New House: Avery's room - in the grey!

Two late afternoons in the new house and one very stretched-at-the-end gallon of paint, and we have a painted room!  Here's a closeup before and after:

This was really a four-day venture:
1) Spackle
2) Sand walls and prep
3) Paint cut-in areas and the corners
4) Roll the rest of the walls

I used a 2-inch angled brush for the cut-ins, which worked nicely, and used some blue painters tape on the top and bottom (I'm steady enough to paint around door trims without it) to get clean edges.  For paint, I used Olympic's "Thin Ice" in an eggshell primer + paint, which is this very lovely light grey color.  Really brightens up the room, I mean WOW!  Let's see the real befores and afters, shall we?

 

 

Sorry for the oddly shaped photos - I got a new phone between the befores and the afters, so the dimensions come out all different now.

I'm thrilled with the color and how much bigger and brighter the room looks now.  Just a few touchups to make and this room will be ready for the next phase!

Thin Ice, by Olympic

Total cost so far: $40 (from the post on the ceiling) + $32 (for tape and Thin Ice paint) = $72

New House: Cassidy's room sky-ling

I'm not 100% on board with how Cassidy's room is turning out so far.  The goal, if you remember, was to put a light aqua on the ceiling, like a sky, and then use white walls.

Here's the ceiling before an after an "aqua" paint job:

Meh.  First, after THREE coats, I still feel like I can see beige.  Second, it looks like a dingy white, not a light aqua blue.  Even Avery told me the ceiling was "white" when I asked him.  He then suggested that I use the blue paint I had in the room.  That paint, of course, being the same paint I WAS painting the ceiling with.

The color is Olympic's "Free Spirit" and my feeling isn't feeling super free at the moment, BUT, I'm hoping with white walls, the color's really gonna pop.

Hoping hoping hoping.

New House: Cassidy's room

While Avery has been in full big-boy mode for a while, this is the room where Cassidy will go from my baby girl to my big girl (insert motherly sobs here.)  But let's take a look at the room before I get too choked up.

Um...ok, so apparently, in all my picture taking, I FORGOT to take a picture of the beginning of the room.  And I've already finished another step, so I can't take a picture now!  Augh!  BUT, it looks a lot like Avery's beginning:

Technically Avery's room, but they are identical

Problems: The beige.  So. Much. Beige. In. Entire. House.  Actually, I don't even describe it as beige, I think of it as a fleshy color, like I'm walking around on someone's skin.  *shudder* GROSS.  Anyway, a ton to paint in this place, but back to Cassidy's room.  The ceiling and walls need painted, the brown yucko carpet needs covered, but other than that, the room is a nice size with of light, it just needs a little oomph.

So the plan is as follows:

• Paint ceiling
• Paint walls
• Find a big floor covering
• Hang up those hot air balloons
• Bring in a toddler bed(?)
• Brighten up the white walls with curtains and art

Here's my inspiration, from my favorite stalkees bloggers, John and Sherry from Young House Love.

What I'm excited to steal the most is the colored ceiling.  I've always had white ceilings and colored walls, but I think it would be awesome to go the other way!  So, I'm envisioning a light aqua ceiling to bring in some color and make it sky-like.  I can't wait to do this part!!

I'll keep you updated as I go!

New House: Avery's room - let's start at the top!

A trip to Lowe's gave me ceiling paint, rollers, a brush, a cup and a dropcloth.  All that makes Ali a happy girl!

My goal is to try to hit up one room a week and start with the ceilings.  You may remember that I was inspired  for a ceiling full of stars for my little man, but I wanted a clean, white ceiling first.    Here's the before:

Meh.  At Lowe's I picked up some Olympic brand flat ceiling self-priming paint.  I did NOT want to be painting a ceiling more than one coat, if possible, so the self-priming was ideal.  I also picked up a kit from Wooster (on sale!) with two rollers, an angled 2-inch brush, and a tray.  Adding in a dropcloth, a trim cup, and a plastic tray liner, and I was in business.

I borrowed a ladder from my work and started in on the part of the ceiling that meets the wall.  I didn't pay too much attention to any paint I got on the walls, but I did try to avoid actually painting the walls as much as possible. (No pics of this - was on a tight schedule).  Two quick trips around the room and it was time to roll!  I didn't find an extended pole at Lowe's, so I had a regular roller, which made for some backaches I felt the next day, but it went fairly fast and I got two coats of paint done (even though I didn't want to do two coats, I really needed to) in about an hour and a half.  Check it out!

So fresh and clean looking!  Let's change the pictures around to get a real side-by-side!

Me likey.  And while I was waiting for the first coat to dry a bit, I couldn't help but think about the next phase!

To be continued.....

Lessons learned:  Find an extended pole, wear goggles to avoid little splatters in your eyes.

Total cost so far: $40

New House: Avery's room

Ok, time for the first look in-depth at rooms in the new house, starting with Avery's room!

Let's talk about the problems, then think about solutions.

First, in case it's hard to see, the carpet is dark brown, pretty cheap, and unchangeable.  Second, the walls AND the ceiling are that amazing fleshy color that covers the 1990s (even though this house was built in 2002).  You may note that color goes out in the hallway as well....and the entire rest of the house.  There are TWO cable lines coming out of the walls (one coming out of a main wall and one coming out of a closet).  The window isn't visible because it was playing tricks with my camera phone, but it's just a single window with a gross miniblind on it.

So, let's talk solutions and inspirations.

I need to:

• Paint ceiling
• Paint walls
• Find a big rug
• Put in his furniture
• Change/paint doorknobs
• Hang black-out blinds and/or curtains
• Get some art on the walls

As for inspiration, I'm obsessed with this ceiling, from Project Nursery and I want to base the whole room idea around these stars:

So, I'm thinking maybe light grey walls, white ceiling, gold or silver stars up high.  And that's as far as I've gotten, but I can't get past how much I love the stars.

He's a big boy now, but I thought about taking artistic photos of his favorite toys and blowing them up black and white to hang on the walls.  I've asked him if he wants trucks, planes, stars, or if he has any ideas.  He likes them all.  He doesn't spend a lot of solo time in his room, so I don't need to make it into a giant playroom (despite the temptation), but I still want to make it a nice place.

Yarrrrr....that be repurposed!

Avery is a kid with toys.  Yard sales, holidays, random things I can't resist at Target - he gets them everywhere!  But where to store them?

For a while, our living room looked like this:

Until we put down $75 on this Martha Stewart piece from Home Depot and organized a bit:

But what to do in his bedroom?  We want him to have a place to play with his toys and a place to put said toys that isn't on a too-hard-to-resist-climbing bookshelf.  Ideally, I wanted a really great toy chest, but those suckers are expensive!

Then, we cleaned and organized our bedroom and closet and we were just about to throw out this piece of history:

Ah, memories

 Yep, that's a military-issued footlocker that I took with me on deployment to Turkey in 2003 during the first rotation of the Iraq war.  It's lightweight, super sturdy (hello, it's military issue!), and the top is perfect for not threatening to cut off little fingers.  So, I took on a mission to redo it to make it look like a genuine toy chest and not a military relic.  THEN, he started watching Jake and the Neverland Pirates and I thought - why not try to make it a treasure chest?

First, remove the 10-year old tape all over it.  Easier said then done, and some scraping cut into the plastic, but I figure a treasure chest has been through some tough times so it'll go nicely.

Tape removed, but still kinda there.

Next, I used some Goo Gone (also introduced to me in the Army by the morons at the Central Issuing Facility who wouldn't take back their equipment until I had removed every little scrap of tape residue) to get rid of all the sticky tape residue.  Then, I bought some spray paint primer and gave the whole thing a couple of good coats to make it easier to paint.

Albino treasure chest

After that, I took some gold spray paint and painted up the stripes that were already on the footlocker.  This was pretty fortunate, because I can't get the top to curve like a treasure chest, but having these jutted out stripes on the middle and the side of the lid really made it look treasure chesty.  I also painted the hardware gold to match.  Since I was going to paint the rest of it brown, I didn't care too much about taping.  Plus, a treasure chest is supposed to look a little beaten up, so a little bleeding of colors will only help.

Gettin' a little fancy

Swapping around the tape job, after the gold was good and dry, I spray painted the rest of the box brown.  It isn't perfect, because all of the hinges are hard to paint around, but who cares, Avery will likely just destroy it anyway.  But how to make a plastic brown box look like wood?  I tried a couple of different things.  First, I bought one of these wood grainers that you drag through paint to make it look like wood.  Fail.  It came out all gunky.  Next, I bought a stencil that looked like wood, but that looked like crap as well.  So, I gave up and decided just to keep it brown and gold.  But then it looked all plain and sad, so I knew I had to dress it up some more.  Enter these babies:

Simple finishing washer from Home Depot at practically nothing for three of them.  They matched perfectly with the gold spray paint, so I grabbed some super glue and stuck em on.

I love the grommet look to really give it a treasure-chesty feel.  But something was still missing - a pirate theme!  I googled around everywhere trying to find something Piratey to put on the chest, but stuff was pretty expensive.  So, wandering out Michael's one day, I found these cute pirate hats.

They were $5 each (grumble) and pretty shoddiliy made, but beggars can't be choosers, so I grabbed a couple of them and removed the skull and bones emblem, which is really just a big foamy sticker.  Then, I took my trusty gold spray paint and went to town.

Here there be gold!

A little bit of superglue, and the chest was definitely for pirates.

Then I bought some gold duct tape at Michael's and wrapped up the handle.  I opted to go for duct tape so it could be well worn and used without paint flaking off on someone's hand.

And there you have it!

The joy truly was Avery looking at it and yelling "PIRATE BOX!!"  So cute and it made me relieved that he recognized it.

What do you think?  Where do you keep your kids toys?  Should I add some pirate jewels to the outside or keep it simple?

Nursery Complete-Ish!

Although there may be some additions or changes, the nursery is pretty much complete!

Remember that we started with this:

Yellowish walls, old stained carpet

Dingy trim

And now we have this:

What a difference a design makes!

Entrance to the nursery

Orange, Aqua, and Hot Pink hot air balloons hang from the ceiling

Bunny hanging out on the changing table

Now if only she could read!

Hot air balloon closet knob - just a cute touch

Glider and some of the artwork..and bunny again

A card given to me in the hospital and the modern day sampler I made

A little silvery lamp in the corner

Here are all the details:

• Paint color is Twilight Grey, by Behr
• The carpet is Insightful III in the shade of Linen, from Home Depot
• The crib is Delta Winter Park 3-in-1 Convertible Crib, which my mom bought for Cassidy at Target
• The changing table is IKEA's Sniglar table, which we chose because it fit perfectly.
• The hot air balloons were made by yours truly, "pin"spired from Pinterest - here's how I did it!
• Cassidy's name was made from cardboard and yarn (on the 6th go-around)
• The artwork is a modern day sampler I made using Microsoft Word (click here to download the template and make it your own!).  Also, I framed the card that Jon, Avery, and my dad brought to me with some flowers in the hospital.
• The lamp is just something we've had forever
• The rugs are bathmats that I picked up at Target
• The curtains are Vivan curtains from IKEA that I hemmed up (slightly unevenly) with fabric glue and hung wider and taller than the window
• The closet doorknob is from Anthropologie
• The changing table fabric bins are from Target
• The rocker was a good score from Craigslist (yay!) 
• The clothes hamper was a Target find also (sorry, couldn't find it online)
• The balloon art right near the door I made on a whim 

I really love how it all turned out.  It's so nice just to step in there into a bright but peaceful room.  It makes me so relaxed and happy (and a bit jealous - I wish my bedroom looked so put together!)  I'll probably hang more art as we go along, but I felt like enough was finished to show everyone all the work I've put into it with the help of my friend Andrea, my dad, and my husband, Jon.

Hope you like it, too!