Nursery Room : Love is Blind

I was hoping to have the final front door post to you guys today, but keeping up with work, my two mile daily walks, and everything else is getting a little rough these days with being 1 week and 5 days from my due date.  Hopefully by Friday we'll have it completely done.

Just a reminder from last week, tomorrow I'm taking an early lunch break and hosting Gevalia Coffee's Bean Chat on facebook at 10 a.m. EST.  They're giving away three bags of coffee during the chat, so if you want to pop over and chat with me about any of my latest projects, or just like coffee, come join me!  I'll post another reminder again tomorrow.

Today though, another nursery post...

One of the finishing things left to do in Kalia's nursery was put up blinds.  Unfortunately, the ones we wanted came either 1.5 inches too short, or about 20 inches too long.  So, rather than have Kalia's window look like it was wearing pants on that were just a little too short, we went with the longer option.  (Side note : My D. Mom used to make my sister and I wear 'tall socks' when we started to outgrow our pants.  Maybe that's why I'm not a big fan of pants that are too short!  Haha!)

We didn't really want the longer version to bunch up at the bottom though, so we did a little DIYing to make them fit to our window.  Which is a standard window by the way...we bought and installed it from the big orange store...so that made the fact that there wasn't blinds to fit the actual window that much more annoying!

I really love the look / feel of textured bamboo blinds.  I love that they bring outdoor elements in, and I also thought they would tie in nicely to the baskets that we already have in Kalia's daybed.

I really am going to fix the basket liners soon...really, I am. 

To shorten our blinds, first we measured up how far we wanted the bottom of the blinds to hang.

Then Chris took the craft knife and cut along one of the thick bamboo slats.  We looked at how the bottom of the blinds were initially put together, and then mimicked it.  We wanted to make sure we had enough extra to not lose any of the smaller bamboo pieces, so we cut below where we actually wanted to cut (which was the dark brown big slat), so that we could glue up the excess string.

Like this.  It doesn't matter that the glue isn't pretty, this part is getting folded over anyways!

And then we added more glue and folded our bottom piece over top of the brown piece to give a nice clean finished look.  It mimics what was previously there perfectly!

FYI, the glue we use is quick grip.  I'm too impatient to use much else...that stuff has a super strong hold and dries really quickly too!

Here she is hung in her new home.

I was actually really impressed by how dark they are when they're all the way down too.  This picture is horrible because only the overhead light is on, but you can tell the difference that the blinds actually make!

And thankfully, you can see that we still have a little ledge left at the window...so there's not a bunch of excess blinds getting in the way!  Woo Hoo!

Anyone else have to modify their 'standard' blinds to fit their standard sized windows or did we get a defective window / blind?  What do you think of the bamboo blinds to finish off the window treatments in the nursery?  I had initially really wanted to build a valance to go over top of all of this, and maybe one day we'll get back to it, but it was one of the few projects that Chris insisted get crossed off the list for the nursery.  The other project was painting stripes on the ceiling!  At this rate though, we need to start on nursery #2 before too long!!  Oiy!

Hope everyone is having a great week.  If you're available, pop over to the Gevalia Bean Chat tomorrow on Facebook from 10-11 a.m. EST to chat along with me.  Happy Wednesday!

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Nursery Room - Window Treatments

The nursery is starting to get some life to it!  Because we're doing a lot of diy work in there, things have to happen in a certain order.  Chris hates putting things on the wall, but agreed that after the quarter round molding was up, the next thing that needed to get put up was the curtains.

I bought the 79'' Hava double curtain rod from Ikea.  Well, we only really needed 75'' for above our window.  The rod wasn't really adjustable on its own, so Chris got out the pipe cutters and with a little twisting magic...

We got rid of the extra 4'' very easily.

We put this cut side against the closet wall, where no one will ever know the difference!  I think we could've shoved the end caps back on, but it really didn't seem worth the effort.

I just learned this trick when hanging curtains over at Young House Love.  When drilling the holes for the screws to anchor your rod into, put a piece of folded tape under where your hole is going to go to catch the excess drywall that will fall out.

That way, your mess is on the tape, and not on your floor!

Chris thought this was the coolest trick ever!  Ahh...the little things!

The curtains I got from Ikea.  I thought I hated them the first bit that they were up.  Actually, I thought I hated them until we finished up a million more projects this weekend, and now I think they're perfect.  I'm going to make tie backs to hold the curtains together ('m debating between the plum/pink color or the white color, which is why my two scraps of fabric don't match), and we're planning on adding some bamboo blinds to cover the window in here too.

When Erin and I initially bought these curtains, I loved the idea that the white in front calmed down the pink while still allowing some of it to show through.  So it doesn't scream "HEY, I'm a PINK CURTAIN, LOOK AT ME!!!", it's more of a pretty in pink thing it's got going on.  And I liked that the pattern on the white brought in some softness and girliness to the room too.  Chris says with most of my tastes, our little girl is going to have gender identity issues.

But, if I'm being honest, I think this picture makes the curtains look ugly.  I think it looks sort of doily-ish and Grandma like.  After all of our projects we got accomplished this past weekend, I changed my tune.   I think they look perfect in there!  Happy happy joy joy!  The curtains can stay!  Oh, and also on the to-do list is hemming the curtains (Ikea provides hemming tape with all of their curtains...score!).

What do you think?  Is it love at first sight for you, or do you need to see more of the room to make a final decision also?  I promise more pretty posts are coming up!

Happy Tuesday everyone!

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Nursery Room - Window Intallers

If I took the time to write everything we did on the nursery this weekend in this post, I'd be here for an hour, and you'd never pay attention long enough to get to the end of the post!

Friday night we had a typical date night at Home Depot to get everything ready for a buzillion projects.  Saturday morning, bright and early, we got to work on the nursery.  Here's what it looked like when we walked in:

During the week, I had primed all of the trim and lower part of the walls, and Chris primed the upper part of the walls, and for extra credit, he primed the closet too.  You can see a swatch of my tester color on the wall.

Saturday morning, I got up and primed all the way up to the ceiling (initially we were going to do crown molding in here, but after project after project cost wise kept adding up at Home Depot, we nixed that idea), and then got to work on painting the ceiling white.  While I was doing that, Chris was busy doing this:

Chisel, chisel, chisel, bang, bang, bang.  After the ceiling had one coat of paint on it, we actually made another run to Home Depot to grab a larger chisel, and then I painted the second coat of white paint on the ceiling while Chris chiseled away at the window with his larger chisel.

And after about another hour or two of chiseling and trying to minimize the amount of stucco work that he was going to have to repair on the outside, Chris got impatient.

And he got the window out.  Can you see the missing glass?!  Wonder where it went?!

Here's a better shot.  Ahhh, yes...all over the floor next to the closet that I was just getting ready to paint.  Nix that idea!  We went ahead and cleaned up the bedroom and removed the carpet instead of vacuuming up a million glass pieces, and then went on our way of installing the new window.

And...tada!!!

Yep, we can add window installers to our expanding resume list of home improvement things we can do if this whole Engineering gig doesn't work out for us in the long run.

And here's a picture of my pretty while ceiling:

Yes, I know it's not as exciting as the new window, but my arms and shoulders still hurt from it, so I have to show it off.

Just as a reminder, here's where we started off Saturday morning:

And here's what we went to bed with it looking like Saturday night:

All in a days work!

Primed, painted ceiling, goodbye old carpet, goodbye old window, HELLO new window!!  Oh yes, and if you look closely, you'll see the tiny bit of closet paint I got on the wall.  I was determined to at least some color there before the day was over.  I tried to convince Chris to let me go ahead and paint the closet after dinner, but he made me take a shower and get in bed instead.  I was fast asleep before 8 p.m., and I didn't wake up (cept to do the normal pregnancy pee thing) until after 8 a.m. on Sunday morning.  It was a long, but very productive, day!!

All day on Saturday, we sang "That's the sound of Chris and Kara working on the nursery, uursery, oh don't you know, that's the sound of Chris and Kara working on the nursery".  You've got to sing it fast to make it sound right.  Good times!

Hope everyone had a wonderful weekend!!  Stay tuned to see the more 'fun' update to the nursery progress.  Things like primer, painted ceilings, removing carpet, and replacing windows are more of the necessities, not the fun part.  But the fun parts coming soon, I promise!

Happy Monday!

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