Project catch-up: Week #3

After painting that yellow wall, I got all inspired and got to work in the basement.  "The Orange Room" was calling my name.  In case you forgot what we started with:

I started by taking the falling apart shelf out of the closet and then Handyman reinforced the upper shelf and closet rod.  It was falling down, too.  Then I filled holes.  HOLEY HOLES!!!!!  Dozens of pinholes, staple holes, and massive holes that took two coats of spackle with a sanding in between.  There were pinholes that had been painted over, so they kind of had a ridge around them.  Blah!  So, I did quite a bit of sanding Thank goodness for my......er.....I mean Handyman's orbital sander!  Possession is 9/10ths of the law, right?  I guess that probably really does make it MY orbital sander! ;)

Anyway.........I sanded down the ridges and the past poor patch jobs, patched the closet where I took out the shelf and proceeded to patch the dozens of tiny little pinholes.  Then I started priming.  Can I just say I dislike painting closets?  There's just a lot to paint around.  So I did all the priming in corners and edges Thursday night.  3 hours worth.  I ended up needing to prime everything but the ceilng.  I don't think the ceiling has ever been beyond the primer stage anyway.  The door has a big hole in it, so it's going to get repurposed into something else.  I haven't touched the closet doors or the new door yet, but they're going to get the royal treatment, too: primer and all.   Friday morning, I rolled all the primer.....Is it bad that I was GIDDY while I primed over that orange? LOL  In the afternoon I had to take Tornado to the dentist to get a troublesome primary molar pulled.  After our date-night last night, I cut in the ceiling and closet and then dragged my tired body to bed at about 11:30.

I really didn't want to get out of bed this morning. LOL  I'm seriously so tired by Saturday from all the stuff I've been working on during the week, that I just want to stay in bed.  I got up about 9 and started rolling the closet and then the ceiling about 11.  The ceilings in the basement have a really weird texture and it really takes a lot of paint.  I'll try to get a good picture one of these days.  It's just really thick in some places, so I had to use a long nap roller and I've already noticed some placed I'll have to touch-up with a brush.  I took about an hour break before I started the walls......mostly because it was at that point that I realized I'd used the wall paint for the ceiling.  I'd been thinking it was darker than I'd like.  Grrr.......I didn't buy any paint.  It was paint that I'd mixed from leftovers from past projects.  So none of the colors I'm using in the boys's rooms are really colors I'd pick out, but using paint I already have is a whole lot closer to $0 than buying fresh paint.  So I grabbed a few gallons and mixed a few things and came up with something that would work.  Not my favorite combo, but it's better than that ORANGE!

So I got most of it painted......walls are done, closet is done, ceiling is done.  I just need to do trim and doors while Handydman puts new carpet and base trim in.  And while I don't LOVE the color combo, I do love that the orange is gone and we've got a nice soothing blue for two of the boys.  Bedtime should be much easier.....once we finish and can move them in.

Cost run-down so far:  I bought new rollers, covers and paint trays in December and used 3 covers and 3 trays.

Primer: $12

Roller: $3

Covers: $4 for 3

Trays: $3

I'll be buying paint for the trim because I want all the trim in the house to match, and we need to buy base trim, so I'll total the cost then.

So this is what we ended up with:

All in all, it was another very productive week.  And that doesn't even count the sewing I did this week.

Project catch-up: Week #2

So, I really have been working, just not writing. LOL  And those shadow-boxes haven't materialized, although I have been pricing out the stuff I want to put in them.  There are just some other things that are more urgent.

Last week, the nesting bug kicked in full force.  There are some things that have been bugging me that are just not working around here.  We need to do a LOT more reading for our homeschooling, but we're realizing that our family room setup is NOT working.  The couches were NOT comfy enough to sit for 20 minutes a day, let alone the hours a day we really need to be spending there.  We weren't sure we liked where the bookshelves were, either.  The entertainment room needed to change, so I could have a temporary sewing area in the downstairs kitchen that we don't use.  So after talking to Handyman about it on Sunday night (Jan 8), we decided that we would move a bunch of stuff Monday.  Handyman took Monday off because he worked Saturday.

So Monday we moved all the bookcases to a different wall in the family room........and decided that we hated it. :(  I hate the gray in there, and I really didn't want to move them back just to have to move them again to paint that wall.  So Handyman handed me the tape and said, "Get painting then." lol  I've really been dreading all the painting we have to do here, so I'd been putting it off.  It was just kind of overwhelming.  I mean there are a LOT of wall that are horrible colors (and horrible paintjobs) in this house.  But the thought of emptying and moving the bookcases AGAIN was even less appealing, so I bit the bullet and bought some paint. 

I hate buying yellow paint, and I really wanted yellow. One of the problems we have in this house is that there's not a lot of natural light in the area of the house that we spend the most time, so I was really hoping to bring some light into this part of the house with yellow.......yellow is just so easy to screw up, at least for me.  I made the mistake of buying 3 gallons of a yellow paint that I thought I'd like at a different house.  I ended up not liking it, but using it anyway, because I was NOT going to waste my money.  Fortunately for me, I have the Magician.  Apparently he has a great eye for color....who knew?!  After hanging the paint swatches on nearly every wall on the main floor to see how they looked in the different lighting, he picked a yellow called "Natural Straw" by Glidden.  And..........IT'S PERFECT!  Go Magician!  I'm taking him with me to pick out paint colors from now on.

So we've gone from this..........

 (This is the setup we changed it TO and decided we hated.)

 To this.  The bookshelves are back on the same wall, but the gray on that wall is gone and we're loving the yellow.  And yes, the books have all been replaced, but I didn't take anymore pics. lol

 Downstairs in the entertainment room we went from this:

To this:

 Handyman picked up these shelves for $30 each (there are 2 of them) at Re-Store.  Have I told you about Re-Store?  Hmmmmm........I'll have to make another post for Re-Store. :)

 All that work was so that we could turn this unused downstairs kitchen into.........

 A temporary (think 1 year or less) sewing room for me.  It's mostly unpacked now and I've been sewing.  I'll post another pic when I've got it all organized and cleaned up.  On the same Re-store trip, Handydman got this long, narrow table - that you can barely see - for $40.  AND it came with 4 dining chairs, 3 of them matching.  So now I have a sewing ROOM, sewing STORAGE, and a sewing TABLE!  The Messmaker is HAPPY!

 The shelves are now mostly full of my sewing and office stuff and the family games.

Project cost run-down for this week:

Paint: $23

Roller: $1

Tray: $1

Total: $25 with half a gallon of paint left.

It's soooooo nice to have some spaces be more functional and that painting that wall yellow has REALLY inspired me to get some stuff going........and this was just week #2!

Project #1......DONE!

In spite of everyone being sick, including myself, all week long......I finished project #1!  Yay me!  Handy Man used to tease me with chanting "completion, completion, completion" to encourage me to actually....wellllll......COMPLETE my projects.  So, here she is! 

I'm not exactly excited with how uneven the edges are and the bow isn't quite centered down there, but....I did it!  I didn't want to spend a ton of money, so I didn't use styrofoam balls underneath the yarn.  I have some, they were just too big and it actually took MORE yarn to cover them well than it did to just wind yarn balls.  I should have counted how many I did.  Whew!  There were a lot.  I did end up buying 2 more skeins of yarn (I used 3 that I had from who knows what project), and I bought clearance ornaments from WalMart.  3 pkgs of 4 for $.25 each and a pkg of 26 for $1.24 because they were 75% off!  I think I may go back and get some more ornaments for our tree.  It was kind of sparsely decorated this year.  Apparently the years with all these boys have found more than a few of our ornaments as casualties.  I also bought some silver ribbon.  I used 4 layers of cardboard cut out to a 16" circle and it's about 3 " wide.  I only looked at the pictures on their blog once and then just made it how I wanted it.  It would have been easier if all the balls had been the same size, if the wreath had been more like 2" wide, and if I wasn't such a perfectionist. ;)  Then I covered them with white duct tape that Beaver got for Christmas, then covered it again with 3" strips of white fabric that used to be a tablecloth.

So......

$2.33 for gray yarn

$2.33 for blue yarn

$1.99 for ornaments (which I still have about 20 left)

$.61 for silver ribbon

And the grand total is...

.....

........

...............

$7.26 for a super cute 18" Winter Wreath! 

Next week I'm making something like this:

http://themamadramalogues.blogspot.com/2009/10/make-it-gorgeous-shadow-boxes.html

A friend of mine in Cali did this a few years ago with all her kiddos coming home outfits.  I've been "going to" do this since then. *sigh*  They'll be a work in progress and all I'll be making next week is the actual shadow boxes.....6 of them.  Maybe I'll even do one for Handy Man and myself one day. Hmmmmm........

Darn Pinterest!

4 days after Christmas, I had all my decorations put away and my house put back together.  When it was all done and vacuumed, I said, "It looks like we just moved in." with a smile on my face.  Then that smile turned into a frown.  It DID look like we'd just moved in: nothing on the mantel, nothing on the walls, the same-old plain blinds in the windows. 

Exciting, huh? *insert eye-roll here*  The things that are changing in here?  Ummmm......pretty much everything.  We moved in on Dec 29, 2010, and on Dec 29, 2011, it looked the same.  What happened to "feminine touch"?  I am the feminine touch in my family and I'm doing a lousy job.  I did a lousy job at the last 2 houses, too.  I must have, because the only "nice" decorative thing I have in my house was a gift!  I have all these ideas in my head, but I just can't seem to actually get them done.

Enter Pinterest.......I don't know whether to praise or curse!  I spend too much time there, first of all.....2nd of all, it's now a screaming-in-my-face fact that my house lacks character and does NOT feel like a home.  Time to pull out my feminine and see if I can touch some things up around here.  I've recently started a sewing business, so in the next few months I should start to have some "play money" to work with.  As always, the goal is to do it for as close to $0 as possible.  So the boys and I are going to do 1 cutesy project(that's what Handy Man calls them) each week for this year.  Today, we're making a Winter wreath for the front door.

This is the one:
http://twojunkchix.blogspot.com/2011/01/snowball-wreath.html

Obviously it won't be exactly the same and my door is still boring white. (That's on the project list for, oh let's say May, when it's warm.)  It just depends on what colors of yarn I have and what I can pick up today that might still be on clearance from Christmas.  We have a birthday boy tomorrow, so some of the boys need to go shopping today.  I'll post a pic when it's done!