Ruler of the Elves

Well, the bedroom painting is finished! What a relief. We tackled it this past weekend and we couldn’t be happier with the results. If you remember, I had scored this can of Premium Valspar gray paint for just $2.50. (It’s the one on the right.)

It wasn’t necessarily the exact color we had originally picked out, so it was definitely a chance taken. However, it is honestly a perfect fit for what we were wanting to achieve. And it would not have been possible if it were for this little guy and a minimal amount of blue painter’s tape.

This is the Shur-Line edger and it is absolutely fabulous for making straight lines along the edges and saving a bunch of time that would have been spent taping. And we all know that extra time is priceless. Especially when it means you will be able to teach your daughter to ride her bike without the training wheels!

Back to the color…

Pinky grabbed her roller and got to work immediately once we broke out the paint. She had fun painting her name and shapes all over the wall and it was a great way to keep her occupied, yet involved in the entire process.

I love photographing this color in Pinky’s room. It seems that it gives off a different look depending on the lighting and time of day.

Sometimes it is very light and airy looking and other times it has a soft blue/purple tone coming through. I was somewhat worried that gray would kind of be a depressing color to be surrounded by, but this gray is just very calm and relaxing.

I think that Pinky is quite happy about her room transformation so far. Her exact words were “I can’t get it out of my head because it is so awesome!” I agree with her. We can’t wait to see how the room transforms as we layer it with furniture and accessories.

So that is our little update on Pinky’s bedroom metamorphosis. We hope you will stick around to see more details as we introduce them to the room!

This past weekend, the weather here was absolutely beautiful. The sun was shining, the temperature was warm, and the sky was bright blue. I don’t remember the last time Easter weekend wasn’t a big ol’ rainy mess. We spent plenty of time outdoors enjoying the weather and when we weren’t outside, we were in the kitchen working on these bad boys.

Yes, we chose to color brown eggs this year instead of the traditional white. I had heard somewhere that brown eggs tend to dye deeper shades and wanted to see what the outcome would be. Pinky thought it was a great idea, so we started by boiling these peeps and luckily only had a few casualties.

Then, after things had a bit of time to cool off, we whipped out our prepackaged coloring kits and the little miss got to work.

Note the tom-boyish appearance of our normally very girly daughter. Chris and Pinky had some sort of crazy thing going on with hats this weekend. I don’t know why they thought it was necessary to wear them in the 70 degree temps that we were having, but I decided that it was a battle I didn’t want to fight and let them have their fun. Head sweat is fun, right?

The colors took a bit of time to turn from the neutral brown into vibrant shades of pink, blue, green, orange and yellow, but it was totally worth the wait.

You can see that some of the eggs were cracked and scratched a bit from the process, but we like to believe that it just gave them more character. I really wish you could have witnessed the colors in person, because the pictures really don’t do them justice. They were just beautiful. Even the two eggs we intentionally colored to be the ugly eggs (a tradition I’ve passed on to Pinky) turned out to look pretty good.

When we were finished, we packed them all up and placed them in the refrigerator to chill overnight. Pinky made sure to write a note with directions on where to find the eggs and left it for the Easter Bunny. Then, she reluctantly brushed her teeth and went to bed.

In the morning, she woke up to find that her floppy eared friend had left her a note in return which stated “FOLLOW THE TRAIL.” She found the just a few feet away, a trail of bagged candies with pretty little ribbons was leading her out the side door. Along the trail, the Easter Bunny had hidden her eggs as well. She looked up, down, high and low to find every last egg and she scooped up the candy along the way too.

At the end of the trail, which led right up to our front door, she found this basket of goodies to go along with the over abundance of other yummy treats she had collected. FYI – if you were thinking about sending us some candy, you can go ahead and keep it for now. Our candy tank is full.

If you can’t tell from the photo, there are various art supplies, a stuffed rabbit catch and toss game, and sunglasses. Part of the basket was also a hat, which Pinky proudly modeled for us.

Overall, it was a great weekend. We all enjoyed our Easter and topped off the day with a great ham dinner. Yum!

Cleaning and organizing now aside, we have started the painting process. Normally, this would just include the walls of a room, but not if you are a part of my little family. I’m a DIYer and everyone else has no choice but to go along with it. (They hardly ever complain. *wink*) So of course, after we figured out what we wanted to do with Pinky’s room, I got to work figuring out where we would get the goods from. And I didn’t let things like the wrong hue hold me back.

Take this day bed from Ikea.

If you saw the mood board the other day, you probably remember this beauty, but in white. However, the Swedish super store only sells the bed in a lovely light blue tone, which is not the direction we wanted to go. No problem though. We quickly got to work transforming it’s cool baby blue to a crisp, bright white.

Then we ran into a problem. One that could have probably been easily avoided had I not tried to work with what I had. You see, painting with a small roller brush is good for certain things and this bed was obviously not one of them. So, we messed around with some sidewalk chalk for a little while we waited for Chris to come home.

Then we headed to the Home Depot…

to pick up some spray paint which will hopefully work better for more even coverage. We will test that out tomorrow. If not, I’m sure I will learn one of these days how to correctly do this stuff. In the mean time, have a happy Easter weekend, don’t eat too many sweets and stay tuned for more of Pinky’s Drab to Fab bedroom makeover.

Well, we’ve finished! Pinky’s bedroom is all done. Painting, cleaning, and decorating. At the last minute, we decided to go in a different direction, but we are still in love with the outcome. I know it may look a little mature for a 5 year old, but we thought it would be perfect for her, considering her 20 year old attitude. What do you think? Do you like it? A little?

Just kidding. April Fools’!

We’ve actually only finished the cleaning and prepping, but hope to start the painting tomorrow. I’m still battling some kind of sickness, so we will see.

In other news, I’m so excited that it is getting nicer outside. Today we spent some time in the sun and it was pretty great. I can’t wait until we can be outside everyday. I think the rest of the family agrees!

“Mom, do you really have to keep taking my photo?”

Top photo via Orlando Rob

Hopefully.

One of the items at the top of our priority list when we moved was getting Pinky’s room set up and finished before most everything else. Of course, we had to unpack our kitchen and all of our other necessities first, but now that all of that is done, it is time for some glamorizing of the small room Pinky chose. Enter exhibit A.

Of the bedrooms in our new house, Pinky chose the smallest room, most likely because it has a weird little closet over the stairs. (More on that later.) So, she and I put our heads together and tried to “design” a room that she would love, but that would also be easy on our pockets and not consist of an explosion of pink. Seriously, if she had it her way, everything would be pink. Everything. And that thought is quite scary to me, even though I generally like the color.

Here is a collaboration that we both agreed on. Exhibit B.

She had previously mentioned that she wouldn’t mind gray walls after both Chris and I vetoed magenta paint. Lucky for us, I found some super cheap gray paint while I was checking out the mistints at Lowes. Most of the items we already own, but there will be a few miscellaneous trips made to Home Goods and Ikea. Mind you, this mood board is not all conclusive and some of the items may have to be substituted, if for some reason we cannot get what we had originally planned for. I hope you will stick around to see how this room transformation turns out. We have a small amount of hope that it will be half as pretty as the mood board above.