Dining Room --> Play Area

So this weekend I finished some projects. It took a long time to get to this weekend and finishing. The superfluous table was taken away some time in July and our actual table was moved to the kitchen dining area. As were the bar and sideboard. (Before pictures can be seen here.)

Behold:


Which left a large empty space housing only a VERY dated (and completely not my style) light fixture:

I removed the glass pieces and Husband remarked that it looked better already:

I blame the drugs and the Lord of the Rings marathon for that opinion. (He had minor oral surgery Friday morning. Not to worry, all is well. He's healing nicely.)

Kipper helped:

A note about Crate and Barrel: they use a ridiculous amount of packaging. Which is handy for packing up things that you'd rather not have break.

So with that out of they way, and a plate in it's place, we suddenly had a nice open space through which a person can walk and not worry about loosing an eye/breaking a piece of glass with their forehead.

Into it went two Billy bookcases, the black chair from the guest room, the console table from the guest room, and a crash pad* - set up as adult floor seating and eventually to be used as a movement mat for Bunny.

Also - because I have serious aesthetic issues with molded plastic baby gear, we picked this bad boy up from IKEA:

The result - when books and a few animals are added to the bookcases - is a nice little area that will be able to grow with Bunny. I see a toddler craft area in its future with very little effort.



(The ottoman that matches the chair will find itself a more permanent home under the console table on the left, but right now it is still residing in the guest room to be used as a stand for the suitcase of upcoming visitors.)

Polly got in on the action, too. By sleeping:


* a note about this crash pad: it was purchased almost exactly a month before I found myself with child and unable to do anything that would result in actually using this particular new purchase (about which I was *very* excited.) I was having issues looking for a movement mat that I liked that I wouldn't feel like we would outgrow and have a hard time reusing or passing on to other new parents. Then I remembered this sitting sadly unused in the guest room and voila! Sometimes the perfect solutions are right under your nose.

Yesterday...

Well. Let's start at the beginning, really. A few months ago I got rather unexpected news. That's right folks - at the beginning of the adoption process and in the midst of infertility testing...I find myself knocked up.
3 months later I emerge from bed (morning sickness is SO mis-named) and start doing things to prepare the house for our child, whom we refer to as Bunny.

Meet Bunny...3 months ago :-)

So the dining area in the previous post has been rearranged, the superfluous table is gone, and bookshelves have been assembled. As soon as we recover from all of that I'll get it cleaned up and cutified and get some serious "after" shots up. Because we all love a good before and after.

But to tide you over...remember that weird little room that I turned into a walk-in for Husband because he's a clotheshorse? It had a bookcase (totally on it's last legs) on which to store his folded clothes. He unmentionables and jeans were kept in a 3-drawer dresser next to my side of the bed. This dresser used to be mine and will be Bunny's - after I make it over. At any rate - it needed to be freed up so I can fill it with baby loot.

So last weekend we headed to IKEA and picked up two more Billy bookcases (for the dining area) and a Malm Dresser:

Note: these things are a piece of cake to put together once you get the rhythm down. We had all three pieces up and running in a matter of hours. And I'm knocked up.

So bye-bye old not very attractive bookcase, hello nice sleek dresser! And to top it off, I moved in an extra chair from our office. He sat in there a lot yesterday afternoon just surveying his goods. I'm trying not to be bitter.

The ugly carpet is still there, but we're renting. We put a towel on the countertop and then stacked clothes there while they were awaiting transition and the minute the terry cloth went down the cats commandeered it. Then they watched with fascination as we changed the house.

Just to give you an idea of how spacious and inviting his closet is now. (The hanging side is unchanged.)

The perfect seat for a clotheshorse like Steve to sit in while he drinks scotch and tries to decide which of his millions of clothes he's going to wear today...

One day, not only will I have a fabulous closet, but I'll have enough clothes to justify it. Maybe.

Before/During: Kitchen/Dining Part 1

We have a dining table. Two of them actually.

This one we inherited from Husband's grandfather. I love it.


Look at these legs! Aren't they just divine. Eventually, I'm going to have a leaf made and the whole thing refinished and the chairs tightened and then it'll be superb.

This one is our landlord's:
Yeah, it's nice. But we don't need it. It's not ours. We don't want it. It's IN THE WAY. By July he's going to sell it. And when it's gone - and I get back from Dallas, our dining table will move into the kitchen area.

Before July, this is going to be emptied and moved out to the garage where it will be put to use storing things like Christmas ornaments and garden supplies. Or whatever.

These two items will get moved into the kitchen:

The dining room will become a play area for the baby. Before that, though, it will become a little loungey seating area. The light fixture will be replaced. It will be awesome.

So that's the plan. This weekend, I got fed up with the cabinets over the penisula in the kitchen. I've been meaning to open them up since we moved in, and fill this awkward spot with cookbooks, but I just hadn't gotten around to it. (Full disclosure, if we ever buy this place I will take untold amount of please in taking a sledgehammer to this particular set of uppers.)

Before:


After:

See that bit over by the wall? It's weird to get to and you can only get to it from the window-side of things. That's Where the cookbooks will go.

I did not straighten before I took any of these pictures because I'm lazy. And I just did the dishes. I promise it's not nearly as visually noisey as it appears here. I blame the camera. And also my laziness.

So since I have until July to get all of this prepped...and even longer before we actually become parents, I'm taking my sweet time. It doesn't help that I get distracted. Or that I'm also trying to finish a novel. Wish me luck!

Bad Blogger

We had a little project this weekend and I was so worn out from it that it's taken me three days to get up the energy to write this blog.

Remember this?


One of my lovely readers (I have Fives of Tens of them, you know) suggested filling in with lava rock to discourage regrowth of what I now call the Ivy Scourge. Awesome idea, but Lava rock isn't free and guess what we had on hand already?

Brick. That's a pile of previously-applied brick in the corner back there. I didn't think to get a decent shot of the pile beforehand. Mostly because it had a metal washtub and a bunch of wood on top of the brick.

We also found brick here:

(we found a nest of garter snakes there, too)

and here:

Yeah. We dug those up. I've always wondered why our useless gardener uses the weed-whacker back here. At first I thought it was because of the randomly placed rosebushes, but now I know it's because once you remove a layer of overgrowth, you get equally randomly placed paths of brick.


Funny story about this area. See all that random, weedy growth behind the brick "Wall"? We started asking the Landlord to pull it out (since it's choking the fruit trees) when we moved in. In January. He came by last week and finally pulled out HALF OF IT. Not kidding:

(see that dirt half on the right? We have a useless gardener and a landlord who is perpetually half-assed about things. If it didn't hurt so much I'd bang my head against a wall.)

Now, I know that this whole "Gardening" thing is new to me (and exciting!) but even I know that the proper way to plant ivy (aside from Not Planting It At All) is NOT to put it in a planter and set it on the ground and forget about it. We unearthed, and then had to unearth, so many of these. Some salvageable, but mostly they'd been chewed to bits by the aggressive, invasive root system of The Scourge. I *hate* Ivy. And I don't hate a lot of things. But this is a plant that will grow INTO the stucco on the side of your house. It will choke out your fruit bearing plants. Its roots will ingest (I saw it) any little piece of whatever that they can't push out of the way.

After the apocalypse, it will be the cockroaches, spam, and Ivy.

Any, on more pleasant topics: the after pictures!


It's prettier from the front. And hey, we were working with salvaged brick. And also, I know that I need to prune that growth from the base of the pomegranate tree. That's technically the gardener's job. Unfortunately, he's a lazy bastard and the landlord is the one who hires/fires him...you see where my frustration lies.

Emily is about to take matters into her own tentacles....um, hands.

Gardening

I know everyone likes a good before and after, but I've just got the before and during...the "after" is going to take some planning. And help. Lots of help. Maybe even from trained professionals:

Before - Lemon Tree covered in Ivy.

After: Lemon tree with ivy removed. All of those green shoots on the trunk are purple-blossomed Lemony Goodness.

This - where the brown/orange filled patches are - had lots of empty/dirt and dandelion filled planters. Some of them were cute and those are in the garage. Just in case. Some of them were plastic and cracked and they're in our garbage bin. I have no idea what to put here, and it appears that our landlord didn't either. He seems to be of the When In Doubt Plant Spider Ferns, Ivy, or Cacti variety. And with little-to-no planning about where they go. I actually found all three in a single pot. Not Kidding.

This is what my kitchen window looks out on. There's an orange tree immediately to the left, which is what is shading it. I think that's all clover, but don't hold me to that.

Those are rose bushes and a random cacti in a plastic pot. I like the tree stump. I think it adds characters. And the neighborhood cats play in it, which giggles me. Back in the corner (on the right by the blue shed thing) are: a fig tree that's producing figs. A tree that's producing some kind of red berry and might be a plum tree? A stand of random bamboo, and a pile of detritus. The pile of detritus will be removed by our (mostly useless) gardener this week.

This is the other side. It's got a lot of potential, except for the randomly placed rose bushes. In that corner where the fences meet is another pile of detritus, also to be removed this week.

This is just sad. It's behind the garage/summer kitchen. We removed a lot of the dirt and dandelion filled pots today and decided that at one point it was a nicely landscaped piece of dirt. Now it's just neglected. Gardener might just get in there and reduce it to dirt. But then what do I plant?

Luckily we have a nursery here that's fairly helpful, but I'm definitely going to have to learn more about what will grow and how to grow it and then do the planning.

Like I said, there might be professionals involved.

I will leave you with something pretty:

In our front yard.

Before/After: Kitchen part 1

Before. This is actually WAY before. This is a midway-through-unpacking image of our lovely mid-70s kitchen.


After. I got sick of the doors. They were a hazard...and inconvenient. No bueno. (And yes, we are that anal. I didn't have to straighten up much for the shelves to look like that.)

But notice something odd about that image? If you look at the stile on the left hand side...about where the hinge would be...

You see it. When they stained our cabinets this *lovely* color, they stained the hinges. I had to chip through stain just to get to the screws.


This makes me stabby.

Deep even breaths and repeat after me:

"Not my house...
Not my house...
Not my house...."

These Walls

Before

After

Inspiration here. The good thing about this little setup is that I can add/replace/rearrange with little effort. And repaint, as soon as I get my head around what color I want it to be. Because I'm so very much Not and Oatmeal Person.

This is in the office. To my left is my desk, to my right is Husband's, and at my tooshie is his 88 Key Synthesizer setup. So I put all of our music-related images there. All 4 of them. He had more posters but I'm not sure where they are....On the left is a sketch of Rogue that he got at a comic convention when he was in Middle School (I think.) The artist passed away a year or so ago so I had it framed for him. I actually really like it.

Still to come:



And this has just come onto my rader:

Our mail slot. It was brought to my attention today that when the owner was rolling oatmeal onto the walls he didn't so much as pull out the nails...and as you can see from the chipping - he just rolled over the mail slot and then pried it open after the paint dried. I want the paint removed from it. Going to have to figure that one out. Any tips on getting paint off metal? Thanks.