Home Makeover: My Edition

For the first time in nearly two years, Phil and I spent several days away from Moo. Phil had a week of vacation back in August, so we took the opportunity to have a staycation, spending the first half of the week as a family doing fun things like going to the zoo and visiting cousins and the second half of the week as a couple making our house a more functional and organized space to live while Moo lived his dream at his grandparents' house. Before I get to the home makeover part, a few observations from our time without a child:

• Try as I may, sleeping past 7:00 a.m. is no longer possible.
• Eating out was actually enjoyable again--especially since I had time to taste my food and didn't once have to put my fingers in someone else's mouth to help them eat.
• With a toddler, I'm lucky if I can vacuum my house in a day; without a toddler, I can conquer the world (or at least my closets)!
• I still woke up with the theme song to Curious George in my head every morning. Could be worse, I guess.

Okay, onto the makeover! If I'd been really forward thinking, I would have had before and after pics to share, but you'll have to make do with the after and trust that it's an upgrade from the before. 

We definitely made the most of our three childless days. Phil and I are wired the same: once we start a project, we work, work, work until it's done. And we had about 20 projects on our list. (Don't worry--we played too. Out to eat a couple of times, lunch and dinner with friends, book store wandering, morning walks, etc.) 

First, the nursery. As you might recall, I'm no decorator. In fact, the idea of decorating a room makes me sweat a little. But I really like how this room is turning out--very feminine and calm without being too frilly. Prior to this week, all we had was freshly painted walls and a rug. Wish I had more pictures, a fisheye lens, and better photography skills/lighting, but you get the idea:

In a house with limited space, redoing one room means redoing parts of others too in order to make space for everything. So next we found ourselves rearranging the living room, adding a chair and this staple from IKEA to tame the toys and books:

Finally, we switched a few things around in Moo's room, which has a definite little boy look now:

Many thanks to IKEA, Craigslist, and friends/neighbors who just outright gave us things (and to my parents for keeping Moo for a few days). It's a much cheaper alternative to moving! 

Three Things Thursday

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Thing one: why I've been away.
Truth moment. Part of why I've been such an inconsistent blogger lately is because, after over a year of catching up on the show, I finally finished watching every season of Friday Night Lights. Laugh. Roll your eyes. Do whatever you need to do to pass judgement on me for this, but y'all. It's such a great show. And the second half of that last season just baited me and I had to watch it instead of blog because I'd spent some serious time with those characters and needed to know where their lives were going. You understand, right?

Thing two: magazine I love.

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Last Christmas, my in-laws gave me a subscription to World Magazine and let me tell you: I'm loving it. Since I can't handle the worst-case-scenario nature of the news and I don't love reading my news online, this bi-weekly magazine is a great option for me. I can read it at my leisure, catch up on world news, and see some incredible pictures. While the magazine is from a Christian perspective, I'm impressed overall with the breadth of the coverage and the quality and balanced reporting of the writers.

Thing three: why decorating is NOT my thing.
We've been slowly converting our guest room into a nursery for Baby Girl. Right now, it just has a really great rug with a mattress on it that Moo likes to do flips on. Pretty much his dream room. Except that it's going to be his sister's (whom he's now calling "Sissy"--quite the upgrade from "Backseat").

It seems like women are expected to be able to do all things domestic--like it's in our DNA or something. Not so, people. Decorating, for example, is not my thing. As in what little I know comes from a few magazine articles, pining after everything at Pottery Barn, and asking my friends a million questions. So the idea of re-doing a room is daunting and, honestly, not fun for me. I'd rather spend my time on lots of other things. In fact, I'd rather pay someone to decorate for me, but I'm too cheap for that, so I'm stretching myself and trying to figure out this whole decorating a room thing on my own. Thanks to some sweet friends for their input, I'm making headway, but ready to be done. All I've decided on are the rug and curtains, but those are the biggest commitments to me, so I can work around that for the rest. Here's what I've got so far (pic on bottom is curtain pattern):

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If you're one of those people who likes to decorate and you happen to be my friend, I won't stop you if you want to give me advice or help. :) Just don't tell me you don't like what I've already chosen because that's already happened. Moving on.

Guest room makeover

I realize that the "rules" of a makeover involve both a before and after picture, but I was so excited to get the new duvet cover on the bed that I completely forgot to take a before picture. And if you've ever wrestled a down comforter into a duvet cover, you know it's not something you want to do twice. So, just imagine a very beautiful, but very old & stained off-white duvet cover with some eyelet detail. It blended into the wall too much. The room was boring. I had no idea what to do for curtains. The whole scene needed some help. 

After about 45 minutes of Internet research and some jaw-dropping prices later, I found this little puppy for (you're never going to believe this): $39.00. While it's not the most luxurious material, it doesn't look cheap either and, hey--it's a duvet cover. It sits on top of a bed. How sturdy does it really have to be? And, more importantly, I was on a budget for redoing the guest room. So...yeah. This was the one. Isn't it just a little bit of happy? Perks the room right up. Curtains to come sometime this summer...

Apparently, clean really IS just a smell...

Do you ever have "human moments"? Moments when you trip over nothing while people are watching (like I did last week at work), or moments when you put your foot in your mouth (like I did tonight*), or moments when you rave about a new detergent that really turns out to be fabric softener?

That's right, folks. Snuggle only makes fabric softener, not detergent, which means that the pair of underwear I was so fondly sniffing the other morning wasn't actually...clean. (Sheepish grin) In my defense, I never use liquid fabric softener, so it didn't even occur to me to carefully read the labels when I was in the detergent isle. I was so focused on finding the "he" symbol on the bottle that I missed the fact that I wasn't even buying detergent. I'm sure there's a sermon in there somewhere.

Only a true friend would point out my error, so many thanks to Melissa for setting me straight and preventing me from "washing" more than a couple of loads in straight up fabric softener. No wonder my clothes smelled so good!

It's back to the laundry detergent isle for me, and I guess I'll start using some liquid fabric softener in my loads for a while since I bought the 96-load bottle.

* Tonight, while on a walk, Phil and I were talking about how much we love our neighborhood and how safe we felt in it. Right after saying that, we saw three cop cars parked outside a house, but some trees were covering up the house, so I didn't see any people. "Maybe it's a stake-out," I told Phil, rather loudly. About that time, we walked right by the front of the house where police were talking to a man and woman who had apparently been in some kind of altercation. I chose the look-straight-ahead-and-keep-walking route after that foot-in-mouth moment. Oops.

Clean isn't a smell, but...

Clean isn't a smell, but I sure do love the smell of clean! The naturalists out there will tell you that all the chemicals in over-the-counter cleaners are bad for you, your kids, your floors, your skin, your pores, your lungs, and your overall heath. All we need is vinegar and water.

And they're probably right. 

BUT.

I LOVE the smell of clean! Honestly, I love every cleaner aroma: the indoor-pool smell of chlorine and bleach, the lemon smell of Pine-Sol, and most recently, the clean laundry smell that stays in your clothes for days. I've washed with regular, cheap Purex detergent for years, but we recently bought a new(ish) he (high efficiency) washer that can only take he detergent.  So, I spent a good 10 minutes in the laundry isle at Walmart looking for he detergents and smelling them all. Snuggle (Blue Iris and Bamboo Silk) was a clear front-runner, and I must say, I absolutely cannot stop smelling my clothes! 

It's really pretty funny. I kept getting wafts of that fresh linen smell all day long, and it had been several days since I had done laundry. Purex had nothing on this stuff. Confession: I even smelled my clean underwear tonight when taking it out of the drawer. Clearly, the brand lives up to its name when I'm nuzzling my underoos! I'm hooked! 

Welcome to our home

I should have posted these back in June when we moved, but just didn't get around to it. Please overlook the poor lighting in these pictures; it was a rainy, dreary afternoon when I took them, but I had just cleaned my house and actually remembered to pull out the camera, so we'll have to take what we can get. It's the perfect little place for us and we love to have visitors!

Cleaning Therapy

Today I discovered that my hair sheds in more places than I realize, that my baseboards are dust magnets, that my sock drawer is out of control messy, and that I have a Christmas present still sitting in its box on my floor just waiting to have its own place in my home. These are the discoveries made on a day off of work, a day dedicated to deep cleaning, a day that comes around only so often. Tomorrow, the dust will again begin its descent onto my baseboards and my socks will probably find their way into inconspicuous places, but today, my house is clean and organized. And as silly as it sounds, when I'm organized on the outside, I feel organized on the inside, like all is right with the world. I'm pretty sure that's just the orderly, type A part of me speaking, but it's true (of course, the fact that I didn't have to go to work today also significantly contributed to that blissful feeling).

So, I am proud to report that my shedding hair is all vacuumed, the baseboards are white again, my socks actually have their own little section in my drawer, the lingering Christmas present has a home, the laundry is clean and folded, my wash-by-hand-only sweater is washed and still air drying, the floors are mopped, the bed is made, the sink is clean, and the mirrors are spot-free.

Some call it spring cleaning; I call it therapy for the neat-freaks of the world.