Freshen up the Laundry Room

Our laundry room is a small space in the back hallway that's been getting upgraded slowly over the past year, including painting the oak cabinets white, painting the trim and walls, my dad building a custom shelf, and getting a new washer and dryer!

Laundry room before

Laundry room after with painted cabinets and new washer/dryer

Laundry room before

Folding shelf in progress

Laundry room now

The color is a shade of blue-ish periwinkle, but I don't know exactly because it was a can of $3 "mistake paint" from Lowe's.

Whatever the color is, it inspired us to go with a bit of an "underwater" theme; check out the porthole mirror with the whale swimming through it.

Other than the unflattering buzzing florescent light in there, our laundry room is pretty much complete and it feels good to have another space checked off the list! 

Future Foster Kids Room

This winter, we finally started to redo the third bedroom, dubbed "the kid's room." But we don't have kids and we're actually not "having" kids at all—our hope is that one day this will be the space for our future foster kids. 

Even though we still have a ways to go in the application process before actually becoming licensed foster parents, it was important for us to move forward and get the room "ready." It helps visualize actually having a child in there someday.

Before its makeover, the third bedroom was a very faint blue; there were lots of holes in the walls and the windows were a safety hazard as they slammed shut, so we knew we had repairs to make along with cosmetic changes. 

Here's a before and after shot:

(Third bedroom before)

(Third bedroom after)

The main changes include painting the room a light greenish/yellow (the color is Springtime in satin finish from Sherwin Williams); adding furniture, which is second-hand or from Craigslist; putting up branch-themed curtains and a matching modern branch stencil-cut desk chair.

There are also new vinyl windows that aren't a safety hazard anymore and an assortment of colorful art on the walls, including cute animals (from Fab.com), globes and maps, and magnetic strips for hanging personal photos or being creative with magnetic poetry.

The other two walls (not pictured) are still in progress. We have a second twin bed to put together and I want to put book slings on the wall in place of having a bookshelf.

The biggest challenge for this room is designing a space that could be for any child, any age, girl or boy (though I know my style leans more towards "girly"). I expect we'll have to make some changes as we go along, but for the initial setup our main goal is to have this room be a cozy, cheery and welcoming space for whoever arrives at our door someday.

Turkish Triptych

Remember this big blank wall behind "Maya's" new couch?

Well, we finally ordered a piece of art to display on it, and we love the way it came out.

It's a scene of the city of Istanbul that Tommie took during our honeymoon to Turkey in 2011.  

We were toying with the idea of getting panoramic prints for few of Tommie's photographs, but prices for large images can get expensive…add to that any frames and we were quickly looking at over a couple hundred dollars for just one piece of art.  

We have ordered several of Tommie's photos on 16x20 canvas before and have been really pleased with the quality, so when we noticed that Canvas On Demand was having a 70% off sale for a three-panel "PhotoSplit" (triptych), we jumped on it.  It cost $75 for what was normally $350.  One of the benefits of canvas is that no frames are required, saving additional costs.  

It took us a long time to decide which image to use.  Finally, we decided on the sepia mosque scene because we figured the coloring and the image itself would look great above the couch.  Even though it is one image broken up into three sections, serendipitously, each panel has two marionettes in it and could almost exist on its own.  (Each panel is 15x30 inches with a two-inch gap in between.)  

Our advice for choosing an image to use for a triptych is to go for a scene that was captured fairly close up and includes a large impact subject.  Each panel should look good on its own as well as together, and don't choose something that will be ruined by the breaks.  The hardest part is, of course, hanging them so they line up perfectly.  Let's just say there was a lot of math involved (not on my part or else they'd be way off.)