Home Tour: Sophia's Room

AKA- Nursery Reveal

I love Sophia's room- L-O-V-E it.

I don't like bright and bold color schemes in a nursery, for many reasons, but the main one is the psychology behind bright colors in children's room creates a stimulating environment that produces undesirable emotions/energy (for instance, the color red in a preschool room has been shown to create an elevated amount of anger or a yellow room creates excess energy.) I know it sounds cooky, but in all my work with kids I have seen that this is true and I totally believe that a nursery should be a soothing environment that promotes relaxation and calmness, for both baby and momma!

That doesn't mean that I don't add splashes of bright color for contrast and interest, and for visual stimulation, but it means that out of the walls, curtains, bedding, ar, and accessories, only pieces should be bright.

Grace's nursery was neural wall color with a pale pink and lavender scheme. Really, it was supposed to be just pale pink, but by the time the bedding got here from the States I realized that the picture online wasn't true to its color and it had a hint of lavender in it, so I ran with it.

Sophia's room has the same neural paint that the rest of the house has- sometimes it looks like a light tan or cream and sometimes it looks like it has a hint of peach in it. I chose to go with a yellow color scheme but wanted it to just be in touches instead of all over the place.

The view into Sophia's room, straight ahead, with Grace's door to her room to the right.

The name sign I made for Sophia's room. I decided to go with a giraffe theme way back in February. My reason being that I had chosen an animal for Grace, a rabbit, and the animal for baby #2 was going to be an elephant but I had decided that in case it was a girl, I wanted to chose a more feminine animal, ha! So, giraffe it was.

The wall on the right, when you walk into the room has her dresser (an old pine dresser that we had refinished and I put new knobs on it,)  which acts as her changing table also. The prints above the dresser are from the same artist that did Grace's artwork- I love them! So whimsical and the colors are so beautiful! The baskets hold diapers and a container of wipes. I forgot to take a picture of the detail work, but the front of the woven baskets have yellow buttons in a row right below the handle.

The wall straight across from the door when you walk in has a huge window. If we had been able to/wanted to, I would have put a rocker/glider in the corner to the right. We chose not to this time though since this house is so spread out. We didn't feel like I would be able to come upstairs to nurse very often.

The detail work on the lampshade. Yes, I hot glued all of those buttons in between contractions! I had to get her nursery finished!

The wall to the left when you walk in the door is where her crib is. I really like her crib but am disappointed in the bedding I was able to find over here. I couldn't find a bumper or crib skirt that I liked at all and the sheet isn't really what I wanted either. Boo.

I did the arrangement above her bed. It's alright, but I'm not crazy about it either. I'll mess around with the papers another time. The orange seems really out of place to me.

And yes, the mattress is all wonky. Sophia has a cold so her mattress is elevated on the right side to help with her breathing and drainage.

The crib sheet is from PBKids and I really like it, but it's just not the one I was hoping to get.

This is directly besides the door, just some floating shelves with knick knacks and our awesome baby monitor.

The sign says "How beautiful are the feet that bring good news." and has Grace's footprints.

To the right of the shelves is the entrance to her closet space. We are supposed to put a wardrobe in there but don't really have a need for it right now. So, here's the brutal truth of what this area looks like- piles of things to be thrown away, donated, stored, or used!

Sophia's room has a bathroom (because every newborn needs their privacy?)

 

So, we naturally use it for some excellent storage. Next to the toilet (unused toilet,) is our collection of infant toys.

In the sink are our children's medicines and soap products- the bathroom door is kept closed and Grace can not reach the sink yet.

And, behind shower curtain number 3?

Oh, just our storage system for the girls' clothes! Because I'm sure you were curious about how it is all stored!

The room isn't exactly how I pictured it, but, to be fair, I didn't start on it until I was 36 weeks pregnant! Plus, knowing that the girls probably will be sharing a room in less than a year meant that I was buying with that in mind. The girls room will use Sophia's dresser and crib, Grace's book cases (a dark black-brown,) Grace will be in a big bed, and probably be a combo of pink and yellow.

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Home Tour: Sophia's Room

Home Tour: Kitchen

I love our kitchen.

L-O-V-E

It may not be of the top quality, model home variety, but it is SO nice and SO much bigger (4-5 times bigger!) than our last kitchen.

Our last kitchen was small but functional, but not really someplace I enjoyed being. Everything in it had been furnished with the apartment, meaning it had been owned and used by countless people before us, including silverware and plates, appliances and pots.

This kitchen, however, is very much my space. And I love it!

When coming in the front door, you see the living room to the right, and a hallway straight ahead that branches into a T, with the office to the right and the kitchen to the left.

 The view from the doorway into the kitchen. You can see why I love it:
1.) the natural light- makes my heart oh-so-happy
2.) the wide open countertop space! I love clear open counters with not too much clutter
3.) it's huge! Our last kitchen only had 8 small tiles worth of space on the floor

Our fridge was a long time coming. We spent a month with a dorm sized fridge that was as short as Grace is, trying to find a good deal on a used fridge. When nothing panned out, we went to an appliance outlet and get a steal on this massive fridge and freezer...new!

Here, you can see my message board that is magnetic and has a little line with clothespins on it. I can change out the paper and colors out whenever I feel like it! Also, my calendar that I tried to make reusable, but contact paper doesn't wipe off very easily, so it's really a one time use type of thing. Grace's farm animal toy is beneath that, but I'm about to switch it out for her alphabet one and then her magnetic nativity set at Christmas time.

View of the fridge straight on. Our water cooler isn't absolutely necessary here, as our doctor assured us the tap water is clean and parasite free, but I still feel funny about it, so we've kept the water cooler. Our trash can (and bag of trash next to it,) and our fire extinguishers cap off the row. Those extinguishers came in handy when we had an electrical fire the other week!

The door to the right is a door that leads out back. There really isn't anything there but a paved sidewalk that leads around to the front of the house and ours and our neighbor's gigantic water tanks. The neighbor kids like to run on the sidewalks that go all around these houses, and since our window isn't covered, at night they can see into our house. Sometimes it is disturbing thinking that these kids are looking in, but most of the time is hilarious when I stumble into the kitchen late at night and freak them out.

Nothing like seeing a giant, pregnant, white lady when you least expect it to make a group of 10 year old girls scream and run away.

On the side of the fridge we have some emergency contact information and my weekly menu note pad with a grocery notepad next to it.

On top of the fridge are two baskets. One is full of cereal boxes, because we stock up when we can find the stuff that isn't filled with chocolate. The other has our dish towels and pot holders in it.

To the right of the door is the counter space with our sink over looking the windows to the back. The drawers on the left hold our silverware, kitchen gadgets, and disposable items, such as baggies, foil, paper plates. Underneath of the sink, the cabinets have a lock on them because we store our cleaners there. To the right of the sink, a gigantic cabinet that stretches all the way back into the corner holds our three different mixing bowl sets, my cake decorating gear, and all of our rubbermade containers. On top of the counter in the corner is our napkin holder, knife block, and my wrought iron cookbook stand, which I LOVE.

The long wall has our stove and most of our storage space. Our stove is highly unusual on this side of the world, as most people use gas stoves. Our house didn't have a gas hook up, much to my relief, and it was just easier to find an electric stove instead. We bought this stove used from a nice Brazilian woman and it has been perfect. It is exactly like our stove we had before we moved over seas.

To the left of the stove is our utensil crock and to the right is my spice rack. Right now the spice rack is more for looks, as I haven't cleaned out the spices from before storage, meaning they are 4 years old!

The cabinets on the bottom, to the left of the stove, hold our pots and  pans and colanders/steamers. The drawers to the right hold our spices (top 2 drawers,) and baking supplies and utensils (bottom 2 drawers.) The cabinet to the right, on the bottom, has our baking pans on the top and corningware on the bottom.

The cabinets on the top hold our glasses and mugs, plate settings, and plasticware.

My absolute favorite cabinet, because I went so long with mismatching, used plates and bowls:

I love my Crate and Barrel Staccato plate settings. I felt like I was at my bridal shower all over again when I opened these up from our boxes!

View of the wall to your right when you walk in. This is where most of our food items are stored, since there is no pantry. The two corner cabinets hold our serving ware (upper) and small appliances (lower.) The top four cabinets have all of our dry goods and canned items while the bottom two cabinets, under the microwave, hold all of the big baking ingredients, mixes, and oils.

The awkward two cabinets that are underneath of that island (peninsula, really,) or bar, is where I keep some fun activities for Grace, such as sensory bins, craft supplies, and hands on activities that are only played with under supervision. This cabinet has a lock on it as well.

The final thing in the kitchen is our laundry room:

It was directly to your left when you came through the door, before you get to the fridge. We bought both of the washer and the dryer for less than 100 dollars, used. They are amazing.

Remember, in our last house we had a manual, single cycle washing machine that took an hour per load of constant attention. I had to drag it across the kitchen, fill it up from the sink, drag it back to the drain to drain it for both cycles, and transfer every thing into the spin cylinder to get the water out of it before moving it all to another room to hang dry. What a pain! Now, I just press a button and "Ta-daa!" it does it's job by itself.

The only weird thing is that the dryer is a condensing dryer, since there are no piping or tubing to let the hot, moist air to the outside. It condenses all of the water in a little tray in the top left and you just have to empty it in between loads. It's pretty easy and our stuff comes out soft, fluffy, and dry in about an hour. Amazing!

I've been eyeing some shelving to go above this area at Ikea, but we haven't gotten it yet. Our washing supplies, iron, and toilet paper/paper towels, are stored on top of the washing machine, while our medicine bin is on top of the dryer. It will be nice to get that stuff off of the top of the machines and have a hanging rod to put hanging clothes on.

That's our kitchen! We love the space and the light and I have loved getting to cook here! We spend much of our time in this room, cooking, cleaning, doing laundry, and Grace playing right along side of us. It's a great space!

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Home Tour: Kitchen

Home Tour: Office/Guest Room

When you first enter our home, to the right, you see our Living Room. Straight ahead of you is a hallway that leads to several different rooms.

We ran out of room for these book cases in our office, but they fit perfectly in this place. I pulled out all of my children's/classroom books that I had brought with me and put them on the bottom shelf. I also have my cookbooks (top far left,) coffee table books, (top left,) and "lendable" books (top right.) Technically, all of our books are "lendable," but these are ones I would highly recommend to friends who were looking for some good fiction (Francine Rivers, Terri Blackstock, and Alexander McCall Smith.)

I used the top to display a bunch of frames and knick knacks. The pictures in the frames all need updating, as alot of the pictures are from before we were married, of high school friends and kids I worked with. I want to put in pictures of our parents and siblings.

To the right of these book cases is the doorway into the entrance of our office/guest room.

Straight through that door is the bathroom. Not pictured, to the right of this picture is a little enclave that could hold a wardrobe (closets are not built in on this side of the world,) but we are just using it for storage of some boxes. Most of the time it is behind the open door, so you can't see it, which is nice!

I like this bathroom alot. It has an older shower curtain that was in our guest bath in our apartment in the States (from Target,) and is a pretty big bathroom. The finishings are all new and modern, but most importantly, they are "western," and no, I do not mean as in cowboys. I mean it has toilets and sinks that are styled like we would do in the States, instead of squatty potties (yep, some houses here have that,) or giant, gaudy pieces, like we had in our last house.

We have four full bathrooms and two half bathrooms in this house. I know. Ridiculous. It takes me a full day of chore time to clean them. But since the builder/owner is a local, he built it somewhat in a local style, which means that no one should have to share a bathroom.

We keep extra toothbrushes, toothpaste, and facewash downstairs in this bathroom, which makes it convenient when you need to freshen up before heading out. Because I'm just that lazy that I don't want to climb those stairs.

The office is the room that we have both been dreaming about for over three years. A month before we got married, in 2008, we were broke college graduates who wanted to buy our first "grown up" piece of furniture. So, what did we do? We went out and spent a ridiculous amount of money on a gorgeous inlaid wood desk.

We're practical like that.

My parents gifted us three tall bookcases and we used Target gift cards to buy four smaller ones, and that room, our office, was our only furnished room for the entire first year of marriage.

True story.

But what a beautiful room it was!

Our office was our sanctuary. We had all of our books displayed beautifully and a nice, peaceful place for Ian to study during his graduate school time. And I loved having a dedicated space where I blogged for my first year of marriage.

We packed it all up in the spring of 2009 and haven't seen it since then! When our crate arrived in July, our books and bookshelves were some of the first things we pulled out and organized.

It has a little different feel to it this time, as it is more of Ian's own space than a shared space, since he works from home most of the time. I used our red curtains in there to try to pull in a Georgia Bulldogs color scheme (his favorite team,) but it would still need a few more details to make it an actual theme in the room.

View from the entry of the room into the office:

The tall bookcases house all of our non fiction books. I've told Ian that we aren't buying any more shelves (except maybe for the girls' rooms) so what can fit on there is all that we can keep. I weeded out a bunch of my fiction books that I will donate to a library or give to a friend and he painfully pulled out a few of his fiction books that are not "classics."

There is still a little more room for a few books and I think there are alot of books that can be trashed/given away, because they were either 1.) no good, 2.) duplicates, or 3.) read and will never be read or looked at again. It'll take me awhile to convince Ian of this. We have a Kindle so we are trying to buy our fiction books on there, but it still isn't the same as a paper copy of a book.

View of Ian's desk and the shorter Fiction book cases:

We have our diplomas framed and displayed and Ian wants to add our certificates from our language school up there, but they aren't as official and beautiful as our college certificates so I am not sold on it yet.

And, yes, Ian doesn't have a desk chair yet. He sits on a little step stool when he works. I keep telling him to bring in one of our six dining room chairs to use until we buy him a real chair, but he doesn't do it very often.

 View of the taller book cases and the twin bed that makes this room a "guest room."

I want to add a small end table with a decorative lamp and some red throw pillows to the bed in order to make it look a little more cohesive and not so stark.

Other than that, this room is DONE! We really like tile floors so I don't think I'll add an area rug. I'm not sure that we'll always have a dedicated office room, but for now, it is beautiful and we really like having all of our books in (almost) one place!
 

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Home Tour: Office/Guest Room

Home Tour: Living Room

We've been living in our house for over a month and a half now. We've been all unpacked since the end of week one, but I've been waiting to share pictures until we got all of the curtains up and bought a few pieces of furniture or appliances that were missing.

Our house is such a blessing to us. In fact, it's not just a house, it truly is home now. Our last apartment was never "home." It was a place that was picked out for us, with someone else's furniture, and a space that did not work right for us. We lived there for two years and made some great memories and tried to make it as "homey" as possible, but it just never happened.

This house fell into our laps, has great neighbors, is in a good location, and has my biggest prerequisite- LIGHT!

The other major feature of this house is the layout and size- it uses every square foot to its advantage and uses the windows and the tall ceilings (12-14 feet in most places,) to make the space feel HUGE.

It's so huge, that we aren't able to fully furnish this house. We are pretty positive that we will only be in this house for a year for a number of reasons, and we are okay with that. But, keeping that in mind, we don't want to invest the money for furnishings and decorations in two of the rooms that we are fairly certain we won't have in our next home.

And that brings you to the first room you see when you walk in our front door: The living room!

It's a circular room which we (dorkily) call "The Rotunda" or the front room. But really it's a formal living room space.

Or, honestly, it could be called the "orphaned furniture," room.

We weren't able to sell our couch and book shelf from our last apartment so it made the move with us. We weren't sure what we were going to do with them, but they fill the space nicely and give a little purpose to the room.

The four curtains cover three giant windows and help keep out alot of heat right now. They are usually all closed, for cooling purposes and for privacy purposes. Because honestly, our neighbor kids would be found with their faces pressed against the window watching what the "strange Americans," are doing, if we didn't have the windows covered. I'm hoping that we can start leaving them oopen more often because the sunlight is beautiful!

The far left corner of the curtain wire is broken but we have to borrow a ladder before we can fix it- until then it works just fine and Grace loves playing hide and seek in the curtains!

Our book case is my favorite piece in this room. I didn't really want it to sell and am glad it didn't! In this book case, I specifically put "conversation pieces." Our framed wedding invitation, travel books, photo albums, and souvenirs from our world travels. There is a framed picture of a beloved little boy, but I really want to use that frame with an antiqued map of the UAE (where we live now.)

Opposite of the couch is our staircase, leading up to the second floor (duh.) Underneath of the stair case is this amazing storage space. If I had the time and resources I would hang a fun, angled curtain and make it into a play area for Grace. Like I said, I don't think we'll still be in this house for her to fully enjoy it so it's not on the top of my to-do list right now, and instead holds some odd items that we are using alot as we move in, like tools and arts and crafts things. Those will all be moved to a closet within a month or two though. Grace's outside toys will be stored here, for easy access when we go outside.

That's it for this time. This room doesn't have alot in it but it actually gets used every day- Ian likes to nap on this couch and Grace likes to ride her little car in this room or play on the couch or in the curtains! I'm glad we didn't sink alot of money into this space but I'm also glad it's not sitting empty and unused!

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Home Tour: Living Room

Good/Great Day

You know it's going to be a good day when you wake up at 3 am (hats off to you, insomnia,) and think "YES! I get to eat Papa John's today!

And yes, I did enjoy myself some pizza. Delicious!

The day continued in full blown wonderfulness with Grace being adorable, followed by a super hot and long shower, and a peach that made my heart sing. And all before 11 AM. Then it just went into a frenzy of amazingness, as our DRYER was delivered!

I have not owned a dryer since we lived in Vancouver, over 2 years ago. It hasn't been horrible, but it is much more convenient to dry towels and sheets, underclothes and t-shirts, in a dryer than having to hang all of those things up.

AND we got it used for 50 dollars. It was a steal.

And if I thought my day couldn't get any better, I was wrong. The minute the dryer delivery was over Ian's phone rang from our fridge delivery guy. Yes, he was supposed to be delivering between 5 and 9 pm, but we took the 1 pm delivery with a smile. You see, we've been living with a dorm fridge for almost 6 weeks now.

Our Fridge

Our Fridge with Grace for a height comparison.

And although it worked just fine, it was so tiny, and our condiments took up so much space, that I had to run out and go grocery shopping every day. We were trying to find a good used fridge (Abu Dhabi has a great Classifieds website, similar to, but, in my opinion, better than Craigslist,) but it wasn't working out. So we went to an appliance wholesaler and got a great deal on a brand new, gigantic LG fridge. And a free microwave.

My first fridge. And microwave. And washer. And dryer. And stove. That we've ever owned. All at the same time.

To put the cherry on top of the epically amazing day, I finally entered the nesting stage of this pregnancy.

At exactly 4:30 pm today.

Yes, I know the time. Because at 4 pm, I was perfectly content to sit on the couch and not work on anything, and by 4:30 pm I was up and going, making list, and sorting things into piles.

Bring on the nesting!

Ian and I spent the rest of the evening, cuddling on the couch and watching rugby.  A good day that became a great day!

----

My friends just back to the States after being gone for nearly 3 years and they have boon posting facebook statuses and pictures showing their joy in the little things of life. Mostly food related, but still. Chick-fil-a, pork products, Wal-Mart, family, etc. It makes me SO excited for our trip to the States next year.

Home Girl, rocking her first pair of real shorts! She looked so grown up!

I'm really eager to redesign my blog, but am not wanting/am not able to spend anything on it right now. I also don't have time to do it myself. I don't suppose there is a really professional blog designer who reads this and wants to do some charitable work?

And yes, I just referred to myself as a charity case.

I'm totally okay with that.

We're keeping pretty busy here, but we like that! I can't believe we are 6 weeks from the due date for Miss Sophia!

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Good/Great Day

Casualty of Moving

 We are three weeks out from our move and everything has been packed and put away for almost two weeks now. I'm pleased to say that we really only had one "casualty" of our move. Three of my glasses were cracked and broken.

That's it!

That's pretty impressive considering we packed everything we owned back in May of 2009 and put it into storage. Then, in January of 2010, a moving company came and picked it up and moved it to a crate. Only, they couldn't fit everything in our box, so they opened our boxes and moved things all around, leaving some things not even in boxes! Our household goods sat in a warehouse for over 2 years, then, just two months ago, in May of 2012, the crate was loaded onto a truck, driven to and unloaded onto a cargo ship, and sailed across the Atlantic Ocean. Then, when the ship docked in Abu Dhabi, it was unloaded, x-rayed and put through other customs procedures, then loaded onto a truck and driven to our new home. There it was unloaded into our house!

Quite the journey and incredible to think that only 3 little glasses got broken! We're so thankful that none of our things had mold or insects!

Grace is pretty impressed as well! She loves "helping," us clean and can often be found with a rag in hand, rubbing doors or furniture down! She also learned the sing for food or eat, and spends most of her time running to the fridge, signing for food, and nodding her little head and saying a cute high pitched "yeah!" or affirmative "mmm-hmm!"

She loves taking her baby, bunny, and bear from room to room, moving them onto and off of the couch, stairs, or rug.


 As for the unmentioned casualty of  this move....my sanity.....

Things are going good. I had a small melt down today, after several hours of unsuccessfully trying to recover our new (to us) dining room chairs. We had been unable to find a staple gun and so I had finished one seat with just some tacks and a hammer but it too almost 3 hours and was a big pain. Ian finally told me to stop, that we would find a staple gun somewhere!

Then, he served me a piece of chocolate cake. Because my husband loves me. And he especially loves for his very pregnant wife not to completely fall apart.

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Casualty of Moving