Mid-Month Progress Report

I just want to take a minute and absorb the fact that there are a full two weeks of September left. I do not have to panic.

Here are where things stand project-wise:

1. Finish re-sizing slip cover for the couch.

I have torn apart all the seams and washed all the pieces to within an inch of their life. Now, I need to lay it on the couch and start pinning, cutting and sewing. Probably start on Tuesday.

2. Finish the basement project

• insulate and seal wall done!
  
• put up wall board done!
  
• paint dresser it went to the curb. Instead, I bought and painted GORM
  
• paint folding table done!
  
• repair or buy new hampers we bought new ones.

3. Paint Master Bedroom

I don't think I am going to do this. I'm really not sure I want to paint it the colour I purchased. I think I'd rather use the paint in the hallways instead. (It's the same colour of paint I used for the front hall, Benjamin Moore's Edgecomb Grey.) The hallway is a massive project though.

What I will do, though, is paint my kitchen cabinets. I want to paint the upper cabinet frame and doors white. That's all. The weather is supposed to be beautiful again this week with unseasonably high temperatures. Going to take full advantage of that!


See? Five doors. That's it. How hard can it be?

4. Schedule repairs for bathroom wall.

They are scheduled. My husband says he'll get it done on his next round of holidays--a week off in October. (That's also when he's scheduled to put up another new wall in the basement. Cross your fingers.)

So, there we have it.

Not at all overwhelming, really.

The endless long-standing Master To Do list--you know the one last updated in November of 2010?-- it's just making me feel antsy to get it done and out of my life. This article --on staging your home for living-- helped, too.

I Said I Would....

I promised my boy about a year ago that I would put his CD holder on the wall.

Today, I finally kept that promise.

The timing is kind of crazy as we finalized the shades of blue and red we'll use in his room today. I put together three combinations of blue and red I thought would work and he picked one of them.

When we paint (which will be in October. I plan to do it on a weekend when he is at Scout Camp) I'll just leave the holes in the wall!

That corner is looking good.

Before:



and now:


Just a bit more work on those baskets in the bookcase and that corner will rock!

Boy's Room: Red and Blue

Currently, my son's walls are yellow, Hawthorn Yellow by Benjamin Moore to be exact. But you'd never know it to look at them.

They are plastered in posters, drawings, a craft or two, pictures cut from cardboard, and even a shot up target and a Yahtzee score card.

I have been searching the web to find better ideas for displaying his stuff. One idea I absolutely love is this one:


I thought I might string it around his walls, about two thirds to three quarters of the way up and then paint a big fat red stripe above it to "anchor" it and give the whole thing a "border."

Something like this with the Dignet "wire" placed at the bottom edge of the stripe:

source: HGTV

In fact, I must have seen this picture before because this is exactly what I was envisioning, from the beige on the walls to the blue comforter on the bed. I found this picture only last night, though.

It turns out, however, that he is more interested in my painting his walls blue than he is in a tidy display of his "art."

So, blue and red? How can this work?

There are lots of ways it doesn't work.

source When my son saw this in Google images, he said he thought it was made from Lego. Need I say more?

I'll spare you the rest of the images of rooms which to me do not work.

It's tough to balance these colours. My son wants a particularly strong blue, too. No sophisticated navy. Nothing pale. No, he wants this:

Big Country Blue by Benjamin Moore.

I was incredibly lucky to stumble upon these two images from different blogs.

The first image is a room designed by Evelyn Benatar.

source: Simplified Bee

The room below was created by a different woman on a different blog. Her son, though three, loves blue and red just as much as my thirteen year old. Moreover, the blue they like is similar.

source: Four Walls and a Roof

These two images tell me that the blue my son has chosen needs to be toned down considerably. It needs a lot more grey in it in order to work. As well, this colour scheme needs a lot of white to keep it from stifling the room. Here, in the second room, the decision was made to restrict the blue to one wall and paint the rest white. That is certainly an option. It makes sense to run the dignet only along one wall.

I can't believe I found this:

source:Cool Kids' Rooms

You know, maybe, this could work.

The Perfect Linen Closet

does not exist.


Remember this?

I absolutely adore those baskets.

I hunted for something similar in my neck of the woods pretty thoroughly last week and couldn't find any decently sized straw coloured baskets-- the ones I found were black. I blame the recent trend to all things grey, black and white. It's a hard industrial look and I doubt it will last, really. It seems to me that people want comfort and cozy these days--when they're buying, that is.

Back to the laundry room. The place I have for it is here: between the pantry shelves and the upright freezer.

what? don't you keep your peacock feathers in your pantry? I suppose you don't keep your spare lamps here, either, then?

I couldn't really find any shelving deep enough. The upright freezer is 24" deep--just a lovely depth to be able to work with to hold the big bulky items I needed to store.

But I couldn't find anything 24" deep except plastic.

Home depot

Not quite the look I had in mind. Not even with baskets.

As some of you suggested, closed storage would be a great way to go here. Wouldn't a nice white cupboard look fabulous?

It would--if I could find something deep enough that wouldn't also put a hole through the bottom of our pockets!

I spent a few hours on-line and my choices narrowed pretty quickly to cabinets 15 1/8" deep like this one with four shelves.

source:home depot $99.00 seemed like a lot to pay for flimsy pressboard and melamine.

The other option was to purchase a bona fide "Wardrobe" closet. They are a respectable depth at 20". But they only have one shelf and a hanging rod. We would have had to drill holes in the sides for shelf supports and then purchase more melamine shelving and cut it to size ourselves. It was just too much work for us right now.

Pricing was in the stratosphere for these things, too. Walmart had one for $219.00. Walmart. Last Friday night I discovered that a local Zellers had similar ones at 40% off--and that put it back into the $100.00 -$120.00 range.

But still.

I want to spend my money (and my husband's time) building and insulating this wall, instead.


So, instead, I now have GORM, from Ikea.

But, mine has an extra shelf and I painted it white. (I don't think I can face another knot of rustic pine.)


Ta da.

We're almost done. The water control switch on the washing machine broke and caused a few floods--which caused some water damage to our brand new walls! We've run some fans to dry things out and we're hoping some primer and paint will cover it up.

As well, the last of the cast iron pipe from the upstairs bath tub clogged and choked up last week--so that has now been sawn out and replaced with plastic. There was water all over the floor on this side of the laundry room, too!

The Whirlwind

I haven't been spending as much time with the kids in their rooms as I would have liked this week. This evening I set the timer for 15 minutes and announced to my son that we were clearing off the top of his desk.


He clearly needed more room!

Well, in order to move items off his desk, we had to move items from his shelves. In moving items from his shelves, we got rid of a lot of small toys, filled a small kitchen bag's worth of garbage, cleared out some drawers, tidied the bulletin board and cleaned up the wall. (I told him he could put everything back up if he wished after a week, but to my surprise, he just took everything down, crumpled it up and threw it away.)

After 45 minutes, we had this:



When I went into his room to take this picture, I said to him, "Hey Dude. Thanks. That was a lot of fun."

and he replied, "Well, it wasn't fun, but I like the result."

Me too.

Laundry room progress.

The wall went up very quickly.

I last left you with our nekkid walls. Fortunately, bat insulation is not hard to find and the next day, before supper, my handy dandy guys had this:


And then, in what seemed like no time at all, we had this:


There's painting and trim work to be done--and the room put back together, but I am thrilled.

It's soooo much better than this yucky panelling.


(By the way, I realised why I might hate it so much. When I was about ten, we lived in Yellowknife in a 14 foot wide house trailer. This kind of paneling was in every room, including my bedroom--which was maybe 6'x 8'

That's me and my dog Sasha, March 1975.

Yep. There it is. The paneling in our laundry room was probably installed in 1975!

Organizing with Kids

It's been slow going.

I'm trying to spend 15 minutes a day with each of them: somehow that is turning out to be difficult.

So far, my daughter and I have dealt with a few clothes and her two nightstands. Today I sent her upstairs to finish vacuuming her floor--and when I joined her--she hadn't started vacuuming-- but she had started sorting the books on her bookcases!


Before:


and after:


I am so proud of her.