Spring Cleaning

Mason and Char. Our trim and the doors were the nasty dark, fake-wood brown.

When we first moved into our new place, we were able to get the price lowered quite a bit because the carpets were so gross and made the whole place stink of cigarette smoke and yuck. The plan was to rip out the carpets right away and give the place a face-lift. But then I broke my knee and put all of our plans on hold for a while. The saddest part was that we got used to how stinky our place was (for the most part) and eventually got fairly comfortable with our 1980's crispy carpet. We rarely noticed it until someone would come over and make a face. My only excuse was that we had other things on our plate at the time. But thankfully, our plans of revamping have started moving forward again and I just love how homey our place is starting to feel!

We didn't have any plans of doing anything wowy to our new place over spring break, but when James came home early one evening, we decided on a whim to head off to our favorite Menards (like Home depot) and pick out paint for our drab walls. While the boys slept, our living room turned a perky and light limey green. But then it kinda snowballed into a "If you give a Mouse a Cookie" type deal and the next morning we decided that we should go ahead and paint all of the trim and the doors white along with it. That took the majority of the following day because we ran into some major nicotine stains and had to paint the trim and doors with about 9 coats of paint in three different paints and primers before the gross brown stains stopped seeping through. After that, the walls looked so nice and new that the nasty old carpet just had to come up.

Many hands make light work, right? Seriously, isn't this one of the reasons to have children? The free-labor? :)

The plan was to just keep the hard wood until we were able to take care of carpet down the road. However, when we woke up to our loud boy's running feet and happy squeals echoing off the bare floors, we knew that carpets were a must in order to keep our wall-sharing neighbors happy. So off we trooped back to Menards and picked out our carpet so that James could install it himself. What a man! 

Mendards have this really cool pre-stretched carpet that is already attached to the foam so it is super easy to install. (But keep in mind that I mostly observed and gave my (incredibly helpful) two cents a time or two.) All you need to do is put down a bunch of double-sided carpet tape and then staple it down on the stairs.

The boys helped press the tape in place by driving their cars on the strips like it was a racetrack..

Burly men are so handy to have around!

James was surprised that I somehow got a picture of him smiling that day

Now that we have new carpets, we can enjoy relaxing on the ground again in style!

Even Batman likes dinosaurs 

Now that I am getting a lot more mobile around the house, I decided to tackle a few projects and ended up making floating shelves and hung them with only the help of my little menfolk! Hot dog! I don't know who was more pleased with my efforts- me or James, since he got out of the arduous task of hanging things on walls!

Power tools are the best things in the whole wide world! And Ana White might be one of my new favorite people! The curtains and pillows were made last year so don't think I have too much drive right now.

 James teases me that my follow-through needs a little work, so while I was at it, I made some large posters and hung them up just to spite him! :)

I made them with cheap engineer prints from Staples and foam board....that I bought about nine months ago for this quick pinterest project.....James might have a point.

So we are not done with our projects yet, but at least we are making a dent finally! I am in heaven! And best of all, our color-scheme allows me to keep decorating with my favorite paper-mache rhino. Because, really. What house is a home without a little paper mache?

 I made this fella in honor of my little Char, who took his role as a rhino on Halloween very seriously.