I'm blogging on my phone from the rollaway bed in Alice's room, at 5 a.m., while rubbing her hand to try and coax her back to sleep. I spent the last 4 hours on Jack's bottom bunk. Both are decidedly "NOT TIRED." I think Jack did eat about 25 cookies and have no less than 6 cups of cocoa at the Christmas party last night, so maybe that? Maybe just breaking in the new house? I'm not sure, but me tired. Send prayers and caffeine, because it's Christmas break. Oof.
In theory I love Christmas break. But this year our home is absolutely infested with boxes. We can't find the remote needed to set up our tv on our new wifi, so Christmas movies are out. We've been so focused on getting 100% of our things moved out of our rental house, which we did on Saturday night. So now I have a 3-day runway to harness the Christmas spirit. I'm REALLY looking forward to a cozy, settled Christmas next year with nary a box to unpack.
It's been another fun, if overwhelming, week. We had wallpaper installed in 2 rooms on Thursday. As a design enthusiast this was a dream, but requires a lot of decision making and work because we needed to prep and paint the ceilings and trim first. In our "office" we installed a forest mural and picked a pale buttercream color from the background for the ceiling and baseboards. It turned out beautiful, at least in natural light. The overhead lights turn it orange, but luckily it's a south-facing room so we don't really need overhead lights in there. It has a great vibe now and we've started calling it the Tree room. It isn't really an office anyway--it houses our piano and Jared's painting desk, so more of a "hobby" or arts room. It is an excellent room for watching the sunrise and sunset.
The other room we wallpapered was our little powder bathroom. We chose a moody, jewel-toned marbled print. I ordered a sample about 3 weeks ago so I could pull a color from it to paint ceiling/trim before wallpaper was put in. Unfortunately, after 2 weeks of waiting, my order was refunded because the sample was out of stock. At this point we were cutting it pretty close to get a sample in time to paint before installation. I ordered form a different vendor on expedited shipping. It still didn’t arrive in time. I ended up choosing a color based on how the wallpaper looked on the website. Lesson learned: don't do that.
We narrowed our ceiling/trim paint down to a jewel-tone blue, purple, or raspberry. Down to the wire, we decided to take a chance on blue. Painting the room was a LOT of work. My brother Chris helped me install a beautiful piece of ribbed trim on top of my baseboards. Unfortunately, the ribbed detail was pretty much impossible to prime by hand, so we tried a spray primer. This worked much better, and I knew we would need to spray the paint on too. We have only ever painted by hand. Spraying is a whole different beast. We had to immaculately tape off and wrap everything in plastic that we didn’t want paint on—the floor and toilet being the biggest areas to protect from overspray. Jared manned the sprayer and did a great job—the trim, ceiling, and door were all a beautiful cobalt blue by the end of the evening.
The next day, wallpaper installers came and told me that due to the half-drop pattern match in our wallpaper, we would not be able to wallpaper from floor to ceiling. Luckily they were able to wallpaper the top 2/3 of the room, and we will wainscot the bottom third later. It looks great! I’m really happy with the bold pattern we chose. But. The cobalt blue trim/ceiling we agonized and labored over is the wrong color for the room😑 The wallpaper is more muted in person than it was on the screen, and the blue is too bright for the paper. I'm not sure we have it in us to mask everything off again to spray a new color—especially since last time we got a lot of overspray on the walls, which we can’t afford to do now that wallpaper is installed. If the blue was more of a navy it would be fine. If we went with a dark raspberry color from the paper it would be even better. I just know we don’t have it in us right now to repaint between Christmas and unpacking, and general painting burnout. I could leave it and just add the wainscoting in the same bright blue color, but I'm leaning toward waiting until we can repaint everything. I really want to get this room right.
Lots more to say from this week, but I'll let the pictures and captions do the talking since that design saga was already more than you bargained for.
^^Sunrise in the tree room.
^^Jack's school Christmas program! Last year he was so anxious and looked absolutely miserable on stage. This year he enjoyed and looked forward to it. I feel hopeful when I think about how far we've come this year since the same time last year, even if we're a little bit drowning at the moment.
^^Our color candidates for the powder bathroom trim. In fairness to the blue we chose and ended up not loving, none of these final 5 swatches ended up being a great match once our wallpaper was installed. Another testament to not choosing paint color based on a screen image of a wallpaper. If we repaint, we will likely go with a burgundy. I'll share pictures once it's closer to finished
^^Playing doctor with Alice in Jack's bunkbed. Too bad about the view.
^^Jack and I went on a date to my dad's choral concert while Jared "stayed back to finish cleaning out the rental." (In quotes because that's what he was supposed to be doing, but sounds like he and Alice went on their own date and mostly partied. He did finish clearing out the rental in the end so it's all good.) Jack lasted through most of the concert, which was filled with beautiful music. Jack was really into the first few songs, until his attention span ran out. He told me he loved the concert, but when my dad asked him about it he said it was "so boring." Oops. It was beautiful Dad! We stopped for pizza on our way home.
^^Alice dressing herself for the day.
^^My brothers and I made foot ornaments for my mom for a gag Christmas gift at our family Christmas party yesterday, which was so fun. We had the best food and fun with chimes and Bingo. It was an amazing way to spend an evening leading up to Christmas.
