Elias' 18 month photos

I had a little photo shoot last week with this little man. He's growing up way too fast! I can't believe we are on our way to 2 years old. I tried to capture a little bit of his personality and what he's like right now (which is why JoJo is in almost every picture!) Also, the cup in one hand, JoJo in the other is a classic Elias shot. He does that all the time. He is all boy and loves playing outside and anything that has wheels (trucks, tractors, trains) so I thought the slide pics were pretty fitting. And then there are those little details like his eyelashes, cheeks, and toes that you never want to forget. Ok, I'm done. Enough mushy mom stuff here are the pictures!!

House Tour Before and After: E's Nursery

Yay another installment of the house tour! It will probably take me forever to get all the rooms done at this rate! But here we go! This is the middle bedroom, between the master and guest bedroom. Here's what it looked like when we moved in.

Then it became a storage room and was literally completely full of boxes. Like most the time you couldn't open the door. Most of the rest of the house wasn't really livable so lots of our stuff just stayed in boxes in this room. But then we found out that we had a little monkey on the way and I got a vision for this room (and we got REALLY busy!!) We patched holes in the walls, re-textured, painted all the trim and cabinets, painted the walls, replaced light fixtures and outlets and replaced the doors and carpet. So this is it after all the major remodel work but no furniture/decorating. 

And here it is today! It was actually finished by the time Elias was born (which I'm pretty sure counts as a minor miracle). I'll let the pictures tell the rest of the story!

Sorry for the "green-ness"!

This Expedit bookcase from IKEA was an awesome purchase! It was the only piece of furniture we bought for his room and I am so glad we did! It holds TONS of toys, books and puzzles (when he was little it held burp cloths and onesies) and he can help me clean up his room since it's on his level. 

And here are some lower quality "during" pictures that I snapped along the way to send to my mom mostly ;) They sort of document our progress from then to now. 

Hope you enjoyed it!

It is well

I love how God gave us so many creative ways to express ourselves. I don't call myself an artist by any means but I still love to use art as a way to express emotion or relax and take a break from craziness. Yeah I know I'm probably crazy but using the creative side of my brain is relaxing to me :)

So Saturday afternoon during naptime I needed some of that relaxing, creative time so I pulled out some supplies from my craft room and started painting. I didn't really have a plan  starting out but this is what I ended up with.  

I love the finished product! It's really calming and of course brings to mind the classic hymn. I need that reminder often that circumstances don't have to dictate how we feel. It can be well with my soul in the worst life throws at me. Love it :) 

Thrifty Entry Bench

Here's the details on the entry bench you saw in the before and after post. It didn't always look so crisp and clean. 

Marcos and I stopped by my favorite thrift store near my house not even looking for this guy. I had a vision of what I wanted for the entryway for a long time and had looked on and off for a while, but that particular day we were after something else (I can't even remember what now). Anyway, all we had done was pull in the parking lot when the clouds parted and the sun shone down on this beautiful little storage bench! Well it wasn't exactly beautiful at the time but I knew it would work perfectly for what I wanted. 

It had a few dings and scrapes and lots of dirt and scuff marks but it was solid wood so I knew that would be easy to fix and structurally it was in great shape. 

So we took him home and cleaned him off and then I started working. First, I sanded the whole thing down to give myself a fresh start on the wood. Then I primed and painted the whole thing (3 coats!) and finished it with a polyurethane protective finish. (Sorry no pictures!) Between our normal schedule, weather constraints, and trying to work during naptimes, that whole process took me several weeks. But when I was finally done and the paint and poly had cured, we flipped it over and took the casters off and brought it in the house. This is what our entryway looked like before we brought in the bench. We had that table in there which looked great but wasn't what I had envisioned. Plus, it was really good at accumulating junk!

You can sort of see the bench in all it's freshly painted glory in the picture below but I forgot to take a picture of it by itself before we started working on the cushion. 

Now I realize our method for making a cushion for the bench was a little unorthodox, but remember that the title of this post is thrifty entry bench. I was attempting to work on a tight budget so we used what we had + free stuff. So, yes, what you just saw was a giant foam mattress topper complete with the eggshell texture and all. We had recently helped a friend move and she was trying to get rid of it. Coincidentally, I had just gone to look at craft foam and that stuff is EXPENSIVE! So of course the obvious solution was to cut up the mattress topper to use as the foam for our bench. Duh! So that is exactly what we did. Here it is all cut to size. We figured out after the fact that if you cut through foam with an electric knife it work a whole lot better than trying to use a box knife (which is what we did). Well (hopefully) you can't really tell that our line isn't quite straight.

 I found this fabric at Hobby Lobby and I love love it! 

The next step was to cut a board (we just used scrap plywood from the garage) the same size as our foam and the top of the bench. Then we just laid the foam on top of the plywood, wrapped the fabric around the foam and stapled it to the back of the plywood. It was definitely a 2-person job to make sure the fabric was staying straight and tight and stapling all at the same time. Here it is all finished and put together! Ta-da!  

It really makes the entryway feel a lot more crisp and clean plus it's a great place to plop down when you need to take shoes on and off. Since both the garage door and the front door are off of this room, this is where all the traffic comes in and out so we really needed this to be a functional room. I'm still wanting some baskets for it but for now it's working to hold our bags (purse, diaper bag and library bag) in between trips. 

Yay for a thrift store makeover! Love this guy!