My Daughter's room

I'm currently redoing my 7 year-old's room. She first wanted a Tinkerbell room, but then changed her mind to an "Under the Sea" room. I'm not talking Finding Nemo or The Little Mermaid, but she wants sea creatures.

I painted her room 3 shades of blue and bought some decals from Amazon.com. I knew I could not paint fish. However, I did paint a scuba diver because I was not going to pay $26 for one scuba diver. My daughter thinks the diver looks great and that's all that matters.

All her furniture is wood. So we are installing wall shelves, buying a lighter desk and I'm painting her bed and dresser white. White goes more with a little girl. I had stripped the foot board and headboard to her bed YEARS ago when I thought I would just varnish them. Since then, I've thought everything would look better white. So I wasted countless hours taking off-white paint off the bed pieces just to paint them again! However, they are now white and look pretty darn good, IMHO.

Her dresser is my dresser from when I was 10. It's in decent shape and all wood. I'm still in the process of removing all the varnish to paint it white. This is tedious. I can't imagine 'wanting' to do something like this for fun. I've put a lot of time into this project, as well. I still have to do some minor repairs to the dresser, too, which required me taking the top off of it. I'm hoping gorilla glue for wood will help with the repair. My husband is doubtful.

So, when all is complete, I will post pictures. This is just a teaser, I suppose.

House Renovation Complete

Well, a lot of time has gone by, over a month. I was not in town for the house renovations, so I could not take pictures. The contractor had his workers start demolishing the house inside before I could get in there with a camera. I have some pictures that have been taken with a camera phone, so they are not of the greatest quality. I will post these later.

All in all, the renovations went well and were completed within a month! Our contractor rocks!! He'll be back when we replace the carpeting with bamboo flooring. That will be in a few years. He'll also be changing out the linoleum in the baths and kitchen. We went on the cheap side just so we could move in.

Right now most of our stuff is still in our basement, where we moved it while in transition between houses. We have most of our furniture upstairs, though. There are some minor pieces downstairs still, but nothing heavy that we can't handle. A lot of clothes are still downstairs and we continue to say, "I think that's in the camper", as Fred was living in our camper for 2 weeks. So, as I upload pictures from my camera and phone, I will post them on here.

New Home Purchase

It's been so long. I'm a slacker, but I'm also working on my master's and just tired of 'writing'. Sooo, here's an update.

We weren't really looking for houses and stumbled across a foreclosure just 4 houses down from where we live now in our rented home. What makes this house so desirable for us is the location. We went inside and saw a lot of cosmetic things, nothing major. This was on a Saturday.

We went for another visit and decided to put in an offer. It went back and forth and we ended up with a good deal/offer/acceptance. Now we're in the process of picking out the details of our renovation. The kitchen is going to be the biggest and costliest project, so I'm highlighting that. The kitchen is a galley, so not much to do there. However, it is getting gutted. One day, I will add before and after pictures. Right now, I just wanted to get this started.

I will take pictures of other rooms and the outside, but the baths and kitchen will show the biggest changes. We are also going basic on floor coverings due to costs. We plan to make our 'dream renos' in the future when we won't have to finance them into a 30 year mortgage.

Stayed tuned. :)