Guest Room, Part 2: Painter's Tape Boogaloo

And the winner is...

"Talipot Palm" from Sherwin-Williams!

Mini Guest Room Update

Notice anything different?

Hmm?

How about from this angle?

No?

What if I supply this picture from the other day?

YES.

We got rid of the... weird... I don't know what it was, actually. Mum kept calling it an entertainment center, but whenever I ventured into Messy Room Land, it was always piled with clothes and treated as a dresser, so... I kept calling it a dresser. Which is weird, because it has no drawers.

Getting that thing out enabled me to move the bookshelf around to the other side, giving me more breathing space along the right wall.

Kara and I hauled it downstairs and out to the curb:

It wasn't that heavy, but when your hauling partner is a 14-year-old girl with weak arms, it gets dicey. 

The white boards are the disassembled rickety white shelf from the corner of the guest room that I covered in this post.

And those of you who left your opinions on wall colors on this post, thank you! I was pleased so many of you agreed with me, but I think my dad's decision will surprise you. Stay tuned!

The Fun Colors Post!

So where I left off yesterday, we had a freshly primer-ed guest room just waiting to get some color added.

I had spent nearly an hour at the Home Depot paint counter in pursuit of three sample Behr colors for the wall, and along with an older sample of Valspar, I had four colors to test on the wall. After all the cleaning, spackling, sanding, and priming, I was dying to get to the fun part--transforming the room!

So here are the samples in all their glory:

... So?

What do you think?

Do you love?

... Well for me, after I stepped back to take a better look at these samples, all I could hear in my head was a sad trumpet sound.

Yeah. Unfortunately, I'm not wild about any of these colors.

Let's take a closer look:

Guest Room Adventures

Remember how I said that the ultimate goal of moving my brother into a new bedroom was to ultimately convert his old room to a guest room?

Well, we got him moved out just in time for me to move in. Mr. Cheddar is off in training halfway across the state, and until he signs the lease on our oh-so-nerve-wracking fixer-upper, I am staying behind with Lucy. 

So while I'm sleeping on an air mattress, it's my job to get that guest room up and running to the best of my abilities.

If you remember from my last post, this is how the room started out:

I wasn't even able to get into the room to get different angles of the "before" pictures. It was mess-ay!

Now THAT'S Entertainment!

Remember this big brown monstrosity?

It's the entertainment center that used to be in our living room for most of the '90's and a lot of the '00's. 

My first idea was to throw the thing out. It's not the most solid piece of furniture in the world, it looks outdated, and the way it was dark and looming always made the room feel smaller.

But I know my mother, and she doesn't like to throw stuff out. So I immediately came up with Plan B: PAINT!

Six Seasons and an Art Show? Yes, please!

A lot of people may not know this, but I have this mildly dorky hobby of making fanvideos of my favorite shows and movies.

Okay I'm totally kidding, you all know this about me.

My favorite show is Community, the show NBC executives love to hate. The fans love to love that show, to the point that one resourceful fan has put together an art show, consisting of fan-made creations that run the gamut--drawings, paintings, plushies, and yes, fanvideos.

And I'm excited because three of my fanvideos will be featured in it!

Here is the information about the show today: Six Seasons and a Movie Art Show

If you're in L.A. or the surrounding area, please try to stop by! It promises to be a lot of fun.

Baby Bro's New Room

The weird thing about being so much older than my siblings (I was eleven when my sister was born and turned sixteen the day after my brother was born) is that I remember their entire lives. I actually picked both of their names! And the house my parents live in is nineteen years old (the same age as my other sister) so all three of my youngest siblings were newborns in the same house.

This room was the nursery my youngest sister was brought home to, decorated with sky blue paint and sponged-on clouds. In the fourteen years that have passed, the paint hasn't changed, even though it's been a virtual revolving door of room inhabitants. 

But now, enough kids have moved out of their house that my parents are able to have a guest room for the first time since my brother and I were babies, and they want to turn the biggest room into the guest room. Unfortunately, my baby brother is still living in the biggest room all by himself, so some changes were in order...

First: moving my brother into the smallest room. This is where we started on Tuesday.

It's needed a makeover for a while (a nine-year-old boy is already a bit too old for whimsical clouds and light blue paint, plus he's a big fan of the color red) and there was nineteen years' worth of nail holes and my other brother's anger management issues to patch up.

The Last Two Weeks in Instagram

Due to a death in the family and the resulting road trip, I had to save last week's Instagram update for this week. Prepare for a picture overload!

Okay, so this one technically isn't an Instagram, but I still Tweeted it. I think these two (Jeff and Shirley from "Community") are too adorable for words. He's Tinkle Town and she's Big Cheddar!

Life in Transition

Shortly after I started this blog, my husband got a tentative job offer with one of the police departments he'd applied for last fall. This department had offered him a job originally, but he had to turn it down in order to stay home and make his mother's last days as comfortable as possible. If we'd had the gift of foresight, we wouldn't have done it that way--his first day was going to be January 3rd, and his mother passed on December 23rd. We could've avoided a lot of family turmoil if we'd known.

But that's all in the past, and the gist of the story is: HE GOT THE JOB! We found out last Tuesday and since then, as he's been celebrating, I've been panicking. 

We'll be moving back to where we lived two years ago, which is a two-and-a-half hour drive from where we live now. Since we're both coming off of two years of unemployment, we have no money to put down for rent. Buying a house? That seems like a very distant dream.

But we looked at a friend's aunt's house today, and my nesting bug was biting. This house needed a LOT of love... starting with a complete kitchen overhaul.

Three words: particle board cabinets.

Our friend's mother-in-law, who was showing us the house, said, "Bless their hearts, I don't know what they were thinking." (Remember, "Bless his/her heart" means they're doing something questionable in the south.) 

The house was built in the early 1970's, which is evident in its spacious car port, vertical cedar exterior paneling, the surplus of wood-laminate wall paneling inside, the insanely large stove, and the questionable layout of the house. It's also on a wonky corner lot, which means the lush back yards Lucy's grown accustomed to will be no more. 

The picture is deceiving; the kitchen is so narrow that I couldn't back up to get a proper feel for the size of this thing. The four coils on the left make up the size of a normal kitchen stove... so the extra space to the right is just that, EXTRA SPACE. Those are actual dials along the back. I would be in love with this thing if it didn't look so close to exploding in person. 

The sink was uniquely huge, too. I didn't get a photo of it, but picture a typical stainless steel double-sink. Now picture that sink with huge stainless steel wings extending out to the sides along the counter, making it twice its size. What is the purpose of that? The world may never know.

The good news is, the house is a fixer-upper enthusiast's dream. It's already wired for gas (something I've never had in my entire life and I'd love to have in my next house) and it has, get this, FIVE bedrooms total. The bathrooms are misused closets, but there are three of them. All of them need some love, one of them will need to be completely re-done.

The floors all need to be re-done (the carpeting has to come up and I think we'll just go with wood floors), the walls need to be painted, one wall needs to be taken down, the closets need to be re-shelved, the exterior needs to be replaced or repaired, the roof needs to be cleaned and patched... are you getting an appreciation for the amount of work and money we'd have to put into this house?

On the one hand, it'd be amazing to transform it, and I know we can. On the other hand... I'd hoped for something less daunting for our first home. Mr. Cheddar and I are quick studies but we've never had the opportunity to be handy with carpentry or repairs. It would be really bad if we got this house and found out we were bad at it. I'm optimistic but I still have my moments of doubt. Moreover, I'll be doing the brunt of the work since Hubs will have a rigorous police schedule.

But this house is still a long shot. The financing needs to work out, and I don't want to force us into something that could be too much financially and creatively. 

Meanwhile I'll be between homes. I actually have nowhere to live as of Monday, but I'm trying to figure something out. So if/when the recipe and DIY posts stop, it's not because I quit blogging--it's because I'm living out of my car and thus have nothing to blog about.

Cupcake Photography!

How has your week been?

When I haven't been painting, I've been researching, studying, and practicing my photography.

I built a softlight box, used to light food shots.

My downfall is that my wonky schedule (go to sleep around 5 AM, wake up at noon or 1:00, such is the life of a cop and his wife) doesn't lend itself to photography by natural light. Anything I bake will be done around 4 at the earliest, which is already past optimal natural light time.

So I researched DIY softlights, since the $90 versions were unacceptable to me. And after a trip to JoAnn and Home Depot, I built myself a pretty awesome box.

Birchbox {June 2012}

I'm a big fan of Birchbox, but I wasn't very happy with my May samples. The only thing I got excited about was the BB Creme sample, which turned out to be an empty tube. I got too busy to contact Birchbox about it at the time, but overall, that box (ironically styled after "Gossip Girl" which was a disappointment all the way around in May) was a bit of a letdown.

Luckily, June picked up May's slack!

I got this in the mail on Wednesday and tore right into it. It's called "Jet Set" for summer traveling, which is a cool concept. This box was right up my alley.

Back Hallway Alcove

Whew, I thought this post would never get done!

I finished this bad boy over a week ago, but we were covered with heavy rain for five days, so natural light was scarce. When the sun finally came out, I was four and a half hours away in Charleston, S.C, for my grandmother's funeral. When I finally got back, it was overcast again, so I had to settle for these pictures. Just know, in natural light conditions during the day, this hallway looks a lot better.

So, remember me talking about the alcove at the end of our back hallway?

Well I really, really wanted to do a herringbone pattern in that alcove. I thought it would add some flair to an otherwise plain hallway.

Measuring the lines and keeping them straight was a challenge. I actually ended up having Mr. Cheddar do it, since math isn't my thing. And our leveler is that short red thing you see on the ledge! It's a miracle these came out straight.

Painting the Back Hallway

Ahh, baby poop brown!

What, that doesn't sound appealing to you?

Well, does it LOOK appealing?

Last Week in Instagram

I baked so much last week that I was SURE some of these pictures were from the week before. Alas, they are not!

Mr. Cheddar ordered me a Troy & Abed In The Morning mug from the NBC store. It brightened my mood about my favorite beleaguered TV show to have a little piece of merchandise from it. Oddly, except for the DVDs, I didn't own any Community swag before this mug, despite how much I love the show!