Progress in the Room Above the Garage, Part 2

In another few weeks, the room above our garage will be complete!  Kind of crazy to think about!  It won't meet the baby deadline, but it will be ready for the slew of guests that we are sure to receive a few weeks after she is born.  We cannot wait!  In this room, our dreams are truly becoming a reality, and we are so grateful!

The last update stopped with rock hung on the walls, and then we quickly got into the finishing process after that.  

The knock down finish on the ceiling makes such a difference.  That and the added can lights makes the room so much brighter.  We brought back the fan that we bought and exchanged it for one without a light kit because the room is so bright already.

We decided that we eventually want taller base throughout our entire house to add to the character of the wood casing around our room openings, so we started with this room.  We picked out a base that's 5-1/4" tall from Lowes.  It changes the entire look of the room, and we are so happy with it.  It's unpainted in all the pictures below, but it will eventually get painted to match all of our existing base, wood blinds and doors.  I mentioned in a previous post that we painted the walls in this room a color that Greg picked out as a potential color for the baby room.  It's Glidden 38-D8 "Dusty Miller".  We thought it was fitting that our last name was in it.  :)  It's a very calm green-gray color.  It's going to look so good once we have everything finished.

We met with a casework provider and went over some ideas we had for the casework and showed him Greg's original design.  Below are the pictures that we printed for our meeting.

This picture is similar to Greg's original design, but we liked how only the TV protruded into the room, so we could still maximize the space in the room since we're already losing some because of the slant of the ceiling.

These 2 pictures show the type of casework that we like, which is referred to as the "craftsman" style.  It has the simplicity of the square border around the edges.  The gentleman with the casework company suggested that we still install a small piece of quarter-round on the inside edge because this style didn't go with the design of our doors in our house.  It was nice to have the suggestion, and we saw an example in his showroom with the quarter-round piece, and it's very subtle, but a nice touch to pull it all together.

Then, there's our beloved craft/computer table, which is the whole inspiration of the room, really.  We were going to build this ourselves, but I just couldn't resist the help and the idea of just having it all done.  Without this table, the function of the room would be lost, so we threw it in our order.

He left our house and a few days later, we had some shop drawings to review.  At first there were 6 drawers next to the TV because of the concerns with weight of the items placed in the drawers.  They were just so small, so we had them change it back to 3 drawers, and we changed the drawer glides to help better support the weight.  The first round of shop drawings also had the height of the casework stopping at 30" with a full depth of 24" for all drawers and shelves.  It was just so short causing the drawers to be shallow, so we had them raise up the height to 40" and make the top drawer less deep.  This will also make the countertop only be around 14" deep.

For the countertops, he put the idea of granite in our minds saying that they may have a leftover slab in their boneyard pile that will be large enough for our project.  We couldn't say no to that!  We went into their showroom and picked out a couple slabs for them to use.  We also picked out the hardware for the cabinets to match the pulls on the casework in the picture below.  We ordered 20" long pulls for the drawers, 8" tall pulls for the doors on the cabinets, and 6" long pulls for the drawers on the craft table.

We also have carpet picked out from Lowes.  They are having a deal on their Stainmaster carpet right now (through August, I think) with free installation if you order that carpet and a Stainmaster pad.  We are getting a little ahead of ourselves, and we are going to have them measure the entire 2nd floor for pricing.  After we brought home the samples, they were just so fresh and clean compared to our dull, set-in, stained carpet that we have on our landing upstairs and our bedroom is probably the worst of all of the rooms.  They come out on Tuesday to measure, so we'll see how the pricing comes in.

Other than that, it's down to furniture and accessories...my favorite, and yet the most challenging!  We'll hold off on that for a little while.  We have a double bed to go in the room for now, but we will eventually purchase a smaller foldout couch.  Oh, and a TV.  You know Greg won't wait on that for long, and I think I saw some good upcoming sales for 4th of July, so we might have one waiting to install in the room.

Well, the next post for this series will be the finished room!  Can't wait!

Elevated Garden Box

Greg and I have had dreams of having a garden for a long time.  I've always been afraid that we will spend all this time and money creating it, and then we'll get lazy and stop watering and taking care of it.  I still have these fears, but we just have to keep with it.  And I'm going to be home for 12 weeks, so I really have no excuse not to get out there and water the plants.

Greg's always wanted a raised garden bed, as in elevated off of the ground.  I, of course, just wanted to get it done, so I went out and bought a garden kit that just had the wood edges and posts from Home Depot one weekend, but we decided not to keep it.  However, this did spark Greg's interest again in the project, and he decided to come up with a design on Sketch Up, and he even created a shopping list for Home Depot, so it was really easy to go and get all the materials.  We even had Home Depot help us with some of the cutting.

We started over Memorial Day weekend and thought we could finish it in 1 day.  We were super close to getting it done, but we stopped for dinner and never returned back to the project.  I keep saying "we", although, it was really Greg who went to town on this project cutting down the wood and assembling it.  I did what I could to help by pulling off the price stickers on the ends of the wood, handing him pieces, helping him mark measurements, and making lemonade.  Kind of sad.  

We parked outside for the next 4 weeks after Memorial Day weekend while the garden box and the mess sat in our garage, and then we finally finished it up last weekend.  Kind of impressive for us to finish a project in a month... :)  We decided that we wanted to apply polyurethane to the cedar in order to protect it from the weather.  We later read that this is sometimes bad for the soil and your plants, so we lined the sides with plastic.  It was also suggested to use plastic when garden beds are elevated in order to keep the water from draining away too fast because they tend to dry out since there is heat on all sides.

Abby and Chase love being part of all the activities as well.  Both of them were so tired after being outside in the sun for a couple of hours.  

We received almost all of our plants from our friends.  We picked up a basil, cherry tomato and pepper plant from our friend, John Binz, over Easter weekend, and we have been growing those inside of our house.  The pepper plant isn't doing so well, but we're still hopeful that it will get better...  Then, our friends, Lisa and Joe, gave us 3 tomato plants and a cucumber plant.  The large tomato plant finally flowered and has 4-5 tomatoes on it now, so that's exciting, and it's still flowering.  

We purchased another basil plant, another cherry tomato plant that's a different variety we think, a jalapeno plant, and a red pepper plant.  The jalapeno and red pepper plant both had small veggies and it, and they have already tripled in size and more are starting to grow, so we're really hoping to have some success with those.

And the soaker hose doesn't work quite yet.  There is a slit in it, and Greg is going to repair it, so for now we really have been good about getting out there and watering! 

So, that is it then.  The 4 corners have solar lights on them, so they light up nice in the evenings.  I wasn't so sure about the elevated garden bed, but gosh it's nice not bending over, and not to mention, Abby can't reach any of the veggies, so she will just have to continue snacking on my hasta plants.  Greg already wants more plants, so we'll see if we can create some room and squeeze some more in there.  We're almost afraid to pick anything because we aren't sure about the proper way of doing that, but we'll research it and be experts in no time!

Decorating the Baby Room

Alright, the baby's room is finished!  What a fun project this has been to work on!  It's so different decorating a room that you don't have to live in everyday yourself.  Greg and I both love it so much, and I can't wait to hang out in there with her.  

We didn't want the room to be super girly, but I'd say it turned out pretty feminine; however, there's nothing that's permanent.  We're hoping she can grow in the room and take the decorations with her when she switches rooms after our next baby, but let's not get ahead of ourselves...

I started looking online and Pinterest for ideas on decorating.  I'm drawn to the rooms with hardwood floors and a fun area rug, but we don't have wood floors.  I'm not a huge fan of pink, but I did like the rooms with coral and oranges, and then I liked turquoise for whatever reason.  I saw a few nurseries that framed scrapbook paper, so I thought that would be easy and add color to the walls and it could be switched out from time to time. 

I looked through my scrapbook paper, and found some floral patterns that I liked, so I went with the theme of flowers and a color pattern of corals, oranges, turquoise, yellows, greens and light blue.  Well, that's almost all the colors...

I bought so many samples of gray paints before I had to involve Greg to help pick out the color.  I kept going too light for our trim color.  He picked out 2 colors that we both loved so much, so we chose one and are using the other one in the room above the garage.  The color we chose for the nursery is Glidden 6011 Wood Smoke.

We bought new furniture for our room and moved the furniture that we had in there into the baby room.  It looks so much better in this room with this paint color.  We went with a white crib to match the white shelves that Alex gave us for Christmas.  Then, we splurged on the glider and ottoman.  I'm really hoping we get a lot of use out of this chair.  It's so comfortable.

Let's talk about art projects...  I went a little overboard with the DIY for this room.  It's not that I think there is too many DIY projects, but it was more stress finishing them than I probably needed especially since they all wrapped up in the 3rd trimester.  I sewed some fabric on the curtains to give them more length, painted the frames for the scrapbook paper, made a headband/bow holder, sewed a bed skirt, painted a toy chest and sewed a cushion to go on the top, decorated letters for her name (that I cleared out of the room for the pictures), and created a felt wall flower art project to go on the wall (this one is still not done and not pictured).  Whew!  It's been a busy last 3 months here.

My favorite DIY project that I asked for some help on is the crib bumper pads that Greg's mom created.  They are so adorable and just tie all the colors of the room together in the flowers on the fabric.

I can't forget to give Greg's dad some credit as well for the toy chest.  He found this in St. Peters and stocked it with all of Greg's old toys.  It used to be primary colors, and I cleaned it up and painted it white to go with the rest of the room.  I'm happy to have the storage in the room, and Chase likes to lay on the cushion.

So, that is it!  Everyone's been asking for pictures, so I hope you like them.  I have so many other pictures from projects we've been working on throughout the house, so I will try and get more posts done over the weekend as I kick my feet up and allow this baby to have 1 more week of growth!