Painting the Nursery

Here's an old post that somehow never actually got posted:
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David took advantage of his time off between Christmas and New Years to paint the nursery.

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Sprocket helped.

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The color that we chose is called Picking Daisies.  It is so lovely and warn; it almost glows.  I keep walking by and thinking that the light is on, but when I go in to turn it off, it turns out that the walls just seem to glow with an ambient light!
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I'll try to get some pictures of how the nursery is looking with furniture posted soon!

Almost-Finished Crafts

We've been working on clearing out the guest room to get it ready to become a nursery.  It has been quite a task, as the guest room also housed storage, a lot of miscellaneous books, and all of my craft stuff.  In going through my craft stuff I found a box full of almost-done projects.  

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All of them are so close to being done, that I wondered why I didn't finish them before.  And then I realized that each of them had an item or two that I still needed to get from the store.

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I made this hat about a year ago, just after my birthday in 2010.  All it needs is to have ribbon sewn on.  I had the ribbon; so what's the problem?  I had no matching thread.

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I made these sweaters over the summer just after we found out that Baby P was on the way.  Both sweaters  are missing buttons.  Also the one on the right needs an eye, a beak, and feet embroidered on to the ducks on the front.

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This project is a little more embarrassing because it has been almost-finished for a few years now!  When David and I were on our honeymoon in Ireland I bought yarn, and later made these Christmas stockings for our first married Christmas.  Because of the two-color patterns there are "floats" of yarn along the inside, and when you stick your hand inside your fingers catch on them.  To fix this, I've been meaning to line the stockings.  Each year at the beginning of the holiday season I have the best intentions of getting this done, but here we are at Christmas number four!

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These hats are made using scraps of leftover yarn from other projects.  I made them both sometime in the last year.  They also need to be lined.

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Last weekend I trekked out to Fabric Depot to got all of the odds and ends that I need to finish these projects.  My goal is to complete them all up before the new year.  I'll keep you posted as I finish them up!

Charging Station 2

Yesterday I told you all about deciding to re-purpose my old jewelry box into a cell phone charging station.  (You can read all about that here.)  Well now I'm back to share pictures of the finished product.

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After removing all the gunk out of the top of the jewelry box I sanded the whole thing down, and painted it.  I spray painted it using a color called "Antique White" which is actually off-white.  It took a couple of coats to get the color even, but now it looks fabulous!

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The cords hide in the drawer, where they are plugged in to a little extension cord.  With the extension cord we are able to plug in three things, so only the single cord sticks out the hole that I drilled in the back.

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David helped me drill three slots so that the chargers can get from the drawer up to where our phones sit.  We put in three because there is definitely enough room for three devices, although currently we are just using it for our two phones.  Perhaps in the future one of us will want to charge our i-pod here.

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So that's my new charging station.  I hope that you like it!

Charging Station 1

I've been wanting a charging station for our phones for a while now.  The charging cords have been cluttering up the top of our dresser for way too long.  I have tried looking for one at Target, but they never seemed to have one that I liked.  So I decided to make my own.

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I know what you're thinking:  That's not a charging station, it's a jewelry box. 

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Well, you'd be right.  A few months ago, after purging my jewelry collection, and keeping only the things that I actually wear, or really like, I was left with a jewelry box that was way too big.  I was about to just get rid of it, when I realized that it was the perfect size for a charging station.

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I figured that once I removed the dividers that were inside and took off the lid, the top portion could hold our phones, and the drawer below could hide the cords.

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This worked perfectly for the drawer.  The dividers popped out easily leaving the bottom fairly clean.  Since the velvety lining was in pretty good shape, and no one was going to see it since it was in the drawer, I decided to just leave it in.

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The top was much more difficult.  The velvet wrapped up the sides of the dividers, and everything was stuck in there pretty good.  After trying and failing to just pry out the dividers like I had done with the drawer, I eventually resorted to using this tiny little saw to cut them out.

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While the dividers did come out, they left behind a whole lot of gunk.  Everything was glued down, and when I got the dividers and the lining out it left behind a the paper backing.

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I nearly gave up, but eventually I managed to scrape all of the paper backing and velvety residue out.  It must have left me exhausted, because I don't seem to have a picture showing the interior clean and free from gunk.

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Well, that was a lot of photos, so I'll save the "after" photos of the completed charging station for tomorrow!

Converting a Keg

 

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David is planning to brew his own beer sometime this summer.  Last weekend he was converting a keg into a kettle to use during the brewing process.

Desk Update

The desk top is now in the office.

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It's just waiting for the desk bases, which are in the kitchen in the process of being painted.

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  Yep, they're in the kitchen.  It's way to cold to be painting in the garage.

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How does Sprocket feel about the desk?

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He's pretty excited!

Norbert the Unicorn

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Over the weekend, we bought a few of the boards we need to finish our desk.  They were too long to fit in the car, so we had to put them through the sunroof.

Desk

I know that you've all been awaiting an update on that "sneak peak" post that I did last week, so here it is.  For a while now we've been talking about building a desk.  In fact, before we built our media center we talked about building a desk instead.  We love the Bedford Corner Desk from Pottery Barn . . . but it's a little out of our price range (okay, a lot out of our price range!).  Luckily Ana White, of ana-white.com, has created similar desk plans.  While building our own desk will cost significantly less than buying a desk, we still have to save up the money to buy the wood.  So we figured that it would be a while before we could have a new desk.  Then one day I was in our garage and I noticed this:

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That's a pile of scrap wood, leftover from building the media cabinet.  It seemed like there was quite a bit . . . maybe not enough to build our whole desk, but definitely a start!  So I did what any good engineer would do, I mad a schematic.

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Yep, I measured all the wood that we had, and figured out what pieces we could get out of it.  Once we ripped some 1x6's down to 1x3's we had enough to build one of the base units.  And we still have enough wood to build most of the other one!  We will have to get a sheet of plywood to make the desktop, and a few 1x2's, but that's a lot better than all the wood we thought we would have to buy!

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We're going to start out with just shelves, and when we buy more wood later we'll build drawers to fit in those slots.  We'll be painting the whole desk white to go with the color scheme in our office.  

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Painting the Office

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Sneak Peak

We were up early, before mass, working on a project.

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Here's a sneak peak of what we were up to.  Check back later this week for more!

Painting the Office

We started painting the office over the weekend.

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There's a lot in there, so we decided to move all the stuff to one side, and paint half the room at a time.

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I'm not sure when we'll be painting the other half of the room . . . maybe one night this week, or maybe next weekend.

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Sprocket had to wait in the hall, so he wouldn't get into the paint stuff.  Even with his bed shoved into the doorway to get it out of the way, he likes it.

White Bird

I found this ugly little bird on clearance at Fred Meyer for about $1.50.  I bought this ugly bird in order to try out a a project that I saw on a decorating blog.

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I'm not sure that this photo really does justice to the ugliness of this bird.  It was kind of a blue gray with weird pink stripes on the wings.

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The idea of the project is pretty basic.  You basically use white spray paint and cover the whole thing.  Now my ugly bird looks porcelain-ish, and it matches my owl book ends.

Media Console

David and I take great pride in the fact that we can park our car in our garage.  We have a one car garage and we have managed to fit about a million things in there.  We have a large shelf unit that holds tools (hammers, screwdrivers, clamps, a router, and multiple saws), gardening stuff, biking accessories, canoeing accessories, and a few boxes of storage stuff.  We have 3 bikes, a lawn mower, a barbecue, and a deep freezer.  And still we usually park the car in there!

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However, from August to November we weren't parking the car in the garage.  Instead we were using the garage as a workshop to build a media console.  

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This media console is based on this one from Pottery Barn.  We used these plans from ana-white.com.

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We built our media console from scratch.  We bought lumber, nails, screws, and wood glue.  I learned how to use a bunch of the power tools that we have, and now we have a finished product that we are very proud of.

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In case you were wondering, no we did not go to the trouble of making 16 drawers.  Those are all fake drawer faces.  There's a big cabinet in the middle, and larger drawers on the sides.

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In case you are interested, below I've put some pictures from the construction of the media console.

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David using a drill to screw in a screw.

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Me using the drill.

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Oops!  We broke a drill bit!

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The "skeleton" of the cabinet.

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Oops!  They forgot to make this screw into a screw!

Office Paint

We've been having some trouble deciding on a paint color for the office.

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I think that we've finally settled on "Tropical Splash."  It's the blue on the right on the bottom row.

Getting Ready for Winter!

Last weekend, I got all of our winter outerwear out and organized it.  This is probably the most organized that the coat closet will ever be.

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I hung our scarves on a spare hanger, and put our hats, mittens, and gloves in a basket below.  It's always fun to look through our hats and scarves because so many of them are homemade.  There's the pale green scarf that my mom made me when I was in college, that is still a staple in my winter wardrobe.  There's also the green and gray hat that I made for David the first Christmas that we were dating, that I stayed up half the night to finish.  And while not homemade, I have a red wool scarf and a tan and red knit had that I bought on our honeymoon in Ireland, so they are still full of happy memories.

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Then we went through our coats, donated a few that we don't really wear, and hung the rest up.

New Coat

David's cousin was getting rid of this coat, and I thought that it was cute, so she gave it to me.  When I got it home I realized that it was just a little bit too big.

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The coat has a belt around the waist that had 2 buttons on it.  

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The coat only needed a little adjustment, so I added a third button to cinch in the waist a little bit.

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I used a neat feature on my sewing machine that automatically sews button holes.

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So now I have a new coat that fits me well, and all I had to do was add a button!

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