Tuesday 20 November 2012

Golden Slumbers

Master E's room is SO close to being done, I can taste it!  Just one wall left, but the biggest and best part of the room is in, and I'm psyched!  Just as a reminder, this is what it looked like before:

























Blah....... minus the little guy in the crib... he's adorable.

And this is that wall now:

























It was sunny on Sunday... but look at that wall!  Glorious! Here's a close-up of the prints:

























It's hard to see with the sun, so here are the originals that were done by my brother [Andy of Arbourne Designs]:



Based on one of my favorite Beatles songs, he took my crappy print idea and made it look about a million times better [that's why he is the graphic designer].  I changed the color on the last print a little because the original that he had done was a little too close to the wall color for my liking.

I think it looks really cute with the mobile that we got from one of D's colleagues at work:

























I also put up some pieces on the window-side.  The mobile came from E's Oma's trip to Germany last year.  The calendar was a gift from my parents, and the canvas was a gift from my work colleagues.  I took E's footprints and then colored in some chevron around them to brighten it up a little bit.

























In the alcove, I added a shelf [made from charity shop books for £1.50 each, and some brackets the landlord left behind with an old Ikea shelf].  We need a place to put bottles and burp cloths, and of course, Yoda.

























Just one last wall to fill, but I know what I want to do.  Just need the supplies!

Tuesday 13 November 2012

All the small things.

Ahh, Blink.  That brings me back to college and my roommate and I listening to the same CD over and over again.  This, however, has nothing to do with that, it was just a good title...

from Souled Objects
Anyway, since the little monkey decided that it was fun to splash in the bath [aka our kitchen sink], it brought us to realize that we have no rug/mat under the sink, so that water goes everywhere.  It's my own fault, really.  I thought it would be fun/funny if he started splashing and having fun in the bath.  Which it is.  It's hilarious, actually [especially when daddy gets soaked and I come out unscathed].  But putting a towel on the floor wasn't cutting it [and it looked ridiculous], so I started looking into getting something to absorb some of the chaos.

I couldn't find anything that I really liked anywhere [that wasn't ridiculously expensive], and I had seen this awesome piece on Pinterest that I had pinned ages ago, and I thought, I could make something like that [obviously it won't be as stunning as these, I'm not delusional]... I can braid hair, so why not material?  Plus, having a boy makes it less likely that I'll be braiding anyone's hair anytime soon.

It was really easy to do.
Step 1: I just took a few of the t-shirts that I have thrown in a box to use for projects [I did a major clean out a month ago or so... I've also packed away all of my maternity clothes, huzzah!], and cut them across the chest, armpit-to-armpit.



















Step 2: I then cut 9 strips of fabric from each of the shirts [I actually added in two more shirts because 5 wasn't quite enough... 7 wasn't enough either, but I'll get to that].



















Step 3: Take three of the strips and tie them together.  Then I looped the fabric around the hook of a metal hanger and braided the fabric until I got to the end and tied another knot.  Letting an infant play with the braided fabric is optional.



















Step 4: Pick a pattern and line up the strips, then run some thread across the braids to attach them all together.

























That's it!  So easy - and washable [since it's just old t-shirts]!  It's a little small for a rug, but it's good enough for now.  If I ever want to add to it I can just cut the thread and add in some more material.  I might cut a little of the anti-slip mat out from under the rug in our living room to keep it from sliding around on the tile, but I'll worry about that later.

























At least that one tile under the sink doesn't get wet when we give the monster his bath!











Thursday 8 November 2012

Accidentally Nautical...

AllAllSo when we moved into this place we knew about the soft blue walls and red/silver damask wallpaper in the living/dining room, but we weren't really sure what we were going to do with it.  This one room was almost as big as our whole previous apartment, so we needed a bit of an upgrade on the furniture.  There is some beautiful [if only slightly uneven] hardwood flooring, which Dan hates, but I LOVE.  We have an unused/blocked off fireplace, so we have a nice little mantle to display all of our little knick-knacks [and hang our stockings from when the time comes in a few short weeks!].   But somehow everything in our living/dining area is blue, red and white, so we've got a bit of a nautical color scheme going on, and if we can keep it clean, it looks pretty nice [though that is really hard to do with a baby...].

We asked our landlords if they wouldn't minds leaving their dining set for us, because for the past three years we were using my old desk as a dining table.  Now we can use the desk as an actual desk, huzzah!  Actually it's used as a table where we keep our phone, printer and take-out menu's [just in case I'm feeling lazy... or if the boy is going crazy...], plus the stroller blocks it now...

Somehow we actually managed to not spend too much money in this room considering that we had to buy all new sofas and chairs.  I was actually originally going to use our old sofa, but re-cover it, and just add on another sofa or a couple of chairs, but we got such a good deal on this set that we could donate our old sofa, and never have to look at it ever again!  We got our sofa set [including a 3-seater sofa, armchair, accent chair and storage footstool] from DFS for £830 total.  It was a floor set that they were trying to get rid of to make room for the new lines coming in, and it was by far the best looking set in the whole place [by miles].  The accent chair doesn't match the room at all, but I am going to buy some fabric to make a slip cover at some point.

The console table behind the sofa is something that I made, based one something that I saw on Young House Love.  I bought two white desk legs [they look like mini-bookshelves] from Ikea for £30 each, and then nailed 4 1"x4"boards to the top to span the two legs [I found these in our shed when we moved in, so we didn't pay for them at all].  I painted the wood white with our leftover trim paint and BAM! Console table for £60!

We got the curtains and pole from Linens Direct for £50 total.  Not bad for sheers, curtains and one pole.  The rug is from Next  [£53.99 inc. shipping] and I've already managed to ruin it [I put it in the washing machine after E peed all over it... turns out the colors ran everywhere].  It doesn't look bad, just a little tie-dyed in the white parts.  We also just bought a couple of anti-slip mats for underneath so it wouldn't slide all over the place [£19.98 for two at Argos].  We had to get a new TV stand, because our old one was too wide [and I turned that into some artworks in the guest bedroom], which we also got at Ikea for only £25.  The only other thing that we bought for this room was a small Billy bookcase from Ikea for £27 [in which to keep all of our boring stuff, i.e. bills and other assorted paperwork]. 


Everything else in the room came out of our old apartment, either the living room, or the bedroom.  I still have a couple things to do in here, like the slipcover for the chair, and finishing up one of the side tables [but that's almost done - and it only took me 4 years!]. D also wants me to 'make his bookcase funky' like I did for mine a few years ago, but that will be another free and easy project, that I can get to during nap time.






















Tuesday 6 November 2012

Week 20 Outtakes

Not many this week either!  We're very quickly running out of backgrounds for my little man, and I now realize that we should have started with smaller objects to lie on at the beginning, but he was so long from the start!  Oh well... it was a pretty plain one this week:



















Funny daddy!



















Why are you doing this to me?



















Oh, mommy's here, too!



















Talking to mommy...



Now it's time to get daddy really involved... but this led to the money-shot:




















I figured it would be nice to document that his hands are constantly in his mouth because of the teeth. 

Also, it's voting day!  So, go out and vote - if we can do it from overseas, you can do it, too!