Video Blog: Tour of Upper Level Addition (Or, Making You Feel Better About Your Cleaning Habits)

Untitled from Heather Zebra on Vimeo.

Video Blog: The Home Addition, Part One (Or, how I show you how messy my house is)

Lower Level Addition Feb 2011 from Heather Zebra on Vimeo.

Part Two to follow next week!

Remodel Haiku, Or, Paint is Just Paint

Soon my son's bedroom
will be a shade of orange.
It may hurt our eyes.

He waffled between
choosing the green or orange
but chose the latter.

I think we may be
a little on the crazy
side of parenting.

If we have happy
and healthy and smart children
we will be happy.

Ringing in the New!

Thanks to the talents of Chelle, Cool Zebras finally has its own look instead of a standard Blogger template.

If you find/see any kinks, please let me know since I've tweaked a few things myself and I'm not that smart about things like this!

I've also started updating my blog roll, so if you want some linky love, start leaving me more comments!

Now tell Chelle how great the place looks!

M's New Favorite Place in the House

Thursday afternoon I made a purchase to add to M's room. For the last year at least, M has staked out a corner of our dining room table for her craft area. The papers and pens and projects have piled up. Not that it's just her stuff that gets piled there. I'm worse than she is, but I thought that my purchase might help us start to get the table back to where it should be...a place for eating.

So I got her this:

I got three plastic boxes to put her various notebooks and pens in, and the box at the bottom for her many, many papers that she accumulates.

Since her dad put the desk together last night she's been up there in her room quite often, music playing on her CD player and happily crafting away. And so far the stuff has been put back where it belongs, in the boxes. Promising.

Now if only her mom could get organized. You don't even want to see MY crafting/scrapping table. Or maybe the more accurate words are you CAN'T see it under all the stuff.

The After photos

A while back I posted before photos of my kitchen and living room and said I would post the after shots...and never did.

The painting is done (mostly). I want Craig to make some wooden valances for the windows too. But here are the after photos so far!

The before photos...

Please read and view the following post and tell me your opinions.

I'm likely to do what I want to regardless of your opinions, but I'd like them nonetheless.

Here are before photos of the proposed repainted areas:

Our house is not very big, if that matters.

Time for some audience participation...

I want to paint our walls in more interesting colors than white. I think it will make our home a prettier place to be.

It will take us a while before we are ready to paint, but I bought some sample sizes to test the colors I was contemplating.

Of course the color isn't that great in photos...but we'll work with what we have. I'm going to post the before photos in the next post.

Here are 2 colors I tested in the living area. I like one over the other, but I'm curious about what you all think:

The second photo is part of my kitchen. The third photo, a wall in the attached "dining room."
The last photo is of the corner between the living room and the kitchen. The colors will meet there and I'm not sure if the colors are too drastically different for this to work in our humble abode.

We also have this wrought iron handrail which is really what they use outdoors. What color should we paint that? (The next post will have a better photo of the stairs.)

Hey, I didn't post during the delurking week, so you all (what? 4 of you?) might as well delurk and tell me what you think of my plan!!