freehand painted t-shirt

Here is a pic i had in my drafts file and its so fun to see i had a style foe painting my animals even back then! :)( This was a draft post from 2011)

New bunk bed and a kids room makover

  I am so super excited to share my finally-finished kids room! For a good long while I had been planning, dreaming, and wishing to get the kids room to be to a place I was happy with decor and storage. I wanted a place that felt thought-out and intentional instead of looking like crowded mis-matched furniture from the side of the road (witch is pretty much what it looked like before).

    Getting the kids room to this point has been a long journey of slowly collecting things from thrift stores and yard sales. The black trunk was from the local thrift store as well as most of the toys. The ottoman under the window (also from the thrift store) is so great for reading books and nursing the baby. The wall-mounted doll house is something I love! Trent made it for Lizzy for Christmas last year. It's great for storing all her doll stuff and I really love how it looks in the room. I am a sucker for doll houses and dolls (as evidenced by my doll house and dolls pin boards). Can you spot three more doll houses in the photos above? I realized the other day that I have bought so many doll houses through the years that it is kind of silly. A while ago I decided to donate my least favorite ones to local thrift stores because they took up so much room. What can I say, when I see cute dolls or doll houses I honestly want every single one! Maybe someday when I'm rich I can own a doll house museum.
   Something I had wanted for a while was a room with enough room to play while simultaneously sleeping three kids. A few weeks before the baby was due, Everett, our third, was still sleeping in his crib in our master bedroom and we knew we had to figure something else out. With two twin beds filling the room, there was barely enough room to play on the floor, so there was absolutely no way a third bed would fit into the room. Thus the triple bunk bed was born! Trent built it in the closet space. He knocked the back of the closet out to take advantage of some unused closet space behind it (from the bedroom-turned-living-room remodel from several years ago).

    One of my favorite parts of the room is the apple crates we mounted on the wall (25 cents each at a yard sale!) They are a really fun way to store and display all the trinkets the kids collect. The metal basket has an awesome DIY story: while at the thrift store we found two stacks of six square metal grates; I decided to buy them and used cable ties to make two baskets with lids on them. The finishing piece was the dresser we got last week (we got it for $15 from some friends who were moving). We are so happy to finally have a place to put the kids clothes away. Ever since the closet was turned into a bunk bed we had no place for the clothes, so we had been shoving them in the colored crates and the toys were never really put away. It was kind of a disaster! Now that everything has a place, and when everything actually is in its place, the room is a dream come true for me and the kids!!

P.S. Right after this photo shoot things literally came crashing down! The tripod leg gave, the camera fell, and the lens broke! :(  It was only yesterday when the camera broke but I miss it already! Waah! Today is Evangeline's two month mark and I was planning on taking photos to document. My needs are nothing to Trent's though, he needs the camera to take photos of his paintings to send to galleries, collectors, for his website, and for prints. Nothing that important though, he just needs it to make a living!  Hopefully we can get a new lens at a good price. I'm OK with getting a nicer one though. :) We'll see, but for now I'll have to post using photos I took previously or really crappy ones taken with the kids camera or the camcorder. Sadness.