One of my favorite blogs is ikeahacker. It’s both entertaining and inspiring.  Sure, a few of the hacks are “whack,” but that’s half the fun!

Not being handy myself (Julio is power tool god in this house – I tend to avoid motorized tools at all costs. I’m actually quite accident prone - to the point that even electric can openers freak me out. “That’s right doctor. I severed my finger trying to open a can of soup.” But I digress.)  Where was I?  Oh yeah.  Not being handy myself, I especially enjoy “hackeas”: simple IKEA hacks you can do in 30 minutes or less. They are right up my alley!

In a previous post, we discussed our own hackea involving IKEA’s Deka curtain rod. Today I plan to wow you with my startling transformation of the Skimra lampshade. OK – maybe not so startling, but pretty cute, I think!

The Skimra lampshade before:

and my post-hack Skimra lampshade:

And its twin:

in Chloe and Ginger’s playroom:

Crafty, eh?

A few months back, Julio wrote that our daughters’ playroom was finished. Truthfully, it wasn’t quite finished - in fact, it still isn’t quite finished - but it’s usable, and that’s almost as good as finished, right?

Since that initial posting, we’ve let our older daughter Chloe have free reign of the playroom. The end result? TOTAL CHAOS! Toys, crayons, drawings, princess paraphernalia and Candy Land game pieces have littered nearly every surface. We’ve often found ourselves wondering why we spent so many months building a playroom when, clearly, Chloe would have been just as happy if we’d rented a dumpster, poured her belongings inside, and plunked her in with them. Continue Reading »

Just posting a few pics to show what’s changed lately. I was supposed to be going back to work today, but I asked for another day off to try to wrap up some of the loose ends. Pic 1 is Chloe posing in Ginger’s room.  Pic 2 is an example of the pain of some of the compound cuts required for trim in this sloped upstairs. If everything were perfectly square, it’d be easy, but there seems to always be just enough variation to make it tricky.  Although, they are definitely easier than the cuts in Chloe’s room, because those had to be notched out to accommodate other sections of the ceiling that sloped into them.  Sometimes it feels more like sculpting than sawing. Pic 3 is of the new shelves I finally constructed to fill the built-in bookcase in the playroom.

I took off Monday and Tuesday in order to have a nice, big five day weekend. I can say without hesitation that the most exciting accomplishment of those days was the fact that I cleaned up the rooms. It is such a great feeling to get out all the clutter and tools and see your creation. A funny story is that I didn’t tell Stephanie that I was going to be throwing all the wood scraps out the window (the only way a reasonable person would consider doing it), and she saw a piece of plywood plummet down while she was sitting at the dining room table. Her first thought was that it was me falling out of the window, which scared her to death. I guess it probably wasn’t very funny to her at the time, but I found it kind of amusing.

Anyway, we had decided a few weeks ago to cut our losses and stop any work on the baby’s room. Since our window of opportunity is rapidly shrinking (Steph’s due date is less than 3 weeks away), we realized that to have any hope of moving Chloe upstairs (and thereby staking a claim on her room (and more importantly, her closet, since ours is only about 2 1/2 x 2 1/2 feet!), we had to give up on our “nobody sets foot in the room until it’s 100% done” goal. Since we’ve never made that target in the past, what made us think we could do it this time? So, that means that much of the finish work, such as staining the doors and doing the trim in the baby’s room, will have to come after the fact. I did manage to get up most of the base shoe trim this week and have even started some of the filling and caulking. Unless the baby comes in the next couple of days, we should even see a bunch of painted trim this weekend!

No! But we’re almost done with the painting. A few design changes have been made in the short time since these pictures were taken, so these aren’t exactly what you’ll see in the end. For one thing, we thought that the front room (lighter pink) looked too closed-in, so we are changing the ceiling to white.  Chloe, who did “help” with a little bit of the painting (”here, paint the inside of this bookshelf cavity that’ll get covered up later), is re-enacting the painting in each room…

After a partial day on Saturday and some work this morning, our drywall was officially declared finished. We are really impressed with the quality of the work, and the only imperfections that we can find are very minor. Definitely nothing big enough to complain about. We’re going to prime it next weekend and then see how it looks.

We have really been happy with our drywall contractor, Rueben Cortez. Continue Reading »

The contractor had said that he “might” start on Tuesday, and thankfully, he did. We had a beautiful, sunny day in the 60’s, which is pretty rare in Portland in the spring. This was pretty much the ideal day to be hoisting drywall up through our patio cover and in through the window. It would have been a real mess if it’d been raining. Four guys brought up 85 sheets in less than two hours, which is really, really impressive. This picture is of one of the three stacks sitting up there right now. They’re going to be back at 8 AM to start hanging it!  By the way, if you haven’t been in our upstairs, the drywall should give you a good idea of how short the ceiling is and why it was so worth the effort to spend nearly a week raising the ceiling by only 3″
Chloe is really excited about her room, and she wanted to come up with me tonight to take pictures of it…

While not necessarily a lot of help, Chloe sure does add a lot of cuteness to any project. Seen in the background are fir boards that have been stained for the kitchen trim.

After being in the house for a month, we finally were starting to feel like we were settling in…

Chloe approves of the new tile floor!