Finally, a project I can show you, just not the wide angle photos 🙂 Remember that bookcase we ordered from Target a couple of weeks ago (the Carson 2-shelf bookcase)? I told you I planned to paint the back of it green, like so…

Yes I know, I am an excellent Photoshopper. I’m working on it 😉 Anyway, the bookcase arrived and it took us a while to get to the back of it, so it sat in the baby’s room like this…

I didn’t put anything on it but a fan to keep me cool while working in there because I knew it would all eventually have to be removed anyway.

The problem was that the almost cardboard-like back was absorbing the paint. The first coat of green we put on literally disappeared. Mike ended up having to use 2 coats of the Valspar high performance, low-VOC primer that we used on the unfinished wood boards on the paneled wall. After those 2 coats of primer, we were able use the same Olympic zero VOC paint we used for the closet (Lettuce Alone B68-3)… but we still did about 2-3 coats of that to get to the level of green we wanted.

Needless to say, between on our other projects and whatnot going on, this whole multiple coat process took us a while. Finally on Friday, we were able to attach the back to the bookcase!

It turned out so adorable and I wasted no time filling her up!

The top shelf holds, well, books.

And the bottom shelf holds a basket full of toys.

If only I could keep the toy collection limited to what fits in this basket. It’s already exceeded the basket and takes up a drawer in the closet, as well as an additional storage bin of older aged toys in our spare bedroom. When we realized that we haven’t even bought our child a single toy, nor did we register for any, we realized we need to start working on that playroom ASAP! Mike literally started working on the new office again yesterday so that we can have the old office for baby gear storage. Clutter is my arch nemesis.

The top shelf of the bookcase holds our adult books and that fabulous fan.

I love this fan because it’s 100% metal, even the switch to turn it on and off. It’s the Hunter Classic Table Fan from Target.

Next up is to come up with a gallery wall design to hang over this little bookcase. Off to Michael’s now to search for one part of it so hopefully I can get an idea of an arrangement today!

ps- Yes, still pregnant. 41 weeks tomorrow.

pps- Sorry if you tried to visit on Friday or Saturday and the site was down. Apparently there was a server upgrade we weren’t aware of that took for.ev.er. to fix.

Since I finally put away our Christmas things, I feel as though I need to write out everything we want to get done around here while it’s fresh in my mind. If I could have tackled all of this tonight, I would have. I am so anxious to finally organize this house and make some progress on projects that were put on the back burner when I was busy with school.

Oh, and we have a baby coming in May so many of these items are marked urgent. Some are just marked as “they are bothering us and we’d like to do them ASAP”. Since we realize we have to prioritize (I’m approaching the third trimester here, eek), I’m putting them in the order we’d like to do them.

1. Finish built-in bench in new office

We scratched our heads and shopped for wood this weekend, but hit a standstill when we realized we need to buy a table saw or something. And we’re cheap a–es. Solution pending.

2. Move office furniture in

Mike needs this room to work in and be organized and our goal was to get him somewhat settled in the new office before the baby comes. We’re going to use the furniture we currently have with some potential hacks.

3. Remove wire rack from the baby’s closet, paint, stencil and add closet system

(from Roomzaar via Pinterest)

I put this as first in the baby’s room progress because the closet is the most needed to start to organize some of the stuff we already have. Hanging tiny little clothes in a huge closet is killllling me. Must. Make. Closet. Pretty.

4. Add board and batten to the baby’s room

(via Decorchick)

We plan to add molding high and all the way around the room, like Emily’s living room. Pattern to be determined 🙂

5. Add crown molding to the baby’s room, paint, add furniture, etc.

I know this category is huge and can probably be another to-do ist in itself, but we kinda have to wait until we get through other stages to work this part out. We have furniture in mind and a general idea of where we’re going, so we’ll share as much of it as we can as we go along (being sure not to spill any gender specific details :))

6. Replace playroom carpet

We originally planned to do this before Christmas but that didn’t happen. Since it’s not a space we’ll be using right away, we put the new office and the baby’s room first. But this carpet has got to go. If carpet wasn’t so expensive, we probably would have committed to this already.

7. Add bookcases to playroom

(via Centsational Girl)

We want to add some Ikea bookcases to the wall where the shelving is in the picture above and make them look built-in, like Kate did with hers.

8. Finish up the molding in our entryway

We need to add the box portion underneath our chair rail in the entryway and upstairs hallway. Mike is itching to finish this one but we reeeally need to do the baby’s room first. We’re just dying to get to number 8…

9. Start our gallery wall(s)

(via Sawdust and Paper Scraps)

I’ve shared this inspiration picture from Sandra before and we’ve been slowly accumulating frames to hang all the way throughout our entryway. We haven’t hung any yet because we figured we’d have to take them down to nail into the wall to finish the molding, so we wanted to do #7 first.

10. Build outdoor kitchen

Despite the fact that we’ll have a newborn, we’re hoping to make some progress in our backyard this year. We seeded back there in the fall and we hope to do something with the landscaping and start working on the built-in grill we’ve been dreaming of (and drawing in Paint :))

Um anyone else overwhelmed by this list? I’m about to have a Jessie Spano freak out moment and start screaming “there’s never enough time!!!”….

Say that 3 times fast!

So we’ve already told you that our striped office is becoming a playroom. We’ve been scheming this since we moved in (probably before) so when we painted those stripes it was totally in our plan to do something fun, yet classy, and neutral. I know that kids come with a lot of gear and we wanted a place on the first floor to store things easily. Other than the stripes, I didn’t know what to do storage wise. For one, we have always known that we want to build a window seat by the bay window.

That’s a picture from when we painted those stripes back in March. We figure a nice little cushioned bench there with storage underneath would provide some much needed adult seating. Plus it would be so pretty 🙂

As for toy, book, gadget, whatever storage, I wanted something that didn’t look childish. This room is still the front room in our house and it has double french doors enterting it. I wanted it to be kid friendly yet still flow with the entryway. We received a Pottery Barn Kids catalog a while back and I spotted this little storage system, which was getting closer to what I was thinking…

(via Pottery Barn Kids)

I like the closed and open storage and I love the artwork on the top, but my problem with most playroom specific stuff is that it is so short. I understand that kids are short and it’s meant for them, but lines often cut a room in half. I don’t think some higher shelves for less used things or artwork would hurt anyone 🙂

While reading one of my favorite blogs, Centsational Girl, I saw that she took some Billy bookcases from Ikea and turned them into built-ins. I’ve wanted to do this forever and she has convinced me… and showed how it’s done.

 (via Centsational Girl)

I got all giddy when I saw this and immediately told Mike that WE MUST DO THIS FOR THE PLAYROOM. While we’re not comfortable building bookcases, we’re comfortable adding molding, which is all that needs to be done here. We can throw some baskets in the lower shelves for toy dumping and maybe even keep some decorative things up high. Ever since I saw this, I cannot stop thinking about it. It was the motivation for our Ikea trip last weekend and why I wanted to get a nicer light.

We have time before we’ll probably do much else with this room since the baby won’t be roaming around in there on his/her own for a while. But it will be nice to store things for the time being and have a room for the baby that’s off limits for the cats. You know, since our house is mostly hardwood now 🙂

I’m on a mission… called make playroom functional and fun for kids, yet pretty for adults 🙂

I managed to write 35+ pages of papers since Thanksgiving, so needless to say I’ve been a little busy. However, we do have a few minor things to report on, so why I figured why not throw them all in one post? So here you have it, our random ramblings…

1. It gets dark before we get home from work now and the 3 spare bedrooms do not have lights in them. Taking pictures of the new floors all cleaned up has been difficult. Even more difficult when I finally got a spare minute to take pictures and the camera died on me… and the battery charger was missing… as was the extra camera. Here are the lone pictures of the new floors. This happens to be the new office.

2. The future office will soon be getting more action because this weekend we decided to paint it! We picked out paint then proceeded to run a bunch more errands and by the time we got home, we only had an hour before darkness. The color we chose is Olympic’s Denim. Unfortunately I could only find this tiny thumbnail of the color on Olympic’s site…

Hopefully this weekend when we’re a little less chaotic we’ll get some paint on the walls before the sun goes down. We really need to get a light in that room.

3. Speaking of lights! (you like that segue?) We went to Ikea last weekend to pick up a light I wanted for the playroom (the old office). You know, this room with the stripes…

No we didn’t clear the room out yet, but I chose this picture because you can see that we currently have a ceiling fan in there. We need the fan for whatever room the office is in because all of the hardware we have produces some major heat. We decided to take the ceiling fan from the stripey room and put it upstairs in the new office. To replace the ceiling fan, I wanted something fun, but that would still look classy as it will be seen from the entryway. We picked up this guy…

Of course, he still has to be put together and hung.

4. Speaking of lights! Does that work twice? Anyway our Jonathan Adler giraffe sconces arrived early!

I think I have an idea of what I want to do with the nursery and I’m planning to write something up in the next few days. Right now I’m leaning towards giving the baby the room with 1 window, as it’s known around here. This one…

Bedroom 2 is still a consideration. At first I always imagined using bedroom 2 since it has 2 windows and a walk-in closet. I imagined the pretty window treatments I could have, but I think that bedroom 1 has more wall space for a better furniture arrangement. Decisions decisions.

5. While we’re on the topic of window treatments, the 6 white roman shades that we ordered for our master bedroom came last week. We’ll throw those on the weekend to-do list too since they won’t take very long to install.

I think that pretty much catches you up with what’s been going on around here. Thanks for hanging around through the chaos. I’m looking forward to December 21st when I can finally put my feet up. But then we’re hosting Christmas events on the 22nd and 24th… so maybe I’ll put my feet up on the 26th 🙂

Thank you all for your comments on the post revealing our big announcement! It has been rough juggling a full-time job, 2 graduate courses, writing posts and doing projects for posts… while being ridiculously tired and usually nauseous around 9pm. Today has been one of my worst days…strangely, considering I’m out of the first trimester. Maybe that flu shot I got yesterday me the sleepies? But I always manage to find a little extra time and energy to blog because well, I love doing this 🙂

One of the hardest part of keeping up with the blog while being pregnant hasn’t been the exhaustion or sickness… it’s been the fact that I could not share all of the plans we’ve been working on! We have 3 rooms that will be directly affected by this baby… THREE. And I could not really talk about everything we’ve been working on which was even more challenging.

But I finally can, so here are the preliminary changes that will be going on around here in the next 6 months 🙂

1. Remove carpet in 3 upstairs bedrooms and have hardwood installed

Last year we removed this carpeting from our bedroom and upstairs hallway. We waited on the other three bedrooms to save us some money since we weren’t using them. Now with the baby taking one room and the office being moved to another, we figured it’s time to remove this beast. This is necessary not only because hardwood looks pretty, but well, we have a cat who is fighting a form of kidney cancer and carpeting is our worst enemy these days (besides cancer). Plus Macky loves to shred this particular type of carpet (it’s the less expensive carpet that some moron decided would make a great scratching post material), so we figured we’d start ahead of the game this time and nip any issues in the bud before they come up. Oh and I have a horrible fear of our child being allergic to cats (both Mike and I were as children), so any dander collectors are out! Right now we’re scheduled for flooring install November 21-22 so our hardwoods will be nice and seamless upstairs 🙂

2. Move current office furniture upstairs to make room for playroom

We discussed moving the office and some preliminary plans a few times because that was the only room we could really talk about! The truth is, ever since we bought this house we knew that the downstairs office would one day be a playroom. That is why we never attempted built-ins in this room and instead went for removable Ikea furniture. It is entirely true that this office was no longer working for us, which is why we were moving it upstairs. Several people asked us what would become of the room with the pretty stripes and the answer is now obvious, it will be a playroom and the stripes will of course stay 🙂 The future of the room was indeed considered when we painted the stripes and we knew that it would one day make for a fun playroom.

3. Replace current office/future playroom carpet

This is the carpeting we currently have in the office. We added a bright green area rug, which will be likely moving upstairs with the office furniture to protect our soon to be new hardwoods from our rolling chairs. While we chose this carpet before our house was even built, we had no idea what it would look like in the room and had no idea that we would be painting gray stripes. But that’s not the reason why we have to replace it. The reason is that little orange guy in that picture. It’s one of those things a lot of people don’t talk about but hey! I’m saying it twice in one post! My poor kitty was sick and couldn’t make it to the bathroom at his worst and this carpet took the brunt of it. Anyone who has struggled with animal accidents (especially under heartbreaking circumstances) knows that they are not easy to resolve. I don’t think we can get this carpet back to it’s former glory so we plan to replace it with something more gray, fluffier and hopefully eco-friendly. We have a $200 giftcard to Home Depot that we’re hoping helps us a lot with the cost since this room is relatively small (11×11). No Darwin, we’re not mad at you, we’re happy that you’re still here with us and that you get to be a big brother 🙂 Now it’s time to get a job…

4. Choose a room for the nursery.

No picture here, we have no clue what room to choose of the remaining two. I’ll keep you posted 🙂

5. Decorate!!

Once all of the logistics are done, we can get around to all of the projects we have in mind for the 3 new rooms. We’ve talked a little bit about the new office (which is still very much up in the air), but we also have some built-in solutions for the new playroom including a storage bench and bookcases. The nursery is still a giant question mark but I have begun the epic search for an environmentally friendly crib and will of course keep you all posted on my progress!

I think this is the first time we’ve done anything in this house with a deadline. Though of course, the baby won’t mind if the playroom isn’t completely decorated in time for his/her May arrival (let’s face it, the baby won’t be doing much playing at that point…) But we’re hoping to have all of the new flooring down by the end of the year, then we can clear out the current office and the priority will probably be the baby’s room. I would like to get the built-ins done in the playroom to store the mass amounts of stuff that comes with a baby. The rest of the playroom will probably be evolving as we get used to this new gig we’re taking on 🙂

So that’s the overall, shortened version of what will be going on around here. Now I’m off to Pinterest to find some inspiration. Wait I’m lying… I’m off to go back to bed… 🙂