Nope.  The delay was caused by this…

Yup.  An adorable squishy active smiley drooly nine month old.

Best reason for a delay ever.  :)

However, the lack of painting progress seriously started to wear on me a bit.  You see, that same ridiculously cute little man isn’t a particularly predictable napper.  Sometimes he naps for a glorious two hours.  Sometimes he barely shuts his lovely long-lashed eyelids and – poof! – he’s well-rested and ready to play again.  This lack of predictability made it super difficult to get much done on the painting front.  The days where I’d predict a lengthy nap were the days that I’d dip my virgin paintbrush into the paint and – bing! – he’d wake up.  On the days that I assumed he’d take a quick little cat nap, he’d sleep for hours.

Yup.  It’s hard to paint with a baby.

So, defeatedly, I called in the reinforcements: my parents.  Mom (happily!) looked after Squishy while dad and I tackled the paint job (thanks mom and dad!)  And I’m thrilled to have this project done.  Thrilled!  And I’m (almost) equally happy with the results!

Here’s what I started with…

And here’s the room lovelied-up with a wee bit of BM Copley Gray…

A full gallery of after shots is pending (there are curtains to go up and a mirror to hang and a few other to-do’s that I’d like to to-do before officially announcing the room DONE) but for now the painting part of this bedroom mini-reno project is complete (can I get a big ol’ yay for progress?)  (Yup – YAY!)

What’s that you say?  You thought I’d decided on Revere Pewter?  I thought I had too.  But it just seemed a little too predictable.  I painted our bedroom at our last humble abode, our happy little 1940′s house, in Revere Pewter and I loved it, but I wanted to try something different.  I’ve been eye-ing up Copley Gray for a while now, and I decided to take the slightly bolder paint-colour plunge.

So am I happy?  Mostly.  Admittedly, it’s greener on my walls than I’d hoped.  At some points in the day, depending on the light, one might even call it (cringe…) sage.  But at other times (and, really, most times) it’s a lovely gray/brown/green that is super cozy and warm and rustic (can a colour be rustic?  If so, this one is definitely rustic.)  And it’s far (far!) better than the poop-ish brown that adorned the walls when we bought this house, so I’m a happy girl for now.

And if, in a few years, I decide to repaint, hopefully Little Squish will be old enough to help?  Or at least stay occupied for a bit while mommy paints?

Wishful thinking, I know.  :)

It’s true.  I love yarn.  I love painting stuff.  I love making things pretty (oh how I love making things pretty!)  And, most of all, I love (love!) scrapbook paper.

You know that aisle in Michaels with all the pretty, perfectly stacked piles of colourful papers?  I get lost in that aisle for hours and hours.  HOURS.  Combining different patterns.  Swooning over prints.  Marvelling over all of the potential for serious prettiness.  Yep.  It’s really rather silly considering I’m in no way a scrapbooker (since, honestly, I’m far too lazy for what appears to be a very finicky and fussy – albeit lovely! – hobby) and since (as previously noted) I’m not particularly crafty.

During my most recent trip to Michaels I picked up no fewer than fourteen (yup – fourteen) (see?  I’m obsessed…) sheets of gorgeous paper.  Did I have any particular plan for all these beautiful papers?  Nope.  I just really liked them.  I also bought a few super inexpensive (they were three whole bucks each, I think) ready-to-paint (or ready-to-leave-in-their-lovely-unpainted-state, in my case) picture frames.  And then I came home and started looking at the fireplace mantel in my dining room.

(Aside: I find it important to clarify that this particular faux fireplace mantel is located in my dining room, since we have no fewer than three faux fireplaces in this house.  The previous home owners were indeed faux fireplace fanatics.)

And then the wheels started turning.  And then I realized that the sheets of lovely coordinating scrapbook paper, and those unpainted frames might look sorta rustic-ish-ly cute on my dining room fireplace mantel.

And so began the rearranging.  (Does anyone else get a little OCD when it comes to fireplace mantel decorating?)  And the fussing.  And the tweaking.

And here is what I finally came up with…

It’s not done yet.  It needs something… more.  Perhaps a few miniature pumpkins in honour of fall.  Or some Christmassy bobbles and doodads (but not for a few weeks – I adore Christmas, but it’s a little too early for that at the moment, even for me!)  For now, and until I get around to adding additional adornments to the mantel, those lovely papers are making me happy.

That all said, there will be more faux fireplace fussing to follow, I’m sure.  And definitely more frivolous scrapbook paper purchases made in the not-at-all distant future.  (I just can’t get enough!)  (It’s weird, I know.)

And I’m also very aware that I’m ridiculously ginormous…

Crazy eh?  I’m still not entirely sure how I manage to stay upright.

Last week, with nesting instincts in overdrive, I put a few last minute touches on the nursery.  Curtains were hung, art was placed up on walls, the more-complex-than-anticipated baby monitor got installed, and I fussed over silly little details (would bashful bunny look better here?  Or here?)  And, with Baby overdue as of tomorrow, I’m happy with the rather peaceful teal, gray, white and mustardy yellow space that this nursery has gradually morphed into.

My dad found this metal wall hanging at a street art fair.  I added the ribbon and hung it from the door.  It’s perfect in every way.

We’re using Ikea’s Hemnes dresser as our change table: it’s a good height for both normal-sized me and super tall Sweetie, it has lots of room for the change pad and diaper related stuff, and (most importantly) it’s rather lovely-looking.

(Unfortunately it was also rather difficult and time consuming to assemble.  But that’s a whole other blog post for a whole other day.)

The Celebrate Everything canvas was a HomeSense purchase (on clearance, no less!) made a couple of years ago, long before Baby and nursery planning had ever started.  Again (and again and again): I heart HomeSense.

And this trio of friendly stuffed animals will eventually be relocated to a shelving unit of some sort (I’m still in search of the perfect bookshelf for this room.)  I’m hoping to find something fairly small, but still very functional.  Until then, these three will bravely stand guard over the change table.

Because the nursery is fairly tiny, we didn’t want a crib that felt large and bulky (as so many of them do.)  Enter: Ikea.  Of course.  We fell in love with Gulliver (and hopefully Baby will too!)

My friend Nadia (we’ve been friends since Grade Nine) (which means we’ve been friends for… um… many many years) made Baby this gorgeous yellow and teal baby quilt.

And the small vintage rocking chair, that long ago belonged to my grandparents, was reupholstered by my mom and dad as a gift to Baby.  It’s the perfect size for this little space.  And I love knowing that I’ll be rocking Baby to sleep in a chair that once belonged to people who, while no longer here, were such an important part of my life growing up.

Keeping watch over everything from beside my beloved rocker is the ever adorable bashful bunny (along with his good friends the happy hedgehog and hilarious hare.)

But my absolute favourite part of the nursery?  This sheep mobile from amazing Etsier (and fellow Canadian) TheMemis…

Each little sheep has a different expression on its face.  It’s absolutely perfect, and I can’t say enough good things about Emi at TheMemis. :)

So there you have it.  Our sweet and peaceful (and gender neutral) little nursery.  I’ll likely continue to add to it as time goes on – I have lofty gallery wall plans for the wall opposite the crib, I still need to find that bookshelf for stuffies and books and toys and nicnacs and such, and I’d love to add a little more coral (if Baby is a girl) or greens and navy (if this belly-wiggler is a wee boy) once Baby arrives.  And my friend Shawn (who I’ve been friends with pretty much since forever) has commissioned a baby blanket for me as a gift for Baby from another mutual friend (Sheilagh) who is an amazingly and incredibly talented quilter (you can see some of her work over at her site, Lay it on Me Baby) – I’m so excited about planning the blanket with her once Baby is born!

But for now I absolutely adore this serene little space, just as it is.

Let’s hope that Baby does too.

Whenever he or she decides to make a big appearance.

But now I think I’m done.

Not because there aren’t a gazillion things I could be doing.  (Dear neighbours: please please please disregard our front flowerbeds.  I promise to be a far better gardener next summer.)  (And dear dustbunnies: please stop multiplying so quickly in the corners.)  But because I just don’t have the energy right now.

It’s a super hard thing for me to admit.  I’m definitely feeling a little defeated.

That said, I had two joyously productive moments yesterday: I finished a couple of tiny little projects.  And I’m quite proud.

First, I swapped out the front entryway doormat for a new one I picked up at HomeSense (oh how I love HomeSense!) a few days ago.  I went from this stripey snore-fest…

(Obviously file footage, since I’ve since painted those super ugly green walls!)

…to this…

Admittedly, it’s not a massive change, but it makes me happy to think that any post-baby visitors will have a much nicer mat to land upon when they walk through my front door.

Project number two involved dressing a long-naked window in our living room.  When we moved in, the previous owners had left some rather hideous and dirty-looking blinds on this window (which I promptly removed.)  I was left with this…

Unfortunately, and rather oddly, this window frame is positioned unusually high – it almost reaches the ceiling (I’m guessing that at some point someone dropped the ceiling in this room to run new, non-knob-and-tube wiring through the house since other ceilings on the main floor are a good foot taller.)  As a result, I’ve hummed and hawed over what to do with this window for several months now.  Yesterday, I had Sweetie hang a curtain rod right at ceiling height.  And yesterday, I finally added curtains to this window.

And today, I am very happy with the result.  The curtains (which are Ikea’s lovely Matilda panels, btw) don’t hide the ugliness of the window itself (see all that stuff on the window?  Spray foam.  Between the panes of glass.  Yup, some not-so-bright but likely well-meaning previous home owner decided that this would be a good solution to winter draftiness.)  (For the record, spray foam between the window panes is never ever a good – or, at least, nice looking – solution to draftiness.)  But the curtains do make the window look better (which this soon-to-be momma is content with for now, until we find a way to disassemble the window and scrape out the offending foam.)

So there.  Those are my two most recent tiny little accomplishments at the old mauve house.  Significant?  Not particularly.  But I at least feel like I’m still making some progress, despite that my body is most definitely slowing down.

Now, if you’ll please excuse me for a moment (or two), this momma-to-be desperately needs a nap.   :)

Ack.  Nightmarish, eh?  Yup.  Absolutely terrifying.

And since “make closet pretty” wasn’t first and foremost (or even seventh and semi-important) on my big ol’ home reno to do list, it stayed that way for the past ten months.  Empty.  Ugly.  Mocking me.  Daring me to step inside (which I would never ever ever do due to the aforementioned scariness factor.)

So where were all of our clothes?  In the nursery closet of course.  (See where this is leading?)  But, with Baby on the way in a few short weeks (yep, you guessed it), it was time to clear out that closet.  Meaning that it was also time for us to face the scariness once and for all and make our bedroom closet a much more hospitable, much less horror movie-esque little place.

So what did I do?

I painted it.

And by that I mean that I really quickly and lazily painted it, using leftover Edgecomb Gray paint that I already had on hand.  Did I remove the wallpaper from the walls?  Nope.  Did I sand down the drywall compound patching job that Sweetie did (since originally there were plaster cracks on the back wall of the closet that made it look even more terrifying?)  Nope.  Did I prime or prep or do anything to make the ugly innards of my closet more humane-looking?  Nope.  I just slapped some paint on those closet walls and called it a day.

And it didn’t turn out so bad.  Behold the after…

I even tossed a quick coat of paint on the baseboards.  Same colour as the walls.  We’re not talking anything fancy here (it is a closet, afterall.)

Yep.  A quick coat of paint and suddenly the closet ain’t so scary any more.

(I mean, I wouldn’t want to hang out and read a book in there, of course, but it’s way better.)

So there.  That’s my scary-closet-turned-not-quite-as-scary-due-to-Baby’s-impending-arrival story for you.  Since I’m guessing that Baby will need its own closet.

You know, for cute little onesies and pretty dresses (if Baby is a girl) or tiny overalls (if this wiggly little belly-mover is a boy) and stuff.  :)

The newest addition to our create curb appeal campaign?  Pretty new house numbers.

I present to you Exhibit A: the old house numbers…

Brassy and rusted and old.  Gross eh?

And, now, the snazzy new mailbox decal numerals (courtesy of etsy seller WelcomingWalls)…

I never imagined that a set of sticky little house number decals affixed to a plain black mailbox could make me so unbelievably happy.

And, just for comparison’s sake, let’s take a look at a couple of rather disturbing before pics, shall we?  Here’s the picture from the original house listing…

…and here’s what the house looked like the day we took possession, with all the previous owners’ stuff strewn all over our newly acquired lawn…

Yep.  We bought THAT house.  We’re rather brave (or foolish?) peeps, Sweetie and me.

And now the after…

See?  Progress.  Slow progress, mind you (we still need to dig out that ugly stump in the front garden and plant some more appropriately sized cedars or boxwoods and – oh! – some flowers in those flowerbeds would look pretty and the shutters and front door could definitely use a lick of paint and that deck would really look far lovelier if it was stained and gee wouldn’t it be awesome if our entire house was re-sided in any colour except for mauve?)

But, still, progress nonetheless.  :)

However, let me break in on this little newly painted room love-fest with a bit of a confession: my kitchen was supposed to be gray.  A nice, light, slightly bluish airy fairly neutral gray colour.

The Coles Notes version of the story?  I got blue.

Like, really blue.

Grumble.

What I was hoping for?  A slightly brighter lighter version of the same colour that adorned my happy little 1940s kitchen at our last house.  That kitchen was painted in Benjamin Moore’s Stonington Gray, and I loved it.  Loooooved it.

Our current kitchen, in our old mauve house, gets far less natural light than our previous sunny little kitchen did.  And it’s less open and needed brightening up a bit.  So my seemingly obvious solution was to confidently (ie “ruthlessly skipping the whole test-pot phase of painting”) go one paint chip lighter on the same paint-swatch card thingy from my previously adored Stonington Gray colour.  Seemed foolproof enough, I thought.  And, even when I held the paint chip up in various places around my kitchen, my newly decided upon colour (Wickham Gray) appeared to be a light gray with a teeny tiny smidgen of blue-y green-y muddy undertones mixed in for a bit of wall colour pizazz.

The real-life post-painting result?  Apparently Wickham Gray turns blue in my kitchen.

Like, very very blue.

Here’s where we started (all gold-y and dark and such):

And here’s where we are now.  Blue blue blue.

Yep.  Definitely blue.  Super ginormous sigh.

Don’t get me wrong!  There are lots of lovely blue kitchens out in the world.  In fact, my Pinterest Kitchens board features several blue-hued kitchens that I’ve admired for a while.  There’s this one, from House Beautiful (although I searched the House Beautiful site and couldn’t find a link directly to this particular image – sorry!):

And this super lovely kitchen featured on the Better Homes and Gardens website…

And, my favourite (pretty!), this cheery blue kitchen courtesy of…  um, Pinterest source unknown.  (I hate those source unknown sorta Pins, don’t you?)  (If this is your kitchen, a: I want to move into your house please! and b: let me know!)

So see?  I’m not at all against blue kitchens.  In fact, I think blue is so fresh and pretty in a kitchen!

But… it’s not what I had planned for my kitchen.  And against my currently cream coloured upper cabinets and brown-tiled backsplash and countertops the blue looks a bit… off.

I’m going to live with it for a bit.  And maybe (with a little tweaking and accessorizing and such) it’ll grow on me!  With Baby on the (ever nearing) (ack!) horizon, and my painting budget tapped for the time being, blue is definitely, if nothing else, better than the muddy gold colour that was there before.  And, when I someday get around to painting the kitchen cabinets a whiter crisper shade of white (Benjamin Moore’s Snowfall White, my all-time favourite trim and cupboard colour, to be be exact), I think the blue might actually look quite spectacular.

But, for now…  meh.  At least it’s not gold.

I bought new placemats for our dining room table yesterday.  Yay!  They were a HomeSense buy (and not at all what I went into the store looking for) and I looooove them.  Love them!  They’re adorable and dotty and pretty and perfect.

See?

Pink polka-dotted perfection, if you ask me.  :)

If we didn’t constantly leave our placemats sitting out, this would, of course, be a non-issue.  But, truthfully, I’m lazy.  The placemats stay out because we use them all the time.  So why bother putting them away?  That’d just be an extra (albeit, two second) step added to my day.  And, with baby stuff looming and last minute renovations on the horizon, that extra two seconds is precious, precious time, if you ask me.

Plus, when you have placemats this pretty, why stash them away?  :)

(Is it normal to get this excited about placemats?  Likely not.  But I’m excited nonetheless!)

They’ll look even better once the walls are de-greened.  Until this de-greening takes place, however, I’ve decided to completely ignore the green.  Kinda like when there’s a bee following you around, and someone (inevitably) says “Ignore it and it’ll just fly away.”  (Which, by the way, never seems like particularly good advice.  I’ve ignored many bees in my lifetime.  Few have flown away just because I’m not giving them enough attention.  In fact, I think they thrive on indifference.  I personally prefer – and often employ – the run-screaming-with-wildly-flailing-arms method for ridding myself of random flying insects.)  Similarly, I’m hoping that if I show enough disinterest in my walls’ blatant attempts to irritate me with their overt green-ness, I’ll blink one day and – poof! – they’ll have fluttered away to wherever bad paint colours go.  With or without screaming and arm-flailing.

But I digress…

Yay!  Pink polka dots!

And while I despise the ridiculously cold snowy winter we’ve had this year, I despise my current window coverings even more.  The previous home owners (being the insane awesome people that they are!) left us a plethora of flood-ready bright white sparkly-swirl sheers for our windows.  An intended act of generosity?  Perhaps.  But regardless of motive, the result is the same: the curtains are making me a crazy person.

Enter: Ikea.  Yep.  My beloved and dependable go-to for window coverings.  Their curtains are cheap.  They’re very cheerful.  They come in really long lengths (for those of us who prefer to set our curtain rods a tad higher than the average population.)  And their curtains come in pairs (which seems to be a bit of a rarity anymore.)  (But really, how many people only need one curtain?)  (Cough, cough, rip off, ehem…)  During an Ikea trip about a month ago I purchased no fewer than six (much needed) new drapery sets along with the accompanying curtain rods and hardware and doodads and such.  After a second Ikea trip a few days later (because a certain someone with a wee bit of baby brain forgot a few crucial curtain rod components…) we finally got everything up last weekend.

Here’s my front living room window before (with its icky swirly silver sheers all aglow):

(Here’s a closeup of the sheers’ sparkly swirls, just in case you’re interested.  Snazzy, eh?)

And here’s the after, featuring my all-time favourite front window drapes (Ikea’s Ritva) and a set of soft-ivory sheers (Ikea’s Teresia).

I’m a happy girl!  But why did we get another pair of sheers?  The glass panes in this window are no longer sealed properly (one of the hazards of buying a fixer-upper with archaic windows) so there’s condensation and dust between the panes and this window always appears dirty from the street (despite that – I promise! – it’s very very clean!)  The sheers help mask that a bit, which means we’ll likely be sheer-people until we replace that entire front window (which, sadly, will be a very expensive venture) (which, also sadly, means it’s pretty far down on our list of priorities right now.)

The Ritvas are waaay too long right now (I’m all for little drapery puddles, but this is a little silly) and will likely require shortening.  Tip I’ve learned?  Wash and dry Ikea drapes a couple of times before shortening them.  They sometimes shrink.  A lot.  Whenever they’ve accumulated enough kitty fur to require a trip through the laundry (which, sadly, will likely be soon) I’ll get around to making them a bit shorter.  For now, however, I’m just happy that they’re not sparkly.  Or swirly.  Or bright white.

Next up?  Here’s the before of my dining room window…

Apparently the previous owners weren’t bothered by the too-short panels (or, um, lack of baseboards) but I think the windows look much lovelier now that they’re dressed with a few Borghild panels from Ikea…

And we added the same curtains to this previously un-adorned window at the end of our dining room too.  Here it is pre-curtaining…

…and here’s the much improved after…

All of which makes me a very happy girl.  :)

The last set of the six sets of curtains I purchased is earmarked for the baby’s room (should we ever get around to starting the nursery) (hello?  Ambition?  You should probably kick in about now…)  If they don’t end up used in the nursery, we’ll hang them in our bedroom (since a certain black kitten has pretty much destroyed our bedroom drapes.)  (He thinks bedroom curtain-clawing is a really fun pastime.)  (Particularly at 5am.)  (It’s a good thing he’s cute.)

And now, for your viewing pleasure (and a little post-title clarity), here’s a little Drapery Safety Dance from Men Without Hats…

…because, well, it’s really, really weird, but so fun.  :)

(Although all this might also just mean I’ve hit the “nesting” phase of pregnancy.  Does nesting feel a bit like uncontrollable and obsessive spring cleaning?  If so, consider me a momma bird eagerly vacuuming her happy little nest.)

First it was my loo: after months of cursing over our overflowing (and not particularly pretty) bathroom cabinet, I finally tidied it up last week.  I ruthlessly threw out any old or outdated cosmetics and prescriptions, and then made it a bit more organized (and way more user-friendly) using some random baskets (courtesy of Bouclair) that I already had kicking around.  The result?  A much less chaotic and cluttered little cabinet that is not only far prettier from the inside…

…but looks way nicer from the outside too.

(I’m not a huge fan of these clear-ish frosted doors, btw.  These doors may eventually fall victim to a little DIY-ing.  Because, really, why would anyone want a semi-obscured glimpse at the inside our medicine cabinet?  The same medicine cabinet that, while tidy right now, will inevitably end up looking disheveled within a few weeks I’m sure.)  (It makes me super sad to type that, but, really, I’m a realist about these sorts of things.)

Organizing this tiny little utilitarian cabinet probably took less than half an hour, but it made me feel about a gazillion pounds lighter.  Like stripping away a big bulky winter coat.  And mitts.  And scarf.  And a super static-y winter toque that makes your hair all flooffy (techincal term) but you defiantly wear it anyway because, seriously, if you didn’t, your ears might actually fall off from the cold.  Good hair days be damned.

(Have I mentioned how much I dislike winter?  I really dislike winter.)

Next, I turned to my couch (which, btw, is overdue for its quarterly date with our washing machine.  Don’t look too closely.)

After months of looking at the same dark brown (and, admittedly, very boring) throw pillows, I turned to the brilliant, pillow-scouting buyers at HomeSense with a great deal of pillow-related optimism.

They did not let me down.  I found these…

And I think my exact words at the time were “Oooooh.  You’re pretty.”  Does anyone else talk to decorative objects while out shopping?  I most certainly do.  It helps me to bond with the blankets, and create rapport with rugs.  In this particular case, I got a little complimentary with the cushions.  They didn’t mind.  And now they’re sitting happily on my couch, looking all spring-ish, like this…

And, they almost match the spring placemats I pulled out of winter storage…

It’s textile fate.  It was meant to be.  :)

And, speaking of textiles, and continuing in my must-organize-and-improve-the-house-in-celebration-of-that-one-lonely-and-cold-looking-robin theme, I then went a little crazy at Ikea.  I purchased no fewer than six (six!) new sets of drapes for our living room/dining room (and all of the required curtain rods/brackets/fancy pieces to accompany said curtains too.)

Pictures of all this drapery actually hanging are still in progress (since, well, Baby decided I needed a day off from all this craziness and urged me to take a very long nap yesterday afternoon) but believe you me: it’ll be one epic and super happy day when the new curtains go up.  (Because the sparkly white sheers must go.)  (Immediately.)   You just wait!

So that’s the story of spring coming to our little mauve-coloured house.  At least so far.  There’s lots more cleaning and organizing and nursery-decorating and probably another trip to Ikea looming (yay!  I heart Ikea so much), but for now I’m happy with the progress made to date.

Now, please excuse me while I go play with my new, non-stark-white, living room drapes.  Whee!