Jacob's Birthday Present, Part 1

I mentioned months & months ago that we wanted to set up a desk area for Jacob in our room so he'd have a quiet place to study.  We reorganized and rearranged and moved the black computer table upstairs to use as Jacob's study/homework area, but that's as far as we ever got.  We weren't ever able to find a cheap chair (we didn't really take the time to look too hard), and the table became a dumping ground for anything and everything that we didn't have a place for.

Jacob's birthday is on Saturday, so I decided to fix up his study area as a birthday present!  I spent over 4 hours cleaning and then reorganizing all of the crap... Yes, it was that bad.  So you can get some idea of how awful it was, I took a few pictures!  I forgot to take a picture right before I started cleaning, so I took a few on my phone about an hour into the cleaning process... every pile on the floor and on the bed was crap that had been thrown under or on top of the table! (Please don't judge us!)

The next thing I needed was a good chair.  I called around to a bunch of used furniture stores to see what they had, but they were all asking 30-35 dollars for a cushioned desk chair, which was still way more than we could afford right now.  So I sent a message out to the freecycle world, not really expecting a response, but I got one!!  I am super excited about the chair... it's in perfect condition, it moves up & down for different heights, and it's cushioned & really comfortable.  And did I mention I got it for FREE?!

Finally, I used wordle.net to make a print to hang above the table (I got the idea from this website).  I used Jacob's name and a bunch of words & phrases that describe him--most were serious but a few were silly--and then I had it printed at Walmart into an 11 x 14.  The print took me FOREVER.  The website is awesome in that it does all the hard stuff for you--all you have to do is type in the words you want and then customize the colors & font and all of that stuff.  But it makes the print into a pdf file that you open in Adobe Reader.  To print it at Walmart, I needed a jpg.  I am NOT good with computers and converting files, so it took me a good 3 or 4 hours of messing around to finally get it to do what I want.  But I finally figured it out!  I framed it and hung it up, and I just love how it all turned out!  And the whole thing only cost me 11 bucks (for the print & frame).  I can't wait for Jacob to get home today to see it!!!!

Once I get our bookshelf cleaned off & organized better, I will probably move some of the things on the table to on top of the bookshelf, giving Jacob more table space for books & stuff.  But that will have to wait a few days!

Our Place-- the living room

When we moved into our current place here in Columbia, we lost quite a bit of room and a TON of storage space.  I didn't love our last place, and it was way too expensive, but it did have tons of storage, which was awesome.  It had a big coat & storage closet under the stairs, a large pantry, a large storage closet beside the pantry, cabinet space under the sink in the downstairs bathroom, double cabinet space under the sinks in the upstairs bathroom, a linen closet, a closet along an entire wall in our bedroom, and a decent-sized closet in Naomi's bedroom.  For a little townhouse, it had awesome storage.

Here, however, there is practically nothing.  We have a decent-sized closet in our room, and the girls' closets have a little space for some storage, and there is a small closet under the stairs, but that's it.  No pantry.  No linen closet.  No cabinets for storage in the bathrooms (the sinks are those pedestal sinks, so there aren't any cabinets under them).  No extra storage closets.  So I have had a really hard time unpacking our stuff.  We've been here for 7 months now, and until this week, our living room still had quite a few unpacked boxes & bins lining the walls & stacked in corners.  So you can get an idea of how bad the room looked before and how much stuff we had to move, here are two pictures (both were taken by Naomi... she likes to play with the camera):

You can see some of the storage I stacked under the computer table and some of the junk that was sitting on the treadmill. 

Another view of the stuff stacked on the treadmill.  There was probably the same amount of junk & bins & boxes stacked in the corner of the room, too, but I don't have a picture of that.

I finally decided I couldn't stand it anymore (and I needed our house to look nice because I am going to start doing a little babysitting here--more on that later), so I went on a cleaning frenzy.  I basically organized and tidied and deep cleaned for 3 days straight.  (I am exhausted!)  And when Jacob was off on Wednesday for the 4th, I made him help me move all the heavy stuff out of the room & rearrange a few pieces of furniture into a better arrangement.  I also made him put up the curtains that I bought way back in February.  I was so excited--this is the first time we've ever had curtains in our living room, and I love it!  I think curtains make any room look 10 times better.  Someday, we will have curtains in our bedroom, too.  Not any day soon, but someday!  :)

Before I decided I wanted to rearrange furniture, I made Jacob finally help me hang some pictures.  But then we moved the furniture around, and the pictures aren't in the right spots anymore.  So please ignore the off-center wall arrangements... I'll have to move them around a bit to get them where I want them.

Because of the lack of storage space here, I have had to get creative and utilize space that I wouldn't normally use... like under the computer table.  I used the space under the computer table to stack boxes of food storage and some file boxes.  Then, because I hated how trashy it looked with all the stacked boxes/bins underneath, I made a table skirt for it.  I used one of the same red sheets that I used to cover our couch & chair because I had a couple extras, so it even matches.  I used industrial strength Velcro to attach it to the edge of the table, and I cut a separate piece for the space in front of the computer screen so when we are sitting at the computer, we can just take that piece off.  That way, we can scoot the chair in without having the sheet in the way or in our lap.  The one thing I haven't done yet is hem the bottom & edges.  It doesn't look amazing, but it is definitely better than seeing all the boxes!

I also took a ton of toys & moved them to Naomi's room.  We used to not have very many toys, but through gifts from family & friends, we now have a good selection of toys!  We were keeping them all in the living room because Naomi spends most of her time playing there, but that meant the living room looked like a disaster area all the time.  It was impossible to keep the room clean.  Naomi would dump everything and get out every toy so that the floor was covered, and it would take me an hour to clean it up every night.  So I chose enough toys to cover the bottom two shelves of the bookcase and put everything else in a bin in Naomi's room.  She can still play with the rest of the toys in her room, and I can change up the toys that are downstairs every week or so, but I don't have a huge mess to clean up downstairs anymore!  I am loving it!

the rest of our week

I was so wiped out from all of our fun on Thursday that I was too exhausted on Friday to do much.  The girls and I spent the morning at the playground, so we did make my goal of getting out of the house and doing something fun, and then Jacob & I spent the rest of the day/evening cleaning & organizing the house and working on our food storage.  I also finished a little house project--I have been trying to figure out what to hang on the wall by the kitchen table for a while now, but it was hard to find something that I liked for the kitchen that I was capable of making and that wouldn't cost me anything.  I finally found an idea for something that I kinda liked a couple weeks ago, and I was able to finish the project and get it hung up on Friday.  I think I like it... it will do for now, at least, until someday when we have money and can buy real wall art!

Centered on the wall behind the kitchen table

Close-up!  There's something about the teapot that bugs me... but it was the hardest one to draw and cut out... I am not an artist!

I have to admit that on Saturday I was not able to get out of the house with the girls to do anything fun.  My goal was to get out every day last week and take them somewhere fun, but I just couldn't do it on Saturday.  I had planned to take them to the Farmer's Market on Saturday morning to get some yummy home-baked treats, but I ended up having to work, so it didn't work out.  Then Jacob was gone with the car for the rest of the day playing paintball with his brothers.  I did make a delicious dinner of sweet & sour chicken, though, so the day wasn't a complete waste!

I was going to post the video I mentioned yesterday of Naomi playing with the food coloring in the tub, but in today's world, I am slightly worried that some crazy person would think it was inappropriate.  So I won't be posting that one.  But here's a video of Aleta babbling in her crib in the morning!  (Ignore the vacuum handle and boxes mess... we had recently finished cleaning and boxing up too-small baby clothes.)

Also, here is Aleta's 5-month picture with the giant caterpillar... she is getting so big!!  I completely missed taking a 4-month picture, and her 5-month picture is like 10 days late, but oh well.  I try my best!

Naomi's Room

I have a habit of starting a project and then never finishing it. I start out feeling all excited about it and working really hard, but if I'm not able to finish the project quickly, I lose my motivation and it never gets done. For example, when we moved into our second apartment in Provo and Naomi started sleeping in her own room, I got SO excited to decorate her nursery. I ordered lots of photo prints from Walmart of our family photos & Naomi's baby photos, I found cheap frames, my mom helped me figure out the best way to arrange all of her furniture, my mom helped me figure out a way to hang her crib comforter behind the crib, and I bought & painted wooden letters to spell her name on her wall. But we ended up moving to Missouri just 2 months after we moved into that apartment, so other than arranging her furniture and hanging just a few of the pictures, I never finished her room. After 6 months of living with Jacob's family, we moved into our own place in Columbia, but I never finished Naomi's room or made it look pretty. Considering we lived there for a year, I really should have done it, but I could never figure out the best set-up or the best way to hang the photos and wall decorations, and Jacob is no help in that department, so I basically just gave up.

When we moved into the place we are in now, I got all excited again about decorating and making our house pretty, but it has still been slow-going. I was especially excited about Naomi's room... she started sleeping in a twin bed shortly after we moved, so I got to buy a bedding set for her. I wanted something cute and girly with bright colors, and it had to be cheap. I ended up finding her bedding set on the Target website. It was PERFECT. It was exactly what I wanted, and it was on clearance for 30 bucks. And it gave me a cute theme for her room: butterflies! (The picture is old--it's the same one I posted a couple months ago when we first got her bedding.)In all of our moves, we somehow lost a few of Naomi's wall letters, so I had to buy new ones. I painted them bright pink & yellow, 2 of the colors in her comforter, and hung them above her bed. I love it!!! It's my favorite part of her room. The only thing I wish I could change is that I had to hang them pretty high, and I wish I could have hung them a little lower. But I can't have them in Naomi's reach, because she will rip them off the wall and ruin it.
I think some of the letters are a little crooked, so don't pay attention to that! I will fix it tomorrow. But other than that, it's cute, huh?? The letters cost me 99 cents each, the paint was about 2 dollars, and I splurged on the butterflies, which cost me $2.99. I got everything from Hobby Lobby... can I just say how much I love that place?

My second project was to tackle the problem of Naomi having no dresser, which means all of her clothes have been in piles & in boxes all over our bedroom & Aleta's bedroom, which has prevented me from being able to finish organizing either room. I've been trying to find a cute white dresser on craigslist, but I haven't been able to find anything that will work out. I was just about to give in and buy the only dresser we could afford, which was this hideous piece of junk from Walmart, but at the last second I backed out and decided there had to be something else I could do. The dresser would have cost us 65 bucks, which was way too much for something so ugly. So instead, I bought a 15 dollar white bookcase and 4 cube storage drawers to put her clothes in. It's not perfect, but it will hold her clothes, it was way less than the cost of the dresser, and it looks way cuter. I'm not finished with the bookcase, yet... I need to figure out what I'm going to do with the rest of the space on the shelves, but that will have to wait a little while.
Also, the colors look better in person... the picture makes the green look darker & uglier, and the other two drawers are purple... the picture makes them look a little blue-ish. And, I would like to add that I put the bookshelf together on my own! I got really frustrated partway through and wanted Jacob to take over, but when I got tired of waiting for him to finish it, I just finished it myself.

Next, I wanted something to hang on the wall above the head of her bed. All I really have to hang on her walls are picture frames, but I don't want anything heavy, especially something with glass, hanging above her head. So I googled and spent a couple hours browsing the internet for ideas! Then today, I went to Goodwill and found the perfect frame for my project!

Here is the before picture... ugly, I know, but it was only a dollar at Goodwill:And this is what I ended up with:

I'm not a creative or crafty person, so I was very pleased with my end result! The frame is incredibly lightweight, there is no glass in the front, and it cost me a total of $2.42 to make! The frame was a dollar, the white paint was on sale for 70 cents, I bought the background scrapbook paper at Hobby Lobby on sale for 36 cents, and the butterflies were cut out of another piece of scrapbook paper, which was also 36 cents. And I can still use the rest of the butterfly paper for another project if I want! Here's a close-up of the little saying (which I found on a few websites online):Also, I found this little guy at Hobby Lobby in their spring garden decorations, and I just couldn't pass him up since he was 40% off... he is definitely worth the $2.40 I paid for him! I think you're supposed to stick it in your garden, but I'm planning on just breaking the stick off and putting him somewhere in Naomi's room... just not sure where yet!

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!