Au Pair Room Done!

It is 3pm on Friday, March 8th.

Our Au Pair arrives at 8pm.

I JUST finished the room.  It has been mostly done for weeks, but the workers were going in and out to finish painting the exterior of house and I didn't want to start cleaning the bathroom and finishing the floors, making the beds, until they were done tramping in and out.

I spent a long long time decorating, planning, and spent about double our budget to get this room together - a room I won't see again for many many many months.

Just so you remember where we started:



When we moved in...



Starting work to build the rumpus room...


Halfway there.




It lived like this for awhile.


We played down here a lot on rainy days and grandparents slept down here regularly.

Then mama got knocked up, we found out about the Au Pair program, and decided to invite a total stranger to come live with us in our tiny 2 bedroom apartment.

So...here it is!


This isn't the most glamorous entrance, but it is her own.


I imagine that rug won't be white when we get the room back in 18 months, but it was SO cheap I don't care.


It would have been nice to iron that slipcover, but this mama's very pregnant and was so not doing that.


We got her a netbook and a cell phone so she can watch netflix and skype and get some privacy from our crazy house.


View from the bed.


View OF the bed.


The bathroom, finally clean.


Frosted the windows with contact paper so she could have some privacy.


A white orchid makes everything look pretty and put together.


Her "kitchen" - I filled it with snacks, tea, a couple cups and plates.  She also has a microwave and a fridge/freezer.  She can use our kitchen anytime, but our house is SO small so if she wants friends over I want them to have a place to hang out and have some privacy, drink wine, and have some snacks.


There's no closet in her room (that wall of doors are the water heaters and furnaces).  I bought these from ikea to hopefully act as a closet for her.  Not fancy at all, but hopefully it will work for her.

I'm a little nervous about having someone come live with us, but this adventure starts in just a few hours...

Bedside tables for a room with no room!

Our new bedroom is working out marvelously.



It feels like a secret adult place in our totally kid house.



But...I like to read in bed, and drink water before I fall asleep.

So far, we've been reaching into the bedside "closets" to put the water down, but as I thought about breastfeeding in bed, I started to get nervous about how that would work.  Plus, with my giant belly, I'm having trouble sitting up on my own and it required a little reaching.

At ikea the other day, I saw the Ribba picture ledges and knew they would be perfect!

I bought 2 and wish I had bought more.



I don't LOVE the way they look, but they hold a glass of water nicely, my book perfectly, and require no getting up at all.

Plus, surprisingly, we don't knock them at all when we get up.

Quick easy solution.

Love it.

Ikea Nasum Boxes - Ugh.

The baskets in this picture?  Nasum baskets from Ikea.

They were amazing.  Sturdy, deep, non-offensive.  The "straw" sometimes came unraveled, but we really liked them.  They held all of T's clothes, cloth diapers, wipes, toys, etc.  When he pulled them out of the slot they were light - so it didn't hurt him like drawers would have.

At $15 a drawer, it was pricy, but so versatile, so when we moved T into the bigger bedroom and the records into the dining room (did we tell you we did that?), we knew we'd use our extra Expedits for the baby's clothes - so we'd have to buy more baskets.

Today, 6 months pregnant, in a rainstorm, I went to ikea to buy a bunch of the baskets - 10 to be exact.  They filled the shopping cart. 

Piled high in my shopping cart, I did the ikea shopping cart crawl back to the car in the pouring rain. You know the crawl - with the basket that wants to chase its tail.  Then rolls away from you in the parking lot and won't stay at your car as you unload.

Drive back across the bay, bring all 10 baskets up two flights of stairs (three trips), put them all together - only to realize that they are now made of cheap crap that falls apart instantly.

%$*%#$

The hinges were once metal.  All 15 of our current ones are made of metal.  Sturdy, screwed into place - awesome.

The current ones?  Plastic "hinges" (really just a piece of plastic folded into a V) and nailed into place - so the bottoms don't fit snugly and the baskets start coming apart moments after you put them together.

I'm pissed.

Now I have to go BACK to ikea.

Not only that, but they don't make the metal hinges anymore.

So, I'll either have to get a different kind of basket, or hunt for metal hinged baskets in ikeas across the land.  I don't want another kind of basket.

End rant about something stupid and insignificant.

Does my bedroom look like a hotel room?

So, everyone who has stepped into my new and improved bedroom has said that it looks like a hotel room.  Cool by me!  I LOVE it.

When we moved into this house, we lost our mellow groovy all white and textured vibe and went with a more playful colorful toddler proof look.  My bedroom never really felt like a place to relax, but more like a place where all the leftover furniture went to die.

I did everything I could, but I never really liked our old bedroom.





There was too much empty space, not enough cohesion, and though I loved each piece individually, they just didn't seem to GO together.

Since Young House Love posted their idea about wardrobes flanking their bed, I thought it looked cool, but we always had plenty of storage.

Till we thought about where we would put two children.

T's room was tiny, but worked really well for just him.



But there was no room for a crib, let alone another floor bed or clothes for an additional person.

I was happy to give up my "big" room and trade for a smaller one.

So we did.

One morning while Bubbs and T were occupied, I painted the room dark grey.  Bubbs was HORRIFIED when he got home (it did look almost black in the evening) and T was pretty disturbed that his room wasn't there anymore.

We had ordered Ikea kitchen cabinets to fit the 30" spaces beside the bed, ikea curtains, and drawers and shelves for the kitchen cabinets.  They arrived in huge boxes.

The next day, Bubbs got going on putting together the cabinets while I put together T's new room.

By 6pm, both rooms were done.  Well, mostly done.


We hung the curtains via Young House Love's method (.79 cheapo curtain hangers). 

I bought the wrong kind of drawers, so they sit to be returned.

We purchased $50 swing-arm lights and installed them from Home Depot.

The chandelier had to be hacked (from Cost Plus) since we didn't have an overhead light in that room.  I bought the wrong color chain, so we'll fix that eventually, but for now it works!  I have to say I was totally impressed that Bubbs knew how to make that work.

We still have some art to hang on the opposite walls.

The light puts a honey comb pattern on the walls so T is obsessed with our "beehive" room and LOVES to snuggle in his hive and hide.

The closed in head of the bed is SO cozy and we keep saying how much we love hte room every time we go to sleep.

T's new room is a MAJOR hit.


I need to patch some spots on the wall still and re-arrange some art, but dude plays in his room SO much more than he used to!






There's room for the baby's crib and eventually a floor bed where the wicker chair is now.



Plus, this might sound nuts, but the "view" from each room is better with the new set up.  Since we mostly sit on the floor in T's room, all you can see is the blue sky and a few tree tops (rather than before, in our room, you would sit on the bed and see the cars parked in the neighbor's backyard).

And in our new room, since you sit on the bed, you see the blue sky as well instead of the stucco and dirt on the neighbor's house.

Overall, total success.

Decorating and Kicking

18 weeks today.  This baby is KICKING - like so you can feel it on the outside.  Looking back, I think I felt it with T at 22 weeks (but my placenta was in the front).

Bubbs felt it this weekend and T keeps yelling, "my brother is kicking me!"  

My nausea is still horrible if I don't take my medicine, but as long as I take it in regular intervals, I can keep it at bay.  I do have a low energy when I first take it, which is a bummer for T, but it is better than vomiting.  For sure.

I had a surge of energy.

We switched rooms. T and Baby Santa Clause (that's the name T has given the new baby) will share the big room and Mama and Daddy get the smaller one.

I painted (with zero VOC BM Paint) a deep dark grey, and over the course of the two day weekend, we built ikea kitchen cabinets as dressers (similar to young house love's old master bedroom), turned T's new room into a playroom/bedroom, and just generally kicked serious ass in the decorating department.

I have to say that I'd forgotten how good it felt to decorate. I get a serious high when I can turn a blank canvas (or baby room) into a sexydarkgroovy well thought out room.  Even if I cheated and stole ideas from other people.  We all slept very well last night - maybe from working so hard and maybe b/c our new rooms are just what they were supposed to be.

We sold our Kivik sofa downstairs in the rumpus room to prepare the room for construction so our Au Pair will have a decent place to live when she arrives in February.  The sale of the sofa completely paid for our new room transformation!

Photos to come.

Cutting and Sawing and Drilling and Dreaming - Closet Fun

This monstrosity was my closet.

I don't have drawers small enough to be useful underwear and sock drawers so I used these cubes that sat on my closet floor along with 50% of my shoes.

My closet has a single narrow door with a lot of space on either side - but it is super dark and not set up in any way that is useful.  Plus the bar looked like it was about to snap.

I headed to my local cramped hardware store (if you've only been to home depot, you haven't lived).

There were white plastic options for cheaper, but I bought three sets of these.



They sat in a bag in the front hall for about a month.

Then, one day, during my lunch break, I got a bug up my butt to do something about my closet (that bug might have been the house exchange coming up.

First, I took got out the drill.

Second, I looked up you-tube videos so I could figure out how to use the drill.

25 minutes later - I figured out how to load the screwy thing into the zizzer thing.

Then I removed the pole.

Um, it was PVC pipe.

Seriously.

In yet another stupid idea from the people here before us (to be archived with painting latex over oil based paint), rather than spend the money on a wood closet bar, they bought PVC pipe.

In yet another stupid idea from US, I just cut the PVC to the lengths I wanted it rather than buying wood.

I used the only saw we have that you don't plug in and cut the PVC into equal (sort of) pieces (after measuring the closet with a flimsy tailoring measuring tape.

Once they were cut and the totally poison PVC sawdust was floating throughout my garage, I went back in to start to re-assemble.

Using my handy dandy thinker hat, I figured that I could start the drill holes with nails.




After an hour of prep, I got my first bar up.


On the other side, I placed two bars - one on top of the other.  I figured dresses and coats could go on the tall bar and shirts and pants could go on the stacked bars.

There was a bookcase that had been abandoned in the garage, so I singlehandedly (well, actually, doublehandedly) carried it back upstairs and loaded my shoes and my underwear/sock boxes on top.

I also took some spare nails to hang belts and bras.



Ta Da!




Oh - and I finally put a lightbulb in (it has been over a year) and the light doesn't work in there. Figures. Thus, aside from my crappy photography skills, the crappy pictures.