement stuff so he was a big help. We weren't able to order extra molding so no mistakes could be made. Steve and Ryan made this little mistake on the first piece they put up, luckily we have enough extra since it isn't that big of a patch. They put the molding too close to the wall and then had to saw it off. It still needs to be fixed. They did a great job.

This is a before/after of a strange corner in the dining room (click to enlarge). It houses the HVAC system that was put in after the radiators were taken out. The former owners put popcorn on the bottoms of the 'boxes' so I scraped it off and then just painted it. The crown molding around the boxes was a bit tricky, but looks nice considering how odd they are.

Living room before

After. Kind of hard to see the crown molding from these pictures now that the walls are a lighter shade. We finally finished the room and bought curtains for the room, plus bought a new leaded glass light fixture, which I love.

Dining room before.


Dining room after. Doesn't look all that different besides the molding. Eventually we will replace the light fixture when we find the right one. We are slowing getting rid of all the ones that were in the house when we bought it.

Baby's new play room

Several months before Harriet was born we cleaned out most of my father-in-law's basement. We started with the room just off where we built his wine cellar. It got a fresh coat of paint, a giant carpet remnant and IKEA wood shelving for storage (we forgot to take before and after pictures). Then we painted the laundry area and a back closet. At this point we tackled the big room that is basically a rec room. If there was an egress window it could be a bedroom, but we decided to not get too ambitious.

Here it is after we took down the old drop ceiling and florescent light, installed recessed lighting and framed around the radiators pipes. All ready for our sheet rock crew to hang the drywall we purchased.

They did a great job finishing off the new ceiling. Once it was taped and sanded smooth we continued.

We painted the ceiling and walls, then tore out the old carpet.

We also took out the old carpet on the stairs leading to the basement. The carpet we picked ran down the stairs, where we added one shelving unit and more recessed lighting for an easily accessible pantry, then into the rec room (to the right). So about a year later, it's finished.

Shower presents

Now that all the baby showers for the season are done (I think) here are some of the present I made for people. Above is some homemade laundry soap in a glass jar decorated with a paint pen.

Here is a changing mat made out of oil cloth. Something I learned about sewing oil cloth that I can pass on is that you should used tissue paper on top and bottom (and then rip it off later) so it doesn't get stuck going through the machine.

A couple of onesies.

Crunchy/tactile toy (crunching part is one of those annoying sun chips compostable bags)

And a baby focus group on some foam blocks I made. Baby approved.

MAY LINK OF THE MONTH

Cool street art website from Russia??

Baby's first swimming lesson