And so it begins...

The nursery, that is.  I've made the first few moves towards transitioning the current spare, spare bedroom into a permanent home for our future child-of-some-kind.  We'll call him/her the blueberry for now (which, honestly, I've been calling it since December).

Its also appropriate since the colors for the nursery are yellow...and bright blue.

Here is a before picture of the nursery from when we bought the house.

We didn't do much to it besides paint the room yellow and throw in some random furniture.  It looked roughly like this for the last three years.

Except that this bedroom also became the unofficial storage room. We're still working on cleaning it out.

When I decided to start working on the nursery, I looked through some decor pictures that I've been collecting for years for ideas.  I found the following nursery images that I've had for a long time and still love.  These are my inspiration for the room.

And finally, here is what we have so far.

The gallery wall is my favorite.  The crib is going to go right underneath it.  All of the images are homemade except for the three largest that I purchased from Etsy.

The puppies also love the nursery.  I think they are under the false impression that it is intended for them.

And for Mom, here is my progress on the throw blanket for the bed.  Duff chose the yarn.  I wanted to go plain royal blue and white but he wouldn't hear of it.  This was our compromise.  I think it will work out alright in the end.

Well, that's all for now.  Jo

Sorry, sorry, sorry

So its been a month since I wrote anything. I apologize. I'm sure you weren't holding you're breathe, though. You're probably getting used to it.

Anyway, things have been very busy around here, as you can imagine, so I only have a few pictures to share.

First, we had all of our ceiling lights installed (yeah!). They look something like this:

Next, I've been working a lot, including at home on the weekends. When she can, Riley likes to help.

And finally, we put up this year's Christmas decorations yesterday (please excuse the pictures from here on out--Duff took them this morning and he wasn't too happy about it).

Which was just in time for our first snowfall.

If only Riley were here to enjoy it. But instead, she's visiting the grandparents for a few weeks and it looks like she's fitting right in.

And I did it all by myself

Usually, when we have something that needs to be screwed in, nailed up, sawed in half or otherwise involves the use of power tools, I let Duff do it. Not that I can't do it...I just feel like he enjoys the use of power tools so much that I shouldn't waste the opportunity to use them on myself.

But last week, the roman shades that I have been waiting for three months for (that's right, they were back-ordered from JcPenneys for three months!) finally arrived. So I wanted them up as soon as possible (patience is not one of my virtues). Unfortunately, however, Duff had to work all weekend, and with the new extended store hours, that didn't leave much time for him to do projects.

So I took this project on by myself. Luckily it was fairly easy and only involved one power tool, several puppy toys, chasing after the puppy when she stole things she shouldn't have, finally surrendering and putting the puppy in her crate, some final pseudo-cursing when I couldn't get the brackets to snap into place, and then vwa-la! Roman shades. Lovely, light filtering roman shades that allow light in the room but block images from going out (if you catch my drift--this bedroom is Duff's walk-in closet after all).


So here's how they turned out. This is the one behind the bed that will probably always stay down for the sake of modesty (and to protect our neighbors' eyes).


The shades actually let in a lot of light, but unfortunately it is a rainy fall day here in PA, so that wonderful quality is not showing in the picture.


When the shade is all the way up, you can barely see it, which I appreciate.

Overall, I couldn't be happier with my $25 dollar purchase. Totally worth the 3 month wait (even for someone as impatient as me!).

The ugly duckling

I feel horrible about this blog. I have the best intentions of keeping it up to date and yet I fail miserably. I am sorry about that.

Now, one of our most recent projects was an update of one of our ugliest rooms. The spare bedroom had been a conglomeration of every leftover piece of furniture and bed linen that came with us to the new house. Not everything matched and almost nothing complemented anything, but it was all we had. But after the addition of the baby Bernina, we were finally able to change all that. We had it all finished just days before my parents came to visit for the 4th. But, of course, the world conspired against giving me time to write about it until now.

Here is the way-before picture of the spare bedroom:


This is what it has looked like since we moved in:


And here is what it looks like now:

Quite the transformation, no? Its our ugly duckling turned into a beautiful...spare bedroom. This is also one of the first rooms that we bothered to "accessorize." So it has lots of lovely little details in it, too.
And of course, Riley approves.