Posted: March 13th, 2012 | Filed under: House Tour | Tags: house tour | 9 Comments »
Thanks again to all of you who left such lovely comments on the mini tour…you really made this Nervous Nellie feel so much more at ease, and I’m grateful to have such awesome friends on these here interwebs.
I thought you might have fun checking out a few of the snaps showing some of the changes around here that didn’t make the cut!
I’ve purposely not shown much of the kids rooms because I feel like it’s invading their privacy, but I relented since we were doing a post about living with kids…they have to live somewhere, right?!
For this tour, I didn’t declutter as much as I usually do..I kinda let it be, especially in the kids rooms.
You can tell I was “keepin’ it real” here…the cluttered bulletin board etc..was not cleaned up …probably should have been!
The blue horses have moved to the dining room for the moment, but you know me, they’ll be somewhere else in a couple of months.
Can you believe it? No Otto photo bombs! Only because he was here while I was shooting…
He finally got tired of my shooing him behind me and decided to take advantage of my preoccupation by sneaking up to the boys rooms. Luckily it only cost us a pair of socks.
Posted: March 13th, 2012 | Filed under: House Tour, Love & Haterades | Tags: Modfrugal mini tour on Design Mom | 5 Comments »
Hey guys, just popping in to say there’s a mini-tour of the digs over at Design Mom as part of her Living With Kids series! Thanks so much to Gabrielle for having me! Check it out here.
Posted: March 12th, 2012 | Filed under: Art, DIY, Treehouse | Tags: godzilla, minecraft, vintage godzilla posters | 7 Comments »
Not exactly an update, as much as an update on plans. We had a family “meeting” in the treehouse this weekend to discuss next steps with the interior painting etc.. and some fun and interesting requests emerged.
1) Zip line access – We have a zip line in the front yard that we can move…this will be tricky to keep it safe, but we think it’s possible…
2) A chalkboard inside - Easy Peasy! We can paint a few of the panels in the chalkboard paint.
3) A refrigerator – Um, no…this is a treehouse, not your college dorm room….next?
4) A TV – See #3….DUH.
5) The bottom bunker built – This is actually top of their wish list. We really wanted our big outdoor project to involve a deer proof vegetable garden this year, but we’re feeling some pressure here. Our answer was: “We’ll think about it.” Still thinking.
6) A poster/collage depicting Godzilla destroying a Minecraft city – COOL!!!! We are a family who geeks out over old 50′s-60′s Godzilla movies…we love them. The boys are also completely obsessed with Minecraft, so this marries their passions on what should be a super fun art project for us…
We’ll be looking to create a combination of these two.
via koyaanisqatsi degauss
PLUS
image via godzilla2012
= CHAOS!
While looking for images, I can across these great vintage Polish and Czech Godzilla movie posters from the 70′s, I love these and I can’t wait to show the boys and see what they think of them.
images via Monsterbrains
We concluded our planning session up there with snacks and a round of Life, and I’m so happy that it is only in this game that I would have 3 weddings and both a set of twins AND a set of triplets…phew!
Oh, I almost forgot! I made a mini-tour of the treehouse so far so that new readers don’t have to slog through all those treehouse posts to see the progress of the building.
Posted: March 6th, 2012 | Filed under: Furniture, To Do List | Tags: dining room, dining room table, parsons table sandrift gray | 13 Comments »
I have table woes. One of the only pieces of furniture in this whole entire house that was purchased new, has failed me.
Am I shocked? Not really.
Am I resentful? Absolutely.
Our dining room table was bought on sale at Pottery Barn, and I think I know why the clearance price was so good. The finish has the life span of a fly. It’s called Sandrift Gray and it started chipping only 6 months after we got it. Now, this is what we see all over…little nicks and chips.
I contacted Pottery Barn right away when the first nicks appeared to see if they sold a touch up kit or something that would match the finish…NO. So now I throw a canvas dropcloth over it if I have guests coming because it’s at the point now where it’s just looking…shabby.
I love the lines…I wanted a Parson’s table, and still do, plus it has a leaf, so that we can seat 10-12 for special occasions. I want to fix the table finish, but how? The “finish” is textured, as you might be able to tell in the photos. Because of that, an opaque paint color might highlight the chips in the texture. If I did some kind of overglaze, would that be enough to hide it? I don’t know that I have it in me to sand off the finish completely and start over…but it’s a last ditch option. I tried a silver paint pen on one spot that I promptly wiped off…sigh.
This will be a big project either way and I’m open to suggestions on how to hide these blemishes…I don’t want to have to live with tablecloths forever.
Posted: March 1st, 2012 | Filed under: DIY, Furniture, Our Projects | Tags: DIY upholstery, tufted klismos parzinger chairs | 4 Comments »
Things are really boring around here since all our projects are mid-stream. On the upholstery front, I haven’t started my new chairs, although I’m dying to, until I can finish these chairs to sell. This is what all that mess was from.
We forgot to take pics of the chairs before taking them down to the frames, so I tried to dig up a few snaps of them from days of yore.
They had button tufting on the back. Yikes… my dining room when we first moved in! Ew!
Terrible shots, but you get the idea…a pair of upholstered tufted klismos style chairs from the 40′s-50′s I’d guess. The only ones I found like them online are attributed to Parzinger, here.
So, the Things were a little rough with them, and the frame snapped on one, so up to the attic they went to await repair. I had planned to reupholster them anyway, but knew we’d have to fix the frame first. Once we got them stripped down, both frames actually needed some structural repair.
The CC likes the woodworking repair aspect…*yawn* and now that he’s almost done, it’s time for me to get to work and sand down the legs, paint them and start upholstering them. I’ve decided to go a little crazy, OK a LOT crazy with these chairs.
Behold what I plan to cover them with….
Scary, huh? That’s several yards of faux grey and white Mongolian fur, and if it ends up looking like a pair of ugly trolls, I can just redo it. THIS is the fun part of trying to tackle this on my own-the risks aren’t so risky. Would I do this if I were paying someone else to do it? Probably not, I’d go with something “safer”.
So that’s one of the many unfinished things happening around the house…I’m hoping for a full reveal sooner rather than later.
Posted: February 21st, 2012 | Filed under: Landscaping | Tags: equisetum hymale, hellebore, horsetail, horsetail rush, pear branches blooming | 4 Comments »
It’s that time of year…the seed catalogs start showing up and I get spring fever bigtime. It doesn’t help that my plants are confused by the mild winter and everything is budding out. I predict the blooms will open on these Pear branches by Friday, latest.
It’s 60 degrees today, and we had snow over the weekend, with more predicted this coming weekend. Today is my window…it is time to prune the horsetail rush or Equisetum Hymale. I didn’t prune it last winter and I think it showed by blowing over so easily. Now it is laying down completely flat and it’s time to hack it to the ground. This is how it looked when I first put it in.
And this is how it looked today. So sad.
I couldn’t find the electric hedge trimmer in the garage chaos, so I had to go old school with the shears. FUN!
Hopefully it will return reinvigorated and upright, like the picture I showed you when I first decided to go for this stuff. By all accounts, it should, so fingers crossed!
via Grow Where You’re Planted
