The Play Room

I am in love with our house's slow but steady evolution into our home.

Today, we will visit the room that should rightly be called "The Dining Room."

"Dinning Room" Today

Only, it's not a dining room.  If I use it's history, I suppose I could more accurately say 'fun room.'  But it currently goes by 'play room.'

When we moved in, or at least when we toured our house, it was a dinning room.

But we quickly decided that we didn't really need a fromal dinning rom.  Our kitchen is huge and we decided it would be a much better place for us to eat.  So we turned it into a Game Room!

We quickly made a few other changes, we tore out the carpet and painted it to be more 'game feeling.'

For a long time, it stayed this way.  It was home to Gavin and my rockband, as well as where I curled up playing elder scroll games during a few very difficult weeks.

Then somebody came along and it took a whole new direction!

Colin needed a place to play and grow and the game room became the play room.

But spending hours and hours in that room, the color really started to wear on me.  It wasn't a play room color, it was too dark and too serious.  So last week we made the latest revision!

 

There are still things we'd like to do, but the color made a huge difference in the feel of the room.

I know this room isn't done with it's evolution.  More than any other room in our house, it will need to grow and change with the needs of our family.  It will probably be a game room again, who knows, maybe it will even be a dining room again one day!

In the meantime, it's host to hours and hours of fun and play.

You're a bright little fish and I love you.

Colin's nightly lullaby is still "Bright Bug".  I painted him a picture of a bright bug that hangs over his crib (and accurately fits all of the descriptions from the song!)

When we started putting together Nursery 2.0, I thought it would be super cute to do a 'Bright Fish' painting.

I'm not a great painter, but I drew out my best idea of what a 'bright fish' would look like:

First Draft

Canvas Sketch

I then used some of the samples we had bought for the walls and got to work painting!  I'm so happy with how the painting came out.  Gavin told me pilot fish are supposed to be mean and have big teeth.  Luckily, bright fish are not. :)

• Bright Bug? Check
• Orange and Green? Check
• Belly Does Glow? Check

I love my bright aquatic bug, already and can't wait to meet him!

The Nursery Project: Step 2, Painting

With Step 1 complete, it was time to Paint!

With our theme in mind, we'd decided we wanted the top half (two thirds, really) of the room blue and the bottom green.  We've had blue and green paint samples laying around our kitchen for a month, and as soon as we were done with the chair rail, we took them upstairs and decided on colors.

Planning for painting!

Like with the Chair rail, I had a plan and it included buying and testing samples.  I'm no designer and a 3" piece of paper isn't quite enough to give me a feel for the color and samples are a cheap way to make sure you don't end up with something you hate.

We immediately fell in love with the blue.  The green, not so much.  We bought more samples until we'd decided on our colors.  The wall was looking a bit festive by then.

Our first samples

Some of these colors anyway....

Painting isn't that difficult, it's not even that time consuming.  PREPARING to paint is the hard part.  I divided it up into several days because I get tired very easily lately.  Sanding, cleaning, caulking holes and taping... We'd learned some from our first painting project downstairs and were much better prepared this time around.

Before

Before

Before (Just look at that lovely Chair Rail!)

This time around we opted to only tape the base boards.  We got some advice on brushes and bought a 1" and a 1.5" Purdy brush for trimming and had pretty good results.  The chair rail gave us a little bit of difficulty.

Gavin and I started on our own on Saturday with the blue only.  I helped trim, although once we started rolling, the paint smell was a bit strong so Gavin kicked me out.

Not before I took his picture!!

It took all day Saturday (with a break for 5 guys burgers) to trim the room and apply two coats of paint, but we had a great time together.  It's a little annoying that it takes hours and hours to trim and then the walls roll in about an hour, but the results were nice:

It's Blue!

On Saturday, we enlisted help.  Bobby and Heather came for Green Day!

The green was darker, and I had anticipated (correctly) that we would need three coats.  Unfortunately I still over estimated how much paint we would need and we ended up with a bunch of extra green paint!

Not enough Green!

I'd learned from our previous painting project that a central supply station/work area was important, so we set up a table.  I think it helped tremendously to keep the house clean and everything organized. 

I LOVE the results.

We aren't huge painters, and there are some rooms in our house that we will hire someone to paint (hopefully soon!) but the nursery isn't that large and it was great to be able to do it ourselves (I didn't help much on Sunday, truthfully, but I was there in spirit and in plan!)

We do Art!

Alyssa is one of the coolest people I know.  How many friends do you have who call you and say "Lets watch one your favorite movie and do crafts!"?  Especially when the movie in question happens to be Hocus Pocus, the 1993 Disney Halloween flick.

She provided the movie, I provided the crafts.  As usually she provided 80 percent of the actual talent, but I'm actually pretty proud of how this guy came out!

We do art!

Pursuing Selfish Delights

I frequently have to remind myself that occasionally being selfish is okay, or in fact, even good for me. This weekend, I spent most of my time being gleefully selfish!

Among other things, I played around with some new painting techniques.


I don't think I mastered them, but I'm actually quite happy with the way these paintings came out. I may hang them, although if I had known I was going to do that, I would have more carefully considered the colors of my composition in relation to my house, instead of just in relation to each other...

I only left the house Saturday to go for my run. I ran further than I typically do today and was rewarded with horrible wheezing for a while afterward. Baby steps! It seems that my new found interest has negatively impact my yoga practice. I attempted a yoga routine that I have done probably over a hundred times yesterday and couldn't get through it. Given this isn't the first time I've experienced a valley with yoga, but it's always disappointing. Luckily, even a bad yoga routine still has Savasana!

I've also been cooking up a storm! I prefer to cook things that involve tomatos, but this week I've only really used them in my Cheeseburger pie. Yesterday, I made a pretty delicious eggplant dish from the William Sonoma cookbook. I'm still not entirely comfortable cooking with eggplant. I find it difficult to cut completely evenly, and therefore it often cooks irregularly. Someday I'll stop fighting with the Mandolin Slicer, which will probably help. For now, I still find eggplant to be very tasty in almost all of the recipes I've tried it in. It's strange to me that I could have gone my entire life without ever having tried what turns out to be such a basic vegetable. I was also quite proud of my turkey rolls on Saturday. To be honest, I was quite proud of having three courses in one meal:


The only odd part is that for some reason, I bought and included the bacon recommended for inclusion with the spinach. This is odd because I very much dislike bacon and I was the only one eating this meal or it's various leftovers.

I've also been pouring over some wedding details, which invariable means spening quite a bit of time with this:

Like any project, I had to start with a binder. The only problem was that for the wedding, my notebook turned evil on me! It took the loving patience of my friend Jen to kick it back into shape. Now the notebook is back to being in good order, even if the wedding to do list is still a bit daunting.