Spring is here...

As I write this, I'm listening to the rolling thunder sweeping across the prairie. We are currently under a tornado watch and a flash flood warning.  So far in May we've had 9" of snow dropped on us by a blizzard, 100 degree temperatures, and now thunderstorms/tornados/flooding.  It takes some adjusting, this "weather" that Minnesota has.  Mostly because in California, we don't have any.

Brody doesn't handle the thunder well..he gets a somewhat manic happy/panty face and follows us around wherever we go.  At night, he insists on sleeping on the bed.  Brody is incapable of jumping onto our bed by himself, unless there's thunder, in which case he's imbued with some super-puppy strength and can propel himself up and onto our bed with no problems.

Anyway, here are some pretty pictures from earlier in the day, pre-storm:

We bought a lawnmower!  Sean's mowed twice already.

Finally looking like spring...two weeks ago, this was covered in snow.

Sean planting trees.

Look very closely...

Mama duck nesting in our neighbor's yard!  She's got 12 eggs under there.

While Sean rushed to get yard work done before the storm hit, I kept chipping away at our guest room.  There's still a lot to be done, but it's starting to look more like a real room.  Today I hung curtains!

They still need to be hemmed, but I'll do that later when I get a sewing machine.  I love how much adding curtains transforms a room.  These were $20 a set at IKEA, and the curtain rods were $25 a piece at Target, so for the whole room it was under $100.

I also got this lamp at IKEA, which I am totally in love with.  It's a little impractical since the arm sticking out makes it take up a lot of width, but I'm thinking it'll be really handy once I put a chair in that corner.  Our guest room will double as my knitting/craft room, so I can adjust the lamp to focus it on my needles.

More IKEA, obvs.  This still needs some styling, but eventually all of the cubes will be filled with either books or knitting stuff/yarn.  I used to use those drawers for office supplies, but I'm finding that I really don't need a home office any more (since my real one is just a few minutes away).  I'm thinking the drawers are going to become knitting needle storage.

Still on the to do list for this room:

• Finishing arranging/styling bookcase
• Hang wall art...I have some ideas but haven't purchased anything yet.
• Hem curtains
• New bedding
• Add comfy chair and rug
• Paint doors & replace handles
• Organize closet
• Build radiator cabinet
• Add crown molding...eventually.

For now, I'm just hoping that our basement doesn't flood and our house doesn't wash away!

The Blue Room

Well, dear readers, hello and welcome to May.  Last weekend was absolutely gorgeous...my thermometer hit 81 at one point.  I spent some time with Brody at the park, had a picnic with the cast of my show, and spent a lovely afternoon exploring Northfield, Minnesota.

And then this morning, May 2, we woke up to this:

(Well, to be completely accurate, that is the view out my front door right now at about 2:30 pm.  The snow plows have already come by.  It is still coming down fast and furious.  There's about 9" on the ground.)

School is cancelled, my show tonight is cancelled, and what better way to spend a snow day in May than blogging and doing house projects?

Let's backtrack a bit: the big project over the last few weeks has been tackling our guest room.  It's been sitting there, full of boxes, feeling rather unloved ever since we moved in.  We'd finally gotten to the point where we really needed the extra storage in there, and so we decided to dive in and make it happen.

Here's a reminder of what it looked like when we bought the house:

Idea #1 was just to scrape down the dragonfly decals (they're like wallpaper, but dragonfly-shaped) and paint.  But, the more we've lived here and thought about it, the more we realized that we cannot. Paint. Over. Any. More. Wallpaper.  Even if it's already been painted over.  So we decided to take the plunge and scrape it all down.

I feel like I've already talked through this process enough times on this blog...you guys know the drill, right?

Ooh, what is that lovely wallpaper underneath?

Wood paneling wallpaper!  Of course!

And some sort of desert landscape.  Beautiful.

Never fear, Sean will destroy it.

Here's what was different this time around though: as I scraped, I found something lurking underneath the layers (around 3 wallpaper, 1 paint):

A crack.  A rather large (floor-to-ceiling), nasty looking crack.  That someone had patched. OVER THE WALLPAPER.

So, the patch came down with the wallpaper and I was left figuring out what to do with the crack.  One trip to Ace Hardware later (I love our local hardware store), and I was ready.  Fiberglass tape and ready-mix plaster!  I didn't get many pictures because it was messy and very dusty, but here's a few so you can sort of see what it looked like afterwards:

First I taped over the crack, then I spread the plaster over the tape.  Here you can see the tape with the plaster applied.

Here's a view of the whole thing so you can see how big it is. 

I sanded it down once everything had dried, but BOY did that make a huge mess.  I probably didn't sand it quite as well as I should have because the dust was so fine and was getting everywhere.  We did get everything cleaned up, but I'll only use this method again in the future for really major plaster repairs like this one.

The good news is that now that we've primed and put two coats of paint over it, it's barely visible.  You can still see the tape a tiny bit if you know exactly where to look, but if you're not looking for it it just disappears into the wall.

The other major repair project in this room was the floorboards.  Here's what they looked like when we moved in:

Basically, they did a terrible job installing them.  There's a gap between the board and the wall, and a gap between the board and the trim at the bottom, plus they never filled the nail holes.  So, I went around the entire room and filled the nail holes, plus caulked in both gaps where it was needed.  It was hard to get a good shot, but here it is with the wood filler and caulk:

I did two coats of paint on all of the trim, and it looks so much better now!

Here's some photos of the room from primer to finished:

Gorgeous, gorgeous freshly painted trim!

Ebbtide by Sherwin-Williams

I'm still not 100% happy with how the color turned out.  It looks gorgeous in these pictures but is a little more intense in person.  However, it's not a bad blue and I think as the room fills up with furniture it won't seem quite as overwhelming.  We've been working on setting up the guest bed and such (another great project for a snow day!), so we should be ready for visitors very soon.  Stay tuned for photos of the furnished room!