When I found out we were moving to Japan, there were many question I asked myself. Where would we live? Would I have a job? Would we take out dog, Paul? Will I ever be able to find pants that go past my knees?

As we started working on the details of our impending move over the fall, the answers to those questions became much clearer (on base in a townhouse, yes–I would begin telecommuting part-time, we had the option to bring Paul–but  because of our small yard we elected to send Paul to live with family in North Carolina, no–but  thank goodness Gap and Banana Republic mail to foreign bases). But one question that I was never able to find the answer to was “Would I be able to feed my addiction to spray painting?”

If you’re a longtime blog reader–you know that many of my home improvement projects involve spray paint. Don’t believe me? Check out the guest room, the nursery, and the man cave for just a few of the many items in our house reinvigorated with the elixir of life…ahem, I mean spray paint. Would I be able to continue repurposing? Friends…I now have that answer.

Ta Da!

Yes…only five minutes away from me right here on base at the Navy Exchange Depot (kind of like a mini office max/home depot) is a great little selection of Krylon Spray paints. Boy am I relieved! So you can look forward to many more spray paint projects over the next few years. It’s the little things…

And my cousin Steve and his son Travis tagged along (That’s Steven with Miles not Steve with Travis…Travis is 16 and is much larger than that ).

They held lots of babies, ate a lot of good food, and while they where here they knocked quite a few things off my Honey Do list!

This is a shot of our kitchen (please excuse the awful curtains by the sliding door and the boob lights…this was before we replaced them…oh and the dog treats and hairdryer on the counter). See that random little cabinet? I HATE it. The placement is great for holding spices and such for cooking on the stovetop, but it’s so tiny that when I get the spices out I ended up knocking half of them down practically every time! Arrrg. And it looks so strange, this one random little cabinet.

So when the Missouri clan came to town they immediately took to work

Here is the Hubby and my dad evaluating how to best take down the cabinet.

Well once they took down the cabinet, they discovered that the wall behind it was the original 1963 wall. So they had to build it up a bit, sand it down, and then paint it yellow to match the rest of the kitchen. This part actually killed me a bit, because I hate the yellow paint in our downstairs, but we couldn’t repaint everything right now, so, we had to buy MORE of the paint I hate for now. Grumble grumble.

While the paint was drying, my cousin Stinky Steve (that’s his nickwhipped up some shelves and brackets based on these that I found online. Yes, I decided it was time to jump on the open shelving bandwagon!

And this is how they turned out! I just love them. I bought these baskets at Target (they’re dvd storage baskets) and plopped all my spices in there. My spices all have black lids, so I used a silver sharpie to label them all, and now I have easy access and it looks so much nicer!

I just love my new little shelves! Thank you so much Steve, Dad, and Hubby!

*As a side note, my hubby was gone when I bought this, and I tried to move it upstairs in our condo by myself. Bad idea. I ended up punching a hole in our wall. Oops.

When we redid the Man Cave last summer, I moved the desk up to the guest room. It didn’t really match the decor of the guest room as a wood desk, so I painted it white. It looked so sweet tucked in the corner.

Alas, it lost it’s place in that room when we started making the guest room the nursery. That’s when I decided to make it a changing table (but later almost regretted that decision in great the boot meltdown).

But sanity prevailed and my hubby sanded her down:

We slapped a quick coat of teal paint on her, and then the Hubby sanded her down again. And this was the end result:

I just love how it turned out–it was so EASY! I’d say all together it took about 30 minutes to complete. And that’s how one desk has had three lives in just three years!

First up, the cribs. Aren’t they adorable? I love those crib skirts turned out. And that dresser was in this room back when it was a guest room. I have some little white starfish that I’m going to put on the walls above the cribs when I get around to it…I’ll be sure to post more pics then!

Moving around the room you can see the desk we painted, that will be our changing table. I LOVE how it turned out. I’ll do a full tutorial on how we refinished it in the next week or so.  I still need to get a changing pad for the top of the desk, and replace the pics in those frames above the changing table, but then that part of the room will be finished.

Here’s a better shot of the changing table and the bookshelf that the hubby refinished. It was laminate and he was very skeptical of painting it, but he obliged his pregnant wife and put in a little elbow grease, and I LOVE it (another tutorial to follow). You can see the little shadowbox I made last week above the bookshelf.

And last but not least, the other side of the room. Remember the little seahorse wallhanging I made? That rocking chair was part of our Halloween decor, but a bit of paint later and TaDa–fit for a nursery. I still need to find a new lampshade for that little lamp (I’d like it to match the Blue lamp on the other side of the room) and a different tablecloth for the side table, but then it’s done. I love how that board and batten wall treatment looks behind everything!

And there you have it! I’ll do some close-ups and a breakdown of prices in the next few days–but I CAN tell you right now that the whole room–furniture, mattresses, artwork, curtains, etc.–cost well under $1000.

Speaking of a house, that’s about how big I feel these days. Here’s my most recent “bump” pic. But I think we can all agree that it’s a little larger than a bump these days!

Any-who. I’ve known for awhile that I wanted to do a shadowbox for the nursery, but I wasn’t sure what I wanted to put in it. So when I had a small piece of burlap leftover from my crib skirts, I decided to start working on my little shadowbox.

I started by just pinning the burlap to the back:

I busted out a bunch of shells, starfish, driftwood pieces, and such that I already had on hand, and started playing. I finally settled on using all the little shells to create a monogramed “M” (the first letter of our last name). I just used a little hot glue and glued them into place after I’d settled on the design. Lastly, I put a little sand and some random shells and such in there. Here’s how it ended up:

And since I already had the box, the burlap, the glue, and the shells, this project was FREE! Love those sorts of projects!

Now, if you’ve ever been in the market for a cribskirt, you know just how flipping expensive they are. Seriously, folks, need to make a few extra bucks? Go into the cribskirt-making business. The cheapest skirts I found were for $19.00 at Target, and since we need two, it’d be $40 just for cribskirts. I just couldn’t do it! So my ol’ friend burlap and I decided to work together. I should warn you that this is the most ghetto-fabulous cribskirt you’re likely to come across–but it looks great, and that’s what matters, right?

First, I grabbed some of this stuff.

It’s the first time I’ve ever used it, but I’ve read rave reviews out there in blogland, so I decided to give it a chance rather than break out the ol’ sewing machine. I took my burlap and measured enough to reach from the mattress to the floor around two sides of each crib (the other sides are against the wall). Because I have this funny bracket in the cribs, I ended up cutting two pieces (1 per side) for each crib. I “hemmed” the bottom of the pieces, and one side of one panel for each crib (the only vertical edge that shows). As for the efficacy of the Heat n Bond–it worked pretty well, not amazing; I wouldn’t use it on a pair of pants, but it was good enough for this project. And it was speedy–just iron and you’re done!

I then put it in the crib and safety pinned it to the springs (I told you–ghetto fabulous).

I folded the edges around those funky brackets on the corner, and made sure the finished vertical edge was right on the corner, so it would be, for the most part, hidden behind the leg.

I put down the mattresses (recently purchased for us by my dad–thanks dad!) with the light blue sheets I just bought, and lastly I tied on the adorable bumpers from The Company Store .

I just LOVE how they turned out!

Now all we need are some babies to go in there…although I have to admit that these cribs look so expansive now. These little babes might get lost in there. Luckily, they each have a little sleep sheep (courtesy of the Hubby’s mom–thanks Barb!) to keep them company.

So there you have it, how I used $12 and many, many shortcuts to make two crib skirts!

Back when the Nursery was a guest room, the one thing that drove me CRAZY about the room was the ceiling fan. I didn’t like the shape of the light or the blades and the wood didn’t match anything in the room. But, a guest room ceiling fan just wasn’t at the top of the home improvement priority list.

So when we started working on the nursery, I knew that a lighting fixture for this room needed to move right to the top of the must-buy list!

All the finishes in the nursery are silver, so I wanted a silver fixture, I debated whether we really needed a fan or if we could go with just a plain fixture. In the end, I decided the option to have the windows open and have a cool breeze here in SoCal is pretty nice–so fan it was. I found this one for $117 on Amazon, not too bad. With our Amazon Prime it arrived in just two days (I LOVE Amazon Prime…if you buy much on Amazon, it’s definitely worth it). The Hubby went right to work installing it, and he had it up in no time. First the chandelier, then the boob light replacements, now this–he really is becoming quite the lighting installer. Here’s how it looks now:

I just LOVE it! And yes, as soon as we have a few more projects finished in the nursery I’ll be posting LOTS of pictures, I promise!

P.S. I hope you’re not getting too tired of all these Nursery projects–it’s kind of been our focus lately!

They were installed by the previous owner. I seriously don’t know what she was thinking! These types of  lights already kind of look like boobs on their own, but hang two of them together? All I see are BOOBS!

So we bought some light fixtures a few months ago at Home Depot. But when we took down one of the boobs to install them, we saw there was a huge footprint underneath the fixture that we would need to patch and paint. The problem? No more yellow paint (which I want to get rid of at some point, but that’s a MUCH bigger project). So we were going to have to paint the whole soffit another color, probably white.

UNTIL…I was putting away the paint for the nursery (I’ll be telling you all about my paint storage technique next week). And I discovered this little gem:

I was SOOOO excited to find this. You see, the lady who lived in the house before us left all her house paint, nicely labeled by room. However, she didn’t store it well, so most of it was pretty icky, and was the paint was degraded to the point where it didn’t match the colors on the wall anymore. That is, all the paint except for ONE can. And that can? The paint for the kitchen! Hurray! I had totally forgotten I had it.

So the Hubby took down the boobs:

And then he spackled the old holes and used an electric sander to sand down the rigid line in the paint where the boobs were:

Then he used that fabulous little sample of paint to touch everything up. I am SO happy we don’t have to paint that whole soffit now (which goes around the whole kitchen)!

Last, but not least, he installed the new lights. I LOVE how they look! See how they coordinate with the chandelier we installed a while ago?

So there you have it…the story of how I got rid of my boobs.

I was in the store, holding the seahorse in my hand, but two things made me a bit unsure about my purchase. Number 1: The shape was a bit ornate for the nursery I was envisioning in my head. And Number 2: At $49 the price was a bit steep for me. I started looking at this little guy a bit closer, and decided that I could make one of these fellows myself.

So off I went to Lowe’s where I picked up a small piece of plywood for a few dollars. I then sketched a seahorse onto the wood–a bit of a more nursery-friendly seahorse.

Then, using a jigsaw I borrowed from my co-worker Mike, I cut the little guy out and sanded down the edges (I will say, I don’t necessarily recommend jigsawing in your 6th month of pregnancy–the big belly can make it a bit hard to see what you’re doing). All in all, it took about five minutes or so.

Finally, using $1 acrylic paints in sea blue, teal, and white, I used a stiff dry brush to layer the color. I just love how it turned out!

Not to shabby, if I do say so myself–and for less than one hour and less than 1/5 of the price of the original. All the more I can spend on cute little boy clothes!

Well, we’ve been working on our nursery for what seems like months (okay, it has been nearly two months since we put that first brush to the wall). It’s been ALMOST done for quite a few weeks, we just needed to touch up the paint. So this weekend, I finally got around to doing the touch up work. And while touching it up, I looked in the nursery closet. And in my head I heard those screechy “Eee, eee, eee, eee” noises from Psycho. Because every time I look in that closet, I look right past those adorable baby clothes, past the box of children’s books from my childhood, past the thermal swaddling blankets. I don’t see those things, because all I can focus on is the horrible off-white color that looks especially dingy when compared to the bright white of the nursery paint, the spackle-filled holes where the previous home owners had installed shelves, the scratches, the nicks, the ugly blonde wood fronts of the shelving units. Ick! (I completely forgot to take a “before” picture, but believe me it was pretty bad.)

So i bit the bullet and I cracked open the cans of paint one last time. I hate painting, but I LOVE LOVE LOVE the outcome. It took me most of my free time on Saturday to paint that closet, but it looks GREAT now. And I’m soooooo glad I took the time to do it. Because it make those little baby things pop when you open it! I thought I was finished at this point…

But as I took this picture. I realized I hated that blonde wood. It doesn’t match anything in the room (and I think it looks kind of cheap). So…I painted those white, too! (I’ll show you a pic soon.)

So FINALLY I have the paint cans out of the nursery. Can I get a “Halleluja!”? They’re not completely put away, the’ve just been relocated to the garage where they await the few pieces of furniture I’m going to be working on this week. But at least they’re out of the nursery!

And with that, I’m taking the night off, relaxing on the couch with the Hubby and bonding with the babies: