Crossing Disciplines: Nursery Edition

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Posted by Rebecca, December 12th, 2011

Remember when I used an outfit of mine to inspire our powder room makeover (which will still haven’t finished)? Well it happened again, sort of, this time with the nursery!

I guess I should explain a little of what I’ve been thinking for the nursery first. I haven’t really had a chance to put my thoughts here on the ol’ blog, so here it goes. First, Mike and I will be finding out the gender of our baby next week. Second, we are not telling a soul. Many people have asked me what this means for the nursery, assuming that when we paint the room, everyone is going to figure out the gender. Come on guys, did you think we’d be that easy to crack? 🙂

When we say we’re not planning on painting the walls a gender specific color, everyone assumes we’re going with a yellow ducky, green frog or brown bear themed room (not that there is anything wrong with any of those). But, what we plan to do is paint the walls a neutral gray/taupe/greige (TBD), add some tall board and batten paneling around the entire room and keep all of the same furniture regardless of whether the baby is a she or a he.

Molding Inspiration via Decor Chick

We figure that is going to take us quite a bit of time, so everyone will be filled in with those updates as they happen (we also have some plans for stenciling the ceiling, yaaay!) Most of our gender specific elements will come in the form of textiles: The curtains, area rug, sheets, changing pad cover, etc. Those are all things we can buy/make in advance and add at the very last minute. So no, no one will be finding out the gender before our baby arrives 🙂

I will go into more detail with what we want to do furniture, bedding, area rug and curtain-wise another day, but for now, I just wanted to share my general inspiration. Which goes back to how I started this post, which is with fashion!

I’ve been on the lookout for a Kate Spade baby bag. Read: I love Kate Spade. I’ve scoped out the outlet and I’ve been stalking the store and the website for sample sales. In the process, I’ve noticed and fallen in love with her latest color campaign, this fabulous multi-colored stripe.

Lately I’ve been loving all sorts of bright and fun things on Pinterest so when I found out I was pregnant, I knew I wanted bright colors. I wanted bold pinks and purples, or blues and greens. I had just never seen a bunch of bold colors together that was done well that sort of hit the nail on the head for me. And then Kate saved me.

iPhone 4 cases, $35 each

Flying Colors Idiom Bangle, $58

Live Colorfully Medium Heddy, $70

Live Colorfully Gift Set, $30

There are so many great colors to pull out of all of these designs. The general plan is to use two gender neutral-ish colors, maybe teal and yellow? Maybe orange and teal? Then throw in some gender specific ones like pink and purple or blue and green to complete my bright and classy nursery. I hope to find a lot of great fabrics in different prints to bring in a lot of fun elements to the room. After all, it is for a child.


So yes, our boring neutral walls, combined with a playful, bold color scheme of accents, I promise will not be boring for our baby.

Yes that’s me there smiling, complete with disturbingly creepy smile. Drawing in Photoshop (which I am still a rookie at), with laptop touch pad is not the easiest. But it’s comical…

Of course, as with any home improvement project, it’s going to be a process that won’t be completed in a day. And sorry, we won’t be sharing the final reveal here until after the baby is born, but I think we have plenty of fun projects up our sleeves to keep you entertained for the next 4 months 🙂

All item images, as well as stripey images via Kate Spade

Ps- I announced the winner of the Black & Decker Rapid Roller giveaway! Check the post for an update!

Rapid-I AM A DAMN GOOD-Roller

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Posted by Michael, December 5th, 2011

A couple of weeks ago, Rebecca was contacted by a representative from Black & Decker who asked if we would like to try out one of their products. We decided to paint office 2.0 over the weekend using the RapidRoller they so kindly sent us. I have to be honest, when the RapidRoller arrived I wasn’t entirely excited to use it. Lets face it, painting is not fun — and painting with fancy products (especially consumer grade products) never works out for us. They’re often cheap and end up causing more work than what they were designed to do (yeah we had some bad experiences with gadgets when painting our stripes). So it’s safe to say I went into this thing just waiting for it to be an epic fail. I cannot believe I just said epic fail.

Setting up the roller consisted of maybe 3-4 easy steps. But the instructions confused me. Probably because I can’t follow directions and steps in numbered order. I’m special, I like to skip around. But when I stepped back and gave it some thought (actually read the directions in the order they suggest), I realized how truly easy it would be to set this bad boy up.

Then it came time to hook the roller up to the paint can and again, I must be honest – I was expecting for this thing to shoot paint all over me. But much to my surprise, the roller sucked a good amount of paint into its handle (see that blue stuff in there?!) and I was ready to paint.

For paint, we went with our usual choice of Olympic no-VOC paint. The color we chose was called Denim, a dark navy blue with some gray undertones.

To draw paint from the handle to the roller, you press the trigger and you’re set. As you are rolling, you’ll notice the need for more paint. My instinct at first was to put the roller down and go into the tray for more. But with this tool, you just pull the trigger and more paint gets sent to the roller. Going back to when the box arrived, I was expecting paint to be all over the place when the trigger was pulled. Once again, the tool proved me wrong. No mess and a clean Mike. Shocking considering I usually have paint all over me when doing projects like this.

The paint went on quite nice with the roller, but I’ll still have to do some touch up work since we used such a dark color. I guess I can’t get off that easy when painting! The roller does have a spatter shield, which is nothing revolutionary but I never used one before. It worked like a charm and prevented quite a few drips and splatters.

So best thing ever? This thing has a kickstand. No more worrying about rollers falling over and sending paint everywhere while you take a break (or in my case, a slice of cold pizza). Why hasn’t the kickstand thing been done before?

via One Project Closer because I forgot to take kickstand pictures.

Here is my only complaint. When the entire handle is filled with paint, it is incredibly heavy compared to a traditional roller (it sucks up about 1/4 of a gallon of paint at a time). But I get it; the RapidRoller gives you the added bonus of barely ever having to refill with paint (the paint is stored in the handle) but with a little more muscle on your part (to lift the handle filled with the paint). I don’t think the added weight is anything that will hinder your painting process, but you’ll feel it. Rebecca stuck to her usual edging process, but I don’t think she would have lasted long rolling. Then again she gets winded when walking up the stairs these days…

I can’t really comment on the pivoting head. I tried rotating the head when getting close to the ceiling, but it takes some adjustment to feel comfortable rolling horizontally. It seemed to have worked but I wanted to go the other way with it, like I was before and how I’m used to naturally rolling. And because I have the attention span of a 3 year old, I reverted back to the traditional approach almost immediately.

Clean up was alright. It’s an easy process, but you’ll be there for a solid twenty minutes. I was worried that if I didn’t clean this thing right, it wouldn’t work the next time around. So I patiently cleaned the roller. It all comes apart quite easily and it’s just a matter of soaking some things and rinsing others as the directions indicate.

In the end though, we painted the office probably an hour quicker than we normally would with traditional rollers and paint trays. But 20 of those minutes previously saved then goes to cleaning the tool after use (typically we buy disposable rollers and trays). I’d say we saved a solid 40 minutes using the tool, plus the time we would have spent cleaning up paint drips. Also, throw in the time I normally spend washing paint out of my hair and buying new t-shirts because I dripped on them. Maybe we’ll up the time saved back to an hour then! Not really a game changer when you’ve committed to painting a room, but lets face it, painting sucks and if something helps me save time when painting, I’m all for it.

::drum roll:: Here’s our finished product, before some touch ups we have to do (some areas are a little streaky)…

We’re very happy with the color and our process was made much easier by the fact that we didn’t have to paint around baseboards! We’re planning on adding taller baseboards in here to match the rest of the house (the builder gave us tiny ones in the spare bedrooms).

We’re thankful that the people at Black & Decker sent us the RapidRoller to give us the kick in the arse we needed to paint this room. And for the gadget that made this job less time consuming when we are so pressed for time this month!

If you are pressed for time like us but want to paint a room, you’re in luck! On Wednesday (after Rebecca finishes up her final presentation tomorrow night), we will be hosting a giveaway where one lucky reader will win a RapidRoller! Be sure to come back to enter  🙂

Fall Fail

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Posted by Rebecca, October 17th, 2011

This weekend, one of my main goals was to finish up some fall decorating around here. You can imagine my excitement as I finished my homework relatively early on Sunday (around 3, since we were at Darwin’s weekly vet appointment from 11-1). The minute I finished, I hiked myself down to the basement to fish out my beloved fall wreath. You remember the one, with the pretty orangey berries from Crate & Barrel that looked so nice on my door last year…

Well, something happened, remember Hurricane Irene and her nasty basement flood?

Well, this fall wreath lived in the office for probably, hm, 8 months.  I couldn’t remember where I put the nice sturdy box it came in, so it stayed put until I finally dug the box out. Buuuut, I didn’t remember doing this.  I thought for sure that wreath was separated from it’s box, thinking Mike got sick of looking at it in the office and just put it in the basement. Do you see where this is going?

There was a wreath box, in a plastic bag, in the basement through the flood.  #1. It was in plastic, sure to be dry! #2. I was lazy and the wreath wasn’t in there anyway, right? Right?? Wrong. When I didn’t spot my wreath yesterday I grabbed the plastic bag with the box in it only to discover that it was heavy. Heavier than an empty box should be. The box was moldy, but I thought maybe the wreath was spared.

What I saw was so disturbing that I only glanced. Not only did water get through the plastic bag, but mold had viciously attacked my beloved wreath. I’m talking I couldn’t even fully open the box because I was scared for my health, mold. I was so upset that I hadn’t realized the wreath was in there or that the box got wet. I mean there were cardboard boxes down there that got wet and didn’t get an ounce of mold. I’m guessing that the plastic bag hindered rather than helped the situation.

So I was wreathless. And upset. It was nearly 4 and all I had accomplished was finding a couple of spiders (huuuge spiders in our basement, btw).  Rather than sulk over a wasted weekend, Mike and I ran out to find another wreath. We first checked the Crate & Barrel website, but I’m not liking any of their wreaths this year. We headed to Target, with no luck there either. I also thought I could pick up the ottoman I’ve been eyeing at Target, but that was sold out of every store in our area. I had a serious whaaamp whaaaamp strike out shopping trip.

I did manage to pick up some mums last weekend, though I have yet to put them in actual pots.

When I took these pictures today, I realized that my mums aren’t looking so hot. They were so pretty, a pretty purple, deep orange and white. We’ve had a lot of rain lately so I thought maybe they got too wet, but the soil feels dry? I’m not sure what to do with them, I am a notorious plant killer 🙁

So here’s where I am…a bunch of pot-less mums, a wreath-less door and a single pumpkin (our CSA farm fell victim to the bad pumpkin season so we got a lot less than last year).

I did pick up a single game changer at Crate & Barrel. Meet the vine gourd I mentioned here.

I mixed him in on the entryway table with the round pumpkins I bought last year, which C&B still has if anyone is interested. No, they don’t still carry my wreath, but vine pumpkins they have (no, I’m not bitter).

I only got one small gourd because I thought the little round ones would offset it well.

I have a large pumpkin from last year that I stuck on the ottoman under the table for now. (ps- I swear I just mopped my floors and the direct sunlight is dark floors’ worst enemy)

Wait, ottoman under the entryway table? Yes, I bought this little storage ottoman from TJMaxx weeks ago but never blogged about it. It’s a little too small for the table and probably isn’t staying, though the pumpkin balances the size well!

That’s about all I managed to get done around here for fall. Maybe next weekend I’ll have more luck finding a fall wreath and maybe my mums will liven up again? A girl can dream.

ps- Here’s how I used the vine pumpkins last year and here is the outside of the house decked out for fall a year ago!

What You Know Bout That

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Posted by Michael, September 28th, 2011

These last few days, Rebecca has been talking about doing a frequently asked questions post.  She planned to do this tonight.  I just went to the family room and she’s sound asleep; completely exhausted from homework and class.  So here goes… just my version… and not necessarily about our house, our projects, etc.

Stamped concrete?  Wood plank stamp?  How much and where do I get the stamp?

All said and done, I believe it ran us just about $10-$11 per square foot to do the concrete patio with the wood stamp.  We had toyed with the idea of doing a wood deck, but in the end, we decided to go concrete patio.  We had found pictures online of a patio that we swore was a wood deck.  And sure enough, it was just stamped concrete with a dark stain.  It absolutely blew our minds.  And so, we knew we’d make the best decision going with the wood plank stamp.

We used a local concrete contractor who was absolutely fantastic.  As for where you can buy the stamp?  I’m not 100% sure, but it looks like you can order it from these guys.

How is Darwin?

Darwin, Diggy, D, Pickles… whatever his name is today, is doing absolutely fantastic.  His cancer is in remission and he’s back to normal.  Actually, he’s better than normal.  Diggy is doing things we either forgot about or are completely new.  He has an abundance of energy, he’s wrestling with Macky and chasing after Mowie.  It’s absolutely amazing how well he is doing and we are so incredibly grateful.

Lately, D has been loving the new couch and cuddling into me as we watch Jersey Shore television.  The little guy actually has his Halloween costume all picked out and ready to go!

What do you and Rebecca do for a living?

I work for a large financial firm where I kinda-sorta administer the content of an internal search engine of sorts.  I would go into what I do for them, but honestly, you’d just sit there confused and be all like, ok so what do you do again?

As for Rebecca, she works for a [not sure if I’m allowed to tell you] company where she does a boatload of statistical analysis.   She comes home at night and tells me all about her day — from what she did in Excel and SAS to how she did such and such analysis.  And I’m all like, ok so what do you do again?

Don’t you also have a music website?

I do!  My partner (What up!) and I run/manage/develop the music community, SongMeanings, where we encourage discussion around lyrics.   It’s been a bit of a side-job for what feels like forever, but has been demanding more and more of my attention each and every day.  We recently licensed over 1 million lyrics from the various record labels, and we pull in about 30-40 million page views per month.

This one time at band camp I filled out one of those ‘Make a donation, write your name on this card’ things and I wrote ‘SONGMEANINGS.NET’ on it.  The employees were all, OMG YOU RUN SONGMEANINGS!  And I was all like, yeah I do — CAN I GET THIS ICE CREAM FOR FREE?

(Rebecca’s comment: We didn’t get the ice cream for free, but Mike felt like Beiber for the night because a bunch of teenage girls knew who he was….)

Did you guys ever paint that newly constructed wall in your master bedroom?

Nope.  We just LOVE looking at drywall as we drift off to sleep each night.  End sarcasm.

3 cats?  Are you crazy cat people?

Yup!  And proud!  Here’s a little ditty about Jack Macky and Diane Sunny.  We found Macky one random day in a driveway, he was less than a half pound, nearly dead and covered in all sorts of bugs.  We immediately brought him to the vet where she said “EW!” and told us he probably won’t make it.  5 years later and Macky is 20 pounds (what Vet, what!).  Sunny came home with us about two weeks later; he was one of Macky’s litter-mates.  He was bright orange, incredibly fluffy and the name Sunny was all too perfect.

One day at Rebecca’s parents house, a cat randomly started crying non-stop at their door.  She was thin, declawed (not cool previous owners, not cool) and was losing her fur from a flea allergy.  We nursed her back to health and then took her in after no one came looking for her.  Oh, we named her Mowie because all she was doing was meow-ing the entire time.

Our life was perfect with these 3 cats for several months.  Then Sunny very randomly contracted feline panleukopenia.  We immediately brought him to an emergency hospital and we fought the virus for two weeks.  After several surgeries, blood transfusions and Sunny telling us he had enough, we made the decision to send him to kitty heaven.   Our little family was devastated.

Several months went by while we mourned Sunny.  Macky would cry non-stop every night looking for his brother.  Mowie wanted (and still wants) nothing to do with him.  Needless to say, Macky was keeping us up every night.

One day, I stumbled upon a cute little orange guy on Petfinder and I fell in love — but we weren’t ready or we thought we weren’t ready.   Then we discovered he had CH, a neurological condition that affected some of his motor skills (he has a very mild, barely noticeable case though).  After doing some research, we found out that CH is caused by the mother having panleukopenia — better known as the virus that Sunny passed away from.  We took this as a bit of a sign and adopted Darwin (see photo as Coke box above)

Here is a picture of Sunny in all his fluffy orangeness.  Before getting sick, Sunny was 19lbs.  He was the original big guy in our family and we credit him with keeping an eye out for Darwin through his cancer.

You don’t eat meat?  I don’t understand how anyone can not eat meat! LOUD NOISES!

We’ve been pretty much meat-free for several years now.  However, whenever I’m with Brian (SongMeanings’ partner) I end up eating meat like the time we were in Philadelphia and had cheesesteaks and also the time in San Francisco when I ate, well, something that was meat.  He’s that friend you have from high school where whenever you’re with them, you turn into your high school self.  (Oh come on, you know that How I Met Your Mother episode.)  But in my case, I eat meat.  But Rebecca hasn’t strayed.

I don’t consider myself a vegetarian.  I just do my best to not eat meat.  And you know what?  I actually enjoy it.  Sure I miss the comfort foods we grew up with, but otherwise, it has made me try new meals and dishes. I actually wrote a series of posts for a while with vegetarian recipes, you can read them here.

Well folks, that is it for me for tonight.  I know Rebecca has several other questions she wants to answer so stay tuned… whenever she wakes up!

Four Paintings are Better Than One

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Posted by Rebecca, July 27th, 2011

I’m itching to do the next round of the casa tour in the kitchen, but Mike is currently cooking and it’s functioning as a part-time kitty oncology unit…

I hate fluid drips. And we’re now doing them twice a day. Grr.

Anyway, I decided to jump into the dining room next since I have a project lined up for that room this weekend.

Here’s what the place looked like when we moved in…

We painted the dining room days after we moved in and bought a Stornas table and buffet from Ikea shortly after. The chairs were a months long saga of searching, ordering, then reordering, but we’re very happy with our Target Avington Stripe Parson’s chairs 🙂

We’re not fans of those columns and hopefully they’re out of there someday! The builder gave us the chair rail in the dining room and we added the boxes underneath (or rather we had someone do it since we hadn’t yet mastered the nail gun). The wine racks are from Ikea and we had them in our condo.

Mike added speakers in this room and the living room so we have some music when we have large groups of people eating over. The mirror is also from Ikea and the light fixtures are from Home Depot. We fell in love with the lights before we bought the house, but they’re on their way out. They probably inspired this room the most in the beginning, but as it’s grown and evolved (and we have too) I think we need less square and more round elements in the room. So I’m planning on adding large, white, round lamps (with maybe a blue base?) and 1 (or 2!) large white drum pendants over the table.

We’ll either stick the old fixtures on Ebay or Craigslist, or save them for the basement. Either way, we’re not in a rush to get rid of them right now.

We really love how they make the space seem like a swanky restaurant more than a dining room, but as you can see in that last picture, the proportion of the lamps to mirror is off. They’re too short, mirror is too big, mirror is too square, lamps are also square, molding is white, lamps are off-white. You get the idea.

Here’s the table decked out for Thanksgiving…

And for Christmas…

The only year round decoration (and the only picture hanging in the entire house!) resides in this room. I got it at Kohl’s for dirt cheap when we moved in and I figured I could always change out the print and reuse the square and double matted (!) frame for the $15 or so it was.

Since we have a serious lack of art and the scale of the mirror is irking me, I decided to pick up four 12″x12″ canvases in Michael’s a couple of weeks ago. I haven’t painted anything in years and I thought this room could use some abstract landscape art. I think that two on either side of the mirror will make the buffet wall look much more subtantial.

To make sure I wasn’t crazy, I chopped up some pieces of paper to get the size of the canvases and taped them to the wall.

Once we have taller, more substantial lamps, I think it will layer nicely.

I think one of my favorite aspects of this room is that not a single thing in here was expensive. The table and buffet were being discontinued in the stain we bought, so they were $199 each. They are solid wood and the table has two leaves that extend the table to fit 12+ people. The target chairs were about $65 each and they had free shipping. The curtains are from Target, wine racks from Ikea and that’s about it! Classy doesn’t have to be pricey 🙂

ps- What happens when you mix an almost 20lb cat and a curtain rod?

No my camera is not crooked, the rod is. Macky has pulled it partially out of the wall. Someone please tell him that he’s 5 and this type behavior is no longer age appropriate?

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