Grocery Shrink

Friends, I’m a mess.  I caught a cold on the 2nd day of Caleb’s room redo and have been laying around like a unmotivated college student ever since.  I breezed through illness season this year because of the new vitamins I’ve been taking, but finally dropped.  Stress + sick kids + no sleep = Sick Mama.

All this time lying around (I used both lying and laying in this post because I can’t remember which is correct to save my life and I’m too lazy to Google it) has been well spent watching Hawaii 5-0 reruns on Netflix while researching home sprucing ideas on multiple open tabs.

These will be making an appearance in our home soon:

I’m also looking into options for this fireplace:

I can leave it as is and replace the candles and picture with a huge green plant likely from IKEA (fake but realistic looking) and the smaller cubby with white sticks and make teepee sticks to cover the gas logs for summer.

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and

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OR I could lightly whitewash it…a cheap but fairly permanent option:

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If I use latex paint I could remove it later with Peel Away.  Heat would ruin it though, so I’d need to keep it away from the fire box area.  I could use Milk paint instead, but it will become one with the brick and not be removable at all.  On the other hand, it’s heat proof and I could move right into the firebox with it.

This room is really dark and I’d love to brighten it up and (remove the soot marks–already tried scrubbing those off and it didn’t work.)  What would you do?

I couldn’t wait to see what the room looked like with the curtains and rug in place.  I used a pair of $3 cafe rods from target since the curtains were just for decoration and not to cover the window.  The curtains were leftover from our other house. I made them from sewing strips of sheets together and had always intended to make 2….but that was a LOT of work.  4 years later I cut that thing in half so I could put it on either side of the window.  Tab tops aren’t as popular now, so it was easy to stitch the tabs to the back for hidden hangers.

He also has a roller shade for privacy. One of the trips to the hardware store was to have it cut to fit the window.  That trip I also grabbed some white outlets to replace the almond colored ones shown here.

I love how it looks with the rug!  I’m wishing I had ordered the larger rug….but once the furniture goes in, it should be ok.

The bed :).  I wanted to stain it dark (Java), but that would take a lot of time from the 24 hour makeover.  Maybe later.  We have plans for a trundle and a velcro bedskirt. I think all that stuff will minimize the gap between the rug and the bed.

My pile from Ikea.  I LOVE building Ikea furniture.  (I’m not being sarcastic.) The duvet cover came from Target’s clearance rack, not Ikea.  I bought it a long time ago knowing I wanted to do gray and white in his room.

Oh the bed!  I love how the duvet covers looks with everything.  The pillows were an impulse buy at Ikea ($5-7 each.) The gray one has lots of texture. The bird one makes me giggle.

He finally gets a big boy desk :).  His old desk was a $5 garage sale find for 1st graders that I spray painted. This one is an Ikea Micke.  It was still cheap, but definitely an upgrade. It took me awhile to make a decision on this desk because there’s no drawer stack.  There are two really wide drawers right under the work surface though and

That’s as far as I’ve gotten today.  Caleb is working on sorting his Legos and I’m trying to talk Darren into hanging the Lack shelves.  I started to do it myself, but the instructions recommended finding a stud.  I found Darren :).

I also have lots of scripture printables from this blogger. I printed them at home on card stock and put them in $2 Ikea frames.  I plan to finish hanging all of that stuff tomorrow.

Just for fun here’s a before and a “so far” after:

Whoops!  Where did last week go?  I had good intentions to write all week, but I spent it doing stuff instead.  What stuff, you ask?

This month is all about focusing on our homes, and I got a little email from Ikea letting me know that the Applaro outdoor dining table I’ve had my eye on is on sale this month.  It looks like it will seat all 8 of us for just $100.  Last year we ate out a lot, but crouched around our furniture-less deck on lawn chairs.  I’ve been hoping for a dining table deal all year.   I didn’t have $100 in that fund, so I gathered up a bunch of our clutter and took it over to a garage sale my Mom was having with her friend.  They were really hospital to let us join in.  I made just enough to buy the table plus tax…..I hope to go get it tomorrow :).

Then we had a little bout of stomach flu.  My son woke us up Tuesday morning and said, I have good news and bad news….I threw up, but I saved the bed.  My brain doesn’t work quickly at 3am, but it didn’t take me long to figure out he meant the 45 year old red shag carpet was toast.

So I spent the week planning a 24 hour bedroom makeover, that we’re doing today (since the kids are off school and we have extra hands.)  The first thing I did was check rugsusa.com and see if they had a rug to fit our theme:  Gray, black, white, with an arrow theme.  This one was 70% off and I ordered it with part of the remodel funds we gathered during the spending freeze. (I ordered it Tuesday and it was in my house by Friday!)

When we did Heather’s room, I figured out that even cheap $1 a square foot flooring can add up quickly when you add the necessary underlayment ($500 later!)  So our plan is to just paint his plywood subfloor and throw the rug on top.  There will be about 2 feet around the edges that the rug doesn’t cover….it should be awesome.

Here’s his room before:

I’d better go get busy!