It seems a little show off-y to have a tour of my own home, but really what are blogs for but to be show off-y? You’ve seen bits and pieces already: too many pictures of my kids’ room and my bathroom even! So why not show you the rest? I get a little annoyed when other sites have home tours and then all you get are photos of little vinettes. I tried to take pictures of the big picture, well really the small picture: our house is only about 900 square feet (85 sq meters). It will be changing in new and exciting ways soon, but for now it suits our little family of five quite well.

If you came over to my house, this is where you would come in–just to the right of the mantel. My dog would probably try to eat your feet (she is old and weird).

If you’d been playing in the mud before you came over, you’d probably have to sit down and take off your shoes.

Oops I got a little vignettey. Well, that’s what mantels are for anyway.  On ours are some doily cover rocks, fake grass, beautiful candles I was given, a bit of art, and my straw garland.

Hey, I am sitting on this couch right this very minute! Yes, we have two green couches in our living room. After the couch I bought in college hit the dust a few years back I went a little crazy on craigslist trying to find the perfect couch. Many months went by and finally I found that vinyl beauty (in the first picture of the post) for not too much. Two days later this lean, green mamajamma was listed for 50 bucks. I snatched it up. They not only delivered it, but threw in a matching chair (which is in the basement because seriously, we can’t have any more green furniture in here)!

Our living room opens up to the dining room slash library slash office slash play room.  No, actually every room is the playroom with three kids in a little house.

Most of our toys are stored in the credenza in the living room, but I also carved out a little play area under the windows in the dining room. The photo of Maya’s play room inspired this space.  Remember the rolling toy boxes I made a while back? This is where they live.

The dining room is also our art gallery, which at the moment is overflowing with end of the year school work. It is a little more edited in this shot. We converted the linen closet into a tiny office that you can see in this post. And the other door leads to our bedroom…

…which is very green.

We updated our kitchen a little this year and hot damn! I love it now. It needs a coat of paint, but it is still pretty.

That’s all! It’s not always so tidy, but we live in it for goodness sake! And we do live in every little bit of our house. And love it too. I hope you enjoyed the tour of our home!

We live in a small (1000 square feet) house that has two very small bedrooms and there are 5 of us. When we had our third baby I was sure my husband and I would have to share our bedroom with him for a very long time.  Then I came across this bedroom on Ohdeedoh one day. The room is small and not only does it fit three kids comfortably, there is room for a desk and a dresser and toys. I thought if they can do it, we could too. Only we had to do it for a 6 year old girl, a 4 year old boy, and the 2 year old boy.

The first thing we did, or rather the first thing I asked my brother to do, was build a loft bed. The room is 10×10, so there was no way we were going to fit two beds and a crib in there. I hate bunk beds–changing the sheets on bunk beds is the worst, but they can look pretty awful too.  We designed this cloud loft bed (for the 4 year old) so it would almost disappear into the background. The clouds act as a guard rail and I painted them the same white as the walls, but I couldn’t resist one stripey cloud (inspired by this coat rack).

Underneath the clouds is my daughter’s bed–the iron number by ikea that everyone loves. We strung christmas lights to the bottom of the loft bed so she has a light. Also because we had to put the cloud bed right in the window. The way the room is set up there was no other place for the loft to go.  I was worried about it, but it turned out just fine–the window and the shade still work and it barely even blocks any light.

The baby’s bed is across from the clouds. Above the crib is a map of our neighborhood that I painted. It still needs street names and the railroad track and the bike path painted in, but it’s a work in progress–mostly because  I can’t do while the baby is sleeping! I picked up the the masks at our local art supply shop and they work for dress up and decoration (a twofer). There are wooden boxes under the crib for storage (that I talked about here) and the hamper was a lucky thrift store find.

On the neighboring wall is the dresser/changing table and the storage/display shelves. We keep diapers in the wooden box up on the shelf and the red cross thing is actually a nightlight!  The dresser caused a bit of problems when I was redoing the room. I really thought it would look good gray, but it ended up looking like a big gray blob in this all white room. So I had to paint it white again (and again and again–it takes lots of coats to cover up dark gray).

But even though it’s boring white on the outside, the inside is super awesome! I fell in love with the idea of painting the inside of drawers when I saw it on pinterest. It took four cans of spray paint: safety orange, farm equipment yellow, lagoon blue, and fluorescent pink (all rustoleum brand). After spraying a few coats of color, I finished them all with a coat of clear shellac. The dresser is the only clothes storage we have for the kids, so they each get their own color drawer and they all share the undie/sock drawer on top.  What happened to the closet, you ask? Stay tune for tomorrow and I’ll show you!

three kids in a room: part two

I’m here. I haven’t fallen off the earth, I’ve just been sucked into summer with three little kids and all it’s sweaty, whiny, wet and happy craziness. I keep waiting for things to slow down a little so I can get some projects crossed off the list, but then yesterday I realized the crazy is not going to let up until summer’s done.

So I’m going to try to take that minute here and there my kids give me and to get something accomplished. Like their room. It’s still far from done and it’s starting to wear on me.  The overhead projector came out yesterday and I started to draw a map of our neighborhood on the big board.  Nothing like a big junior high flash back in the middle of the day.  If you are too young to remember the drone of the fan and the slightly burny smell of the overhead projector well then you are just too young aren’t you.

If you’ve got a keen eye then you spotted the bumper I made in the first picture. And here is the bunting bumper (rubber baby bunting bumpers!) in all it’s glory. Take a long look, because I will never be making one of these suckers again. You know when you are dreading doing a project and then you start and think, hey, this isn’t so bad, kind of fun even? Well this wasn’t like that at all–it sucked the whole way through.  But thankfully done and off the list.

Painting the dresser is next. Any thoughts?

Here are the first few posts about the room if you need a refresher:

• before
• during 1
• during 2

I got this fabric, well really it’s more like a print, from reprodepot last year. After asking my super talented art major friends how to display this ginormous piece of fabric, I went to the art supply store to get stretcher bars. Stretcher bars, if you don’t know (I didn’t), are used to make a simple wooden frame that you can then stretch your canvas over. Now that I think about it, they are like large square (or rectangle) embroidery hoops. They come in every length, so you can make a frame in whatever size you like. I only say all of this because if you like fabric, sooner or later you are going to want to put some on your wall and stretcher bars will help you out immensely. I was really nervous about this project–mostly I didn’t want to destroy this beautiful fabric. I finally got my nerve up at the last craft night and put a thousand staples in it. It may be a little wonky, but I’m okay with that. It’s in the kid’s room and they love it (I thought it might give them nightmares, I mean it’s pretty large and a little on the creepy side). When all the furniture rearranging (for this little baby) finally is finished I’ll show the whole room.