art possibilities for the boys room, house #10

The boys' room currently looks like this:

I need to paint that blue bookshelf white, and add orange baskets for toys.  On the wall to the left (not shown), I will be hanging the six framed DVD covers.

My budget for this room is limited, so I'm using mostly what we have.  I've thrown together a few mood boards that don't quite bring my vision to life.

First up, blue striped curtains that are currently in the room, orange lamp, the dvd cover art, and two large scale, blown-up photos of the boys.  I would frame the photos and hang them over their beds, like this room. The only thing new would be the blown-up photos, as I already have everything else.

The second option changes a few things.

First, I would take down the blue striped curtains, stretch them over wood frames, and hang them behind each bed.  The picture above looks like they are above the beds, but they would stretch from the floor to nearly the ceiling.  In the middle of the canvas I would hang the two orange canvases I made for the boys in the last house; they say "You are awesome" and "I love you a bushel and a peck".

Over the white bookcase would be a campaign mirror I have, which I would paint orange.  I am unsure of this option, as it means there are basically six rectangles against that wall.  Perhaps a circle mirror would be better?

 I couldn't fit the lamp in the picture, but there would be an orange lamp there, since the room does not have overhead lighting. I think I may also look for a plug in pendant lamp to help with overhead lighting.

Lastly, since I would be repurposing the striped curtains, I would bring in these ZGallerie orange trellis curtains.  This is a bit of a splurge, but it would be the only thing I would have to buy (plus a minimal amount of lumber to make the striped canvas frame), as I already have everything else in the room.


Lastly, the third option, which is a round mirror and white drapes with orange trim.

Again, this still uses the striped curtains as a large scale art treatment behind the headboards, but here I would use a round orange mirror over the white bookshelf.  (I have a round mirror I will paint orange. Seriously, you have no idea the amount of decor stuff I have in the garage.)  This is a little less rectangle-rectangle-rectangle along the wall.

This also uses plain white curtains, which I would trim with an orange fabric or ribbon.


I could use any combination of the above three options.  To recap, I am thinking of changing the drapes, putting up a mirror, and looking for art over the beds.

I have not yet decided on which way I am going to go; these are just ideas I have floating around.  Your thoughts?

the boys' room, in progress (house #10) (part 1)

Nearly every room in this house is a redux of our last house.  I am using nearly all of the same furniture and decor in just about every room, although of course not everything fits or works the same way it did in the old house.  The boys' room will look fairly familiar.

When we first moved in, I put Princess in the front room and the boys in the side room.  Their rooms are the same amount of square footage, and the side room has a bigger closet, so I thought that would be the best room for the boys.  I didn't take any pictures of this.  A few days after I got the upstairs unpacked, I knew this was a mistake.

Neither room is very big--they are both about 10x11.  In the front room, Princess's room was shaping up to be a lovely, light-filled, spacious nursery.  The boys in the side room, however, were cramped, even with a minimum of furniture, and the room just did not have a good layout.The front room had a smaller closet but a better wall layout.  So after two weeks of that, we switched the rooms around, putting Princess in the side room and the boys in the front room.

Yes--I moved my children from our old house to Grandma's house then into a new house 3000 miles away, and juuuuust when they were settling into their new rooms I changed them all around again. When we finally got a bedframe for Greg last week and started to build the bed, Princess wandered in and said "ah we changing dis back to my woom again? Da brudders are moving back to da udder woom again?" Keep them on their toes, I say.

I will admit space planning is not one of my strengths.  I sometimes have to live with a layout for a while before deciding why it doesn't work (like...three years in our Haddon Township house before I figured out a good layout for the living room).  When we switched the rooms around, I arranged the boys room nearly identically to how it was in our last house, with the two beds at the head of the room and the dressers at the foot of the bed.  I kept the white Expedit in the room in the bumpout under the window, because we don't have another place for it, and it won't fit in the side room.

This still looked and felt cramped (all the mess in there notwithstanding; I am forever going "oh crap, I forgot to take a before picture").

I wasn't terribly happy with it, but I left it for a while, because it was functional (the mattress was not standing on end, I swear), and I had other areas of the house to concentrate on.  Plus the second bed still did not have hardware, so Greg's mattress was on the floor.

This weekend we finally gave up on attempting to find or replicate the old bed hardware, and ordered a freestanding metal bedframe for Greg's bed.  We screwed the headboard and footboard to the new metal frame (not without difficulty, but we are hoping it will hold).  

I have no idea why I took this with such an artistic angle.

While I was sitting in the room watching the Mister be handy, I started thinking about how we could improve the layout.

The most obvious solution was to remove the doors to the closet and put the dressers inside the closet, along with the filing cabinet, since the boys have no real need for a place to hang clothes.  However, if we are to keep the filing cabinet in the closet, the sliding doors need to come off, because one cannot access anything in the middle of the closet with the doors on. Unfortunately, I have nowhere to put the closet doors; the garage is full.

After much deliberation, we moved the filing cabinet out of the closet and into the hallway at the top of the stairs. This is heinously ugly but for now it will have to do.  This meant that the two dressers could live on either end of the closet, the doors can stay on the closet, and we now have much more floor space for the beds.  Voila.

I moved the Expedit out of the bumpout and stood it up at the foot of Greg's bed.  The two beds are now centered on the opposite wall.  The dressers are in the closet. This also allowed us to bring in the blue bookshelf to act as a nightstand between the beds.

So that is the mostly blank slate I am working with.  What remains to be done in this room is to repaint the blue bookshelf white, get some baskets for toys, and hang some art. I will talk about my ideas for art in another post.

Color My World week 3: paint

This week I'm supposed to paint something in my colors of pink and orange.

There's not much in my bathroom I can paint--I'm renting, and I'm not painting the walls or the vanity.  Or the toilet, despite last week's intimations.  

When I unpacked, I came across these apothecary jars with little wicker balls inside.

 They were originally in my bookshelf in the living room, but I moved them into the bathroom and spraypainted them pink, orange and gold.

I am eh on the gold...I think they will be repainted pink and orange.

I also framed the rug remnant from last week.

My budget for this room is minimal, so I  looked through the garage for a suitable frame. I didn't find any.  But, I did find an old corkboard.

I sprayglued the rug onto the corkboard and anchored it with a few flathead pushpins.

I hotglued orange ribbon all around the edges.

And here it is:

Check out what these other wonderful bloggers have done this week:

Ange - The Blooming Hydrangea
Anna - A Newfound Treasure
Carmel - Our 5th House
Cassie - Primitive and Proper
Jadyn - Dutch.British.Love
Jessamie - Bird and Branch Redesign
Julia - Black Tag Diaries
Julia - Pawley's Island Posh
Kristy - Hyphen Interiors
Lisa - Shine Your Light

Maury - Life on Mars

Shaunna - Perfectly Imperfect
Shelley - Crazy Wonderful
Suzy - Saved by Suzy
Tiffany - Living Savvy
Tiffany - Worthwhile Domicile
Vashti & Jamie - Like me Some...

Be ready next week to link up your own colorful addition!

To the dump

When I was a kid, I spent many a day at trash dumps.  My father is a pollution engineer, and we had many family outings centered around seeing a new trash plant.

Trash to steam plant? Been there.  Tullytown garbage dump?  Has a hell of a lot of pigeons.  The best trash vacation, however, was the one near Hershey, Pennsylvania.  "Hey kids! We are going to Hershey!"  Imagine our faces when we discovered we were not going to the Hershey amusement park, but to the trash plant nearby, where my father took pictures while we sat on the top of the hill, looking down into the dump below.  My father then took us, not to the Hershey amusement park with all the rides and waterparks....but to the Hershey museum across the street.

My father has never lived this trip down.  I bet that in 1986 when we went to the museum my father did not think that he would still be hearing about it in 2012.   You'll notice that my mother scrapbooked these pictures with the caption "the infamous Hershey Park trip."

That is one fabulous haircut I am rocking in 1986.

Keeping with longstanding family tradition, this weekend the Von Trapped family had a family outing to the dump.

We have gotten a handle on our trash problem.  We recycle everything!  This has really cut down on having an overflowing trash can, since the garbage company will only pick up one trash can.  Unfortunately, now our recycling bin is overflowing.  We have simply moved our trash problem from the trash can to the recycling can.  And since the trash company will only pick up one recycling can....we have to take our extra recycling to the dump.

My children do not like the dump. "Its stinky."  I recall saying something similar thirty years ago.

I  am my father's daughter.  I can't wait for my parents to come visit us so we can relive some childhood memories.   Bring your camera, Daddy.

I need a haircut.

In college I started going to a hair salon down the street.  I started with a junior stylist named Fawn, and when Fawn left and went to another salon, I went there too, and when Fawn started her own salon, I went there for the next fifteen years.  As we ping ponged around the state to north Jersey and south Jersey and back again, I kept going to that salon, even though by then it was over an hour away.

After I had children I found that it was becoming nearly impossible to make the trip--a haircut and highlights was usually at least three hours time in the salon, plus two hours driving there and back added up to a prohibitive amount of babysitting time, plus the cost of the services.  I got recommendations from friends and tried a number of salons closer to home.  None of them were very good, and some of them were truly terrible.  After the world's most horrendous mullet, I gave up.  I kept going to Fawn, although instead of every six weeks it became more every four or five months.  I gave up being blond and went back to mousy brown/just cover up the gray color, which lasted much longer between visits.

Last week Greg found a picture of me from a few years ago, where I had a shorter, edgy blond cut and was wearing makeup.  "Hey Mom! Look! Its a picture you when you were pretty! That was before you had kids, right?"

I have been thinking lately that I need a haircut and my gray hairs need some covering up.  I guess that was the confirmation I needed.

Unfortunately, this means I have to try a new salon. My luck in that department for the last twenty years has not been great.  I am dreading getting a new cut and color.

There is a lot of Very Nice Hair here.  I notice, however, that nearly everyone has Very Long Hair here.  Not even medium long hair.  Its not quite Krystal Gale hair, but its definitely middle of the back, long, shiny, healthy, lustrous hair.

I do not have long, shiny, lustrous hair.  I have medium-ish, thin, scraggly, split-endsy hair.  Clearly I would prefer shiny, lustrous hair, but as Greg so aptly pointed out, my children stole both my youth and my hair.

Getting a portrait of your own hair from the back is not all that easy.

I generally wear the Ponytail of Defeat most days.

Have you ever had a keratin treatment on your hair?  You know, the Brazilian Blowout kind that gives you cancer?  There are no lengths I will not suffer for beauty, unless of course it involves wearing makeup or uncomfortable shoes or pants that are not sweatpants, but still, I am willing to pay lots of money for pretty hair.

Do I just cut it off? I have spent two years growing this mop out, but am less than thrilled with the results. I want to walk into John Frieda and say "do what you will!  Give me a haircut that makes me HAWT and disguises my large posterior!" but rumor has it that John Frieda charges $750 for haircuts.  Although I would totally pay $750 for a haircut that makes me hot and disguises my posterior.

Advise, invisible internet friends.  

umbrella stands

I need a pretty umbrella stand. It rains in California far more often than I was expecting.  Reasonably priced umbrella stands seem to be in short supply.

This one from Home Decorators is whimsical:

I love these woven baskets from West Elm, might one use them as an umbrella stand?  But the lid is part of what makes it so pretty, so perhaps not.  I'll be honest, I'd love a large and small one for in front of my fireplace, but the price is kind of prohibitive.

Or the Target version (no pretty colors):

To be honest, the only umbrella stand I have found that I consider reasonably affordable is this one from Target:

Galoshes, perhaps?

I haven't been able to find too many umbrella stands that are bright and vibrant and under $50.  Have you seen any?





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William Morris Project: filing all the things

Remember way back in the day, like two months ago, I did a William Morris project and said that I wanted to buy a filing cabinet so I could get our bills and important papers out of diaper boxes on the basement floor?

This weekend, the Mister and I bought a four drawer vertical filing cabinet.  We don't have an office in this house, so we tucked it in the closet in the boys' room.

Also in the closet in the boys' room were seven bins of papers.

All the papers from about the last five years that we have been lugging around from house to house.  In 2009 we did a massive purge of papers when we put our house on the market.  That purge took an entire day and gave us fourteen banker boxes of papers to be shredded, because between the Mister and I, we are packrats who save every scrap of paper that we have ever touched.  We attempted to shred it ourselves but after an hour we burned out the motor on our shredder, and we ended up calling in a professional document disposal company.  Since that purge I have tried to be less Hoarder-y and only keep what we need.

Clearly I have fallen down on that job, since I got rid of about fifty pounds worth of Verizon phone bills from the last three years.  I could have wallpapered a barn with the amount of Verizon bills I had. On the bright side, I found the titles to our cars.

Being an eternal optimist, I figured I could transfer all the papers in those seven bins into the filing cabinet in a hour or so this afternoon.

Lets just say that my estimate was off by about five hours.

Since the filing cabinet is in the boys' closet, I made a mess all over Greg's bed, and had to put stuff away so the kids could go to bed before I was really finished.

I still have one box left, and another bin of stuff I had shipped out here separately.

I'll try to finish it up tomorrow.

I'm linking up to Pancakes and French Fries William Morris Project.