Kids rooms- with a learning curve

Designing your first kids room is exciting, and a bit intimidating. There is a plethora of adorable themes and prints, colors, and it can really make your head spin. Since you don't know your child's personality yet, it really relies on you! Do you want you baby boy to support your favorite sports team, love boats, or animals.

I guess its kind of like your wedding. I remember trying on slim dresses, big poofy dresses, mermaid style, etc. I had nautical themes, farm themes, ocean colors, fall colors. If I could, I think I could have planned a wedding for each season in a different setting.

As with my wedding, I finally settled on a theme/color scheme. I decided to do a jungle theme for my first baby boy. I love jungle animals and I had a lot of things that would go with it. It is that last statement that I realize is where I fail. Usually, every vision comes with a price tag and in order to save money I always look to how to incorporate what we already have. Which ends up leaving the overall design a little flat.

I came across this picture today.

 This was the room decoration for my first born. At the time, I LOVED it and thought there was some great cohesion with the things in the room, and in all fairness, there was. What isn't shown is the art piece with the African animals walking out of the painting and the wood carvings I got in Kenya. There was some cute stuff. But damn if this room isn't screaming BORING! The monotone of the walls, the lack of enthusiasm in the draperies. It feels sterile. A little paint could have made this a different room all together. 

If we look at my next attempt at his room.

Seriously? Wall decals? Not even arranged with any creativity? I did like the orange closet, only because it was my son's favorite color at the time and he loved it.

But this room is the opposite of the first. The furniture and design items are limited at most. The color is an overstatement, especially with the oak trim, and the double curtains. There is a lack of a bedspread and honestly, not much cohesiveness other than sports theme sprawled all over.


As time went on, and my second son moved into the room, I tried to find a way to make it better. I was on a budget and figured the room would grow.


I will say, when I got the bunk bed in and got matching bed sets, it started to look better, though, I still never liked it. It wasn't thought out, and I didn't have the budget for it, so it seemed rushed and thrown together. I blame pregnancy on this one.

On my third kids room, I think I really started to learn. Here is my daughters room.

In true recycling fashion, I was able to keep the jungle theme and girly it up with a pink jungle bed set. It was the first time I went and found inspiration. I decided to take a risk, I painted the trim off white and did a half wall, mimicking the design from Sherwin Williams collection. I took all the colors from this:

Terrible quality photo, I'm sorry. It's the only one I can find from when it was her room. Once again, as my rooms get better, I wish my photography skills did, so I could really show off how good it looked.

After realizing it wasn't fair to give the single girl the bigger room, this room became the boys, and I got a clean slate to start over. I had to figure out, do I paint again, or do I try to fit their red, navy, and baby blue sports theme in here. First thing first, I knew I had to get rid of the green wall, it just didn't work.

The tan and off white did fit the sports theme. Especially when I was able to do the baseball wall. This was one of my original inspirations of the "sports themed room". But in the other room the boys were in, there really wasn't any wall space where this would work. I think it came out awesome here. The colors are SW China Doll for top, SW Dromedary Camel on bottom, the tan stitching is also Dromedary Camel and the red stitching is left over exterior door paint SW Salute. I used a kids paint brush from a water color paint set and just did it by hand. There were a few that came out a little wonky and I painted over them and redid it. I also traced the original half circles with a pencil before starting. Took me an hour or two and it really pops.

Here's the wall in progress:

To do the half wall, I measured along the wall and marked with a yellow crayon, then I laid painters tape just above my yellow marks and used a roller to roll on the tan. I made sure to hit the bottom of the tape and then pull the tape off still wet. I think I got really clean lines. The next stage we moved the beds in and got matching red end tables. The green floors stayed because I thought they gave the feel of a field.

For Christmas we gave the boys these cool skateboards and they fit in perfect with the colors and the theme of the room. I added a bookshelf and kept it the natural wood color to match the skateboards and here it is. I love it. Although the floors are green and fine, I do look forward to the day they have actual hardwood floors in here.

 

The garden walkway

It's funny how sometimes a small project can grow. When I thought about getting a beautiful arbor for the entrance to my garden, all I thought about was how much it was going to really pop. It would make the garden entrance look so beautiful and inviting. It would make the yard look more complete. It was a one day project, that was it.

It was perfect... but, it made that side of the yard look messy. There was a scraggly lawn attempting to grow around it. There was also a half attempt at a perennial bed that I had thrown a few random plants in. To me, it seemed weird to have a grand entryway with no walkway. After a week or two, I realized it was driving me nuts and something would have to be done. And like that, my one day project turned full summer project.

The first thing I needed was some inspiration. Its such an odd space. It's off to the side and in front of the driveway. My biggest problem was that I could envision where I wanted the walkway, just not what to do on the right side. The space is so big, I just could really picture doing a huge garden there. At the same time, I didn't really want lawn there, because then I'd have to mow it and go over whatever walkway I had to get to the other side to mow.

I started to mark out the walkway. You can see the odd space I have there on the right. Plus, it had been home to our picnic table. Not that we picnic there, but the kids play on there and have snacks there sometimes. I had to think about what could go under that and be low maintenance.

I pushed on. Next thing I knew, I had shoveled, hoed, and pulled out all the grass and weeds. I took a metal rake and I smoothed out the dirt the best I could and I cut and pulled about a million roots.


After many pinterest and google searches of "garden walkway". I finally decided that we really couldn't afford this new project I had in mind and that I was going to have to be thrifty. My first attempt was to find flat stones and lay them out. But, I quickly realized this would take me forever and it really wasn't giving the look I wanted.

I finally decided I would make fake cobblestones using the Quickcrete(R) walk maker. I read up and I thought it would give me the look I was looking for, but cheaper, and I could do it myself. Hahaha. I packed the kids up in the car, drove to Lowes and bought the mold and five 50lb bags of concrete. Looking back, that is hilarious.

While the kids were doing "rest time" I got out the wheel barrel, grabbed my hoe, a large measuring cup and mixed up the concrete. I bought the non-quick dry since it was $1.20 a bag. I mixed and mixed and laid all 6 bags (I had one bag of quick dry 50 lbs already at home). This is how far I got. Had I actually thought about this, and realized that 6 bags only covered the inside of the arbor, I may have quit. But I loved how it was looking. I even had all my kids put their hand prints on a mold.

 

I tried adding some colorful glass, and quickly realized it didn't look good, so I quit. And the project continued. 

I got a 5 hour, kid free window one day and made it this far. This was around 29 bags of concrete later. I had to work that night and I could barely hold anything. My arms were jelly and I quickly wished I'd rented a cement mixer. I was only about half done. :{

Knowing that I wouldn't be getting another 5 hour kid free window, I got antsy and wanted to see what it would look like done. I needed some motivation to get it done. So I laid some mulch on the sides and started to see what it would look like!! I also threw in a few more plants to the sad perennial bed.

Next we got a huge rain storm and pretty much all my mulch washed out. So I had to start again with the mulch. About 50 + bags of 50-80 lbs of concrete later (I later used 80 lb bags to help make it go faster), it was complete. 

I dumped black mulch on top of the concrete stones and using a large broom, filled in all the crevices. This made it look so much better. Any imperfections weren't showing and it helped make the concrete stones look like they were part of the landscape, instead of sticking up.

In the end I put another path to a little cast iron garden bench for the kids my neighbor gave us as a house warming present. I planted a hydrangea and some coral bells. I decided that a huge perennial bed it was :) It also took me the next couple big rain storms to see where I needed some help with stones so that I could prevent wash out.

Garden project

I am one of those people that never knows what I want for birthdays, Christmas, Mother's Day, etc. Or at least, I'm one of those people that thinks of things all the time and then the actual time comes and I draw a blank. Then I usually try really hard to think of something I'd like or need and end up just saying something I neither really want or need. Fortunately, this past Mother's Day was not the norm. For some amazing reason, I got inspiration and I knew EXACTLY what I wanted - a grape arbor.
I know, I know, I'm super exciting, aren't I? In all seriousness, I really did want this. I have these visions of growing grapes and making the kids fresh jam. Any person I told about my hope to grow grapes assumed it was for my own personal wine making venture, and though that sounds tempting, I think I'll leave wine making to the experts.
My first thought was that we would buy and arbor from a box store. So went on all the websites and nothing was really the look I wanted, or the price we could afford. All was not lost though, this research helped me narrow down that I was more interested in a pergola style arbor vs. well, any other style I saw.

We already had a pergola style arbor by the water well (above).

Actually, here is a better picture of it without all the greenery. Plus an added bonus of a family picture.

I was thinking something as simple and small as this would do. I started scouring craigslist. Maybe someone was getting rid of one. I struck out there too. There wasn't much, what there was I didn't like or again was way out of my price range.

My next route was to get the hubs to make one. Why not? He's handy. I went to the place you go for all inspiration ideas - pinterest of course. I found a few direction pages but in particular I found this one here. From there, I just had to keep reminding my husband that Mother's day was coming up and I think it was going to take a while to build. *hint hint*

Well, Mother's day weekend came. My husband went to buy lumber. Our first stop was the local lumber yard. Lets just say, the cost for just the cedar lumber was much more then buying one of the expensive ones we had looked at online. Off to the big box store it was. A reminder that going local is not always the most cost effective. Instead, we got all the pieces we needed for about $180. And that was the only cost.

It took a day, almost the entire day, the 95 degree, humid day of mother's day to built. But it is huge, it is cedar, it is gorgeous.

Ta Da!

Honestly, building the actual structure was easy. It was digging out the holes, leveling it and cementing it that took the most time and physical endurance. We have a lot of rocks down below that grass. Isn't it beautiful!?!

Stay tuned for part II, the walkway... the story of how one woman, took on too many bags of cement.