Liam's Teepee

Like most children, Liam loves to play hide and seek, and fit himself into small spaces in closets or behind curtains. So I FINALLY made him something that he is very excited about! He calls it his "tent" and likes to play cars in it, or just hide and have me "try" to find him.



I got the pattern here, but made mine smaller as I used some fabric I had from Ikea sitting around, and not a bed sheet like the pattern calls for.




The pattern was great, and easy to follow. It helps to have something long to measure with, as that was the trickiest part of the whole pattern.




The beautiful thing is that when the teepee is not in use it can fold up pretty small and be tucked away!



Pretty good, and this project in total only cost around $15, depending on what materials you end up using! Well worth it if you ask me.

Playroom

Another room finished! This one is an area in the basement leading to the third bedroom (in the process of becoming my sewing room/Jake's office) and the laundry area. We decided it would make a great playroom for Liam.

Originally I wanted to do it all white, floors included. I am in love with the European designed white rooms. It turned out to be a little tough to do white flooring, as we would have had to paint a wood floor, and in the end would have been a little more work that we were up for at the time. We ended up doing the same flooring as the upstairs, and I do like the effect.



I found these baskets at Zellers to hold some of the smaller toys, but they didn't have a liner in them. These wouldn't have been too bad to make had I not wanted to save fabric and do just the band with the coloured fabric. They turned out, just don't look too closely :)



I love all this fabric, but the "Jacob Loves You" pillow is my favorite. It actually was a shirt that was given to me years ago, and I always wanted to make a pillow out of it. This was the perfect place for it!



And my favorite part of the whole room:


The pallet bed inspiration came from here, and the alphabet wall from here.

Toddler Backpack

I've been wanting a toddler sized backpack for Liam, but was unable to find any the right size, for the right price; or at least ones that I also liked the look of. Until I came across this pattern here.

This project was definitely my most difficult sewing project I have done to this date, as I finally learned how to sew with piping! Prior to this I had a tendency of just writing off any patterns with piping as being too difficult. I'm not going to lie, there were a few tense moments, but in the end I am pretty happy with how it looks! The tutorial was great, with good pictures and lots of detail, just what I needed. The backpack is not perfect, but Liam really doesn't care. Actually he doesn't really care much about the backpack at all yet, but once he realizes that he can use it to bring some of his much loved cars and trucks with him places I am sure he will warm up to it. I hope.



He's not really into posing with things that I make for him these days, I never did get a good picture of him in his owl costume, but here are some pictures to show the size of the bag:

Memory

This project has been in the works for a while, not because its overly complicated, but because I have been working on it little by little. Its finally done!

I hate to admit it, but it was inspired by an iphone app. I have a few for Liam to play when were grocery shopping, or I need a few more minutes of sleep in the morning. One of his favorites is a memory game, so I took some pictures of a few of his favorite things, and put it together. He's not quite at the point where he keeps them in neat rows, but his new favoite thing is "counting" to two, so he really likes finding two of the same picture and putting them together. He's happy, and I am happy with how they turned out as well, considering how simple they were to make!

Family Room

There are so many talented people that I get countless ideas and inspiration from. I have a long list of blogs that I check on a pretty regular basis and they never cease to amaze me with their creative ideas and great photography. On the top of my list would have to be the incredibly talented Ashley Ann with her blog "Under the Sycamore Tree" I love what she did for her daughter's nursery, and pretty much everything else she has done. Not only is she very creative, but she has amazing ideas of things to do with your children, and unique ways of explaining concepts to them so that they understand. I won't go on and on, because I just cant do it justice, but go check out her blog if you are interested.

All that to say that my most recent project was inspired by one of hers, you'll have to check it out here: http://ashleyannphotography.com/blog/2009/12/24/merry-christmas-our-cards/

And here is my version of the chalkboard frame:


Right now I have pictures of our summer memories on it, but it is so easy to switch up, and have new art in your family room. All you have to do is put up new pictures, and write whatever you want on the board with chalk. Mine is a little smaller than her's, and in my opinion not quite as awesome, but I am really happy with it! So with that project finished my Family Room is now complete.

Here is the before pictures:


Basically we did a facelift to the room. New flooring, paint, trim, lights (there were none before) and tile on the fireplace hearth. Here are the after shots:


The paint looks pretty blue in these shots, but in reality its a little more gray. My favorite feature is the fireplace. I love how it looks, we wanted to stay true to the style of the 60's rancher, but just make it a little more modern.

Art Corner

Our basement is now finished in terms of paint, flooring, electrical and all that other fun stuff that had various strangers walking in and out of our house for weeks. Now the fun part begins!

I am very excited to be slowly unpacking all my boxes of supplies for the sewing room. It is seriously like Christmas sometimes as I come across things that I either forgot that I had, or have been looking for for around two months now. It also means that I have been able to get back to working on a few of my projects, and even finishing a few of them! Tomorrow I will post pictures of something that I was pretty excited to get done. Unfortunately I didn't get it done with enough daylight left to take some good pictures of it today.

I did finish one corner of the basement though, and Liam has been getting a fair amount of use out of it, in between pushing every button on my washing machine, and "re-organizing" everything I have unpacked.

This table we had sitting in the attic of our old place for a while just waiting for its turn to be made over:


I originally had just painted the whole thing white, but then one day I had my chalkboard paint out for something else (you'll see what tomorrow) and decided to paint the table top with chalkboard paint.


It turned out to be a good thing. We painted the walls in the basement white, because the one room has no windows, and was looking pretty dark before. Liam is at the stage where is is wanting to colour, on everything. Chalk comes off VERY easily if he does happen to "accidentally" colour on the wall.


The clipboards are a fun way of displaying his art work, and pretty easy to switch up when he comes up with something new.

Finished Kitchen!

The kitchen is done! We were going to put crown up on top of the cabinets, but after Jake put one piece up we decided we like it better without.

Here is the before pictures, what the kitchen looked like back in June:








And here is the kitchen now! We ended up gutting it down to the studs, and starting from scratch. You can't see the lights in the before shots, but it was one box florescent light that we swapped out for some pot lights, and then re-designed the layout of the cabinets, adding an island in.







I am really happy with how it turned out! There isn't anything that I would change, and my favorite part is the big greenhouse window (which was there before, we just re-finished it) looking out onto the backyard.

Chickens

After months of planning, building and studying we finally did it! You can call us chicken farmers if you want, because we have our very own backyard coop set up and stocked with adorable little chicks. There are currently 11 of these little creatures running around, so many because they are too young to sex. Once we know which ones are hens and which are roosters we will bring the number down to 6.


Liam was extremely excited when we put them in the coop. He couldn't stop grinning, and pointing to them. We chose to do chicks because we want them to be hand tame, and used to having us around. They are already quite friendly, despite the fact that the farmer we got them from didn't exactly sit out in the coop and hand feed them.


We chose two different breeds, Americanas (which will be regular sized chickens that lay blue eggs) and Silkies, which are a bantam (smaller breed) that were recommended to me as a very friendly breed. So in an ideal situation we will end up with four Americana hens and two Silkie hens.


Here is a picture of the coop Jake made us. Its not quite finished yet, it needs the roof to be completed, and eventually we will paint the hardy board to match our house (when we paint the outside of our house). I'll will post more pictures of the coop when it is finished, but let me say that this picture does not do it justice. Jake did an amazing job on this thing, its all cedar with two nesting boxes and a good size run.

Summer...

Have I really not posted since August 8th? That is crazy. Especially since I still don't have the kitchen done (still waiting on two cupboard doors to be hung, and the crown on the cabinets) and the family room, which I take full responsibility for. I only have one of the pillows finished, and I bought the materials for the art work, but still have to actually put it together.

Even though not much really changes in the fall, I am still looking forward to September in an odd way. It's not like Liam goes to school or anything (thankfully) but I still feel like it will bring a bit of order to this place. Maybe once it starts to rain a bit I will actually get to my ever growing projects list. Maybe. In the mean time it just keeps growing and not much gets done.

The basement is coming along really nicely now too, as I type I can smell the primer wafting through the house. Which is not really a nice smell but it means progress!

Plus two friends with muscles happened to stop by this evening, and moved the chicken coop to the backyard with Jake. It only took a lot of grunting and literally chopping down a tree to get it there. Yup, that is right, chicken coop. I will post pictures soon, but Jake built this beauty a few months ago, and we just now have it in our backyard! Liam and I are pretty excited.

A little of this and that...

Here is a brief glimpse of what we have been up to lately:

Lots of big trucks have come to our place, which Liam gets very excited about. We have also been camping, to the fair, sushi picnics in the park (LOVE IT) and about a thousand other exciting things.

I also have a really long list of projects that I either have started, or am wanting to start really badly. We don't have a basement yet (that will be ready in the fall) so that makes it a little difficult. Jake isn't really a fan of my sewing stuff spread out all over the table (understandably so) but he is being very good about it. And my tools are all still buried in the garage, and its going to take a good week just to find them. But considering it is summer, I'm not getting as much time to work on my stuff as I normally would, and am really not complaining. Its just nice to be outside most of the time.

This week I hope to dig out my chalkboard paint, more fabric and (hopefully) find a working rotary dial telephone. (I have been looking for MONTHS now and it seems no one wants to drop theirs off at the thrift store. Seriously, if you know of one just sitting around calling my name I would love to hear from you). This is all just for the family room. I'll post with more details when I'm finished, until then sorry you'll just have to wonder what I could possibly be doing :) (okay your probably not as excited about it as I am)...

We're also making some good progress on the yard as well. By we I mean Jake, but I have every intention on starting some weeding tomorrow so I feel like I can count myself in on that. Intention is 90% of it anyway.

So that is the most recent update! Hopefully the kitchen will be completely finished this week so that I can post some pictures, it is 95% there, just a few little things left.