He Sowed She Sewed

We LOVE our living room.  It is the only room in the house that is finished. 

What a lovely word.

We sit in this room and dream about what the rest of the house will look like someday-  As wonderful as this living room!

Here are pictures of the work we did with the living room:

ripping down the wallpaper

We took off the wallpaper, which took forever and a day.  Never knew wallpaper would make me want to start swearing.  We eventually got it off and got started on painting.  We kept the previous red color from the former residence but we painted the wall again since it hadn’t been painted in a number of years.  We repainted the outer walls as well to give a clean and fresh feel.

We love the new carpet that went into the living room.  It is a sort of darker brown with light tones of white coloring.  I am very happy with it.

carpet doesn’t get any newer or feel any better than this

My chairs and poufs add so much to this room, they tie the blue and read and white together.

The sectional couch we got from my parents a few years ago.  I made that button B picture during the superbowl and the lamp we got at a thrift store last week.  I made the owl on the entertainment center (not sure if he will stay there), and the picture on the left I got when I was in Ethiopia about five years ago.  The picture in the back right corner I found at a garage sale for $5 and there is a sticker on the back that says it is from Kohls and originally cost $165.

 Our fish even matches the room =)  He is red with blue fins.  His name is Comet or Carlos (Carlos was the name of our previous fish, don’t ask) and I think he adds a lot to the room.  We have always “housed” our fish in the kitchen because it is easy to remember to feed them there and I guess it makes sense.  But I think he looks wonderful on the top of our entertainment center.

Don’t you want to hang out in this room all day long?

The biggest new purchase we have ever made in our married life was a mattress.  Most everything else has been bought at thrift stores, craigslist or random garage sales/flea markets.  This has served us very well.  We have made the most of our purchases and it has worked out just fine.

Now that we are in a permanent place of residence we are weeding through our less than perfect selection of mismatched furniture and belongings.  We have clung to a lot of things because we never knew if we would be needing particular things for a future house.  Now that we know where we are we can make serious cleansing decisions.  It feels very good to be getting rid of some of the stuff that is falling apart and not very attractive.

I have had this in my sewing area for the past year and now can get rid of it.  Thank goodness (thanks Jared for the shelves)

We are having a slightly difficult time deciding whether or not to buy new stuff or keep forging around for that perfect item.  There are plenty of things that we don’t need asap but other things we do need/want pretty quick.

Our bedroom has been getting the shaft.  Since only Jared and I go in there (besides the kids waking us up of course) we haven’t been working on it at all.  Half of our clothes are still in suitcases and we don’t have curtains or pictures up.  Nothing is in the bathroom drawers yet since I want to line them with cute paper.

I am not sure why i wanted this so much but I did.  I REALLY really wanted to have matching nightstand tables AND matching lamps for each side of the bed.  It is hard enough to find nice items at second hand locations but I thought we might never find a pair of both.  So we bit the bullet and bought them new.  It was a weird experience for us, since we almost never do this but I love them and hope they will be our nightstands and lamps for a VERY long time, perhaps our whole life?

Jared and I both read before we go to bed and last night was the first time we could read in bed and when we got too tired to read another page we leaned over turned off our own lights and fell asleep.  We didn’t have to beg the other person to get out of the warm and cozy bed to turn off the big overhead light.

This is one purchase that is helping us feel more at home.  It’s the little things, right?

look at the sunlight in the morning!

I have boxes and boxes full of fabric and clothes I want to fix up.

If my fabric remains in boxes I will not sew.  The fabric will sit in the boxes because I will not want to sift through 17 boxes to find what I was looking for.  Sooooo, Jared, my knight in shinning armor made me some shelves!

They are adorable and useful and magnificent.  I love them and I can’t wait to fill them up.  Jared is hanging two more shelves as I write this post.

Isn’t it perfect?

Well here are my shelves, they were free and extremely sturdy.  Way to go Jared

Just because it is a kid’s room doesn’t mean it doesn’t matter.

We have been making many paint decisions during the past week.  Choosing paint for the whole  inside of a house can be a bit overwhelming because you don’t want to make the wrong choices.  I must say that paint on a little card looks quite different than paint covering a wall.

Needless to say, we flubbed it up on the kids play room.  This is the fabric I am going to make curtains out of:

so we decided to paint the room green and orange.  Not good:

The colors together were both ugly and also unsettling to look at.

Jared and I walked around the house painting other rooms as we kept glancing into the kids room questioningly.  We kept thinking, ah, it’ll be fine- it’s the kids room.  It will be fine.

The biggest reason we didn’t want to repaint the room was an issue of time and effort.  If we kept the room green and orange it would be done!  But we couldn’t do that to ourselves or our new house.

This is a room that we are going to be spending A LOT of time in.  All the kids toys are in this room and we want it to be athsetically pleasing, inviting and friendly to both adults and kids.

We decided to paint over the green paint with white.  I am SO glad we bit the bullet and put in the extra work.  Here is the room:

breaking in the room with a bedtime story

I am working on curtains right now and they are going to tie the room together and put the finishing touch on this fun room.  Can’t wait to show you-

We are officially in the parsonage.  Hallelujah.

We are so glad that we are done moving and we  can get our belongings out of storage.

Here are some pictures from the past week:

As you can see we have done a lot of work and have a whole heap of work ahead of us.  But it is exciting because it is our house and we are so happy to finally be here.