Before and After

,

A Home Project!

,

On the surface, it feels like you should be able to get all kinds of things done to your house, now that all we do is stay home. In reality, nothing is happening. Finding time to clean our floors seems impossible, let alone do all the home improvement projects my brain can dream up. So it is a VERY BIG THING that we somehow scraped together lunch breaks and half days and minutes here and there to get a big project done.

It’s way scaled back from my original plan, but we’ll call this Phase One. It’s a big improvement from what was there, super pretty and definitely functional. But I might put a hold on any other big projects for a while. It turns out doing these things in a pandemic with two small children is not easy.

We’ll get into the details, but first, a before and after!

, ,

Then and Now

, ,

Who wants a fun post, full of pictures, to take their minds off all the crazy stuff in the news lately? I know I do!

We’ve obviously seen how quickly life can change when big things happen. Everything seems uncertain now, and we’re not really sure what’s going to be happening in the next few months. Instead of speculating on that, I’m going to focus on how life changes slowly, over the course of a year.

, , ,

Hacked Play Kitchen

, , ,

Okay we all know I can go a little overboard at times, yes? And sometimes I’ll admit that I’m not sure if I can actually pull off what I’ve dreamed up or not. This was one of those projects.

Almost a year ago we started talking about getting E a play kitchen. I spent some time looking at what was out there, and trying to decide what we wanted. A lot of them were pretty, but a bit plastic, and I wasn’t sure how well they’d hold up.

Outside!

Once E learned this word, we were done. With his big brown eyes and cute little voice, he jumps up and down and declares “Outside! Outside!” Now that it’s not freezing and a huge undertaking to get us all out, we agree more often. And we’ve been taking steps to make it easier and more fun to be in our yard too.

We recently fenced in our porch, which has become a toddler’s wonderland. There’s a play structure with a slide, and a sandbox, and even a chair for Mama. We’re working on our patio still, but this year we finally did something I’ve been wanting to do since we moved in.

, ,

Have a Seat

, ,

If you've been to our house recently, you've already seen the end result of this project, but I figured it was about time I shared the journey of how we got here.  After all, I only started this project back in July!

As I said before, we needed a lot of new furniture to fill up our house, including a dining room table and chairs.  I spent a day shopping with Nicole and found a table I liked (as did Tom when I brought him back later to look at it) but no one really liked the chairs that went with it.  So we bought the tables and started the search for chairs.  At some point I got the idea that I wanted the chairs to be blue.  Of course I couldn't find what I was looking for anywhere, so shortly after, I decided that I'd paint the chairs myself.

,

Our Office: A Transformation

,

I'm not going to lie, there are still a lot of unopened boxes in our house.  There are entire rooms that are either empty or just full of things waiting to be unpacked.  It's not easy to furnish and decorate a whole house! 

Lately we've decided to turn our focus on our office.  At some point we decided that if only our office was set up, we'd be able to unpack a majority of our boxes.  All of the books could come out, computer equipment, important papers... they could all find a spot.