Do you have an area of your house that looks like this?
or this?
Laelia has been doing some very beautiful artwork on our walls lately. I don’t know who is so kind as to give her so many writing implements when mama turns around (no one will fess up). And every time I moved furniture today to paint, I found a new drawing, coming to a grand total of 8 drawings on the wall (one I know was Willow).
We have been working on repainting our living room this week. Here’s what it looked like before:
Getting rid of our TV has kind of spurred on this project. Of course we had a big hole in the wall from where the cables went into the TV. We had to do patch work. So that plus Laelia’s artwork plus the ideas whirling around in my mind equals time to makeover our living room.
And because the living room, kitchen, and dining room are all lumped into one big room…triple makeover!
Here’s the dining room:
and a partial picture of the kitchen:
We have plans for a gorgeous tiled all behind the stove and as a back splash behind the sink! I can’t wait for that part! The hard part though was agreeing on the tile. We went to the store three times to choose it. The first two times were a bust, but the third time we went in and both immediately agreed on the same tile. What’s that? Same store and everything. Well, I’m pretty happy about it I gotta say.
So far this week we’ve been in the mud/sanding stage of painting. Ugh! And, the craft area (which is right off the kitchen and is actually a breakfast nook that I reclaimed as my craft area) has rippled walls. Rippled! It looks like a really crazy mud job, which I’ve been working on and finally finished sanding today.
You, like my husband, might think this is excessive. Trust me! It was so necessary. And I don’t think it was really ready to paint today. I think it needed at least one more time with patching. I just want my walls to be nice and smooth and even. They are definitely better than they were before I used a ton of mud on them. Speaking of mud. I am really fond of the pinkish/purplish stuff that dries white! How about that!? For some reason it makes the job a little more fun. It was also easier to see the dips I was filling in the past few days.
In our living room/dining room we have two of these ledges. I have things up there that I use to decorate a bit. Today we had to get them all down so Scott could start painting (I’m too short for this part).
The girls found a basket of sea shells among the stuff that was up there and played with them for about an hour. Chloe found some nuts in the basket and took them in to her work bench. She hammered them to find out what was rattling around in there. Willow made her little skirt into a pouch to carry her favorite shells in so she could take them to special places in the house. I love it. They are so good at exploring, even when it’s something as simple as sea shells in a basket.