Home Projects

I really love our apartment. For all of the inconvenience of having only two bedrooms, very little storage, and no yard, I will really miss this place when we do move. Partially because we haven't let the fact that it's just an apartment prevent us from doing what we can to make it exactly the way we like it. Paul and I have been busily getting ready for baby girl's arrival in... can you guess? 5 weeks! That's like a month. Wow. Little panic attack just saying that :) Here are some of our recent projects:

Carpet Cleaning

While most people reading this are probably thinking "Um, great", I am super excited to have truly clean carpet. Weird end-of-pregnancy obsession. I love vacuuming right now too. Anyhoo, it needed to happen. What a blessing that Paul gets to bring home equipment from work (like a carpet cleaner!).

Oh so clean :)

All of our living room furniture was in the kitchen while Paul worked, and Westly had a blast doing the couch jungle-gym thing. It was a bit of a lengthy project, so I put a VeggieTales on the laptop to keep him busy. He's such a cute little bean :)

Bathroom

This is one of those little things I've been meaning to do forever. Over the past few months Paul and I have been memorizing the book of James together. I try to post a new set of verses every week or so in the kitchen and on the bathroom mirror.

                                                

Lovely, right? Now, it looks like this...

                                                

It's a little thing, but pretty makes me happy and now Paul and I aren't throwing elbows for mirror space :)

While we're in the bathroom, I also snapped a shot our new shower rod set up. The one that came with the apartment was dangerously loose (West pulled it down more than once) and drove me nuts because the curtain was constantly pooled around the floor. We decided to go for the curved, hotel-style rod. So much more space and light in the shower. I love it.

(Anna, I think we have the same shower curtain).                                             

Ok, enough of our powder room.

Bedroom

There will be a few more photos from here in about a week. The crib arrives tomorrow and will live in our room. A while back Paul and I found a solid wood (oak?) armoir on Craigslist for $85. I couldn't find anything new that was remotely comparable for under $200-$300. So wonderful deal, and perfect for storing baby girl dresses, clothes, and linen in our bedroom. But, sadly, it was... ugly. I wish I'd thought to take a pic of it when we brought it home. No handles or knobs on the doors and drawers, and the finish was too close to "poo brown" for comfort. But my awesome hubby and I teamed up with some paint (no worries, a mask was involved), a drill, and some hardware for a much nicer finished product.

                                               

I haven't decided whether or not to go the next step and distress it a little with some sandpaper. Any suggestions?

I am also quite proud of what you see on either side. Storage was really the biggest issue for having another little person live here. The dressers were $30 together at a garage sale, and the filing drawers are a hand-me-down from a friend. They had kind of an oakie-orange finish and black handles originally.

Ok, last one for tonight.

Living room

This, again, is kind of a little thing. Looking around our living room I began to feel oppressed by black. Black couches, black book shelf, black photo frames with black mats. Something needed to change but I like the contrast of the black shelves with the cube baskets and floral frames we have on them, and new couches are just not in the budget at the moment. We have what we have, and basically something needed to change for $0. I went to work on my picture frames. On one wall everything with a "real" frame got a coat of paint in the same color as the filing cabinet above to break up the monotony (you can't really see the color in the pics though). I added some color with scrap booking paper.

                                       

The whole "not level" thing would be a reflection on my photography talents, rather than frame-hanging abilities.

                                      

It's not a huge project, but I'm excited about it :)

Hoping to be able to reveal Breiella/ Briella's bedding set sometime next week.

(I'm thinking the spelling issues will be resolved when we finalize a middle name; whichever look best together. I'm also thinking the middle name may not be decided until we see her.)