Lots of progress, but not quite complete

The room has been painted. It is "Bramble Tan."
The table is assembled. It is shorter than we thought, but still looks good.
The bar stuff is back in the room.

The fabric for curtains?
Well.. I went to Fabricland (Fabricland!) and looked through every single aisle of fabric. I looked at the pre-made curtains, the drapery fabric, the clothing fabric, even the vinyl, but found absolutely nothing that I wanted to make curtains out of.
I left, discouraged, and went to the paint store to pick out paint.
It took me a while to find the colour that I thought would work well.. something that had some sort of colour to it, but was still neutral enough to not cast any colour onto our computer monitors when we are editing photos (speaking of photos, I'll mention something at the end of this post). I also figured if the paint was fairly neutral, finding fabric to go in the room wouldn't be too difficult.

I brought the paint home to Ryan who was priming while I was gone. He asked me about the ceiling. Crap. I forgot to pick up white paint for the ceiling. So... he went off to the store to get that and I went off to do more shopping in the hopes of finding something to use for curtains.

I went to Zellers, Zehrs, Canadian Tire, and Walmart, but didn't find any curtains to go in that room. Nothing seemed to work. Nothing was fun. I even looked at shower curtains, tablecloths, and plain fabric at those stores. I returned home, frustrated with my lack of progress.

Ryan had painted the room when I was gone and it looked good! Furniture was also started to be assembled. As I said earlier, the table was shorter, but that's okay. It's still taller than the table in the kitchen, but shorter than one would expect a bar table.

Off to the mall on Sunday. Checked various stores then went into Zellers to see what they had (different Zellers than Saturday). Found nothing of interest in the curtains section or the sheet section, so off to the tablecloth section we went. Finally, we found some good striped tablecloths that I think will work.

So. No pictures of the before and after yet, but once I make the curtains and we finish putting the room together, I will post that. Hopefully it will be within the next week.

** the photo portion I was going to mention. I started a new blog for my photography. So far there is only one post, but I plan to add to it regularly. Vic's Pics

Have a good weekend, everyone!

sprucing up the ol' homestead

This weekend Ryan and I are going to make the computer room/bar look nicer. We already purchased a nice bar-height table and stools that will be going in there and Ryan got a new laptop, so we will no longer have a need for an actual desk to house a desktop computer. The new table will be our workspace for our laptops and also entertainment/eating/drinking space for other times. We will be changing the colour of the walls in there since they are currently some peachy pinkish colour that they've been since I moved in here in late 2005. Other room colours changed at that time, but I didn't know what to do with the little room.

In preparation for the update, Ryan got to work taking the ugly chair rail off and pealing what we thought was wallpaper off the bottom half of the walls. Turns out it was burlap and apparently this was the in thing to put on walls back in the day. So now the burlap and chair rail is gone and we have normal-ish walls to work with.

Tomorrow I am on paint and fabric duty. I must go to the store and find some good paint for the walls and I still don't know what colour to use in there. We need something neutral because we'll be doing a lot of photo editing in that room. Our furniture is dark brown, so I will probably go for a taupe or a grey. We'll see what jumps out at me when I get to the store. The fabric is for curtains, which I will make. Maybe I'll just go to the fabric store first and find some fun fabric, then go to the paint store and find something to go with the fabric.... could be a plan.

I'll have to see if I can find a picture of that room for a "before" shot and then do a nice photo of the improved room after the weekend.

Random Updates

Seeing as my last post was the first in almost a year, I thought I'd do a short random update post today.

So.. here are some highlights of the past year.

Ryan and I got married June 21, 2008



We went to Cuba for our honeymoon



Ryan and I went to Las Vegas at the beginning of December where I ran the half marathon. Here are two photos taken by Ryan.

My goal for the race was to finish in under 2 hours, but I did it in 2:00:37. Bah! Still not bad for a first half marathon. I'll have to beat that time in my next half, which will be in Ottawa on May 24th.

My next post will be more interesting. I promise.