Custom Roman Shade - DIY

While I was in the middle of our master bathroom’s mini-makeover about a month ago, I got this (what I thought was a) great idea about how I could easily make a custom roman shade to liven up the window in there without any sewing.  Fast forward to one morning last week, when I got around to tackling that idea.  All was going swimmingly and I took a ton of pictures to show you and then I hung it up the finished shade and, well, if there was a soundtrack to go with my life, the sound bite at that moment would go something like *womp womp*.  Let me tell ya, it’s one thing when your plan fails halfway through the process and you can just ditch it for Plan B or just ditch it all together.  But when you complete the whole process AND THEN at the very end, when you’re expecting a firework of good emotions, things don’t pan out, it’s heart-breaking (in the most superficial way possible, of course).

Le sigh.

But, there is a good ending at the end of this even though my sorry roman shade had to be jimmy-rigged.  I’ll explain later.

Here’s that finished roman shade:

It looks real good in pictures but as we all know, pictures can lie in a social media world.  #amiright  #oramiright

The window in our master bathroom is frosted and our backyard is large and very private so there’s really no need for curtains or shades or anything like that except for aesthetic reasons.  And I like aesthetics so I decided on a shade.  After hunting around on some secondhand sites and online for a small, bamboo shade and coming up empty, I found this little guy* on Amazon Warehouse.  I was trying to find something under $10 and he rang in $3 over so not too bad but the magnetic feature was super cool, I thought, especially since this shade wouldn’t need to function.  The magnetic feature assured there wouldn’t be any strings to hide so I was sold.  Plus, I had further plans for it.  Read on.

One way I like to add color and pattern to a space is in the window treatments.  When you get tired of the current pattern you can swap them out pretty easily and somewhat affordably (especially if you’re talking sewing your own or using no-sew hem tape to make some).  I wanted to add some fun to our bathroom and the magnetic shade wasn’t going to do that on it’s own.  Nope.  It needed a little help. 
After a little bit of a search, I found this fabric and knew it would be the perfect match to our new shade.

A little bit of hot glue later and BAM, pattern right where we needed it.


Let me go into the process of how I went from plain to patterned because the process is gold, and then I’ll dive into where it all went wrong and how you can take the successful route instead.

Upcycled Hanging Planter - DIY

I’ve been using plastic bottles to make wall decor again – guilty.  Instead of a body spray bottle this time though, it’s a lotion bottle.  I’ve been holding onto this empty bottle of baby lotion for a good long while so that I could repurpose it and I just got around to it last week.  If you want me to write a post all about how you can idealize a project and not actually DO IT for months, let me know. 

Can you spot it?

A Lighter & Brighter Laundry Room

Hi friend!  I kind of took an unintentional blogging break (but intentional social media break so I guess it just kind of follows?) over the holidays and so now here we are toe-deep into 2019!  To backtrack, Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to you!  We stayed home this year (our usual has been to travel to family every year) and we just had a grand old time.  It was care-free, so very peaceful, and so good for us in preparing for the celebration of Jesus’ birth.  How was yours?  Did you travel?  It’s always a brave undertaking to travel during Christmas, right?  We did get a few things around the house done too – we painted our master bedroom and bathroom!  I’ll have more updates on them later but things are looking so much better!!

Today, I’m just going to jump right back into it and show youl what’s changed in our laundry room. 

Here’s what it looked like right before we moved in:

I took this picture in the afternoon, when the lighting is the darkest in here but even so, this room is bright for the first part of the morning and darker throughout the rest of the day.  We brought our own washer and dryer with us and the two that were left were pretty old and dirty so it was nice to get ours up and running again (our previous, temporary rental had a washer and dryer so we stored our beloved Frigidaires in the garage for that six months and I missed them dearly). 

Over-Dyed Rug–DIY

Happy belated Thanksgiving!!  I hope yours was a fun-filled, family/friend-filled, edible occasion!  We drove to my sister’s house in Florida and, while our time spent there was a blast, that seven-hour drive is always so F U N with kids.  ;)  But, I guess it’s like anything – pregnancy and labor, the job interview process, research papers, school in general – you have to waddle and labor, hop around the interview train, read, read, read, and study, study, study to get that baby/job/A+/graduate.  You feel me, right?  LIfe can’t be easy or we’d all be bored out of our minds.  So goes road trips.  The miles might be hard but getting to that destination is super sweet.

And, I don’t mind if I do swing it around but, painting a rug might carry the same sentiment.  Let me explain.  I told you I painted the rug in the kids’ room, right?  Well the process wasn’t necessarily a party but the result IS.

When my sister and her fam moved into their current house, the owners’ left behind this rug:
They had it under their dining room table and so it wasn’t the cleanest of all the rugs in the land.  Well, my sister didn’t want it but I thought maybe it had some dyeing/painting potential so after a visit last year, we wrapped it in plastic and hauled it home, roof-top style, all those seven hours.

It got stuck up in the attic until further notice and then we moved, twice, and to this current house it came, still wrapped in that same plastic.  We made progress though – we unwrapped it, laid it outside to shampoo the heck out of it, and then laid it in the kids’ room.  As is.  Not pretty.  But, it is super heavy (which made washing it a feat of CrossFit-sized proportions) and thick and I loved the idea of having a fun round rug in their room…emphasis on idea.

The One Room Challenge lit a flame under my rear to finally get it colored something else and well, if you’ve seen the reveal, you already know what color it turned out to be, but in case you need a reminder:

I’ve never turned a rug a whole different color before so I wasn’t positive how this was going to turn out – success or fail – but it looks exactly as I envisioned with that big ‘ole punch of color.

Here’s everything you need to know about how I painted our rug and how you can too.  You know how I do.  ;)

Gender-Neutral Kids’ Room Reveal!!!

The kids’ room is FINALLY done!  I won’t get into why I’m late again because maybe you already know but hey!  The kids’ room is a real kids’ room now – not a small brown box of a space.  It’s happy and fun and so, so cute.  And I can’t wait to show you but first, let’s trot down recollection ave because you can’t really appreciate where it is now without seeing where it was.  :)

When we moved into this house, we tried something new – we moved all four kids into one room together.  It’s by no means a big room (maybe 11’ x 11’) but, with them all in one room, all of their toys could then be tossed into the other spare bedroom in the house and get labeled “playroom”.  So, squeezing beds and a couple of dressers in wasn’t a big deal in a small room since toys didn’t have to fight for the space too.  Bunk beds were a crucial component but I’ll get to those later.

Here’s what their room looked like before we moved in:It was dark and ultra brown, just like every other room in the house.  This room doesn’t get a ton of light, especially in summer with the higher sun plus a tree stands almost right in front of the window and blocks a lot of light.  It’s great for sleeping though.  #halffull

After we moved in, those darker curtains went and the kids slept on an air mattress until we could build them some bunk beds (you can read more about those plans here).  A month in, we still hadn’t built those beds (le sigh for a busy life) but we were given a set from some good friends.  With that set plus a toddler mattress slipped underneath as a trundle for Sebastian and Gianna’s crib in the corner, the kids slept soundly for months.  Or did they?  Welllllll…kind of.  The thing about that bunk we were given was that it was big and awesome but there was only one side rail up top and it was low and the girls were afraid to even go up much less sleep up there lest they roll over and out.  So they shared the bottom twin.  Sound sleeping?  Questionable. 

(In the above pic, we had taken the rail off the top and not added the ladder so the adventerous two-year old didn’t go on a climbing spree as she’s highly apt to do.)

But then we got the deal of a lifetime (slight exaggeration…but only slight) on a new pair of bunks and finally, everybody had a bed.

That fact was fantastic, fine and dandy except our kids were still sleeping in a boring room and it didn’t have to be that way.  I wanted them to have a space that felt fun and that they loved retreating to.

So…