Home Improvements

I keep putting off blogging & posting pictures of our new place because it's a mess and we're not even close to being unpacked, but if I wait until our house is perfect, it will probably be months before I blog again. So, I'm posting some pictures! Please excuse our crazy mess... moving with a one-month old baby & an almost 2-year-old and then getting sick over & over has been difficult, so our house is still messy & unorganized!

Although this isn't really an improvement to our home, it has definitely improved our life, so I'm going to mention it: I made the best purchase of my life on Wednesday. Aleta has been a very fussy baby, and she has gone through entire days where she hasn't really slept, and it has been frustrating. So I bought a baby swing off of craigslist, and I love it! I don't know how we ever got along without it. Jacob especially has had a rough time dealing with Aleta. The first night we had the swing, I went out to do some shopping. Usually when I get home, Aleta is screaming and Jacob is at the end of his rope. But on Wednesday, I got home to find Jacob happy for once and Aleta sleeping peacefully in her swing. Jacob pointed at it and said, "That thing is a miracle. I might actually start to develop some affection for her." So yay for craigslist and affordable miracles!

Our first home improvement was actually done months ago, but I never mentioned it. We desperately needed to do something with our entertainment center set-up. Our entertainment center was given to us when we got married by some of Jacob's family who no longer needed/wanted it. And it was perfect. It held our tv & xbox & dvd player & speakers & all of our games and dvds. And it was free! But once Naomi became mobile, the entertainment center became a death trap. The corners were sharp, there was a broken shelf on the bottom with a screw sticking straight out, and the tv was low enough that she could hit it and pull on it. She could also get into the drawers and reach every shelf except for the very top ones, which meant we could no longer use it to store any dvds. So we needed something new. But entertainment centers are expensive, and most of them are not kid-friendly. So I had a stroke of brilliance one night as I was laying in bed, and I realized that our dresser was the perfect height to hold the tv out of Naomi's reach. It was also wide enough to hold our speakers and xbox, and it was sturdy enough that Naomi wouldn't be able to pull it over by climbing on it. Almost every drawer was broken on it, so we didn't use it for clothes anyway... it was just taking up space in our room for absolutely no reason. So we trashed our entertainment center and the top part of our dresser, and now our set-up looks like this:

The only thing I still need to do is use some wood glue to glue the broken drawers shut so Naomi can't pull them out, because when she tries to pull them out, they fall on her. Then I'll put baby-proof locks on the few working drawers and use them to store dvds or xbox games.

The next problem I need to solve is the fact that we now have no dresser, which means our clothes are in boxes & piles everywhere. Naomi has no dresser, either, so I have been shopping on craigslist. Hopefully before too long, I will find something that will work for us!

Thanks to my mom, we got a new quilt for our bed! (The picture of this will have to wait until our room is a little more unpacked and organized!) I bought our old bedding set when we got married, and I loved it at first. It was red & gold and pretty, and it came with everything--sheets, bedskirt, comforter, and pillow shams. And I found curtains that matched it perfectly. But then the comforter started getting all bunchy, so there'd be a lot of padding in one place and none in another, and it started coming apart at the seams, and it was so warm that we always ended up throwing it on the floor. Its worst feature was that it was dry clean only... do you know how much it costs to dry clean a huge comforter? It's a lot. So we trashed our old bedding set and got a new quilt from my mom, and I love it. It's a pretty red color, and it's washable, and it's lightweight so we can actually use it at night without roasting. The only problem is that I now have no bedroom curtains, and it will probably stay that way for a while. I just can't justify spending money on something that is purely cosmetic, like bedroom curtains.

Also thanks to my mom, we were able to get another bookcase. She sent me 30 bucks to buy another bookcase last semester to help us get more organized (we have WAY too many books & dvds for the one bookcase we had), but I never got around to buying it. So I finally bought it, and Jacob set it up in our room, and I filled it with our books. Also, through a little rearranging we moved all of Naomi's children's books to the bookcase in the living room, and then we put the small bookcase from her room into our room. I filled the small one with dvds, and our new large bookcase holds almost all of our books. It was a nice surprise when we put the new bookcase together and it perfectly matched the small one from Naomi's room! I think they must be the same brand and everything, because the design and color are identical. (I bought Naomi's bookcase off of craigslist when we lived in Provo, so I had no idea it was the same type of bookcase as the new one I was buying from Walmart).

Our new bookcase... don't mind the mess!

When I bought the bookcase, I also bought a new table for our computer. When Jacob and I got married, I went out and bought a cheap 4-foot rectangular folding table from Walmart, and we've been using that for our computer. It's worked ok for us, but I recently decided I wanted a table with a little more room. The monitor, keyboard, and printer just barely fit on our old one, and since the computer console was on the floor, Naomi was always messing with the cords and turning the computer off when we were in the middle of using it (she just couldn't resist the blue lights around the power button!). So for 38 bucks, I bought a 5-foot table (which is also quite a bit wider than our old table), which now fits the printer, computer, monitor, and keyboard with a little room to spare.

I have also been wanting to get Jacob a desk or a table for him to use when he studies and works on schoolwork. He's never had anywhere that he could sit down to work for school, and I know it's bothered him. So when we set up the computer on its new table, I moved our old folding table to our room to be used for Jacob's office area. This also finally gave me somewhere to put all of our random office supplies, like paper, pens, scissors, staplers, envelopes, etc. I had a ton of stuff like that (mostly stuff I bought when I was teaching) which has been sitting in bins in a closet for the past year, so I finally got it all organized in drawers & paper trays so that we can actually find something when we want to use it.

When we moved into our new place, I realized our kitchen has no pantry. Our old place had an awesome pantry... it was huge, and we filled it. So I had no idea how we were going to make do in our new place with no pantry. Right now, our food is using every top cabinet except one, and we still have a box of food to unpack. If I had money to burn, I'd buy a pantry... something like this one from Walmart:
But since I'm not made of money, I bought a little cabinet for 20 bucks from a thrift store! I had decided that we couldn't afford to do anything to help with our kitchen storage situation, and I had gone to the thrift store in search of dressers, so I was excited to find something affordable to help me get the kitchen organized! I haven't filled the cupboard yet, but I'm hoping when I do, it will free up 2 of my top cupboards for some dishes.

(Naomi broke those blinds about 5 minutes before I took this picture... and then she threw a tantrum because I wouldn't let her continue breaking the blinds.)

I mentioned Naomi's bedding in my last post... well, it came in the mail a few days ago, and I absolutely love it! It's adorable and bright and fun and girly, and it's exactly what I wanted for her room. And as I mentioned before, it was on clearance, so that makes it even better! I also bought curtains, which for Naomi's room are not purely a cosmetic concern... without curtains, she wakes up at the crack of dawn, and it's killing me... I need more sleep! I had really wanted pink curtains, but although the pink curtains were very pretty, they didn't match the pink in the bedding, so I got yellow instead. They're going to be cute... pictures soon to come!!

Naomi's new bedding!

I absolutely hate our couch and chair. They're this ugly faded blue-ish print, and I just really hate them. I've hated them from the beginning, but the price was right (they were free), so I couldn't really complain. But I finally decided I couldn't stand their hideousness any longer, and I covered them with red sheets. My friend Jess & I tried to cover them when Jacob & I first got them. Jess was a genius and used safety pins to fit the sheets on perfectly so that the couches & chair could still recline and stay covered, but the sheets just didn't stay put very long once people started sitting on them. So I gave up. But our recliner chair got all gross when we had it in storage, and the couch has a big hole between the two cushions where things always fall & get lost (like phones & pacifiers... the last time we moved the couch to vacuum, there were like 6 pacifiers under it), so I decided to give my sheet covers another go. They don't look awesome, but they cover all the spots & holes, and I found a way to get them to mostly stay in place, so I like them. And they were free, since I already had all the sheets! It was also important to get our couch covered because Naomi likes to drop food & crumbs in the hole between the couch cushions...this is quite annoying, because the couch weighs a ton, and I can't lift it or move it by myself. In our new place, this is an even bigger problem because these townhomes have a roach problem (yeah, it's gross... more on that fun topic in a later post), which means we need our home to be very clean and have no crumbs... an almost impossible goal with Naomi! So with my sheet covers, Naomi can no longer drop crumbs in the holes of the couch, which means I can clean up after her much more easily.

The last home improvement we've made was to buy an area rug for the living room. At first, I was really excited about having hardwood floors (ok, fake hardwood, but still pretty). But every day, Naomi slips and falls and hits her head on the floor at least 5 times, which causes a lot of crying and screaming. She also likes to throw tantrums, during which she will often throw herself to the floor. This wasn't so bad when we had a carpeted living room, but now, her tantrums usually result in Naomi hurting herself. So I bought a cheap area rug from Walmart, which has been very helpful. And I think it looks pretty!