I’m channeling my inner J-Lo with this post title.  Oh yeah.

Since Rebecca has a human growing inside of her, we decided to rip up the builder-grade carpet in our spare bedrooms this week.  Just over a year ago, we replaced the carpet in our bedroom, sitting room and hallway with hardwood floors.  And a few months ago, the builder had to come in to rip up our existing hardwood floors downstairs and replace them.

Seriously.  I am sick of looking at hardwood floor boxes.  But the good news is we’re actually almost finished with them!  (Because we really don’t have anywhere else to lay hardwood down anymore.)

Here are some before shots with the builder-grade carpet.  They’re a goldish tanish color (I’m horrible with colors.  One day my kid is going to ask me what color something is and I’m going to be all, it’s a reddish grayish color with a hint of greenish.  And then the kid is going to give me the same WTF look that I give my mom today (love you mom!)).

This is the bedroom that is nearest to our master bedroom.  It’s also a potential baby room.  It has one window (just off camera to the right) and faces the woods.

And here is the other potential baby room which is at the back corner of our house.

This is the 3rd bedroom also known as office 2.0 around here.  We’ll be moving our current office to this room as the downstairs office will become a playroom.

And here is that same room with the new floors!

Here is a view with our backs to those windows and looking towards the hallway.

This is the bedroom in the corner of the house.

And this is the bedroom nearest to our master. Followed by a shot of looking out of this bedroom into the hallway.

The hardwoods will be completed tomorrow (hence the dusty and dark pictures) then we can clean this place up and get you some better ‘after’ pictures. It’s incredibly hard to get full room shots of these rooms, but it’s already so nice to have seamless flooring from the bedrooms, to the hallway, down the stairs and into the kitchen!

Now I guess we should decide which room will be the baby’s, eh?

The day has finally come. Tonight, Mike and I ordered real shades to replace the paper shades in our bedroom.

I know, it’s been a year and a half since we moved in. It’s been a year since we added those french doors and accompanying wall and they’re still not even primed. Well last week, we decided to change that before the end of the year. We figured we’d at least get some paint on the walls and get real blinds before the baby comes. Because let’s face it, once 2012 hits we’ll be working on a nursery and we won’t care about our embarassing paper blinds. Which can grow to be even more embarassing when we’re up at all hours in the middle of the night and our bedroom is illuminating the whole neighborhood….

We’re not planning on doing an entire bedroom makeover, we’re just getting the basics that we should have had from day one and we’re basically making the room more cozy and easier to sleep in. We haven’t decided on a paint color yet, but it will probably be something neutral since we have 2 different colored duvets to rotate between and not much else planned. So we decided to go with some basic white roman shades from JCPenney.

JCPenney Cotton Roman Shade

They don’t have an image of the white ones, so brown it is! I really wanted blackout roman shades for the bedroom, but the one I ordered for the kitchen was no longer available. Which is funny because I really didn’t want blackout for the kitchen, I just wanted a dark brown and blackout was all I could find in the right shade. I decided to go with these basic cotton thermal shades because they are on clearance for $29.99 each, plus we had a 20% off coupon and they were offering free shipping. Since there are 6 windows in our bedroom, I did not want to spend any more than that. Is there an Extreme Couponers: Online Clothing & Home Items Edition? I refuse to ever pay full price or for shipping! Though they may not fully darken our room, I’m sure there will be a big difference when compared to the crinkly awful paper blinds we currently have. Even if it’s just aesthetic

I just finished mass amounts of homework so I’m keeping it short tonight. More to come when um, the shades come (in 4 – 7 business days)

No, mom, this entry title does not mean Rebecca is knocked up.  I wouldn’t tell you via the blog; I’d do on Facebook instead.  Or via an email.  I’m not sure yet, I’ll let you know after our 5-year plan to have kids.

Every time Rebecca and I watch Knocked Up, one of us always brings up how we love the house in this movie.  Then we spend the next 5-10 minutes discussing why we love the house so much.  And then we spend the following 5 minutes laughing about how whenever we watch this movie, we comment on the house.  It’s a vicious cycle.

Anyways, as we watched Knocked Up the other night, I had the idea to highlight the areas of the house we love and post them!  Original, right?  Right!  So for your viewing pleasure, here are all the things we love about the Knocked Up house!  (btw, it was incredibly hard not to label Katherine Heigl in every picture).

Okay, I don’t like this pool and seating area.  I like the idea of this pool and seating area.  Got it?  Good.

Actually, is that house for sale? We want to trade up.

ps- This is our 200th post! So far we’re doing well on our list of goals we set out in our 100th post, which can be found here.

You know how I said yesterday that I might jump around with the house tour? Well I’m about to, hang on kids

Our master bedroom hasn’t really been touched since we moved in, which is why you haven’t seen much of it yet. We did add hardwood floors (we had gold, builder-grade carpeting before) and we separated the sitting room from the main room with a wall and some french doors. Otherwise the room was ginormously awkward. Like those 7 foot tall basketball players who are only good because they’re eye level with the hoop.

Here’s the master on our floor plan…

I forgot to draw some french doors in the opening to the sitting room, but you get the idea. We did toy with some paint ideas for this room, but we ended up using one of our choices for the office stripes. So somehow, 16 months after moving in, we have white walls and paper blinds. This is embarassing.

The room does have some great features, like 6 windows between the main room and the sitting room, as well as cathedral ceilings.

And of course, the french doors we added that we still haven’t even primed.

Please ignore the cat beds and toys in the next picture. They sleep here too

I didn’t take any recent pictures facing the other way because the sitting room is currently Darwin’s hangout since we had to put an extra litter box in there for him. I figured no one wanted a view of that, even though it’s tucked behind the door, so here are some older pictures. The wall looks exactly the same so an updated picture wouldn’t do much for you, though daylight would probably be prettier

And just for fun, here’s what the room used to look like when we moved in.

One reason that this room has stayed so blah for so long is that I couldn’t find any sort of inspiration I was in love with. I am beyond sick of being blinded by the white on white and I hate our bed-in-a-bag temporary bedding that has been around for far too long. The room is just so large that something simple wouldn’t do. I thought about painting stripes on the walls, then it was going to be stenciled, then we were going to do molding all the way around the room and it just constantly changed. But lately one idea will not leave my head. It involves this Pottery Barn Farmhouse Canopy bed….

I have wanted a bed like this for my entire life. Mike has never been a fan, but he agrees with me on this one because it looks “classy” (Mike, 2011). I think that with our high ceilings, we actually need a bed this grand. One of the problems with any of the wall treatments that I planned to do was that I couldn’t think of what kind of headboard to do with them that made enough of a statement.

Because of the hefty price tag on this bed, we’re considering 3 options:

1. Save our pennies and buy the bed (which isn’t realistic in the near future because of Darwin’s weekly chemo treatments)

2. Try to luck out and find one on Craiglist (I’ve found some in other states but none close by yet)

3. Build one using Ana White’s plans (while I would love the feeling of accomplishment in this one, we have major time constraints with jobs/school)

On top of this (almost literally) we want to do a fancy ceiling treatment, but I’ll save those plans for another night. I’m off to go talk Darwin into taking his pills, since he’s refusing the cookie treatment tonight. In the meantime, if anyone spots a farmhouse bed deal, send it my way!

I couldn’t think of a good title today.

Since we moved in, I’ve had striped walls on my mind. Originally, I thought of doing a light tone on tone horizontal stripe in our bedroom. I’m not sure where I got this idea, since I had it in my head long before I discovered house blogs. Probably some show on HGTV! I was thinking something like this…

(via Apartment Therapy)

Our bedroom is large and I knew the walls needed something, but I was too intimidated to try a stencil or wallpaper. If I ever made the bed and took a picture, I could show you a decent angle. And I’d rather not show you the uber embarassing kitten conference, unmade bed, pants on the ground picture again. So here’s an equally awful and creepy picture of the wall behind our bed, taken from our sitting room which has no light fixture in it (hence the ghostly looking cat…)

I just couldn’t imagine stripes in here, but it was the easy solution. Then I decided to man up and attempt a stencil.. attempt still pending.

So I diverted my need for stripes to another room after seeing this must-have inspiration photo from Elle Decor…

(via Elle Decor)

I fell in love with the dramatic contrast and figured the perfect place for something so bold would be the powder room. Until one day recently when I was analyzing the powder room and I realized my beloved stripes wouldn’t look good in there.

The ceilings are pretty high..

And the door is actually at an angle, so the room isn’t a perfect square.

At this point I figured that maybe I’d just use my dark brown stripes in our future basement. Note: our basement is no where near finished. By the time we finish it, I’ll probably think of something else. I have no clue why it took me so long to think of this, since this was my original, original idea, but the office could use some stripes.

Way back when we were buying office furniture and all gung-ho office, I wanted to do stripes but knew the bedroom needed a fancy wall paint more and I didn’t want to be the stripe house. We’ve lost some motivation in the office, since it needs so much organizing and I was having a hard time visualizing the finished space. We went with the furniture we could afford and I wanted to balance the Ikea modern with some more traditional elements to keep it classy. I think the stripes will do just that.

To reassure myself, I download Google SketchUp last night and played with it for just a half hour or so. Awesome program. I just fiddled and wasn’t aiming for perfection, but this is what I got…

The walls on the sides are the same color as the darker stripe, SketchUp just does a 2D shadow type thing. The room is missing the bay window on that left wall and the gallery wall would be on the right wall. The white line at the top is crown molding we’d eventually like to do. We’ve been eyeing up these white chairs from Staples and that’s as far as I got last night. I didn’t rotate that one chair, but then I realized it was kind of funny to keep it like that because we will probably never push our chairs under anyway! The paint color is the Benjamin Moore Smoked Oyster we’ve had in mind since we moved in, though we’ll have to throw a little sample on the wall before deciding. The color in this SketchUp is far more purple than the actual color. Here’s a little image from the Benajamin Moore site…

We’d probably pair the Smoked Oyster with the Elephant Gray or Portland Gray. Smoked Oyster definitely has some purple tones (to make my purple loving self happy) but falls into the brown/gray family as well. That is the only reason why Mike agreed to it as well, I even gave him the option of a green!

Anyway I’m super excited about my new area to put some stripes. Now maybe the office will make some progress soon