Right before Halloween, I headed out to our front yard to clean up some weeds and put these mums in actual pots.

It nearly killed me. I was so winded from yanking weeds that before I went into the shower, I told Mike to keep his ears open in case he heard a loud thud. Thud being me falling over.

All of that work and I had not even attempted to pull up the bed of shamrock things that were covering an entire side of our landscaping. I knew I couldn’t yank all of those, so at the time I stuck to the big weeds and secretly hoped the cold weather would kill them. It didn’t. Whaaamp whaaamp.

You see, this year we didn’t put any new mulch down because we put some down late in the season the year before. By the end of this summer, it was noticeable. Weeds were popping up everywhere and with Darwin sick, fast paced summer classes and then getting pregnant, the yard was seriously neglected. Remember this beast?

And this was just the beginning of the weed invasion…

This weekend we want to decorate for Christmas and the appearance of our front yard has been killing me. I knew that with finals coming up at school and the fact that I get tired easily now, I couldn’t do it. So we swallowed our pride and hired someone.

Best. Decision. Ever.

(Please excuse the awful coloring in these pictures, we got a new camera and Mike used it over the weekend. I could not get the settings back to what I normally use and it was freeeezing out this morning. I snapped quickly then ran off to work!)

Not only did this guy pull weeds, but he dug up those stupid flat fern things I’ve hated since we moved in and wanted to dig up, as well as the dead seasonal flowers we planted. Did you notice they were gone? Here’s what they looked like…

Not just that, but he also re-edged all of our flower beds, which the grass was creeping into and we wanted to do this year, but didn’t get a chance to.

Then…

Now…

Those bushes have been looking weak all year. The soil here isn’t good and for some reason they’re not as full as the same exact ones on the other side of the house. We may possibly replace them next year, or at least move them to be less front and center.

Then! He trimmed all of our daylilies so they’re barely visible and trimmed our tall grassy things (which have since blown into a mess with a bad storm we had last night, ugh).

And last but not least, he asked us if we wanted him to remove those piles of dirt hanging around our patio that we never got around to landscaping. Why yes! Yes we do!

The only thing I still want to do is trim these little trees a bit, which I do once or twice a year.

Otherwise, I’m just enjoying this nice clean view 🙂

I honestly have no idea why we didn’t do this sooner considering the hell of a year we’ve had. We were just going to let all of this landscaping go until the spring, until we realized that depending on when it warmed up, I will either be 9 months pregnant or have a newborn. Therefore, the situation would not get any better. At least now we have a clean slate come April/May and Mike can put some fresh mulch down and we can get some new plants in. Because we know that the cleanup phase alone would have taken us 2 months working only on weekends… and that’s without the pending baby. Since this guy did such a good job and depending on when the baby actually comes, maybe we’ll let him do the mulch again. We did our own mulch once and it was not a fun homeowner project. We shall see where life takes us come spring, but at least our yard is no longer embarrassing 🙂

**THIS GIVEAWAY IS NOW CLOSED**

The winner of the RapidRoller is Tammie, lucky commenter #77 who said:

“Wow……the rapid roller is amazing!!! I have a new house and painting is in order since the walls are egg shell white…ewww…..this will make my life easier!!!”

Congratulations Tammie and enjoy your new RapidRoller! 🙂

As promised, this week we will be giving a Black & Decker RapidRoller away to one lucky reader!

The holidays are a great time of year to either freshen up some paint around your house or give one as a gift to your favorite home improvement addict. In case our review didn’t do the roller justice, here is a video courtesy of Black & Decker that shows you everything the roller is capable of…

So for the deets…

• One reader will win a Black & Decker RapidRoller (a $35 value)
• To enter, simply visit Black & Decker on Facebook (facebook.com/blackanddecker) and browse their holiday gift guide (listed on the left side of the page)
• Come back here and leave a comment letting me know what gift from the guide you’d like to receive and why

And the rules…

• Only one entry per email address is allowed
• A winner will be chosen using Random.org
• This giveaway closes on Sunday, December 11th at midnight. Any entries made after that time will not be counted.
• A winner will be announced on Monday, December 12th so check back 🙂

While you’re on the Black & Decker Facebook page, don’t forget to “Like” them and play their Holiday Match & Win game for more chances to win free stuff! Good luck!

ps- We received a RapidRoller ourselves in exchange for hosting this giveaway. And happy first giveaway to us 🙂

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  🙂

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 🙂