What's Cooking In Our Kitchen

What's been cooking in our kitchen?  Not food! Unless you count Dream Dinners meals and freezer meals I prepped while pregnant with E. What we've been doing (FINALLY) is some decorating and personalizing.

A few months ago we bought some tile from Lowe's to do a back splash and at long last A.R. was able to install it. It took him pretty much three-four hours for each wall/section he did on five different days with all the cuts he had to make around the outlets, but it came out fabulous and we both love it.

In addition, I sewed some sheer curtains for our solarium off the eat-in portion of our kitchen and then went on the hunt for some red curtains to coordinate with our red couch in our adjacent family room. I couldn't find fabric I liked to sew the curtains myself, so we ended buying them from JC Penny. These pictures don't have the top swag up yet as I still have to order them, but I like the look so far with the pale yellow walls and it ties in well with our adjacent family room.

Horrible lighting, but you get the idea...pale yellow walls, sheers, and majestic red curtains

I was very particular about the tie backs I got as I don't really like the long tasseled kind, I didn't want to screw hooks in the wall, and we wanted to be sure to still let some light in. I found these tie backs (see picture) from Ann & Hope and absolutely love them. I just hope my kids don't figure out how to remove them and use the pin as weapons on each other! ;)

I LOVE how our kitchen, casual dining area, and solarium turned out. It actually feels more like "our" home now with our personal touch.

Our next project is putting up a mantle and fireplace surround in our family room. A.R. wants to hide the cords from the television behind the mantle and in the wall. We hope to have that done before E's baptism party on the twelfth. We shall see! We have all the supplies now to do it except the insulation for the wires, so it's possible.

Big Girls Don't Cry

To appease my nesting instinct to prepare for Baby 2.0 I had to do some decorating in our home.  Since we are recycling our nursery that we decorated gender neutral with the intention of rotating all of our future babes through it, I got to decorate a big girl room for Miss M.  We wanted to make the switch early enough so that M didn't feel outcast by the new baby from the only room she remembers sleeping in since birth (she was in our room in a bassinet until she was 3 months old).  It made sense with timing and the start of my third trimester to make the switch around her 2nd birthday as sort of a gift to her.  She got to come with us furniture shopping and jump on the beds a bit as we picked out her furniture in early February and I dragged her on quite a few trips to Target until we stumbled across some bedding we (ok, mostly I) fell in love with.

M has always been infatuated with horses on carousels and with the live versions in general since her first pony ride last fall.  If she sees a horse (she says it in Spanish: caballo) she always yells, "NEEEIGGGH!" before she actually calls it a horse.  When I saw this horse bedding at Target I knew she had to have it.  She was napping the first time we "shopped" for it, but I totally took her back to the store awake to see if she liked it and she did.  A.R. thinks I'm pushing my love of horses on her.  I say it's in her blood and I swear horse lovers have an extra gene to be just crazy enough to want to ride the magnificant creatures that they are.  M has that gene.  It was quite evident when we visited my friend in NC and she got to ride her first real horse. :)  Definitely a proud Mami moment for me!

Ok, back to the subject.  M came with us to Home Depot to pick up paint swatches.  We decided on an awful Pepto Bismal pink (I'm more of a purple kind of gal) called Pretty in Pink from the Disney line of Behr paints.  It matches her bedding perfectly and M LOVES her pink room, so that's all that matters.  I'll get to paint a room purple in that house some day!  The night A.R. painted it we let her do a few rolls on the wall with the paint roller and she was so proud of herself.  After it was painted she ran around the room doing her own happy dance as her signature of approval.  Her furniture was delivered the first weekend in March and she got so excited once I put her horse bedding on her bed and A.R. hung up the horse painting.  We had purchased wall decals to match, but made a fatal error in putting them where she could reach them.  "ick-her, Mami! ick-her!" ensued as she though they were giant stickers and pulled them all off the walls.  We bought another box of the decals and need to hang them up higher out of her reach this time :).

We had planned to let her just play in her new room for a couple weeks and let her sleep in it the first time for her birthday, but she was much too excited about it.  Every time we opened the door to her room to give her some play time in there she'd yell, "NEIGH!" and one night we just figured, why delay it?  She obviously loved the room and had figured out how to use the step stool to get up and down from the bottom bunk with no issues, so we took a leap of faith and on Daylight Savings Time eve let her sleep in her new room the first time.  She woke up twice, but was more disoriented than upset and quickly fell back asleep each time.  She never once cried for her old comfy crib converted to a toddler bed or her old room (the nursery).  On night #2 I told her to go to her room after brushing her teeth and she went straight to her new room without even a glance at the nursery across the hall ::tear::.  My big girl doesn't cry.  She moves on.  Once again Mami had a harder time with the transition than she did.  I think the hardest part for me was having her sleep in a room without a video monitor hooked up for the first time.  I admit I peaked in at her before I went to bed anyway, but man I miss that spy cam!

We opted to go more neutral with her furniture and got bunk beds as her new room is our biggest bedroom besides our master bedroom suite and should we have three children one day (we'll see how it goes with two little ones first!), two of them will share this room.  NO, we don't know what sex Baby 2.0 is.  My in-laws saw her new big girl room and automatically assumed we already know we're having a girl, but honestly we don't know.  We just figured we're investing in furniture that is going to last through high school and we know we'll eventually have two little ones in this room, so why spend the money on interim furniture.  If we end up having two boys and M is our only girl, we'll move her out of this room into her own room and repaint the room a boy color.  If we have a boy and then a girl, we would still expect M to share her room with her youngest sister and if we have another girl come June, SCORE- no extra painting for A.R.! And if we end up with just two little ones?  We have an extra guest bed and a spot for friends when M is of sleep over age.  Of course, the top bunk is off limits for quite awhile.  M doesn't even realize what it is at this point and we don't plan on showing her anytime soon.  I fear for our health insurance premiums once she's old enough to climb up top!  I do remember always wishing I had bunk beds when I was little, though, and I'm glad we can give that to our kids.

Kitchen Upgrades!

At long last we started painting another room downstairs in our home (okay, it was really done two months ago...) and doing a bit more decorating.  We had picked out a paint color long ago, but never gotten off our arses to actually buy it and paint.  Of course it doesn't help that I've been banned from picking up a paint brush in our home- I'm horrible at painting, I get more on me than the wall- so the most I can do is tape and clean up afterwards leaving a majority of the work to A.R.  Hey, I offered to help with the roller at least!

Right before our cruise in August, A.R. took a few extra days off and tackled the job of painting our kitchen, eat-in dining room, and solarium.  We chose a pale yellow from the Behr Premium Ultra line called pale honey and I LOVE the results.  It took A.R. a whole day to paint the area due to all the edging that was required.  Thankfully he didn't have to do another whole coat and was able to just do touch-ups where needed.  We've also decided to put in a back splash and found one at Lowe's that we are in love with after visiting 4 different stores including 2 that specialize in tiling.  Hopefully, it won't take us as long to put the tile up as it did to finally paint!! 

We've also already purchased the curtain rods for the solarium and I've cut five panels out of a sheer fabric in an off-white to use under some curtains.  I'm going to sew the sheers myself, but I admit that my time is limited, so I'll probably buy the actual curtains.  We finally found a design we love at Home Depot as part of the Martha Stewart collection.  They are a red with a black and gold design.  The red ties with our couch in the adjacent family room with our open floor plan and the gold will tie in the pale honey paint color in the kitchen.  I think our neighbors will hug us when we finally hang curtains in these windows!!

More pictures to come.

More Family Room Progress!

Looky what A.R. put up in our family room just before we left on our trip!  Me likey a lot.  We still have to paint that wall, so this isn't the final snapshot (it's taken at night BTW- hence the glare from the flash), but you get the idea.  The only photo that isn't ours is the 5x5 on the left side, I'll be putting a picture from our cruise in there.

Family Room upgrades

A.R. and I have slowly been getting the itch to paint and finalize the rooms in our home ever since we painted M's nursery over a year ago.  That's probably a good thing since all white walls is getting rather boring and we have lived in our home now for almost 2 3/4 years (yes, I just actually counted that out...).  I'm sure our neighbor wouldn't mind us putting up the remaining curtains in the back windows of our home if I just actually took the time to sew them!  A.R. still gives me a hard time for not making the curtains for the solarium and formal living room considering I've had the fabric since before I was pregnant with M (I'll let you do the math on that one!).  I tell him I'm in no rush because we haven't painted yet and he has yet to buy the curtain rods.  Hello?! Can't hang pretty curtains up without those.

After view of our FR in the evening

Before view

Since he is not a fan of my artistic skills with the paint brush- he saw those skills when we painted my condo- I'm not allowed to touch a roller in our current home, so the most I can do is tape and clean up.  Let me tell you that putting up painters tape with a toddler following behind you and peeling off said painters tape you just applied is a real treat.  She even had painters tape stuck to her Baby Legs yesterday as we try to get our kitchen painted before our great vacation (more to come on both of those)!  We finally painted the focal wall in our family room when Uncle Sam was rather kind to us and A.R. found a good sale on a new flat panel television we've been eyeing to hang above our fireplace.  Yup, that was back in March and we are just now finishing up the room.  Disclaimer: it still isn't done if you count finding a mantel, valances, and hanging pictures after painting the other 3 walls (we have a light tan color picked out already, but it will involve painting up a staircase and the entire upstairs hallway at the same time). :P


After- I have a family photo to hang in the spot above these shelves



Before

Anyhoo, the focal wall is painted, the flat panel is mounted above the fireplace, and we have fabulous new shelving courtesy of my local IKEA.  The shelving is all custom from IKEA's Besta line.  The best part is that we were able to childproof the DVR and satellite boxes behind glass doors so we can turn the television off/on, change stations, and use the Wii without little sticky toddler fingers pushing random buttons.  Of course she has figured out how to sneak her little arm behind the door even with the childproof latch and turn the surround sound off and on, but the novelty of that is quickly wearing off for her when she realizes it makes Barney go away.  The paint color is Macchiato from The Home Depot's Behr Premium Ultra line.  The paint is pricey and is supposed to include primer, but we still had to do two coats of it to cover all of the original white paint.  Here's hoping that it doesn't take another month to finish the room up and hang the last of the pictures!  The link is the picture collage we will be hanging above M's toy box which is to the right in the first picture.

Come a knockin'

After 2 1/2 years in our beautiful home, we have slowly begun to make small improvements (3 rooms have paint now!  Well, really 2 rooms and a 1/4- more to come on that) and changes to make it ours.  The latest change was something I've been wanting since our first Spring in our home when it would've been wonderful to have a cross breeze from the front porch into the kitchn.  We finally ordered and installed a screen door!

A.R. and I picked out a door we liked at Home Depot after doing a lot of window shopping and finally custon ordered it when our tax return from Uncle Sam made its appearance.  Ordering it was the easy part.  Having the time to actually install it was the tricky part.  I think it sat in our garage for a good month before A.R. attempted to put it up!  He was determined to do it himself and not ask his brothers for help.  It probably took him a little bit longer than planned (a full week), but it is installed and works great.  He even took the time to spray paint two air spring closures hunter green to match the door and installed them so that it self-closes (a must with dogs and children ready to escape in an instant).

Checking out the new door on tippy toes!

Our dogs and M all love looking out the door now when it's open, but they haven't stayed there long enough for me to snag a photo.  Yet! :)

Nails in the wall!

Finally, we put some nail holes in our Family Room wall. I think both A.R. and I have been procrastinating in putting the first nail holes in the sheetrock in our Family Room. We weren't quite sure what we wanted to do as far as wall decor (besides the flat panel TV we intend to put above our fireplace) and never really found a print that we had to have. FINALLY, after a year and a half in our new home we bit the bullet and actually put 11 nail holes in our Family Room wall. ::Gasp!:: I had wanted to put a photo collage up one of our stair wells with family photos, but after picturing it in my mind I changed my mind and decided to put the collage in our Family Room instead. The focal point?! Our 1st family photo with Mariela in our arms.

Our photo collage (with 2 pics missing still)

Under the photo collage, I plan on putting a bench with storage that can double as extra seating when we have guests over and storage for baby toys. Something like this or this is what I have in mind. A.R. wants new couches for our Family Room, so I want to wait a bit longer to see what he has in mind before we invest in a bench. The walls in our Family Room will be painted Plateau by Behr Premium Plus Ultra except for the wall with the fireplace which we plan on painting a darker shade of brown as a focal point in Macchiato by Behr Premium Ultra Plus.

A little color goes a long way...

Finally! Room number two is painted in our new home! After painting Mariela's room back in December, we got the urge to start painting the rest of our house. When we built our house, the builder recommended not painting for a year to allow the house to settle some more. After the final walk-through and warranty items were fixed (nail pops, touch-ups, etc.) after our first year in our home we were going to paint, but didn't get around to it (ah-hem, read "lazy") until Ms Mariela was on her way. A.R. painted the nursery by himself behind closed doors...even with the low-VOC paint he insisted I stay away...so I wanted to help paint the next room. Well, let's just say I was once again kicked out of the way and instead of painting, I was supervising with Ms Mariela as my side kick. I do suck at painting and usually end up with more on me than the walls, so it's probably for the best. :)

Our master bedroom is now a beautiful teal and we added a new comforter set from Kohls to complete the look. We sort of have a beach theme going on in our bedroom and will continue it into our master bathroom. Our bed is like a sand island in the middle of clear blue ocean. I've added beach-y decor around the room including sea shell accents, lighthouses, and other trinkets. We used the new Behr Premium Ultra paint with the primer already in it. You really only have to use one coat which is awesome considering how long it took to just paint the first coat in our large bedroom. The formal name of the color we chose is Venus Teal. At first I thought it was a little dark, but now I LOVE it! It's beautiful during the day and relaxing at night.

We still have the painting bug and want to continue adding some color to our boring eggshell walls. I've already chosen a color for our guest bathroom which will be my purple room, our half bath will be a shade of orange, we've narrowed down to two possible shades of red for our formal dining room (plus we want to add in crown and chair molding), a pale yellow for the kitchen, and we've narrowed down several browns for the family room. In the family room we want to do a darker focal wall and then the rest of the walls will be a lighter shade of beige/brown that will carry to the upstairs hallway. It took us 6 months to paint room #2 after painting the nursery, so how much do you want to bet it'll be another 6 months until room #3 gets painted?!

Adventures in Sewing

My mom taught me how to sew with a sewing machine when I was in middle school, but it’s been years since I actually made something. For my graduation back in May my grandmother got me a brand new Singer sewing machine and I’ve started putting it to good use. After researching curtains to buy for our house and counting the number of windows we have that I want to decorate, it became apparent how expensive my taste in window treatments is.

The curtains I made for our guest room:

So, I took on the task of making the curtains myself and now a full year after moving in our home I’ve actually finished the curtains for our guest room and made the sheer panels for our formal living room. I have the fabric and patterns available (from Joanne’s Fabrics) for the windows and sliding door in our kitchen/solarium and hope to finish them before the baby is born.

The sheer panels I made for our Formal LR:

Right now, the formal living room is just going to be sheer panels until we decide on colors for that room, but the kitchen and solarium will have sheer panels with sage green jabots and valances. Here is the pattern I’ve been using by Simplicity (top right photo shows the valances, and jabots with non-sheer panels, my jabots will hang lower on the sides and my long panels are sheer):

We're Back!

Ok, we've been back for almost two weeks now, but I have been too tired/lazy to post. Our trip was definitely an adventure, but not 100% what we had hoped for as our last big trip before becoming parents. The food on the cruise ship wasn't as good as usual (perhaps due to budget cuts??), Alexi caught a cold on the cruise and ended up passing it along to me, and we spent most of the last half of our cruise avoiding Tropical Storm Erica.

We realized we were traveling in prime Hurricane season, but after Tropical Storm Hanna showed up in Connecticut on our wedding day what were the chances we'd experience another tropical storm on our 1st anniversary trip?! Apparently pretty good! We still made the most of our time together away from it all and the cloudy skies during the last half of the trip probably spared me from some serious sun damage. :)

I'm now 12 weeks and 4 days pregnant and feeling good. The fatigue is slowly fading and I'm not as queasy anymore when I get hungry. I was really fortunate that I didn't have morning sickness that bad, but I am sure ready to get some energy back again! I start the 2nd trimester on Sunday which scares me a bit...the time is flying by so quickly and we have so much to do still! I've now told all my teammates at work about the pregnancy and the rumors are already flying fast across the whole floor.

We did finally pick a theme for the nursery (frogs and ducks) and found a crib bedding set. I'm going to order it a little at a time with coupons friends have been giving me. Once the first peice arrives we'll use it to pick out paint colors for the nursery. :)

Here is the set we are getting:
Stay tuned for pics and an overview of our vacation with lots and lots of pictures. I think the most beautiful islands we saw (besides Puerto Rico) were St. Maarten and St. Lucia. I was least impressed with Barbados, but snorkeling with sea turtles there was incredible.

H

Our New Formal Dining Room Set

I'm so excited we unexpectedly found a beautiful formal dining room set last week. My coworker's mother is selling her beach home and is selling all of her furniture and knick knacks inside of it and thought of A.R. and I. The set is 10-15 years old but has hardly been used (it is covered at all times and in a beach house, so it was only used seasonally) and is in pristine condition. It is a Thomasville set. I'm not 100% thrilled with the chair backs, but figure I can put covers on them or switch them out in a few years. The set (a dresser, china cabinet, buffet, 6 chairs) will come home to our house in October. In the meantime we plan on painting the dining room and installing a chair rail.

This buffet folds out to make a server.

Color ideas for the Dining Room...