Peanut has a bedroom!

Right after Christmas we started with the big Peanut related purchasing. Andre's parents had been very generous with us this year starting with a cash gift for our Anniversary in September, and then another cash gift this Christmas. We decided that instead of using the money for something for the house, we would put it towards Peanut. So Boxing Day we actually went shopping and picked up the crib (Graco's Lauren crib), and then the following weekend we went out and purchased the dresser at The Brick.

The day the dresser arrived mother nature decided to co-operate with us (in a way) and start snowing, so what better way to spend the day then huddled up at home assembling a crib?! I have to say that I am so proud of Andre and I. We have a horrible track record of bitching and moaning while assembling furniture, but we were so great assembling this crib. Not one curse or negative word was uttered. We worked so well together!

We haven't finished the nursery completely, but we have a pretty good start I think. The only piece of furniture that we still have yet to put in the room is a glider. My mother has decided that she is going to purchase this for us.

Here is a before of the room after clearing everything out, and then a couple pictures of our furniture, before we cleared recycled all that cardboard (oh the cardboard!!):

We haven't put any bedding in the crib since we have a cat, and we didn't know what Mikey was going to do with the crib in the house. Thankfully he hasn't figured out how to jump into the crib, but that might change once there is a glider right next to it. We have some artwork for the walls, but I need to get some picture hooks first, and figure out exactly where we want the crib to go on the one wall. I think for safety reasons we might end up putting the glider in that corner and moving the crib farther along the wall towards the closet, who knows.

We still have 6-8 weeks to make those final decisions, and get a ceiling fan hung (sitting in the box next to the dresser), and purchase a blind for the room, and decide once and for all if we're keeping the current drapes. At least for now Peanut has a room, and a dresser full of clothes already, and we haven't even had a shower yet!

We're at it again!

Redecorating that is! The next room on our hit list is the office! This room has been months in the making. It was the last room in the house to still have wallpaper left to remove. This was the main reason it has taken us so long to tackle it.

We're still not done yet, but I'll post some preliminary pictures. This is what we started with:

This room was the perfect blend of everything horrible from the 70's and 80's. It came complete with stained pale grey carpet (I swear it makes my skin crawl), pale lavender gloss paint, fabulous balloon valance, and you can't see from the picture, but the far right wall and two smaller walls were covered floor to ceiling in a pale pink wallpaper. The full wallpaper wasn't that hard to remove, but the border was a little more difficult.

This is what the room looked like after the wallpaper was removed:

We were left with each wall presenting us with a unique problem. Two walls had been wallpapered over without being painted first (GRRRR). One wall was a matte pink paint, and two others a glossy lilac-ish colour. :Le Sigh: Can nothing ever be easy? So to make our lives a little easier we decided to use Behr's new paint and primer in one. It has covered beautifully, and I'm very impressed so far.

Alas blog land I do not have any after pictures to post. The room is painted, but I am not yet finished painting the trim, and we still have the carpet to rip out, and the new flooring to be installed. This last bit might take awhile since I think I may have lost the phone number to our flooring guy ::shakes head:: I really hope that we'll be able to find it or I might be begging all of our friends for numbers to flooring guys they know so we can get this job done.

A little late I know...

I had promised earlier to post a little picture of some DIY holiday decor and I totally slacked off. So better late than never here it is!




The one in the middle is actually a square vase filled with seasonal potpourri that we had received as a gift. I had no idea what to do, so I went with the red and silver scheme in it and decided to make use of two other square vases that I had kicking around.

I went to Zellers and picked up some plastic red faceted Christmas balls and some small shiny and sparkly silver balls. I played around with them until they were where I wanted them, and Ta Da! Cheap Holiday Decor.

I have seen Christmas balls used as decor quite a bit this holiday season, but I didn't want to use glass balls as I didn't want them to break. I think that this looks just as good, and it's a little more guest and pet friendly. This way if my cat decided to play I wouldn't be cleaning up shards of glass everywhere! So keep it in mind for next year or this year when you're out shopping and see some decorations on clearance!

Guestroom makeover

I just want to start by saying I think this is my new favourite room in the house. I just love how it turned out. We had our doubts when we started let me tell you. To refresh your memory this is what we started with. It was less than fabulous.

First off we painted every surface of the room. We used the new Behr paint and primer in one, and let me tell you, I am in love. We have already bought the paint for the office makeover. We used "Simply Sage". I originally wanted a neutral colour for the room and just came across this colour and brought it home on a whim. Andre fell in love with it too and we went in a different direction.

We then had some oak coloured laminate installed to cover the horrible wood flooring we found under the carpet. Then we hung some curtains, assembled our Ikea sofa bed/futon, and threw down an area rug that we had lying around. This is what we ended up with:

We obviously still need to add some finishing touches and some art to the walls, but it still wows me every time I go into the room how far we've come from the horrible rust coloured carpet, and the beige semi-gloss everywhere. My mother came over this weekend and said she found it hard to believe it's the same room compared to how it looked the day we got the keys.

I hope that Andre's parents enjoy their new home away from home when they come to stay with us for Christmas!

On a lighter note...

I have been anxiously awaiting the delivery of my very first Etsy purchase. I had started looking at something to hang on the one wall of our entry way shortly after we moved in. I thought about art, or vinyl decor, and then came across some "family name" plaques. I was on the search for the perfect one, and late one night I found it. I loved it, it was perfect (or well, perfect for me).

The link for the item can be found here . I immediately bellowed for Andre to get his butt up to the office so I could get his final approval (but who are we kidding, I would've ordered it anyway!!). So since August 11, I have been running up to the office every night to check if there has been any contact from the seller to see when the item had been shipped. To make matters worse the seller has been super busy lately, so I've had a longer than expected wait.

The good news is that I received word from the seller herself on Sept 2, assuring me that the plaque had been shipped and I would receive it sometime between Sept 11-17th. I'm hoping it gets here soon, I'm dying to see what it looks like with our colours!