Time Flies

If you asked me when I made my last post I would have said it was a couple of weeks ago. Wow, time flies! I guess I've been busy with... life. We actually started work on the boy's bedroom on Memorial Day. We picked up the paint and covered the top half of the walls with dark blue and put in the chair rail. This last week I've been making the curtains and trying organize their stuff. Man, they have a lot of stuff.

Yesterday and today I got to work on making the bookcases for under the windows and designed and built some shelves for their closet to help organize and make the area more useful. I hope to finish painting them tomorrow and hopefully put them in the room on Thursday. Once that's all organized I get to start the fun stuff and make the big tree and paint stars on the wall. KC is a little anxious about me painting on the beautiful blue walls but I think the boys will love it.

In the meantime, bedtime has been fun with all three of them together. Will just thinks it's the most awesome thing to go to bed now, because to him, it is silly time. The other boys think it's way funny, so I have to go up multiple times to threaten loss of privileges if they don't shape up and show Will how you are "supposed" to act at bedtime.

Once I get the shelves up I'll take some pictures. I promise.

Boy's Bedroom Design

We are thinking/planning on moving all the boys into a room together sometime this summer. I also have been promising the boys for six months that we would paint their room. I thought it would fun to do a jungle theme since they have cute jungle pillowcases and their grandma is making them sort of jungle themed quilts. I also wanted to cut out a big tree in a MDF board, paint it and put it on their wall. On the branches there would be pegs and shelves for their hats and trophies. (Doesn't that sound cool?)

So today I was trying to layout the room and "design" it a bit. I have this:

(click to make larger)

The tree is going to be also inspired by these two pictures:

Been Busy

Where have I been? Of course there were the holidays, that always keeps us busy. We also spent most of November working on a project inside the house. Time to share the results. I didn't take any before pictures. Just imagine white walls with finger prints, scuff marks, and pencil from busy and creative boys.

First here is the dining room. We added blue paint, chair rail and made wainscoting boxes using pencil rail.

This the entry hallway. It is far from finished as we are trying to come up with the best way decorate this massive hallway. We thought a great first step is the paint and more wainscoting. We love the brown.

 Then everything was continued into the living room.

In the bedroom we took a slightly different approach and made cornice boxes inspired from All Things Thrifty. Then inspired from Suzy's Sitcom we used the same textured wallpaper as on the cornice boxes and glazed it with the wall color framing it with chair rail on top and the pencil rail on the bottom.

 Closer view of the wall decor. We also painted the bathroom the brown color from the bedroom (not pictured).

Lastly, KC got a new job that he started this December. Instead of working from home in his pajamas he now commutes on the bus to downtown and wears a suit everyday. Here is a hint at the new job.

What a difference a few months make.

After months of work we finally put grass in this last week. It is such a stark transformation. We didn't just go from dirt to grass, we went from sloping rocky expanse, (seriously one guy who did our cement commented repeatedly that they should have put a gravel pit here and sold all this rock, cha-ching)
to dirt with about 6 truckloads of dirt,
add some cement, a garden, trees, and plants
Finally there's grass. Such a difference.
The last step is to add a pathway and a planting area along the left border and put plants and rock/bark in the rest of the areas. (This is a photoshop mock up of what it might look like, yay photoshop.)

Progress

We've begun the first steps on finishing our backyard, sprinklers. We had the trenches dug last Saturday and laid out the pipe. KC and I (mostly KC) spent all of Wednesday making all the connections and we basically got it all done this morning. A few truckloads of topsoil is going to be delivered tomorrow. If you can't tell from the pictures our "dirt" is mostly rock so we'll need a lot of topsoil.

This is Isaac helping us fill in the trenches when we were done.