Adding Some Color

Our whole marriage we've "enjoyed" ugly neutral walls. Like the slightly-off-white-but-not-actually-nice-looking ones that come in apartments. Then we moved to our own house and we were met with brown walls. Everywhere. So much brown. Again, not as bad as the apartment, but still not my favorite.

Now that we've lived here a year we're ready to start making some changes! Home Depot is our new best friend. I made it my goal back in January to repaint the upstairs. Sadly, this miserable pregnancy derailed that until this month, but at least it's finally moving forward!

So we decided to start with converting the playroom/guest room/office into the baby's room. Probably out of desperation for some color, I went directly for bright pink paint. May not be to everyone's taste, but I love having color! One room down!

choosing the right pink

decluttering the junk room

almost there!

and we are PINK!

While we were painting, Peter got the idea to try and scrape our ugly popcorn ceiling in the room as a kind of experiment. We've gone back and forth over the past year about whether it would be worth it to do it ourselves, pay someone to do it, or even scrape them at all. We finally felt that we should really get rid of it; it makes the house so much more dated and dark.

 Everyone says it's really not hard to scrape them yourselves and they're right, it's not that hard. It is, however, a giant pain in the butt. Even if the actual scraping isn't that hard, the prep work and clean up is ridiculous. That stuff gets EVERYWHERE! We even used one of those scrapers that attaches to a bag and it still made a dust storm in our house. About halfway through, Peter declared that he would never want to do this again.

what a stud! he really did all the scraping

great. now what?

So we finally got it all scraped and cleaned, and then we ran into a big problem. Now what?! We thought we could just seal and paint the ceiling, but turns out you really need to texture it first. After talking to the guys at Home Depot, texturing and painting seemed like just too much money and effort for us to really want to do it. But since we're trying to put a baby in there in like two months, it needed to be finished. We debated for awhile about what to do, then ultimately decided to just pay someone to do it. And while we're at it, hey, let's just do the whole house.

It cost $$$ and got us kicked out of the house for two whole days (no naps, no breaks, more hotel overnight fun!), but in the end, totally worth it. Our ceilings looks gorgeous! I swear our ceilings looks 6 inches taller now! The house is also so much brighter! And it just feels cleaner (less spider webby)! The nice white ceilings, however, do really set off how brown the walls are, but that's okay. Slowly but surely our house will not be a cave!

how to entertain kids outside the house.

go to lake!

we really loved this little swimming hole in Castro Valley. Too bad it wasn't very sunny that day!

what to do when you get back to town, but realize you still can't check into the hotel to get some naps for these sleep-deprived toddlers: more sugar!

party in the hotel room down the street! 

seriously, my kids kinda trashed the place. we left with chocolate on the sheets, blood on the towels (nose bleed), and just general chaos everywhere else. 

they absolutely insisted on swimming in the hotel pool before check out the next morning (even though our much better and warmer community pool was two blocks away)

what now? Movies! Finally saw "Inside Out" and Eleanor was just too adorable to describe while watching it

passed out with icee

our house!!!!!

tried my best to get a good popcorn-less shot. this is about all I could come up with.

Now I feel like I'm on a roll and I gotta pull out as many projects as I can before October. We bought new light fixtures to replace the ugly boob lights (and they are sooo much brighter!) and I've got color samples up on the wall in the kids' room, ready to be painted on Saturday. I'm really hopeful that I can get this all done in two months, but we'll see.

it's always a party at Ikea!

At least for now we can say we have SOME color!