Well Hello There

It’s been a while, I know. I’ll just be honest – the first half and a bit of pregnancy was rough. I’m finally feeling like I’m coming back to life, and I thought I’d celebrate that with a quick post.

A lot of people have seen this on Facebook already, but I really should post there less and here more, and besides – I thought my grandma would want to see, too.

We welcomed the end of the 24/7 nausea and the beginning of spring with a bit of paint in what will be this baby girl’s (yes, that’s right, girl!) room. It took us more than a couple days to clear out what had become our storage/junk room, but the painting is going splendidly. I decided on white walls and a light green trim rather than the more-usual other way around, and I’m so glad I did. The Mr. is doing the painting, of course, but when he’d taken down the tape from this little window and I finally walked in to take a look, well… it took my breath away (and no, it wasn’t the fumes). How pretty is THIS?

Somebody who saw this photo asked me if that was the REAL view. Yes, it really is. Our cherry tree is in full bloom, and is right outside this window. Pretty neat.

And this is the pretty light fixture we installed, and the reason these walls couldn’t stay yellow. It makes a pretty impressive picture all together, but more complete pictures will have to come later – we have a lot more work to do!

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Paint-Chip Calendar

I believe that my husband and I have recently found a calendar system that actually works for us. The Mr. likes a big huge dry-erase calendar on the wall. I like it too, but it has the great disadvantage of showing only one month at a time, which doesn’t allow you to schedule very far ahead. Enter my “control journal” notebook – a FlyLady concept that I’ll explain in more detail another day. But for now, it helpfully holds a small paper calendar for future months.

Like I say, it works for us and you all know that finding something that works in your house is most of the battle. But I was incredibly bored of the ugly whiteboard hanging in our hall. Inspired by Pinterest leading me to beautiful dry-erase calendars such as these pretty projects, I decided to tackle one of my own. I couldn’t decide on just one colour, so my SpiritPlay-teacher love-for-rainbows made an appearance. 7 colours, 7 days, everyone! Don’t let anybody fool you into a 6 colour rainbow…

This project was a bit time consuming but otherwise pretty easy. I gathered up my paint chips (Behr, who can resist polar bears marching along the top of each week?), selected a few pieces of poster board, and bought a cheap frame designed to hold a poster. I was originally going to do a white background, but I think the colours really pop better on black. The poster board we bought was, annoyingly, too small for this poster frame, so strips of purple (left) and blue (right) make nice areas for extra notes.

Once the colours have been cut and laid out, it’s really just a matter of gluing everything down. This did not go perfectly. I messed up a little bit with some measuring, so by the time you get to the last few days of the month everything is looking a little cozy. It doesn’t bother me enough to redo it… yet.

The poster frame is topped with thin flexible plastic, not glass. A fine-tip dry erase marker works just fine on this. Actually, I’m finding it erases even better than it did on the whiteboard – no stubborn streaks left behind.

Most of the projects I’ve seen have neatly trimmed squares, but I set this up so that the names of the colours show. Some, I chose specifically for us (“Glacier Bay! We’ve been there!”), and I couldn’t deny names like “Zephyr,” “Lazy Sunday” and “Bicycle Yellow” their chance to remain visible on our board.