THE NURSERY It’s finally time to reveal the nursery we’ve created for our baby girl. Yesterday marked my 38th week being pregnant, which means I have a maximum of three weeks left (that’s a week extra if she’s late). Your … Continue reading
So, mine and my husband’s goal to have everything ready for baby by Feb. 4 (a month before our due date) is so close to being met. In addition to painting the nursery after finding out the gender, another goal … Continue reading
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So its only been four months since we moved into our new home, even though it feels like a year. Working ourselves a little too hard every weekend… we had/have a goal to get every room painted (we’ll see), crown molding and … Continue reading
Not much to explain with this post, but I thought I’d show you what I’ve been up to since my last “nesting update” … we relocated the guest room furniture and decor in the now nursery to another room. Then, … Continue reading
Ok so maybe I’m nesting or maybe I’m just the girl who gets Spring Cleaning Fever a tad later in the year, but either way, I’m full-throttle into cleaning, re-organizing, purging and de-cluttering mode.
I’d say decorating but really I don’t think this counts as there is no furniture involved (if I could afford to, I’d completely decorate and furnish the front living room, replace or reupholster the dining room table set and also get a buffet piece for in there, and buy a king mattress for the master…..but we have to focus on the nursery and the new guest room first).
So anyway, here’s what I’ve been up to the past couple of weekends around the house in preparations for Baby Irvin’s arrival:
1) Spruce up the backyard. Check.
2) Begin the transition from guest room to baby room. Meaning, EMPTY CLOSET, RELOCATE ITEMS, FIND SPOT FOR THEM ELSEWHERE IN HOUSE. Also know as… closet re-organizing mania. See pictures.
Baby Irvin’s closet: newly emptied and cleaned, save for baby’s first little things.
To get to where I could empty the closet, I had to relocate my entire linen storage (it was previously in the guest room), relocate my golf clothes, and soft shells and sweatshirts; and I took the opportunity to purge items I didn’t need or use and could donate. Here’s a peek at my new linen closet and more … spiffy with labels and all!
I know. As organized as I am, I refuse to take the time to fold sheets properly. Or blankets for that matter. This is the best I can do.
As a result of emptying one closet, this one got re-organized. Now my scarves are neatly hung for me to grab on a whim this fall/winter when I grab a jacket or coat.
Another closet that fell prey to my re-organizing. This has always held some of my shoes and misc. clothes. Now it will be my designated MATERNITY CLOSET! Yay!
3) Deep clean the entire house.
4) Tidy. De-clutter. Re-arrange knick-knacks.
5) Finally frame some wedding photos after 5 years (instead of buying new frames like I wanted to, I re-used some boring-but-satisfactory frames I found in a box from my college townhouse.
6) Organize and decorate the office built-in in our master bedroom. For the past two years, it’s been a wasteland of clean and dirty laundry, new and old mail, a to-shred mail pile, a to-file mail pile, dog toys, random cords to electronics, etc. A MESS. AND MY WORST NIGHTMARE. Finally, I cleared it all off. Sorted, shredded, cleaned, filed, and headed to Target to buy some cute desk accessories. Here’s the end result of that over-due project (sorry no before photo!):
I labeled the slots and storage boxes and such to help keep us accountable!
My amazing co-workers bought me this NEST Candle in “Moss & Mint” and it’s the best, most relaxing bedroom candle ever. NEST Candles are pretty pricey but well worth it! Fortunately, this fragrance doesn’t seem to bother my allergy-prone hubby.
Oh, and I’m OBSESSED with my small glass lamps. $60/2 at Target. DEAL!
I chose to do a his and hers side, where the books under each lamp are gender-friendly, and themed to our aesthetics (kind of). Note: Michael’s sniper, war, politics and business books and my childhood keepsake fairytale books, personal memoir books, and a motivational, personal enhancement book … fits us too a “T”!
These baskets – which I placed at both sides of our built-in – correspond with our drawers for clothes in the built-in. I bought these for us to store clean laundry that we’re too lazy to put up at the moment. If the basket is full, I told Michael, too bad, time to put it all away. LOL. We’ll see how long that lasts.
ta-da! clean, peaceful room with a view of our serene backyard!
Now, the next two projects on my brain are….
1) Paint the mud room and decorate it. (No picture, sorry). Ever since we got broken into and the door had to be replaced…no, scratch that…ever since we moved in and I’ve had to live with this weird wallpaper that you’d have to see to understand, I’ve been waiting to paint over it. We will be DIY painting over wallpaper … stay tuned for the post!
2) Renovate and customize our media cabinet in the main living room – aka, the blue room – to fit modern TVs and such. We’ve been talking about doing this since we moved in too and now I’m super motivated to get this eye-sore of a TV stand from our college days out of the house and off the floor, so Baby Irvin has more room to spread out and play. And so mama and dada can buy a 70″ TV haha! Ok, that’ll actually have to wait a while but it’s def. in my future plans for this room too.
Until then…
This weekend in Little Rock, the weather was gorgeous. After a hard, long rain on Friday, we woke up Saturday to fall temperatures, sunshine and a cool breeze. It was heaven. I started my weekend with Mrs. Aubri Duran – … Continue reading
It’s no secret that we got a puppy. A super cute one named Dexter. He’s a golden doodle and an absolute doll! He’s super friendly and when you meet him for the first time he will make you feel so special and lick you to death. I love seeing him so friendly to everyone he meets!
Aside from being on cloud 9 from all the cuteness in our house puppies are a lot of hard work! I don’t think Matt and I really understood when people tried to tell us. We probably thought “oh you just had a difficult dog… or it’s just hard for you but we will make it work!” Oh how little did we know! The first few nights (and days) were rough on all of us. Dexter whined or cried every few hours and he had lots of accidents (one #2 accident I saw coming and caught in mid air with my hand towel as I was washing my face… my husband was hysterically laughing).
With that said everything is SO much better now. He sleeps all night in his crate but still wakes up just a little before we would prefer 🙂 He hasn’t had an accident in days but this is partly learning on our part too. We know about how long he can wait until he needs to go again.
The biggest challenge we still deal with is chewing and biting (because he needs something to chew on and that might be you!). He hasn’t destroyed anything but we’ve given him less freedom to roam so he won’t. We also try to make him tired at night by taking him on walks around the neighbor. Thankfully the weather is perfect for this right now and we’ve got a great backyard for him to do lots of running and playing.
We seriously can’t handle the cuteness sometimes. We just smother him with kisses and tummy rubs. But I’m glad the puppy stage is just a “stage” and we get to see what grown up Dexter will be like someday. Hopefully he’s still his friendly, adorable self but just a bit calmer 🙂
PS I’ll take any and all puppy advice out there!
Q: Easiest & Affordable way to change the look of your home?
A: Paint
Here are a few amazing room transformations and furniture makeovers with paint. FYI, these are not images of my home, as it will be a work in progress for the next couple years.
Sherwin Williams has a sale about 2 or 3 times a year with their paint being 40% off, and about 3 weeks before we were to move into our new home, I went ahead and bought about 27 cans during their awesome sale! Something people don’t know, is that you can buy their “paint in the can” without having color added. Then, at a later date when you have decided on your colors…. bring the paint back & they will add color (free of course, since its already been paid for at an earlier date.) Also, if you estimated more paint than necessary, you can return it (with receipt), unless of course you have added the color to it. (I believe there is a 60 day return policy, so just figure it out sooner than later.)
Another paint estimated tidbit: Apparently, when you have popcorn removed from ceilings, its likely to need double the amount of ceiling paint you actually think is necessary, because the ceiling will just drink it up.
About a week ago, I mentioned reader, that there would be pictures of my updated laundry room…but guess what? I’m not finished. Between working full time, and driving about 2 and a half hours a day for this job…I am usually exhausted when I finally get home at 6:30 in the evening. My husband and I have been trying to push through our “paint reno” after work everyday, but the process has been slow going.
Today I just have some progress pictures…but next week I promise, I will have images of our finished “completed for now” master closet & laundry room.
Goal for this week: Finish painting ALL closets & complete laundry room
Ongoing Project: Painting Living Area, Question Room, Kitchen, & all bedrooms
I feel like summer is slipping through my fingers with all this talk about school starting (FYI for the first time in our marriage Matt is NOT starting school this fall… woohoo!) and this amazing fall like weather. Don’t get me wrong I LOVE the fall. I can’t wait for pumpkin lattes, mums on my front porch and college football but that’s for a different post. Today I want to talk about some of my favorites things from this summer.
1. Grilling: Every house needs some kind of grill, right?! Well since we’ve been in an apartment the past 4+ years we’ve been holding out on a proper grill till now. We found a great deal on one at Home Depot and use it several times a week. And lucky for me Matt has seriously mastered the perfect grilled chicken, steak and burgers. I’m not even kidding. I’m going to be sad when it’s too cold to eat like this for dinner every meal.
2. Crepe Myrtles: Also since buying house and learning about the world of keeping up with a lawn I have fallen in love with Crepe Myrtles. Pictured above are the beautiful ones in front of our house. I love laying on our bed or sitting on our front porch swing (when it’s a little cooler) and just staring at all the pretty colors. But really I’m not just a fan of my own Crepe Myrtles, I love seeing these colorful trees all over town!
3. La Croix: I can not get enough of this drink. I drink one at least once a day. Lindsay introduced me to the lime and coconut flavor. I TRY to keep the sugary drinks to a minimum (I save the sugar for my coffee… it’s a must!) but with no sugar and no caffeine I can drink these, as Lindsay would say, “like it’s going out of style.”
4. Fresh produce: Summer can bring some incredibly hot heat but the gift of fresh produce almost makes it worth it. Just as I mentioned above about our love for grilling this summer it also goes with our love to grill or roast summer veggies. We love tomatoes, corn, squash, zucchini, okra, bell peppers, cucumbers and probably whatever else you put in front of us. Thankfully we’ve gotten most of our produces from either our neighbor’s garden (who also happens to be our pastor and his wife) or my in-laws garden.
5. Salsa: I make Pioneer Women’s restaurant salsa about once a week. It makes a big batch and it’s my go-to snack. I’ll tweak her recipe here and there with making it a little warmer but it’s a definite staple to my summer eating.
Summer is almost gone so be sure to enjoy those things you love most about summer while you still can!
Aubri
Among a million other things going on in our lives the past few months buying house is one of the big ones! We LOVE our house and thought it was the cutest thing we’ve ever seen. We love the front porch, back porch, the layout, the neighborhood, the big yard and the potential to really make it our own. But by no means is it perfect… it does not have my dream Pinterest kitchen or my dream bathroom or even the right shade of gray on the walls but we will make it ours in time.
Sorry about the rainy pic. It’s been raining like crazy in Little Rock lately. Yay for green grass!
I’ve been working hard at these flower beds!
We’ve got several home improvement projects lined up for the next couple of months. First up, take off the popcorn ceilings and replacing the carpet. It might not sound like that big of a project but check out Matt below in our stairwell trying to get to the popcorn ceiling… yikes!
I love how just last week Susanna wrote about how she got her popcorn ceilings removed BEFORE they moved in. I couldn’t agree more! If you can get it done before you move in, do it. We just didn’t have that kind of time because we were moving from a different state and needed somewhere to live (with all our stuff) when we got here.
This weekend we got a LOT of head way on our to-do list. Check out the photos below!
If you’d like to see Matt scrape off the popcorn ceilings live check out my Instagram post. Don’t worry we didn’t try anything fancy, we tried to stay focused! However, at the beginning of the day I was not excited about the work ahead but by the end of the day I felt very accomplished.
While we are proud of our progress from this weekend we’ve still got a ways to go! Living in a renovation space is not my favorite thing (EVERYTHING gets dusty) but seeing the progress is encouraging! I will keep y’all updated on the status every few weeks.
Stay tuned!
mrs. and the misc. 