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Sunday, October 30, 2011

Boo! Halloween is coming!

Hello readers! Hope everyone is having a great weekend!  So today is Sunday and that means tomorrow is Halloween!  I loved Halloween as a kid, of course, but you know, as you get older it gets less and less fun but once you have kids, it all comes back! :)  You get to re-live all the fun Halloween stuff; ie. the pumpkins, the decorations, the candy (my fav.), the costumes, fun Halloween projects with the kids, and of course trick or treating!

Liam is obsessed with pumpkins!  So naturally we took him to a pumpkin patch a few weekends ago and he loved it and we went home with 6 pumpkins!  Here are a few pics from that experience:






He had so much fun and did NOT want to leave.  So the next weekend I thought it would be fun if we painted a pumpkin!  I bought him some Crayola paint and put him outside on the deck and he went to town.






His finished masterpiece! :)



I'll be back after Halloween to show off his little costume and hopefully he had a good time trick or treating!  This is really his first year to understand whats going on and he's been practicing saying "Trick or Treat!"  He's ready.

I hope everyone has a wonderful Halloween and make sure you are careful!  Check your kids candy :)

~Kristine

Tuesday, October 25, 2011

Nursery Progress - Phase One Done!

Good Afternoon, Everyone!  I hope everyone had a great weekend and Monday. :)  Well Scott and I were able to get that disastrous 4th bedroom cleaned up and organized.  We finished it all yesterday while Liam was at school till 3:00 then finished it up when he got home.  It was a tedious project that Scott took the reins completely!  Which I appreciate :)  If you need a reminder, this is what it looked like before:


Wow.  It was bad.  Scott started by just making piles of everything before he pulled out all the storage boxes out of the storage closet.  So now there is actually room to walk.  We just started going through all the bins and boxes and tried to compile everything into the plastic bins and get them all labeled so we know what everything is.  Slowly things were coming off of the floor and into the bins and into the much organized finished attic closet (LOVE this thing).  The only reason this took some extra time was because I needed to find all my old baby stuff that I am going to need for our daughter.  We have several Good Will bags and of course lots of garbage bags.  

Here is what we have when we are almost done (sorry, forgot to take a half way shot):



Looking much better, huh?  So after some major dusting, sweeping (about 3 times & with the Swiffer!), magic erasing the walls & doors (yeah, the people who lived here before left major dirt all over the walls & doors),  we decided to go ahead and move the guest room furniture into the new guest room.  So now here is what our new guest room looks like!:




Pardon the un-made bed.  Still hanging just a few things up.

It looks so different and I feel so much better that we are done with Phase One.  There will be many phases I'm sure until this nursery is done.  Just for kicks, here is what the babies room looks like now:




Nice and empty.  Just those beautiful blueish/greenish walls that will be painted over very soon.  We are making a trip to Home Depot in the next day or so to pick out the paint color for the nursery.  It will be a beautiful light gray color.  Remember, nice and calm is what we are going for.  

Thanks for reading and stay tuned for Phase Two! :)

~Kristine

Friday, October 21, 2011

So it begins...

Howdy!  I hope everyone has had a good week and now here's hoping to a good weekend!  We had to turn our flippin' heat on Wednesday night.  All day the high was only 53!  And rainy.  So of course that night, it got mighty chilly.  And then again last night.  But I love the cold weather!  Sweaters, boots, hot chocolate, hot anything! :)

Anywhoo...I keep thinking my lovely husband keeps forgetting that we are having a baby soon because we literally haven't done anything.  Not one thing.  I have been SCOURING everywhere for the perfect bedding set for our daughter and the one that I found that I just LOVE...We can't afford.  Here it is here:


Sigh......It's from Restoration Hardware and for a 3 piece set, its $226!  Um...No.  So I decided that I am going to re-create it or "re-style" it myself!  For A LOT cheaper too.  Like less then $100.  But that is a different post.  We'll get there soon.  

So it begins means cleaning out our 4th bedroom that we have upstairs or should I call it our "storage room".  We literally just put everything in there that we just don't know where it goes yet.  This room has to be cleaned out so we can make our guest room our daughters room and our "storage room" will be our new guest room.  Ok, so here it is....I'm a little nervous to show you what it looks like...

Here is the entrance...

Holy Cow - That looks scary!!
I forgot to mention that this room is huge!  I have no clue how we are going to set up the guest room.  The good thing is; is that this room has access to tons of storage.  So most of this stuff will go into some bins and stored away.  Um, also, yes - those are boxes.  Yes.  We have lived here since December 17, 2010.  Don't hate.

This is the guest room that I will say that I am sad to paint over this beautiful paint color :( But, for my daughter, I will do so :)



We will be painting over this with a beautiful gray color.  Her nursery will be grays & pinks & maybe a splash here and there of some pops of color.  But the whole point is to keep it very calm and girly without being too girly :)

This is the famous to do list, because I love a good to do list:
  1. Clean out "storage room" & reorganize it
  2. Move everything out of the guest room & set up in the new guest room
  3. Paint the nursery
  4. Paint all the trim, white
  5. Buy crib
  6. Buy dresser
  7. Make the crib skirt
  8. Collect the rest of the bedding
  9. DIY some awesome art & wall decor
I think that might do it for now - I'm sure I'll be adding to it soon.

Wish us luck!! :)

~Kristine

Thursday, October 13, 2011

Stair-Wall Project

Hello Readers!

I have an exciting project to share with you today!  Not only is it exciting, but did I mention it was...FREE??!  Yep, didn't cost me one penny.  However, it did take a little time and my little hand does kinda hurt.  More on that in a second.  I needed to fill a space in our foyer that I have been wanting to fill for awhile.  When I redid our foyer a few months ago (you can see that here) I knew I needed to do something on our HUGE, TALL wall that leads up the stairs.  Here it is here:


Blah.  I had two sconce thingy's there, but they need to find a new home.  So what I decided to do was stencil "The Graham's" and then place pictures around it of our family.  

Here is what you need to do this stencil project:
  • Card stock
  • Exact o-Knife
  • Printer & Computer :)
  • Tape
  • Paint & foam brush
Just a few steps.  I opened a word document and typed what I wanted which was "The Graham's".  I put it into the font I wanted and made it a 300 pt. font.  Then print out on the card stock.  You want to use card stock because its thicker then paper which will hold up better when you start cutting it out.  Here is what I got:


Now you need to get to cutting!  This is where my hand hurt...After trying to be so precise, it hurts.


After you finish cutting, I went and hung it on the wall where I wanted with some tape and left it there for a day to make sure that's where I wanted it.  


Then came the "fun" part.  Painting the stencil.  I used a brown sample paint that I already had (free!) and grabbed my little foam brush from Michael's that I also already had (but if you needed one, they are only .73).  Here is what it looked like after one coat.  I did two, just to make sure!


So the next step was to break out the old Ikea frames (6 of them) and they were also free since I already them.  I decided to paint them a pretty light blue color so the whole thing would blend in with the foyer.  The paint was a sample paint I already had.  I sanded down the frames and got to painting and they turned out so pretty!!  Here is the final product up on the wall.  Pardon the quality, I took them at night so I'm not sure they turned out too great.



This is a view from upstairs


I think it turned out nice!  Especially since everything was FREEEEEE :) I am in love!  Hope you guys enjoy it too! 

Thanks for reading!

~Kristine 


Friday, October 7, 2011

New Dining Room

Ok, so we moved into this house on December 17th, 2010 & I immediatley wanted to start decorating everything.  Obviosuly it is a process and the dining room is right at the front of the house and it needed a little TLC.  Mainly because we used it as a "crap" room.  Why the heck would we do that I now wonder since it is at the front of the house that everyone can see...Hmm, oh well.  Well I told you back a few months ago that we got a new table and chairs and it is sooo pretty.  It sat in the dining room for about 2 months without any spruce.  We needed spruce.  Stat.  If you need a refresher of what it looked like before, here it is:




We decided on a paint color and that swatch on the wall also sat there for about 2 months. So Liam and I went out of town for about 5 days so Scott decided to get his paint on.  We have beautiful crown molding in there and a chair rail so I really wanted him to re-paint alllll the trim (the crown molding, the window frames and sills, around the door, the chair rail, the floor trim) a nice fresh crisp white color. Around the window sills really needed it because the previous owners had a dog and the dang dog chewed on the window sills.  Anyways...So the trim paint really stunk so he wanted to get it done before we got home.  It took him like 2 days because it was a lot.  When we got home we went and bought the paint and got to painting!  Here is daddy's helper:


The color turned out crazy pretty!  It is a very light gray-ish color and that was only painted above the chair rail and below it was a crisp white.  It turned out so nice!  And here is the after!




Here is a good (as good as I could capture) picture of the paint color, crisp trim & white under the chair rail
I wanted it to look really open and airy and crisp.  Have I said "crisp" enough in this post?  We still have a little ways to go with decorating, but we added a nice rug from Walmart, two silvery vases and some sconces I got on sale at OTP.  I would still like to add some sheer curtains, maybe?  I was thinking maybe some lavender ones.  The room lets in a lot of light and it makes the paint color look so pretty, so sheer will be the way to go if I decide to put anything up.  I still want to add a picture or two and maybe some shelving on the big wall.  But for now, it looks great!  We got the chandelier from my mom for FREE :)  Thanks, Mom!  Yes, it is not centered in the room...who ever did that doesn't know how to measure.  We could move the table over to the left to make it centered, but then the table would be off center..Ahh! What to do!  We'll just leave it :)

 Hope you enjoy the new dining room!  We are in love and have already used it once! :)  Hopefully we'll be using it a lot more in the future.  Thanks for reading!

~Kristine

Thursday, October 6, 2011

"Fall up" your front porch

Hello everyone!

Wow, ok so I know it's been awhile since I have posted - my bad! :)  Being pregnant takes a lot of you and WITH a 2 & 1/2 year old too...who is verrrrry demanding of his mommy's attention.  But anyways, I'm back with a lot of new updates and new projects in the works.  Obviously one BIG one is the nursery we will be preparing for our DAUGHTER! That's right, we are having a girl :)  Very excited about that.  Another thing I am super excited about is that it's fall!  Yay!  This is my favorite time of year like most peoples I'm sure.  And I am typing that as I sit outside with Liam watching him play and me type :)

Here are the things I love about fall:

  • Cooler weather - duh! As my husband says "shorts and long sleeve shirts kinda weather"
  • All the pretty fall colors - reds, oranges, yellows, etc.
  • Yummy fall drinks from Starbucks (which I can't really enjoy this year since being pregnant..you know, no caffeine & they just don't taste as good decaf!)
  • Hot chocolate! I can have that! :)
  • Halloween!  I love Halloween now more since I have a child, especially a child who is getting older & sorta understands what it is.  PLUS we have tons of kids in our neighborhood & everyone here realllly gets into Halloween - I love that!
  • Thanksgiving, of course! Don't even need to elaborate..
  • FOOTBALL! We are huge football fans in this house
  • And lastly - decorating!  I'm not realllly into decorating the inside of the house in "fall" gear, but more the outside..hence this post :)  But I do like to decorate the inside of the house for Christmas! Can't wait for that..
So yesterday I decided that I needed to go look around at my two favorite stores & see what kind of sales they were having on their fall gear.  Of course I am speaking of Hobby Lobby & Old Time Pottery.  Hobby Lobby's sales were ok, not great.  The sign I got on the door was 30% off, so not too bad.  This is what the porch looked like before (& let me remind you, we don't have a big front porch):



Didn't have too much decorating out there for Spring/Summer, but it's something!  And here it is after I "falled" it:

Pardon the 2 year old..he wanted to be in the picture :)



So the changes were: New front door sign, new plant stand, pumpkin, two new pottery holders & flowers. This all cost me around $50.00.  Which I normally wouldn't want to spend, but since this is our first house, we didn't have anything like this so you have to buy it all initially!  So next year, I shouldn't have to spend much or none at all.  I think I would like to replace (for now) the front door mat & get something with more fall colors, but we'll keep the blue for now.


Oh, and here is a really pretty tree in our front yard that is already making red leaves - love! :)


If you're interested, here was the cost break down:
  • Door sign from HL @ 30% off - $6.95
  • 2 flower pots from OTP - $12.00 (for both)
  • Pumpkin from OTP - $5.00
  • Plant stand from OTP - $14.00
  • Feux flowers from OTP - $12.00
Grand Total - $49.95

Have any of you guys "falled" up your front doors/porches/houses??  Hope you enjoyed!  Will be back soon with some posts very soon! :)

~Kristine