A New Room for the Girls!

Popular decorating trends and countless searches of Pinterest and Google had almost convinced me that there was no way to have historically-accurate dark-stained wooden trim in a bedroom and still make it look fresh and feminine.  But I think we pulled it off!

ALL DONE!!

This project took us ages and ages to complete.  We began in May of 2015, when this was just "Stella's room."  Flora didn't even exist yet, and it would be awhile more before we knew she was a girl and would be moving in with her big sister eventually.  So then it began to be called "the Girls' room," and as there were now two people sleeping elsewhere in the house and waiting for their room to be ready, I was feeling more and more stressed about its lack of completion.  But it's finally done, thank goodness, and we did it all by ourselves, and I'm very satisfied with the outcome.

Before
The finish on the trim and doors was in rough shape.  The shellac varnish had darkened so much over time that it was almost black.  It had a lot of crazing and drips, and whoever had last painted the room had splattered drips of paint all over the baseboards which had then been absorbed in by the old shellac.

The walls and ceiling were both painted a very pale blue-gray color that didn't work at all with the warm wood tones, and made the room feel quite depressing.  The carpet was a similar blue-gray and covered in stains.

The ceiling fan/light fixture held only one bulb and just added to the dull dreariness of the whole room, and there were several areas of plaster in need of patching.


In Progress

Tom spent countless hours of his life removing the shellac with alcohol and rags.  Honestly, it would have been easier to just replace the trim completely, or perhaps to sand it instead.  But he wanted to preserve the original features as much as possible.

"before" on the left, "after" shellac removal on the right

Once the shellac layer was off, we were able to add some stain to darken the wood to a deep brown, and then we added many coats of polyurethane on top.  This whole process probably took up the majority of our time spent on this room.

While Tom was working on trim, I kept myself busy refinishing a lot of furniture.  We bought two similar dressers on Craigslist.  Tom sanded them down and cut off the silly country-style decorative elements from the bottoms.  I then painted the "bottoms", and stained and poly'd the tops.  I painted a lovely ornate (plastic!) mirror I picked up at a flea market and have had sitting around for a few years.  I also acquired (on Craigslist, of course) a nightstand which I repainted and put new drawer pulls on, and a bedframe for Stella which I repainted.  And we're super bad about remembering to take "before" photos of anything, sooo.....you'll just have to trust me that what we did made a huge improvement!

I also asked Tom to add some decorative elements to a bookcase we already owned - he put a case and a crown, and some piping along the sides.  Then I re-painted it a girly pink-and-white.

before

after

We ripped up the carpet to find some nice hardwood underneath.  As you can see, it needed to be refinished.

We decided to do it ourselves - so we rented the huge sander with all the sanding disks, bought the fancy floor polyurethane and applicators, and spent a couple weeks working on that at night after the kids were in bed.

My verdict on DIY floor refinishing: a lot more expensive than I expected, and WAY more work than I wanted to do.  I definitely want to hire a professional to do it if we ever refinish another room (the trick will be convincing Tom to agree!).

applying polyurethane on a hot and sticky summer night

Tom replaced the ceiling fan with a nicer one that holds more lightbulbs.  He also switched out all the off-white outlets and lightswitches for brown ones, and I stained some wooden outlet/lightswitch plates to match the trim.

I patched up the walls extensively, repainted the ceiling in a flat white, and after much deliberating over the appropriate wall color, chose to paint them lavender.  I bought some pretty white floral fabric from Jo-Anns and sewed some curtains for the windows.


After

Stella's bed

Flora's crib

Flora's dresser

Stella's dresser

Stella's nightstand

the rug whose finding and deciding-upon required hours of my life to be wated away in internet searches, and threatened the peace of the spousal relationship in our household

done at last!

{p,h,f,r} Homeschool Method Research and Other Stuff

{pretty}

No commentary needed :-)

{happy}

Tom recently wired up some extra speakers in our house.  Now we basically have surround-sound on the whole bottom floor!  There are wall-mounted speakers in the corners of the living room, dining room, and kitchen - and Tom fished the wires through the walls so everything's nice and tidy.  They all hook up to our stereo, so I can play listen to anything I like, and actually hear it as I travel through the house cleaning up during the kids' naptime.  It truly does "spark joy" for me, to use a term from the Kon Mari method (which I've been loosely following for the past year to tidy my house).

Recently, I've been listening to this podcast about the Charlotte Mason approach to homeschooling: A Delectable Education.

There are a lot of great ideas here, and now I plan to take a Charlotte Mason inspired approach to homeschooling next year.  Sly will be in "first grade," so it's starting to get real!

{funny}

We're big thrift shoppers, and one of our favorite things to do when we just need to get out of the house is to check out a thrift store.  The other day, before going to Goodwill, we allowed the kids to open their piggy banks to get out a few dollars - in case they wanted to buy something for themselves (but only if Tom and I approved it first!).

Linus found his item right away:

haha!  We ended up telling him he wasn't allowed to buy it, though.

But then when we were up at the register paying for things, Linus reached into the pocket of his little 2T shorts, and whipped out a crisp $100 bill!!  Everyone of us - including the cashier and the people in line - gasped.  It was so incongruous to see a toddler holding that much money, as if it were nothing.  Sly explained that he had helped Linus pick out his money, and thought he'd given him a $1 bill!

{real}

Some days, mom just doesn't feel like being a short-order cook for lunchtime.  So I put together what the kids excitedly call "making a platter."  Basically, a hodge-podge of whatever's in the fridge and pantry.  The kids love it, and actually....I'm starting to think I should just do this every day!  SO much easier on me.

And lastly, If you have any stained wood in your house, and don't already use stain markers, you have to get some!  I use these everywhere - on our trim, floors, and  furniture.  As long as you use a stain color that's pretty close, they work wonders at hiding scratches.

Check out this before-and-after I took the other day

Amazing!

Happy Feast of the Epiphany!

I promised some updates on Christmas, and here I am just slipping under the gate right at the end!

Ah, well.  It's because Christmas was such a busy, yet pleasant season for us this year.  Everything went smoothly, and we miraculously managed to avoid any major (lack-of-sleep+too-much-sugar-inflicted) meltdowns from the kids this year.  We even went to the Christmas midnight Mass for the first time ever.  With the kids! 

A question I have yet to find a satisfying answer to: Is this the twelfth day of Christmas, or was that yesterday?  I've been reading very conflicting things about this.  Do you start counting on Christmas day, or the day after?  Even Wikipedia admits that there is a controversy over which night is "Twelfth Night".  Most of my trusty sources seem to think Epiphany Eve is the proper Twelfth night, though, so that is likely what I'll go with.

We're having a very small Epiphany party tonight.  A priest friend invited himself over to do the Epiphany blessing on our house (!), and we said, "actually, we're still waiting for someone to come give our house the regular house blessing.  Can you do BOTH blessings for us?"  And he said yes, of course.  So we decided to invite over a few friends, serve up some dessert, break out a Catholic trivia game, and make a night of it!

Epiphany celebrates - among other things - the visit of the magi to Christ.   We finally moved our three wise men from their lookout on top of the china cabinet to join the other figures in our nativity set...on top of the television cabinet.  It's always disappointing to me that they only get to be there for one day before I pack the whole thing away.  So last year, I kept just the nativity set out until Candlemas, which I might do again.

I wanted a little more in the way of Epiphany decorations, so I recycled one of the Dollar Ttore cardstock stars from the kids' birthday party to serve as "the star."  I hung it from the chandelier over our Christ child statue on the dining room table.  (I almost said I "hung it over our centerpiece", but I realized it would be rather irreverent to refer to it that way!)

*****

 Here are a few snapshots of our Christmas...

baby elf

a very well-dressed Santa we ran into downtown

Yes, that's right!  It only took me TWO YEARS to finish these babies.  And with that, I think I'm ready to retire from knitting.  With the exception of one baby blanket for each of my future children, but only because I set the precedent with the first ones.

This was our first Christmas in the new house, and I must say - I think the house really took well to Christmas decorations.  All the beautiful woodwork and molding provided many little ledges and nooks on which to place pretty things.

Unfortunately, most of my photos were not able to do it justice.  I still haven't found a way to take decent indoor shots with my mediocre camera(s) and the low amount of light in our house (a problem we are currently working to address!).  Almost all of them turn out blurry.  So here's the few that didn't.

 

 
Tomorrow I will begin taking down the decorations.  Part of me is looking forward to it, because it will remove a lot of visual busyness in one fell swoop.  The house is going to automatically feel cleaner and more spacious. 

But at the same time....it will no longer be so festive and cozy.  Just having the decorations up inspired us to light a fire in the fireplace almost every night.  But our wood supply is now dwindling, and I know we'll want to get more conservative with our fires for the rest of the year.  I am not looking forward to these cold, wet, and dreary days to come.  January through April is the most depressing and slow-moving time of year. 

So I'm determined to keep myself busy through the late-winter doldrums, by taking on a lot of painting projects around the house.  That will provide me with activity as well as some spirit-brightening changes around here - as well as, I hope, adding some literal brightness.  We're going with lighter, brighter colors in a lot of the rooms to counteract the dark wood everywhere.  We recently painted the dining room ceiling from light green to white, and the difference was astounding.  It immediately cheered me up every time I walked in there for days.

Well, Happy Twelfth Day of Christmas OR day-after-the-twelfth-day-of-Christmas, as the case may be!  Happy and joyous Epiphany to all!

Our Projects of Late

We've had many projects going on recently, which has been taking up much of my time.  As way of explanation for my almost-absence from the internet, here's a look at some things I've been doing in my "free time."


Crafting
I'm still working on the baby quilt at my quilting group.  I finished piecing the top.  I still need to get some batting so I can sandwich it all together, quilt it, and bind it.
 

This was my first time doing appliqué work, and it looks pretty rough up close.  Sewing right along the edges was not as easy as I expected, and I hit that point where I stopped caring, and just said "good enough!"  As long as it doesn't all pull out in the wash, I'm happy with it.

Another thing I'm doing with my quilting group is "block of the month."  Our instructor gave us a guide indicating how much to get of different types of fabric ("1/2 yard of fabric #1", "1/3 yard of fabric #2", etc.).  We get to pick all our colors, but we have no clue what shape it will all take in the end.  Every month, she'll give us a new pattern, showing us how to put together one block.  At the end of a year - supposedly - we will be able to join them together into a queen-sized quilt.

Here's my first block.

 

I'm making the quilt for my bedroom.....which is now finally re-painted!  

Master Bedroom
When we moved in, the master bedroom had peach walls with matching peach trim, done in dull flat paint.   Very unhappy looking place.

before

before

"before", but after we had already scraped a lot of the old caked paint off the window moldings

And here's the room after painting the moldings white and the walls in a purple-gray satin paint.

after

after

 

after - I'm loving the contrast between the walls and the trim

This was a big step, but our bedroom is still not done.  We need to hang pictures, refinish the free-from-Craigslist headboard (I'm thinking white, with some antiquing paint to pull out all the nice carved flower details), and - the big one - build some bookcases in the alcoves beside the bed.

Which is why the alcove area still looks terrible, with the original wall color and stacks of books, waiting....

Kitchen Backsplash
Ever since we had our kitchen cabinets and counters re-done, we've been hoping to attempt installing a tile backsplash ourselves.  It's taken so long to get started - mostly because we were intimidated by it.  But after reading many online tutorials and watching a handful of Youtube videos about tiling, I felt confident enough to try it.  So far, we've just done the small piece of wall above the side counter.  This was our "practice" wall - Tom did most of the cutting, I did most of the tile-laying.  We're hoping to start on the rest of the backsplash a little after Thanksgiving.

wall before

after laying the tile, but before grouting

ta-da!!

I know the aqua and white is not to everyone's taste, but I think it's beautiful.  I can't wait until we have the rest of the backsplash done :-)


Moldings in the Playroom
When we moved in, the playroom had pale blue-green walls and white trim.  It was clearly in need of a new paint job at some point, but we decided not to even deal with it for a year or so.  We have too many other projects we'd like to do first.

But we noticed a few areas on the window frames and doors where there was some paint starting to chip off.  Worried that it might contain lead, Tom started pulling these little chips off with his fingers so he could throw them away before the kids got them.  It was soon discovered that 1. the paint is no longer well-adhered to the wood, and can pull off very easily, and 2. the stained trim underneath is still in great shape.

We did not need this as a project now, but Tom is so excited to restore the room to its former stained-wood glory that he's taken this on as a little side job when he has nothing else to work on.

I am going to miss the fresh and bright white trim in that room.  I'm so torn between wanting to restore the house to its historically-correct look, and claiming a few rooms for a more-modern white-trimmed look.  (Luckily, the trim in our bedroom was discovered to have always been painted, so Tom didn't fight me on that one).

This shows the white trim on the window and the baseboards (taken shortly after moving in)

This was a few weeks ago, after Tom started to chip the paint away

I don't have a clear vision yet for this room's future look (or function), but it's definitely going to be a big change in feel.  To me, white trim seems light and feminine, while dark trim seems heavy and masculine.

Roughing It in the Cold

Well, winter weather is starting to set in for sure.  When I climbed out of bed this morning, there was a bit of snow on the ground (not as much as they got in Western New York - have you seen the pictures?!), and my little weather station told me it was 13° outside...and only 56° in my bedroom.  Oy.

At time of writing...

 We've been keeping our thermostat set to 62° to save money on natural gas.  But in an old house with literally no insulation in the walls (I did not realize this until Tom informed me of it the other day.  Apparently, in the 1920s, there was little need for insulation in houses, since coal was so cheap - and probably especially so here, as we live in coal country - and you could always just throw another shovel in to the furnace to make it warmer...), the upper floors never even get that high.  

There's a Facebook group I'm part of, and one of the women recently asked what temperature everyone kept their thermostats set to in the winter.  There were dozens of responses, ranging as high as 72°.  The average seemed to be between 65° and 68°.  Only one person I saw kept theirs lower than us: at 60°, and she said she lived in Vermont so maybe she's just used to the cold...? 

Here, we spend the days wrapped in several sweaters, thick socks with down-filled slippers on top, and scarves and hoods as needed.  Sometimes I even sleep wearing a hat.  My body maintains a low level of constant shivering.

Anyways, if I thought my room was cold this morning, it felt like a veritable sauna compared to the attic.  I went up there to wake Sly, and could hardly stand how cold it was.  You can see your breath up there!  Poor kid. The ducting just has no warm air left to give by the time it reaches the one tiny floor vent that's supposed to service the whole third floor - and that's after we've selectively closed off several of the vents in "unnecessary" rooms below, such as the bathroom....brrrr!

Tom and I have been brainstorming about measures we can take to help keep it a bit warmer in the house/cheaper to heat.  He's partially through with covering the windows with plastic, and using spray foam insulation along the drafty bits in the foundation in the basement.  Hopefully that helps a bit.  And he found a tutorial for how to strategically add insulation to the specific type of attic shape we have.

As much as I want to complain about how cold it is here - and I think I pretty much spent a whole blog post doing just that! - I keep reminding myself that in terms of human history, we are so lucky to be enjoying a house that's as warm as it is during the winter.  Even into the Victorian period, many people had to close up the majority of their houses during the winter, living in just a room or two, huddled around a common hearth.  And insulation or no, I know our house is much toastier than the little loft where the Ingalls girls slept in the Little House books!

7 Quick Takes (Vol. 42)

So right now, I feel as if I have a thousand possible things to talk about, but none of them that are thought-out enough to write a whole post on.  I've been pretty busy and scattered recently.  But lucky for me, it's a Friday, and that means I can just give a few of those things a quick mention as a Quick Take!

-1-

This morning, all three kids were pretending to be a band.  Sly played drum and kazoo, Stella had another kazoo, and Linus played a tambourine.  It was pretty adorable.

I reflected that the only reason they managed to stay happily engaged and playing all together for so long was because I was present with them.  I had intentionally sat down on the floor with them, ignoring the thousand-and-one chores I wanted to do around the house.  I wasn't dividing my attention between them and a computer screen, I wasn't reading a book or magazine or sorting through mail or washing dishes.  I was just sitting there being with them.  And they couldn't have been happier.

I don't know why it's so hard to make myself drop everything sometimes, and just spend real time with the kids.  But I never regret it when I do.

-2-

Last weekend, we repainted our quite-chippy front porch.  It looks much nicer now.  It's so pleasant to sit out there in the mornings or evenings (the sunlight is too glaring during the afternoon).  I'm wishing I had taken more advantage of it while the summer weather lasted.

I'm kind of waiting for that old black couch to finally kick the bucket, and then I plan to find a hanging porch swing - a lifelong dream of mine!

-3-

While I'm discussing house projects, I might as well show a "before" and "in progress" shot of our kitchen.  The actual "after" shot is going to be a long time coming, I'm afraid.  I'll save all the details for a later post, but if you have any specific questions, feel free to ask in the comments.

We had some the original cabinets refaced, some new ones added, new solid surface countertops, a big single-basin sink, and a microwave and garbage disposal added.   We ended up doubling both our cabinet and counterspace. 

Main wall "before"

Main wall after renovation (I have rugs and curtains and pretty things in there now, so it actually looks much more colorful than this at the moment)

side wall "before"

side wall after renovation

 I love white kitchens!  Once everything's done, though, there will be plenty of aqua and yellow mixed in, which are "my kitchen colors."

The portion that we paid other people to do (i.e. Sears, who did a great job, so don't necessarily listen to all the terrible reviews on the internet) is done, so now it's all down to Tom and I to finish the rest.  And there's a lot to do: tile a backsplash, build corner shelves near the sink, replace the baseboards, re-frame the doors, change out the yucky fluorescent lighting,  repaint all the walls.  It's going to be awhile, unfortunately.

My latest kitchen project was to painting the brown door and the dirty "white" interior of the pantry.

Now it has a nice clean white door, some brand-new shelves that Tom cut for me, and an aqua interior.

This is a pretty crummy picture, sorry - someone was fussing for a snack as soon as she saw me in the kitchen

-4-

Some people make their houses child-proof....we make ours child-accessible!  (I'm "trademarking" that for a future blog post, because this is a growing philosophy of mine).

We added a second low handle for the pantry, so the kids can help prepare their own breakfast in the morning!

-5-

I let the kids watch Sesame Street this morning and this song came on.


[Link here in case the embedded thing is acting funny]
Not only was the song pretty catchy on its own, but I felt especially drawn to it, because it could basically be my theme song.  I would be barefoot all day, every day, if I could :-)

-6-

I signed Sly up for a Catechesis of the Good Shepherd program.  I'm pretty thrilled about it, as I've been hearing great things about them for years.  I have yet to read The Religious Potential of the Child, but since its based on the Montessori method, I expect it's pretty effective.

-7-

A number of years ago, when I decided that I wanted my (future) family to develope the habit of observing many of the feasts (and fasts) of the Church, I expected that it would take an enormous about of thought, preparation, and planning to pull it off.  But as the years roll by, we've been very slowly and gently tucking new little things into our days and I suddenly find us having legitimate family traditions for certain days, without even meaning to establish them.

For example, last St. Joseph's Day, I made a "fancy" dinner, and pulled out a bottle of wine (which we rarely have in the house, so I have no idea where it came from!), as well as a bottle of sparkling grape juice I had in the pantry.  We let the kids drink the grape juice out of these tiny little cordial glasses that are stemmed, so looked like our adult versions (I think Montessori would approve).  Sly was unbelievably giddy over the prospect of "kid wine", and still talks about it often.  He has said, "I can't WAIT for St. Joseph's Day!"  If we keep this up, we'll just entrench those happy memories which surround the day of this great Saint.

And I think this is probably how many Traditions start anyways.  You do something once, and it proves itself to be worthy and good, and so it gets repeated, and gradually becomes an inseparable part of your culture.

Quick Takes is hosted at Conversion Diary