that's faux awesome...

Well, here it is... today is the day that I said "Sayonara!" to our terrible faux wood paneling.... I got the primer on. And a preggers safe, non-smelly, bonding primer at that (since an oil-based is way too odoriferous for me to safely use) all thanks to my favorite Lowe's paint guy (who I'm sure is sick of seeing me, by the way, I'm only in there like, every other day). And tomorrow, if Babies R Us hasn't called, we shall get two generous coats of flat white interior paint on top of this fabulous primer. Who am I kidding, even if BRU does call me and I come home with a crib and dresser, I will still get that darn paint on there.

So let's rejoice in the epic awesomeness that is this white primer on top of my faux wood paneling... because let's face it, who has faux wood paneling anymore? And just look at how much lighter the room feels after getting that white on there! (don't mind the curious cat trying to shove her fat body in that air duct =] )

cue the dramatic music...

The cabinets are done, the cabinets are done!! Look how awesome they are:

I do have to admit, I was a little freaked out by the color when I first started painting them but now, I absolutely love them! Especially with all of the hardware back on; the silver drawer and cabinet knobs really pop and bring out the color of the cabinets. So, the Cabinet Project has officially come to an end and it's on to the next one... the Wall Project. We still have yet to pin down the exact shade of yellow we want, but I might just start on painting over the paneling in the mean time.

I also made progress on some of the nursery stuff. For example, I checked on the status of the furniture and fingers crossed, I will be getting a phone call on Monday or Tuesday. And I worked on the Name Project a little bit more too. Now I've just got to figure out which wall I want to put them on. I got to thinking about the layout of the Alphabet Project and the Name Project, and the alphabet may have to be on the bigger wall, where the crib is supposed to go, to give me more room to spread it out. But we shall see when the furniture finally gets here...

dishwasher? did somebody say dishwasher...

Ladies and gentlemen, here it is... Stage 2 of the cabinet project... the base cabinets finally got some love; so did the hutch and the fronts of the drawers. And the more Hubs and I look at the color, the more we like it. I think it's safe to say "Fired Earth" is growing on us. It's amazing how just a coat of paint on some old cabinets can totally transform a room.

The game plan for tomorrow after work is to get the cabinet doors painted so we can get our kitchen somewhat put back together... that is, until we rip the countertops off. You heard me, we're getting new countertops! I am finally getting rid of those horrendous golden speck counters!

In other news, Hubs said the magic word today... dishwasher. That's right. We do not currently have a dishwasher, nor has he ever had one in this house, and it's about darn time we think about putting one in. So what does the Hubs do after says the magic word? He gets out the tape measure and measure the counters to see if we have room. But we already know the answer to that, because this isn't the first time we've talked about putting one in... but there IS room for one. OH MY FREAKING GOSH! I want a dishwasher!!!

And in other other news, the color scheme for the kitchen has officially changed. I wasn't quite sure how Hubs would feel about bright colors on the walls, so I went with my neutral plan in my head... but what other magical words does he say tonight? He says, "How are you going to bring bright color in?" YAY! So that did it, I grabbed the paint samples and told him to pick one he liked and we'll go from there. And what did he decide on, you ask? None other than...

"Top Banana"

I know, the digital sample looks super crazy, but the paint chip (which in our experience, we've come to find out is like, 100% accurate with how our finished product looks) is a little more muted, but still really bright and cheery. I am just so excited, I'm bursting at the seams! I can't wait to get the banana paint and look at countertop samples/colors and pick out a dishwasher!!! And now my search is on for some cheery contact paper/drawer and cabinet liners/just regular paper that I can line all my cabinet shelves and drawers in.

And do me a favor, cross your fingers and hope that Babies R Us calls me tomorrow to let me know that my nursery furniture is in =]

i must be crazy...

I don't know what y'all like to do when you get home from a long day of work, but this girl right here? This crazy pregnant lady? Apparently, she really likes to paint. But seriously, I do love to paint. And when I got home yesterday, I said to the Hubs, "Man, now that we've started talking about it, I really really wanna paint the kitchen cabinets." And what does he say to that? "Then go get the paint." So I did. And that, my friends, is how I spent the evening last night. Painting my kitchen cabinets.

See what it looked like before?

And the other side, with the corner hutch and table?

Well, I grabbed a bunch of paint samples at Lowes the other day (I swear, someone just needs to buy/give me a bunch of paint decks, so I can have all of the colors right here at my fingertips, instead of having to make a billion trips to Lowes just to get samples). And I show them to the Hubs, and we pick a color we like and that's what I purchased. I kind of had a color scheme going on in my head, dark cabinets, light brown/tan-ish walls, bright white on the paneling. I guess it looked kind of like this:

The cabinets ended up looking a little bit more grey than espresso, like I originally had in my head, but I'm just gonna work with it. I think part of the reason why I'm not really crazy about it right now is because the walls are still really dark, so now our sad little kitchen looks like a sad little dungeon kitchen. Which is the OPPOSITE of what I'm going for here. But anyways, here's what I have done so far, just the frames of the upper cabinets (I suppose I wanted to make sure I liked it before I painted everything) and we'll just call this "Stage 1":

And what does all this mean? It means that when I get home around 6 o'clock tonight, I'll be painting the base cabinets and all the doors. Woohoo! And it also means stay tuned... I'll be back with Stage 2 pictures.

Ta Da!

Breaking news.... the nursery is painted! Done. Complete. Finished. Hecho. Finito. Thank goodness.

Hiccups...

So, I was bad and didn't post last night. It was a busy day, and a late night, for sure. As I am writing this, Mason is hiccup-bouncing all around... or maybe he's just excited. We got the green on the walls! Although, I have lots of little spots to touch up on the white band due to leakage at the paint edge.... which I am not too thrilled about. I thought that $12 roll of 3M "edge-lock" painters tape was supposed to prevent that?! Oh well, I goofed a little green on the white myself, so I'm gonna have to get the white out anyways. But now we're off to get the blue up on the walls!

I'll leave you with our progress so far:

And I promise to post again tonight with our (hopefully) finished walls!

doin' a little happy dance...

Okay, so I am way too excited to wait, so I'm gonna post this right now...

WE STARTED PAINTING THE NURSERY TONIGHT!

Came home from work today, and decided I was just gonna go ahead and paint the ceiling (while I try my hardest to decide how I want to split up the walls) so that it can just be done and taken care of. So, I got hubs to help me move the futon out of there, covered the floors, taped my walls (for a super clean line) and started painting:

 Have I ever told you just how much I hate painting ceilings? I despise the task. Mostly because I am too short for the job, and that's with a four foot extension on my roller; I can't hold even pressure on the darn thing and I get crazy gloppy lines all over the place. So Hubs comes back from dumping trash out of the garage and he does the second coat for me (my knight in shining armor) and as it's drying, I eat a quick dinner and ask him about how we should do the white stripe dividing the blue from the green. Should we do a small, narrow line right in the middle, or make it bigger and fatter to give more separation between the two colors, kind of like the sky and the grass?? One benefit of marrying an electrical engineer is all the cool tech-y tools and stuff we have jam packed in our garage: Mr. Tech-y brings in his handy-dandy laser level and we figure out how wide we want the stripe and... voila, a perfectly level, perfectly taped stripe at the perfect height!

We cheated, just a little bit, by turning the top line of the existing green into the bottom line of our white, so we really just had to laser the line for the top of the white. The picture on the bottom is with just one coat, though we ended up doing a total of three, for perfect coverage of our perfect line. 

So next up is the green (Valspar's Everglade Glen) and blue (Valspar's Sea Kiss) paint, which look something like this:

 Now, the paint swatches that we picked up from Lowe's match the crib bedding exactly, but these digital versions are off just a smidge. The green is less olive-y and more lime-y on the paint chip and the blue, well, it's actually pretty darn close. And here is the inspiration for our little boy's room:

I'm not quite sure if we're going to actually put anything in our white stripe, it's wayyyy too soon for decisions like that, but maybe we'll do something clever in there, because I think their bubbles look adorable. [photo from someone's site, link won't work]

And here is our adorable little turtle bedding set that we both absolutely fell in love with and bought almost immediately. Yes, there's a story behind the whole turtle thing, two stories actually, but we'll get to that some other time. Cute right? I know. So I'm thinking kind of along the whole "blue represents the sky" and the "green represents the grass" lines here, but without doing anything crazy like painting a mural on the wall. But still cute, in my opinion.

Well, that's about all for now. My favorite part comes tomorrow..... ripping down all of my tape! For real, I know that I am a super geek, but pulling down all of my tape lines is my absolute favorite part of redoing a room. And I think I might just get up extra early tomorrow morning and do that before work. And after work? Maybe we'll just get our "sky" and "grass" up on the walls?!