Ladies and gentlemen (or man, since I apparently have a single male reader), Mike and I did something on a whim on Saturday. Are you ready for this?

We took down the paper blinds in our bedroom. I repeat, we took down the paper blinds in our bedroom!

Yes, we moved in nearly 3 years ago and had not touched these crinkly jerks until Saturday. We’ve actually been on project overdrive, gearing up for Christmas and finishing Easton’s room finally. Oh and the playroom. I have a lot to blog about, but I’ve been too busy checking things off our nagging list to stop and write.

Right, back to the blinds. We’re DIYing some Christmas cards and we were having a photoshoot for Easton in our bedroom. The walls are white and there are windows on more than one wall, so it was perfect. When we went to “raise” the paper shades to let the natural light flow in, we decided to just rip those suckers off finally. Bold move, considering there are 4 windows in the main part of our bedroom and it was already around 2pm.

We ordered roman shades from JC Penney about a year ago. We got 6 for our room (4 in main room, 2 in sitting room) but we used one in Easton’s room since they were just sitting around. How funny is this Photoshopped picture of Easton’s navy chevron curtains?

Once our photo shoot was done (we will share details once the cards are designed). Mike started drilling brackets. During Easton’s late nap, I helped him hang a few. The last 2 or so had to wait until Easton was in bed. And those last ones of course were stubborn and wouldn’t screw in.

But they’re done and it feels like a luxury resort to us.

I’m not a huge fan of these particular blinds since they don’t lay flat no matter what I do, as I mentioned in the post about the one we hung in Easton’s room. But they were inexpensive and they work. I plan to add some curtains to them anyway.

(Yes, I’m sure our neighbors are thankful to no longer have a view of crinkly blinds.)

(And that is an awful iPhone picture taken into a bright window surrounded by bright white walls…)

The bedroom is now blindingly white. White walls, white blinds, white bed (which I didn’t care to make for these pictures I snapped with my iPhone). Though it needs some loving, all of that white is strangely clean and refreshing feeling. For now. Someone get me a roller in a few weeks…

For now, I must get back to gallery walling, Christmas decorating/crafting and rolling around the playroom with Easton. I’ve forgotten how good it feels to be inspired, now if only my blog server will continue to cooperate…

Those hooks sat there for months until we faced the same dilemma in Easton’s room.  His room layout is a rectangle but the closet sticks out as you walk into the room leaving a space that is rather dead.  We wanted to utilize this area to hang random items; quite like the laundry room idea.  We went through some ideas from just mounting the hooks directly to the wall to buying one of those pre-made pieces of wood with hooks on them.

Both ideas just seemed lacking.  Random silver hooks on the wall?  Could work, but it just seemed too plain.  The pre-made idea would work, but we wanted something to really tie into the rest of the room.

The wall behind E’s crib is paneled and all white.  Why not extend this idea to the area when you walk into his room?  After all, I had a ton of wood left over since, well, I can’t measure (but that’s a story for another day).

So I ventured out to cut two straight pieces in order to make a joint in the corner.  From there it was some paint and attach the hooks.

Neither one of us were really sold on the hooks within E’s room.  We love the metal, of course, but the size feels a bit on the larger side.  Did we need to go so big?  I’m not sure; probably because his stuff is so tiny.  I’m sure with a couple of years and book-bags, sports gear and so forth, we’ll be looking to add even more hooks.  So perhaps these hooks will be just fine as Easton grows.

It was such a simple project that added functionality to an area of the room that otherwise would be useless (besides an opening for the door to swing, duh).  And plus, super cheap.  Left over wood from a previous project + left over white paint + roughly $10 for the hooks ($2.50 x 4).

Note to self: change those damn gold door knobs and hinges. 

After a few weeks of sleeping on the bed, I was hit with back pain. There was one weekend where I couldn’t step up and down the single step in our family room without doing this embarassing yelp of pain. The mattress was much too soft for us and Mike’s back wasn’t far behind mine. We knew there was nothing we could do to really help it, since we found out that my brother had the same problem, so we didn’t want to invest money in any sort of topper. We slept on the couch most nights until we finally decided to bite the bullet and head to Sears for their Labor Day mattress sale.

We bought our queen mattress there 5 years ago and knew the prices were ridiculously low at this time of year. The last time we went mattress shopping we shopped around for days, hit every possible store, layed on bed after bed and made an educated decision. This time we went to Sears with Easton, left his pacifier in the car on accident, had an overtired baby with no paci and picked out a mattress in less than 10 minutes.

We went with a Sealy Posturepedic and chose it like Goldilocks. Sterns and Foster? Too expensive. Basic Sealy? A little flimsy feeling. Then there were two priced in the middle $100 apart. I compared the features while running back and forth across the department and decided to go with the one with the stay cool fabric memory foam Eurotop. I think Sears called it the Gibson. Then I tried to make Easton forget about his missing paci while Mike played the same game and landed on the same mattress. We had the option of getting it plush or firm and after the two of us were walking around hunched over for two weeks, we went with firm.

This was also a great opportunity for us to add on that standard bed frame so that our mattress was no longer on the floor. We saved some additional money by keeping my brother’s box spring. All in all, it was way cheaper than I ever thought we’d be able to get a middle ranged, king mattress for. I think in the end we paid around $1000. I was too busy keeping my finger in Easton’s mouth while he slept to watch the register…

Our mattress was delivered on Monday and since we now have a frame, I figured it would be the perfect opportunity to show you the pathetic state of our bedroom.

We moved in 2.5 years ago. Still no paint. Still no window treatments. This room kills me. At first I was like WTF, the pillowcases don’t match for the picture? Then I realized that it just adds to the trailer park chic

Part of the reason why we haven’t done anything in here is that the room is overwhelmingly huge. For example, we just got a king bed. In this picture, you will see that our queen frame (and bedding) is still living in the room, fully assembled….

And there’s a full sitting room behind it that can accommodate another king bed. And we can probably fit a full by the door. Maybe we should just rent this space out to some nice college kids?

Since we added a wall with french doors to close off the sitting room (it was one giant room before), we still have yet to prime it. We also have yet to caulk or paint the new trim in the room (new meaning 2 years ago). Since we’ve put this off for so long, we think it’s best to hire someone to tackle it. Let’s face it, we’re not going to do it. We always put the rest of the house first and this job is HUGE. I’m fully confident we could do it in a weekend, but it has taken me 2.5 years to realize that I’m fully confident that I don’t want to. I would like a nice hotel like feel in here, but I also savor every bit of my weekends now. If we opt to paint it ourselves, we’re just going to put it off again. I think we finally need somewhere cozy to sleep.

Operation bedroom starts now. I’m thinking medium gray walls, an upholstered headboard, maybe I’ll make another bedskirt and some curtains. I’m feeling inspired by this extra set of sheets we picked up at Target…

Maybe I should finally make a mood board?

ps- Sorry my posting has been inconsistent, I’ve been battling my second and third nursing illnesses… in a single week. Just when I feel like I’m making progress in the juggling game, I am put back in my place.

Every morning, my one ass cheek has been clinging for life off the side of the bed. So when I heard that my brother was looking to get rid of a king and that my other brother, who just bought a condo, wanted our queen, it was perfect. Plus, my brother’s friend was willing to pick up the king, bring it to our house and take away the queen. Talk about an ideal scenario

This all happened so quickly that we are bed frameless. I’m currently typing this from a mattress and boxspring sitting on my bedroom floor. We held off on a king because a) we didn’t want to spend money on a mattress and b) we hoped to build a bed because c) we didn’t want to spend money on a bed. We wanted to build the farmhouse bed from Pottery Barn…

(via Pottery Barn)

But once we had a mattress (on the floor), I thought maybe we could find an expensive bed frame at Ikea. So we packed up the kid and headed out!

The verdict was… he loved Ikea.

I think this is only the second or third picture that I have of us together. I really need to work on that.

We were pretty disappointed in the bed selection. I couldn’t snap any pictures because, as you see above, someone decided he didn’t want to sit in his car seat anymore so we ended up carrying him around. The only thing we liked was this Bekkestua headboard.

(via Ikea)

It seemed overpriced though, the Ikea website lists $300 for a king headboard alone, though I swear it was $400 something in store. Combined with the frame it it ran over $600! Still not much compared to other stores, but still more than we wanted to spend. Needless to say, we left Ikea empty handed for perhaps the first time ever.

We think we’re going to make Easton like the Travelocity gnome and just take pictures of him in front of random scenes.

Since we had to travel to Philly, by the time we were leaving it was time for the bub’s next meal. We may have spent just as much time in the parking lot as we did in the store.

Yes, his bottle matches his outfit

After striking out in the bed search, here is what I’m thinking. The bedding we have is aqua/white…

But we also have an orange/white duvet cover, so I want to keep things as neutral as possible. I want to be able to change bedding easily if need be (and because I have an accent pillow addiction).

After seeing the upholstered headbard at Ikea, I think maybe I’ll make my own for now. In my dreams I would still like a canopy bed someday, but I know our to-do list is endless and it’s just not a priority now. After browsing Pinterest, I found this headboard/wall color that I’m liking…

(from Bedding Experts via Pinterest)

I’d probably do the headboard a lighter gray like the Ikea one and keep the walls a darker gray/brown/greige color. I’ve always loved patterned headboards, but I think keeping things neutral is the smartest idea for us. I’m also not sure about the tufting and I prefer a straight, more modern headboard. So yeah, I pretty much just like the lighter headboard on a darker wall. As for the frame, we’ll probably just expand the current full sized metal frame in our guest room and rock a bed skirt.

For now, I shall sleep on the floor… sprawled out

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?

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)

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.

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!

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

While we’re on the topic, I’ve been meaning to do a ‘how I choose paint colors’ post since I started this blog. Outside of the blog, it is probably the #1 question I am asked. I’ve gone paint shopping or have visit quite a few people’s homes to help them choose colors, though they don’t always listen to me or they end up not painting at all! I know this is a very poor business model, I won’t be quitting my day job for this one. But the moral of the story is, I don’t think anyone has a fool proof method of choosing paint. It is all a bunch of trial and error that depends on so many variables. Our Wedgewood Gray is a little blue because we overestimated the amount of light the room would get and went one shade darker than we were going to go. But it’s okay, because it’s still pretty close to what we wanted. In fact, I was watching HGTV a few nights ago and commented that I liked a wall color on one of the shows. Mike pointed out that it was our exact family room color, as evidenced by the fact that the TV is mounted on the wall color itself for a side by side comparison. Whoops. But we seem to get the blue/gray feel we were going for more at night than during the day.

So for the bedroom, we decided to take the extra step and pick up some testers. We headed to Lowe’s and paid $2 and change for these things…

Then I pulled out my brush and got to painting! And can I tell you, even a little dabble felt great. I cannot wait to actually paint. I added the two new colors to the old failed Waynesboro Taupe trial area…

The big giant light one is the Oatlands Subtle Taupe.  The top dark one is the ruled out Waynesboro Taupe and the bottom one is the Valspar Smoked Oyster. Not having enough evidence, I added the Oatlands to another wall…

And the Smoked Oyster to the sitting room (where it would go)…

(Please ignore the cats’ scratching post and playhouse. Yes that is a Crate and Barrel box and they love it…)

The verdict? Love the lighter Oatlands, but the Smoked Oyster is too purple. Which is ironic because the Benjamin Moore Smoked Oyster IS purple but this Valspar one looks more brown on the swatch.

The Smoked Oyster on the right is the one on the sitting room wall, doesn’t it look completely different??

For a second opinion, I called upon my always present sidekick, Macky.

“HmMmMM!”

“No like!!”

I’m going to try one more option, Olympic’s slightly more gray versions of these colors. I like the Oatlands Subtle Taupe, but I get nervous when trying to do two different shades between different brands/swatches. I’ve made that mistake before and though they may look like they go well together, it’s tricky to match the undertones. Plus, I want to use Olympic paint regardless, without a doubt. I asked the worker at Lowe’s to color match the Valspar color to Olympic and she told me they couldn’t. I’m pretty sure she was lying. But we might as well try the pre-existing Olympic colors first. The no VOC aspect is huge to us since a) the room is our bedroom and I’d rather not sleep on the couch for a week while the stench leaves b) it’s winter and we can’t open any windows while painting and c) Macky has seizures and we try to keep him away from any and all possible triggers- chemicals being one. We had our downstairs areas painted long before we moved in and in the spring, so we dodged that bullet. But from now on, I’m sticking to no VOC, and I’m thankful Olympic has provided an easily accessible and affordable option!

Back to the drawing board!