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If By Yes

~ the musings of a left wing left hander with two left feet

If By Yes

Tag Archives: decorating

Blue Skies, Smiling at Me

04 Wednesday Aug 2010

Posted by IfByYes in How is Babby Formed?

≈ 11 Comments

Tags

airplane light fixture, cloud theme, decorating, home depot, nursery, painting

Clouds!

Isn't it heavenly?

Left wall

I love my friends. This is the room I always dreamed of. Better, because of the light fixture.

Don’t you love it? Perfect Husband picked it out a year ago, when we were shopping for lamps. He got all excited about it (he loves aerospace stuff – he can watch Mayday for hours and has a massive amount of NASA trivia memorized) but we decided not to buy it, because buying light fixtures for babies who don’t exist seems like a jinx. However, when I got pregnant, we went back and searched through a couple of Home Depots until we found it.

It’s a good thing I had always planned on a “sky” themed baby’s room, because that airplane was going in regardless. They had a ship one too, which appealed to the Maritimer in me, but a) Perfect Husband was like “nooo…. plaaaaaane!!” and b) since I was planning a SKY themed nursery, a ship wouldn’t have made a lot of sense (though I could have made a Wynken, Blynken and Nod argument).

Anyway, we opened up the box today and my friend was installing it when we realized… it didn’t have any bloody wings. I hear that’s kind of important. I was ticked. It was totally sealed when I opened that box, so why was there no wing? How was I going to convince Home Depot to give me the part? We bought this thing months and months ago – no way we still had the receipt. I was having nightmare visions of having to buy a whole new fixture, and what with cell phones and buckets of paint and everything else, money is not exactly abundant in the IfByYes household.

But I called the Home Depot where I bought it, and they didn’t give me any hassle at all. They didn’t accuse me of breaking it, or trying to rip them off. They just invited me to come down, which I did (friend’s son in tow for company) and they ripped open a new box, yanked out a wing, and said “there y’go.”

Home Depot, if you have customer service people trolling the interwebs for customer comments, like Shaw did for Mommy By Day, please here this loud and clear: I love you, and THANK YOU.

Now I have an amazing baby’s room. Now, if only I could afford furniture for it…

Check it out:

31 Saturday Jul 2010

Posted by IfByYes in How is Babby Formed?

≈ 7 Comments

Tags

decorating, nursery, painting

The baby’s room is no longer gulag-grey!

I decided to go with Behr Premium Plus Ultra (…Uberbar, Super-Fantastic, Luxury etc) paint again. That’s what we used for the rest of the house. I chose a very bright colour of blue. Originally I was going to go with a more muted shade, but after looking at this one on Behr’s website the previous shade looked too dim and grey.

So I sent the links to my Mommy and asked for her opinion (without telling her my own thoughts) and she told me the same thing – that after checking out Horizon Haze, the Caspian Tide looked dingy. We decided that a baby’s room, of all places, can withstand a bright colour, especially since we’re going to cut the blue with clouds and possibly giraffes.

Before

After!

We were right about it being bright – it glows! But that’s fine. Children like bright colours and I want the room to be cheery. It’s North-facing, after all. The ceiling will eventually be painted too, but we (and by we, I mostly mean my friends who came over and basically did this all for me, insisting that I rest myself and stay away from the fumes) decided to leave that to my graphic design professional friend, when she comes to do the clouds, because when we touched it with a wet cloth bits of ceiling rained down on us and we were scared.

Appreciation and Anticipation

03 Saturday Apr 2010

Posted by IfByYes in The House Saga

≈ 5 Comments

Tags

bookcases, decorating, home improvement, Ikea, torches

The close-call on the house, and the prospect of actual repairs occurring some time in the next five years, has given me a new appreciation for our home.

Lately when I’ve looked at it, I’ve only seen the stains on the carpet, the dog fur in the corners, the papers on the coffee table, and the grey mist in the windows. But the last few days I’ve been concentrating on the glowing colour of the walls, the wood floors that are the exact shade I have always wanted, and the plans we have to improve it – baseboards, for example – and how great it will look when those are done.

Yesterday, Pefect Husband and I spent a lot of time online trying to figure out a solution to our living room.

Currently, Moby (our CRT 32 inch widescreen HD TV), the cat tree, an extra coffee table, a small black two-shelf bookcase double-stacked with DVDs, and our various Nintendos (from NES to Weslii, our Wii) are stuck in a jumble at one end of the living room, which ends in a kind of niche. Perfect Husband and I have been talking about getting a proper entertainment unit that fits perfectly into the niche, and displaying our torches on top of it. On Thursday evening we finally put the torches into their stands and sprayed them with hairspray to keep the soot on them. It is time to get a place to display them.

In our Internet search through Ikea, Sears, The Brick, United Furniture Warehouse and many more stores, we discovered something:

  • Most Entertainment centres these days don’t have a shelf which goes over the tv on which we could place two torches.
  • Those that do are too high to have room for two torches at the top.
  • No entertainment centres actually have a space deep enough for something as startlingly enormous as Moby. They are all built for slim, sleek little LCD flat screens, not massive whales like Moby. In fact, most of them intend you to HANG your tv.

So we made a new plan. We decided to get two tall book shelves to place one on either side of Moby and a matching shelf to stretch in between, OVER Moby, and we could put the torches on this. We made a foray to Ikea, which was a madhouse. Apparently, we weren’t the only family to celebrate Dead Jesus Day by going shopping at a Swedish furniture warehouse and eating hot dogs and cinnamon buns for 50 cents each.

We found two bookcases that we liked, and their little living-room displays made me realize that I wanted to get little bookcase lights to shine classily down on our shelves’ contents, so Perfect Husband patiently hung around the lighting section for 20 minutes while I hemmed and hawed over that selection. We grabbed the two bookcases, which weight 100 pounds per box and were so long that we had to tie the trunk down with twine (which made for a harrowing trip home given the ridiculously high gales that Vancouver was experiencing yesterday). But… we couldn’t find a shelf that would fit between them.

They seem to have standard shelf sizes. 32 inches is too short to comfortably fit two torches onto, and 46 inches is four inches too wide to fit between those bookcases. Our niche is about 104 inches wide. The bookcases are 31 inches wide, each. The 46 inch shelf would make the entire width 108 inches, which doesn’t fit. We need a 40 inch shelf, and those don’t appear to exist.

So that will be its own odyssey, apparently. But in the meantime, we have 200 pounds of bookcase in boxes lying in our hallways, and I can’t wait to have them up and looking all new in our living room, with their fancy little bookcase lights.

DOWN WITH THE JUMBLE!

*Headdesk*

27 Thursday Aug 2009

Posted by IfByYes in The House Saga, Well, That's Just Stupid

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

decorating, Inanity abounds

So we stopped by the house today because the linoleum was supposed to be put in today. We noticed something.

This is what was on our floors:

wrong floor 2

But this is the linoleum that I picked out in the store (the middle roll):

floor in kitchen 2

Does anyone else notice anything about these two images? Like, perhaps, the fact that they are TOTALLY DIFFERENT FLOORS?

Run from the paint, children, RUN!

26 Wednesday Aug 2009

Posted by IfByYes in The House Saga, We Are Family

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

decorating, floors, home, house, mothers, painting

Guess what! We got our house last Thursday. Isn’t that GREAT?

Except that the walls were painted a stark grey that made the place seem as warm and welcoming as Alcatraz. The kind of colour that the landlord clearly must have picked because he wanted to communicate to his tenants “THIS IS NOT YOUR HOME AND YOU DO NOT BELONG HERE.”

INTERNMENT-CAMP GREY IS ALL THE RAGE THESE DAYS, RIGHT?

INTERNMENT-CAMP GREY IS ALL THE RAGE THESE DAYS, RIGHT?

The message must have been heard loud and clear, because the tenants had made their best efforts to scratch and mark and damage the walls in as many places as possible during their tenancy. One wall was SO marked and dented that all my friends exclaimed on it when they arrived. The greatest part of Saturday was spent spackling, sanding, and washing the walls. Friends who showed up to paint ended up having spackling trowels handed to them, and spent the subsequent hours on their hands and knees, trying to make the walls look more like walls, and less like swiss cheese.

As the day wore on, though, the dingy and unwelcoming house which we had just bought began to take on a new and cheerful feel. Slowly, my personality was spreading through the place, with tendrils reaching from the kitchen, up the stairs, and into the bedrooms.It was transforming from internment camp to… home.

From grey kitchen to sunny kitchen

From grey kitchen to sunny kitchen

Up the stairs...

Up the stairs...

Stairwell

Past the landing...

Then… everyone stopped for the day. People had to go home. Only half the painting was done. I had to teach a puppy class the next morning. Three people pledged to come back after I was done class, and they did. But when they called it a day, there was STILL more to be done. I began to fall apart. It was all so overwhelming. The flooring guys were due to come in that coming week. We had to move the next weekend. There were still some Alcatraz walls and I wanted them gone. The only room I had given permission to ignore was the future baby’s room – decorating a nursery in advance of any kind of pregnancy seems like counting chickens before they hatch. The painting jobs stretched on and on… I would never be done. One day, old and toothless, I would totter into the bedroom and announce

“I finished painting the bathroom today.”

“WHAT?” Perfect Husband would holler, adjusting his hearing aid.

So Monday night after work, Perfect Husband and I went back. I started on touch-ups downstairs while he gathered up drop cloths from the stairs to move into the bathroom. He found green paint spots on the stairs.

“Fuck!” he said, “how did that happen?”

He ripped another drop cloth off of the floor. “FUCK!” And another… “FUCK!”

They were everywhere. Paint splotches on the stairs. In the upstairs hall. The master bedroom. The computer room.  Yellow and green.

I once had a dream that shining yellow paint was oozing through the ceiling, landing in splotches at my feet. I knew that if it touched me, I would die. I ran to my parent’s room, seeking safety in my mother’s arms.

“It’s too late,” my father told me, “it touched her. She’s dying.”

Now it seemed like it was back, magically appearing under drop cloths, poisoning my new home. The downstairs floors were all slated to be replaced, but I had preferred to leave the carpet upstairs, so that little sock feet could run down the stairs in future years without slipping. Perfect Husband scrubbed grimly at the stairs while I miserably touched up thin spots on the walls downstairs. The paint didn’t want to come up. I faced the horrifying realization that we might have to redo the upstairs floors, too. Another two thousand dollars. A rush to either pick up new carpet, or a last minute decision to risk small people tumbling down the stairs by extending the laminate flooring up the stairwell. Then we would have to get the guy in to measure it, and convince him to install it before we moved in on Saturday. It was too impossible, too terrible for words.

“We’ll look up a way to get it out,” Perfect Husband assured me.”Now let’s paint a bathroom.”

So we did.

So we did.

The next night I called my mother AND my decorating-expert friend and moaned to them for a good hour and a half. Finally I had to face the fact that:

a) I wasn’t going to be able to sleep until I KNEW that I could get the paint splotches off the carpet

b) that it was becoming ridiculously late and

c)… I wanted my mommy. If Mum were within 500 kilometres of me I know she would have been there, armed with special paint removing solutions and a scrub brush, got down on her knees, and not risen until my carpet was saved. But she’s SIX THOUSAND KILOMETRES AWAY. I’m married and a homeowner. I’m supposed to be all grown up, but once again I just wanted to run from those paint splotches right into my mother’s protective arms. For the first time it really hit me how badly I miss having my mother at my beck and call.

But my mother couldn’t come save me, so instead, I set out at ten o’clock at night armed with nail polish remover, oxyclean and rubbing alcohol (all scrounged from the bathroom cupboard) to try and remove paint from carpet. Perfect Husband stayed behind to continue packing. Alone in my new home that night, I learned two more things – I may not be my mother, but I could get paint out of a carpet and… hire professionals next time.

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