Baby Announcement Party

When I decided to return to the blogging world about a week or two ago I had mentioned that we had a unique and interesting way to announce whether we were having a boy or a girl. This was my Mom's idea. For those of you who decided to wait to find out the gender of your child kudos to you! As for us, we couldn't wait and had no desire to wait to find out. My Mom decided that she wanted to throw a party with our family and closest friends to announce the gender of our child. She had heard an idea that you tell a baker if it's a boy or a girl and depending on what it is, the inside of the cake will be colored pink or blue. Then the frosting of course would be something neutral so that no one would know what it was. Instead of asking a baker to make the cake we asked a friend to do it because she is very talented when it comes to making cakes. The way it worked out for us was that we had our ultrasound on a Tuesday. We told the technician not to tell us if it was a boy or a girl. She wrote it on a small piece of paper, and put it in a sealed envelope and we gave it to my Mom so we could avoid the temptation of opening the envelope. Then my Mom delivered the envelope to the friend that was baking the cake. We had plans that evening, and also Wednesday evening that prevented us from being able to have the party then. We had to wait in anticipation until Thursday to find out what our baby was! Before the guest arrived all I wanted to do was stick my finger in the cake to know! This is what the cake looked like.

 After everyone showed up we quickly ate dinner ..... Pizza, the easiest and quickest thing possible. Then we cut the cake with all our closest family and friends surrounding us .... Including my grandma from Florida via the iPad (Thank You Steve Jobs!).

I love this picture because everyone looks like they are thinking what is it going to be!? And the point of reveal .....

We cut the cake to reveal a pink color! This is when I whispered, "It's a Girl!" Can you tell how excited everyone was? That's my sister-in-law jumping up and down screaming! Johnny and I were both shy with all the people watching us but so excited to find out we were having a little girl.

And then we all ate cake! And it was DELICIOUS!

 Prior to this party everyone asked me what I thought the baby would be. My gut feeling all along was that it was a girl. After I saw the ultrasound images, especially the 3D ones (which are very scary), I thought well maybe it could be a boy. I was shocked to find out it was a girl. All my life I have grown up around boys, I have four brothers and now here I am having a little girl. To those of you who wait to find out the gender of your child that's awesome, and I am sure you have great reasoning behind waiting! I'm sure it adds motivation during your pregnancy up to your delivery day. But to me finding out the gender has bonded me more with my little girl to be. I can refer to her as "her" or "she" rather than "baby". It also has given me the chance to think of ideas for the baby room. I was so happy to have an announcement party and share this moment with my friends and family and I highly recommend it!

Dining Room: Before and After

The dining room was probably one of the easiest projects in our entire house. The previous owner had resheetrocked both the dining room and living room. Here is a picture of what the dining room looked like before we did anything to it.



I have noticed that in a lot of older homes there is a door separating the kitchen from the adjacemt rooms, probably to keep the heat from the kitchen out. The first thing we did was remove the door from the hinges and get rid of it all together. After that basically all that was required of us was to sand the walls and ceiling. When the previous paint job was done they must have used a bad roller. It really pays to use an expensive roller because you don't leave behind particles from it. After sanding the walls we needed to wipe them down and clean the room to prep for painting. The color I chose for the walls is called zinc by Martha Stewart and I love it!

This is the Dining Room looking into the Living room.

When we finished painting both the dining room and living room we had someone come in to sand our floors. Our home was a foreclosure and it was uninhabited for a while. During that time there was some damage to the floors. I'm not quit sure what happened but something with the heating system (which was completely replaced by the seller before we moved in). When the heating system went it caused some water damage to the floors which caused the beautiful hard wood floors to buckle. Many people we spoke to thought it was something that was unrepairable. Fortunately we found someone who told us that he would be able to sand them down and get rid of the buckling at the low price of $480 for the entire downstairs. And he did an unbelievable job!When the floors are being sanded the sander usually has to come back about three times to finish them. The smell of the finish is very bad for your health especially if your pregnant. So during that time we avoided the house for a few weeks. Once we returned, the decorating stage was ready to begin. First Johnny and his father installed our brand new chandelier. Johnny's mother and sister bought this for us. It's origionally from Pottery Barn but they were able to get it at www.overstock.com

Then we chose our roman palisades blinds from home depot.

It became a dusty mess again because during this process the kitchen was also being worked on.

We decided to use these blinds for the entire downstairs. Then came the round dining room table and four matching chairs and two cozy fabric chairs from my mother and father-in-law.

We had eight windows in our old bedroom which is just as many as we have between the living room and dining room so we decided to reuse our old curtains and I love how they match!

 After that I hung one of my favorite pictures in the dining room. It was a picture that Johnny and I got on our cruise at an art auction. I plan on hanging another one once I am able to get it framed and I will move the mirror to another wall. I also was able to find some tie backs for the curtains at Christmas tree shop for $1.00 each and they were the exact color match to the curtains. The latest addition to this room was a rug from Pier 1 imports that my mom bought for me. It was originally $399 and she got it on sale for $75!

 

I, as we all do with our own homes, have a few more ideas planned for this room but haven't gotten to it yet. Johnny and I are both so fortunate to have such generous parents and family. Without them we would not be able to afford to have a beautifully decorated and fully furnished home.

Before

After

Planning the Baby Room

The babies room is our most current home makeover project. It is actually the biggest bedroom in the house. This is a before picture of the babies room.

 I've had a difficult time choosing how I want to decorate the baby room. I was shocked when I found out I was having a little girl. All my life I've grown up around boys. I have four brothers. I am girly in my own way but when it comes to colors and decorating I'm not a huge fan of pinks and purples. I don't want the baby room to be over girly but I also don't want it to be so neutral that you can't tell it was meant for a girl. The first thing that we picked out for the baby room was the crib and dresser set. The one we chose is from Chaplin Baby and it's the Sonoma Echelon set in Driftwood.

 This is what the crib will convert to in the future.

 The next thing I ended up buying was an area rug from Pier 1 it was originally $400 and I was able to scoop it up for $75. What a great deal. I love the crocheted Flowers and the earth tones.

 Pinterest was my main source for choosing colors. This picture inspired me most. I wish I could crochet those hanging lights!!! I also love the star decals on the wall.



 My mother in law and I went together to pick out the color. We bought Elephant Gray in Benjamin Moore paint. I like this color even more than my inspiration color because it has a hint of purple in it rather than brown.



For my baby shower one of the gifts we  recieved was the Shermag Cherry Glider Chair from Babies R Us. This is what it looks like.

The chair matches the crocheted flowers on the rug and the earth tones in the bedroom. The most recent decision we have made is on the curtain material which I posted about earlier this week.

The last major thing I have to choose is the crib bedding. I'm not quite sure what I want but here are two of the sets that I like.

This bedding is very neutral and goes with my colors. It is from The Land of Nod.

I also love this Spa Pom Pom set but I thik it might clash with my curtains. So many choices to make!

I can't wait to see the baby room completely finished and put together! I will post pictures of the room once it is complete!

Osgoods Fabric Store

Earlier this week, on Tuesay, my Grandma flew in from Florida. She is visiting so that she can make it to my second baby shower and possibly be around for when the baby is born. While she is around I am going to make use of one of her many talents .... Sewing. My grandma is a hot ticket and she is so creative. She is always working on projects and I'm pretty sure she probably has more pins on pinterest than I do.

  About a month ago I purchased some curtains from Pier 1. The ones I chose were on sale. I bought two packages and still spent $100 bucks. I didn't mind because I really loved them, and thought they would be perfect for our bedroom. I also thought I deserved to treat myself. When I got home I was quickly disappointed. The image on the packaging led me to believe that each package contained two panels. Wrong! Each package only contained one panel, which meant on sale I spent $50 for each panel and that I would also need to buy two more panels. So in the end I would have to spend $200 for one small room. That's when I decided to return the curtains and utilize my Grandmother's talents. And thankfully, she happily accepted this task. So this week we went to Osgoods Fabric Store.

 It's a local material warehouse and it has better prices and more options than Joanne's Fabrics. When we got there we were very overwhelmed by our options.

Wouldn't you be in a place like this!?

So many choices!

 I could have spent all day in there. After perusing for a little while I quickly learned that I have very expensive taste. Some of the fabric I liked was $25 a yard and I needed 12 yards. At that rate I would spend more making curtains than what I would have at Pier 1. Here are some of the materials I liked.

My grandma suggested that I take a look at the cotton material. She explained that I could make curtains out of this and still get a print that I love at a reasonable price. She also explained that cotton curtains are much easier to clean. I ended up choosing some material for the baby room and next time I go I will choose some for our bedroom. Maybe I'll even have my grandma show me how to make them and I'll make them myself. In the end this is the material I decided on.

It was $3.50 a yard. I ended up spending a total of $49 on the material and it will create 4 panels! What a great deal - the price of all 4 panels less than the cost of 1 panel on sale at Pier 1! When I got home I washed the material, dried it and immediately took it out of the dryer and folded it. When you use cotton this is a necessity because you need to preshrink the material. You also don't want to let it sit in the dryer otherwise you will end up with wrinkles that will later require ironing. I can't wait until my curtains are done and hanging in the baby room! It will be nice to see everything come together.

Kitchen: Before and After

Remember this hot mess of a kitchen?

I can't believe I even contemplated leaving it like this and redoing it sometime down the road. When we purchased our home the biggest eye sore of the entire house was the kitchen ... And as we all know everyone loves to hang out in the kitchen! Thankfully one evening back, in November when we were working on the house, I went out to get pizza for everyone and when I came back cabinets were being torn down!

This didn't upset me in the least bit because who doesn't want a brand new kitchen, I just knew that it would set back our move in date .... It was totally worth it. Not to mention we had it made at my in laws house with the entire upstairs to ourselves, so there was really no rush or deadline to be out. Now that the cabinets were down I made it clear that the paneling and the drop ceilings had to go. And so it goes demo was underway.

 Some of the bigger projects that went underway was that we needed to patch up the chimney.

 

We also had to agree on sacrificing some closet space to ultimately gain cabinet space. If you notice in the images above, to the right of the chimney there was a closet. We ended up sheeting rocking right over it. Before the sheet rocking stage we insulated the outside walls of the kitchen. Being an older house we lack insulation everywhere. We also had to hire an electrition to come in and rewire, put in new outlets, and install our recess lighting. My father-in-law also installed new windows. After that Jack and Johnny were able to begin sheeting rocking. I enjoyed watching this. The sheet rock had to be cut to size, outlet holes were cut out and also the lighting holes. My father-in-law did all the taping. The only thing I took part in was mudding the  screw holes.

The next step was to sand everything. Not fun - glad I was medically incapable of taking part in this job!We then primed the kitchen and painted it with a very neutral color because we weren't sure what we wanted and how the colors would look with cabinets. We figured in the future we can paint it again, or add backsplashes.

When the ceilings were being torn down, the linoleum floors got a little banged up and had to be torn out. Before I knew it beautiful hard wood floors were installed.

Now we could begin to design our kitchen and pick out cabinets. This took us a little while. We didn't know what was the best way to go. Origionally we looked at Cabinets at www.cabinetstogo.com. This website offers discounted wood cabinets. They also have a very useful program that they can set you up on to design your own kitchen. I was able to play around on the website to figure out what the best options were for where to place all our cabinets. The difficult thing for us is that we have four doorway openings in our kitchen and almost one wall is taken up by window space. In the end though, we decided to buy our cabinets from Lowes. They were running a great deal. I brought in my layout and we met with a consultant who gave great pointers on how the kitchen should ideally be set up.

In our origional design we wanted to have the fridge built into the cabinets. After a lot of hmmming and haaaaaaaing we decided to move the fridge to the external part of the cabinets. The advantages of doing this was to prevent the fridge door from banging up the cabinets and now we have a lovely magnet board to hang pictures and funny poetry frases on.

 Our next project was to pick out countertops. We went with formica countertops from Lowes. Lowes had a lot more options than home depot. My father-in-law also put new molding everywhere in the kitchen. He matched it to the style of the molding found everywhere else in our house which is old fashion. I appreciated that he preserved the look of our older home. Our last project was hooking up all the appliances and filling our cabinets with food! We needed all new appliances because our house didn't have any. They were delivered before the cabinets and sat in our living room for a little while. It was so nice to finally move them into the kitchen and get them running. I think that is about everything that has been done in the kitchen. Here are the official before and after shots!

Before

 

After

Before

After

After

The last thing our kitchen needs is a little bit more decorating! Oh yeah, and a microwave to go above the stove!