view from outside chloe's room

Chloe turned six earlier this month, and while it may be sort of an odd fixation for a six year old to have, she is nonetheless obsessed with Paris. Santa must have heard about her francophile tendencies, because he left some brand new Parisian-themed bedding under the tree on Christmas morning.

Nicole Miller’s Fifi bedding features dozens of Vespa riding French poodles tooling through the streets of Paris while taking in familiar sights including sidewalk bistros, Hector Guimard’s famous Art Nouveau Abbesses Metro station, and – of course – the Eiffel Tower.

In keeping with the Parisian theme, we framed several posters including one of the above-mentioned Metro station and one of the Eiffel Tower. (Chloe is especially excited about the Eiffel Tower poster because it’s a photo of the tower in the snow, and Chloe loves snow almost as much as she loves the tower itself.)

Her room is far from finished – it’s still lacking sconces and closet doors, and we have a few more items we may want to hang on the walls. That said, the biggest obstacle to finishing her room is my inability to carve out time for sewing.

The Roman shades currently hanging in Chloe’s room are fairly trashed (luckily I bought them on sale!) I had been planning to repair them, but Chloe’s new comforter isn’t white (as advertised) – it’s actually more of a cream color — which looks horrible with the old shades.

The replacement curtains I have in mind might have fit in well at the Moulin Rouge of a century ago – ruffles and stripes and pompoms – oh my! If they turn out the way I hope, I’ll be sure to post photos. In the meantime, here is a photo of Chloe’s room in it’s current incaration.  A bientot!

Chloe's room circa early 2009

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 year ago today marked my the end of my fifth week of “house arrest” (otherwise known as bed rest.)

Chloe, the older of our two daughters, was born prematurely and spent roughly six weeks in the hospital. So last May, when baby number two threatened to make an appearance two months ahead of schedule, I was advised to stay off my feet for SIX LONG WEEKS.

Being confined to bed rest in your third trimester is excruciating. Not in terms of physical discomfort (although there is a bit of that.) Rather, it’s the psychological distress that’s unbearable. Not only are you steeped in worry over your unborn child, but you’re locked in this perverse battle of wanting – or perhaps more accurately, NEEDING – to give in to the all-consuming “nesting instinct,” yet you know that your baby’s health depends on ignoring that desire/need. Ultimately, you end up glued to the couch for a month and a half, obsessing about everything that isn’t getting done.

Since climbing the stairs was forbidden, climbing the walls definitely wasn’t option. So as I anxiously waited for Ginger’s arrival (and hoped that she wouldn’t arrive too soon) I tried to find ways to keep myself occupied.

At first I decided to do some sewing – a fairly comical decision in retrospect, as I don’t actually know how to sew. I’ve taken a whopping two (2) sewing classes in my lifetime. In the first class, we learned how to make aprons. Yup – an apron. (It was a pretty nifty apron though, with an adjustable strap and a snazzy front pocket.) In the second class, we learned how to make a bathrobe. I chose really soft and lovely retro-printed fabric and even learned how to create piping. Finishing the damn thing ended up taking forever though, so I quit working on it about three quarters of the way through. Come to think of it, I don’t think I ever finished the apron either! But did that prevent me from dragging out the sewing machine and going crazy with sewing projects for the nursery? Hell no!

I guess nesting is a bizarre sort of prenatal psychosis because almost overnight, I became a sewing maniac! I made black polka-dotted valances and a tablecloth for the playroom, complete with ribbon trim and pom-pom fringe:

I also sewed rocking-chair cushions, a changing pad cover for the changing table, and curtains and a dust ruffle for Ginger’s room. (Amazingly, if you don’t look too closely at the seams, everything looks passable.)

Then it got HOT – so incredibly hot – in the triple digits for days on end! My feet puffed up to the size of watermelons and I simply couldn’t bear sitting inside hunkered down with my sewing machine any longer. (Which was OK. I was out of fabric anyway.) So, my bulging belly and I moved out to the patio where I soaked my enormous melon-feet in ice water and started painting. No – sadly – not the outside of the house (which was, and remains, in dire need of new paint) but three teeny square canvases for the baby’s room.

I’d been leaning toward trying to match the baby’s bedding with paintings of frogs and lily pads, but big sister Chloe voted for ladybugs. (She has something of a polka-dot fixation, if you couldn’t tell from the playroom.) Since I had plenty of time on my hands, I ended up painting both.

Now, I’m no more an artist than I am a seamstress, but again, the hormones seemed to kick my creativity up a notch, so if you don’t look TOO closely, the paintings didn’t turn out too badly:

I joke that I was in labor for three months because I began having contractions in May and, much to everyone’s surprise, Ginger decided to wait until August 3^rd (12 days past her due date) to join our family:

You might think that with all of those “extra” weeks between the end of May and the beginning of August we would have had plenty of time to finish Ginger’s room, but you would be, um, wrong.

Our goals at this time last year were to finish enough of Chloe’s room to allow her to move upstairs before her baby sister arrived, and to finish enough of the playroom to give Chloe a hangout to escape to when her sister was sleeping. We did somehow manage to meet those goals. But in the process, Ginger’s room ended up getting pushed aside and she wound up bunking with us for awhile. Ten months to be exact. Ten months and counting, in fact!

Our goal this summer is to FINALLY move Ginger into her own room – hopefully before her first birthday rolls around. I can’t believe that’s she’s almost one! For as unbearably long as my six weeks on house arrest seemed at the time, the past year has gone by in a blink, and our “new baby” is almost a toddler now. Where does the time go?

So, without further ado, here is a sneak peek at Ginger’s room:

Doors still need to be stained and hung, and oh – I don’t know – moving the crib and changing table into the room might be helpful too. But the closet and dresser are full of baby clothes, the curtains are hung and the stuffed animals are just waiting to be snuggled (and probably chewed and drooled upon.) In other words, after all this time, it is finally starting to look like a real nursery. Hopefully Ginger will enjoy it.

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.

Rather than admitting defeat and calling the dumpster company, we tried thinking of alternate methods of dealing with the growing mess.

Chloe attends a Montessori preschool where she is only allowed to play with one item at a time. Before she can move on to another item (or in Montessori lingo “job”) she has to return the first item to its designated spot. We a now enforcing a similar rule in the playroom. To make things simple, everything has a designated bin. Games, puzzles and art supplies go in baskets on the built-in bookshelves (which Julio finished a few weeks ago. Hooray!) Stuffed animals and toys go in their own baskets and bins. Books go on the free-standing bookshelves across from the stairs. And nothing new comes out of its basket, or down from its shelf, until everything else is put away.

(It remains to be seen if Chloe will follow the new rules. Past experience suggests that compliance is probably a pipe dream.)

While, at least in theory, the new baskets and bins will contain the toys and games, we faced another challenge. Most afternoons, Chloe comes home from preschool toting mounds of paper (drawings, worksheets, collages, etc.) She’s proud of her work and, understandably, wants to display it. We just want to keep it off the floor (and out of her baby sister’s mouth.) We found a quick and inexpensive solution at IKEA.

IKEA’s Dignitet curtain rod is basically a length of wire suspended between two small metal posts:

Curtains hang from the wire via tiny dangling clips. These little clips also happen to do a great job of displaying a preschooler’s art collection:

We considered hanging a second wire below the first one to make the wall appear a bit more balanced, but now that Ginger is crawling, we figure anything hanging that low would be way too tempting for her. With the current installation, Chloe’s drawings and worksheets stay safely out of her baby sister’s reach (and aforementioned mouth.)

With the larger drawings hanging neatly on the wall, all we had left to worry about were Chloe’s smaller treasures. We constantly seem to find postcards, birthday party invitations and little construction paper cutouts on the playroom floor, so we decided to see how a French memo board might do at keeping smaller bits of paper contained.

Chloe has an odd fascination with the Eiffel Tower, so she was completely thrilled when we found this little number on eBay:

It arrived about a week ago and we have since begun covering it with postcards and small school projects:

To further stem the tide of clutter, we’re considering adding either a toy box/storage bench or second freestanding shelving unit. We also still plan to hang a few things on those bare green walls, but at this point, the playroom is the most finished space in our house. It’s also the most organized. (For the time being anyway.) It’s a nice feeling having one almost-finished space. And best of all, now, whether Chloe actually adheres to the new playroom rules or not, we have photographic proof that for one sweet yet brief moment in time, the playroom floor was actually visible.

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.

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!

We have really been happy with our drywall contractor, Rueben Cortez. Not only have his guys done a great job, he has not asked us for one cent. He said he’d come back for a final walk through after the priming, and if it looks good, we can pay him then. If not, they’ll fix it first. It’s surprising to see someone in this day and age that will do something like this. I think it really speaks volumes about how good of a job he delivers.

Here’s what it looks like now, and we’ll get more pictures up after the priming…