Homework Hide-away

Back to school!  We’re on a year-around calendar, so my oldest has been back to school since July, but lots of kids are going back right around now.  Back to school means back to homework!

I don’t know about your house in the afternoons during the school year, but my house is c-h-a-o-s starting at about 3:30 pm.  The dynamic of the kids when Justin gets home is crazy, everyone’s excited, a little tired, ready for a snack… and then it’s homework time.  It’s hard to settle in and get focused for my 7 year old, he’s always complaining about being distracted by his sisters.  So when I saw the Homework Center idea in Family Fun magazine I thought it was the perfect solution!  He can sit at the kitchen table, near to me as I start dinner incase he has a question, while still having a bit of privacy.

Homework Hide-Away

I made it 2nd grade friendly, so no calculator or anything too advanced.  I started with a large tri-fold display board and added all the things to make homework easier.  I wrote important dates and meetings into a desk calendar and attached top and center with large clips…

Homework Hide-Away - desk calendar

I mounted foam frames to the board, leaving the top backs of the frames free from adhesive so that I can easily slide photos into the frames.  I used some of his favorite photos from our summer vacation to get him started, and I’ll switch them out as the year goes on and he has new favorites.

Justin brings a sheet of spelling words home every week and has assignments using those spelling words every night, so I cut up a folder and mounted the pieces onto the board to use as pockets.  These hold blank paper on one side for his assignments, and the spelling words on the other.  They can also be used to hold any other worksheets or study sheets he may bring home.

Homework Hide-Away - paper pockets

I mounted a small plastic sliding box to hold pencils, pens and highlighters…

Homework Hide-Away - pencil box

And some large paper clips to hold any fun extras or small notes.  I stuck a RecycleGuys.org trading card in one of them to get him started…

Homework Hide-Away - paper clips

I left the entire bottom center of the hide-away empty so that he can add his own personal touches… tape up his art work, add stickers, whatever he wants to make it his own.

As you can see, it’s a hit!  He likes to call it his “office.”

Homework Hide-Away - his "office"

A note…

I’ve decided to fire this blog back up! I started it back in 2007 as a place to write about my life as a Mom of 2. Now, in mid-2009, I’m a Mom of 3 (!) and I’m busy, busy, busy!

I’d like to change the direction of the blog a bit and make it about my crafts, projects, recipes and anything else I may spend time creating. I’ve deleted a lot of old posts, the ones of more personal nature, and left a few on topic. Take a look around, and add me back to your blog reader of choice if you’d like to see what I do next!

Thanks for reading!

and now she has curtains. sorta.

Another step towards finishing Kat’s room.  Curtain rods!

I had a bit of a hard time finding exactly what I wanted.  It didn’t seem like I was asking for much… white, wooden, double rods, with the main rod having some girth, and finials that were pretty and yet simple (but not too simple!), and still substantial in size (I wanted them to stand out a good bit against the darker paint).  As it turns out, I’m lucky to find double rods at all locally, forget about white wooden ones fit for a little girl’s room.

So I stumbled upon the JCPenney website and found these on sale.  I had some issues with JCP customer service (rude responses, not answering my questions, etc)… but the rods finally arrived, in one piece and they’re perfect.  Yay!  (Still undecided as to whether I’ll shop JCP again.)

The curtains are Pottery Barn Kids chambray curtains that used to hang in Jag’s room a few years ago.  We’ve changed the colors of his room since then and they no longer matched, so I’d packed them away hoping to reuse them.  While they aren’t exactly what I wanted for Kat’s room, they’re close enough that I’m not going to bother spending money on something new.

As you can see, some of the panels are a lot shorter than others.  I bought 4 panels in all originally, but only ended up using 2 in Jag’s room.  I bought the extra long panels because they were on clearance, so I had to shorten them for his room.  So the other 2 panels are still extra long.  I can’t let out the hem on the shorter ones because even with a wide hem, there’s still not enough fabric to reach the floor, so I think I’ve decided to cut the long panels down to match the short ones, then sew a wide white eyelet ruffle to the bottom of all 4 panels so that they reach the floor.  (I recently saw some wide eyelet ruffle sold by the yard at Joann’s – it will match Kat’s crib skirt perfectly!)

I realized after taking this picture, that after I get the curtains hemmed and trimmed, all I’ll have left is to paint the dresser and hang wall art!  Not that those are especially small jobs, but they’re not huge either so I feel like I’m almost done!  Yay!

teacher appreciation week

This week is Teacher Appreciation Week, so I’ve put a few things together for Jag’s teachers (both the primary and assistant teachers).  They looked so pretty sitting on the dining room table (my gift/decor holding area – not like we use that room for anything else!), I thought I’d snap a picture.

Today I sent in hand-dipped (by me!) chocolate pretzels, so those aren’t pictured here.  The gift bag in the back is classroom supplies – dry erase markers and eraser.  The yellow and green tin watering cans each have a cactus and gardening gloves (in colors matching the cans).  And up front, my favorite chocolates – Lindt truffles, assorted flavors.  Mmmm!

Jag’s also going to sit down and write each teacher a thank you note to take in this week.

prettying up the house

Is “prettying” a word, and if so, did I spell it correctly?

Anyway.  Speaking of cameras and pictures…

this is what I’ve done in my foyer.  I’ve been collecting a variety of stuff to decorate my house with for a couple of years now, and a lot of those items still haven’t been hung or set out.  Seriously, two posts previous when I said I’m a slacker?  I meant it!

So this is where I finally started.  Right inside my front door.  The mail/postcard rack was a clearance find at Pottery Barn last year.  Frames were purchased during one of Michael’s 50% off sales year before last (hence the old prints in them – I need to update those), antique cameras were gifts from my antique-savvy Mom several years ago (there are a lot more I haven’t put out yet!) and the little red table was actually a recent find, 30% off at World Market (I also got a smaller, matching one that is sitting on the opposite side of the front door but I have nothing on it or over it yet).

A little progress in my Finally Decorate the House project! 

floor sneak peek

We’ve been super busy with this whole new floor project, but thought I’d take a minute to post a quick pic I took last Friday of the breakfast nook.  This room has been grouted now too, but we’ve moved the fridge and some other random things in there while we work on the main part of the kitchen so I haven’t taken updated pictures yet.

I’ll scrounge up some time to post more later – hope you all had a Happy Easter!

there’s no turning back now!

And I’m freaking out!!

We finally made a tile decision over the weekend.  We ended up going with something that’s sort of a grayish, brownish and maybe even a slight hint of greenish (if you look in last week’s picture, it’s on the very top right, although the colors look different in our kitchen).  Don’t tell Jason, but I’m having doubts again.  I don’t think he’s keen on taking 22 boxes of tile back, so I’m going to give it a couple of days to see it in different light.  Even if I don’t love it, I think it does look *okay* and honestly I’m not sure I care enough to start the decision process all over again.  So we’ll see.

After we got the kids to bed, Jason started ripping up the vinyl floors and I started to panic.  OMG, we’re doing this!  We can’t change our minds now!

I know in the end we’ll be glad we did it, but right now I’m wondering why we thought it was worth the chaos we’ll have to live in for the next… well, however many weeks it takes to scrape the adhesive off the concrete floor.  ;-P

Jason started ripping everything up so fast, I didn’t have a chance to get before shots (although I have a couple of decent pictures of the kitchen that I took a couple of years ago when we thought we were putting it on the market so I’ll dig those up later), but I did grab the camera and get a couple of the lovely concrete slab and adhesive.  These pictures are poor quality, but you get the idea…

Next on our decision list:  carpet!  I brought home a sample board of frieze, want to get that decision made ASAP so we can get the ball rolling on that as well.

new floors! – a home improvement project

This is going to be a loooooong, drawn-out project (like pretty much every project we do, ha!)  I’ll document with posts and photos as it progresses.

First, I have to tell you a secret.  The floors in my kitchen?  Not wood.  Nope.  It’s VINYL!  Vinyl that looks like wood.  Okay before you groan and say “ew,” I will tell you that I can’t count how many times someone has come into our house and said “beautiful wood floors!”  Granted, that’s before they actually walked on the floor.  But totally fooled, so it’s always made me feel a little better about it.  (The wood floor in my foyer is not vinyl however.  I love it, and it stays.)

A little back-story:  when we built the house 4.5 years ago, we asked for an estimate on putting wood floors throughout and actually didn’t think the number was that bad, but the real estate agent/builder’s rep (who was awful to deal with, just awful) told us it would be even cheaper to do it ourselves later.  We believed her and had them put in this wood-looking vinyl in the kitchen, breakfast nook and laundry room to hold us over until we got around to getting the nice floors in.  Welp, we never got around to it (ha, another typical story for us) and come to find out, it’s way more expensive for us to do than it was to have the builder do it.  She was on crack.  And we should have done our research.  So here we are.

Okay so with that out of the way, I’ll also say that we have decided to stay in this house a little longer (and by little, I mean more than a year, less than 4 – we don’t have an exact number).  Since we aren’t here for the long haul, we’ve decided now against the wood floors throughout.  It’s just not worth it to us (we’ve got another idea for that money now – more on that later).  So we’ve decided to replace vinyl floors with tile and replace our old, crappy builder’s carpet with new, pretty carpet.

Yay for new floors!

Um, except booo on picking out new floors!  I never realized how overwhelming, exhausting and just plain NOT FUN picking out tile is.  I’m not enjoying it.  I’ve got a stack of tiles too heavy for me to even pick up by myself and none of them look right to me.  We have different light in different parts of the room, so tiles that look good in the natural light of the breakfast nook look like junk in the artificial light of the kitchen, and vice versa.  Really frustrating.

I’ve gone from darker tiles to lighter tiles; from grayish tones to brownish tones.  Nothing is striking me.  And I need something to strike me before I can commit to it.

Jason saw a discount/factory outlet type tile place in town, so that’s our next stop.  Cross your fingers for me, hopefully something there will be perfect and maybe I’ll get lucky and it’ll be inexpensive too!

Oh and on the bright side?  I *did* find carpet that struck me!  Hopefully I can find tile that works in the kitchen AND coordinates with the carpet because I really love the carpet.  More on that when we’re done dealing with tile!

chalkboard: the final-after shot

All done!  I endured the 3 day wait, “conditioned” it as the can of paint instructed, and now I’m free to write and draw anything I can I dream up!  Yay for chalkboard paint!  (I actually wrote that on the chalkboard, hehe!)

final color

Welp, painting is done!  There are a few touch-ups that need to be done, but otherwise the bulk of the work is over and I can show a semi-after photo!  (I’ll show a final-after photo when the whole room is done, of course!)

I’ll admit, that dark pink was really overwhelming for me at first.  I walked into her room several times over the course of the day yesterday, looking at the color in different lights, trying to decide if I loved it or hated it.  I think I’m starting to love it.  And once I get all her furniture painted white, I think it will help immensely.  As you can see, it’s pretty cute with the white bookshelf!

Still so much to do, though… paint the crib and dresser, sew some curtains, make or buy wall art (most likely I’ll make most of it, I’ve got a lot of ideas – too many actually, she doesn’t have enough wall space for everything I’d like to do)… but I’m motivated now, so hopefully I can crank it all out quickly.  I’m making it my goal to have it finished by her birthday at the end of April.

Oh, and speaking of making things myself… I quickly painted up a letter “E” for her bedroom door last night in-between feeding the kids dinner and Jason getting home.  I used a purple floral patch from her quilt as inspiration.

(I bought a “J” for Jag’s door too, but he’s decided he wants to paint it himself, so it’s in the works… )