Before and after pics of our office/guest room

April 28, 2011

Tomorrow night we are having our first overnight house guest and I thought I’d share the before and after pics of our office/guest room.

I grabbed a few screencaps from the video I took before we started any work on our house. They aren’t the best quality but it’s all I have to use.

Dirty berber carpet, wallpaper under layers of paint, inconsistent wall texture



I edited out the piece of the house tour video that just shows the office. Please watch this short video to get a better idea what the room looked like before.

And here’s the after…

Ikea light-flltering curtains, sofa bed from Craiglist, trunk holds all of the bedding for the sofa bed

shelving and desk from The Container Store

See the roller shade at the top of the door? That's for guests to use for some privacy.

 

Here’s what we did in this room.

Wallpaper removal

Although the whole room was originally painted the same color, the bottom actually had layers of wallpaper under the paint while the top had texture. We removed the multiple layers of wallpaper before the painter came to take over after that.

Paint

In order to speed things up, we hired a painter to scrape our popcorn ceilings and paint all of the rooms. In this room, the painter also added texture to the bottom half of the walls where the wallpaper had been. Now the walls have a consistent texture from top to bottom. The wall color in this room is the same as the living room.

New floors

The old, dirty berber carpet was removed and Andy installed wood floors in here. We opted for floating wood floors that allowed us to install it ourselves.

New baseboards

Since the old baseboards were removed to install the wood floors, Andy put new baseboards in that are wider than the previous version and look a little more upscale that the standard ones.

Sofa bed

This room is not big so we had to be really careful to buy things that were just the right size and arrange them in a way that made sense. I did a bit of research and discovered that queen-size sofa beds were too wide for our room so we’d need a full-size sofa bed in order to make it work. After searching Craigslist a few times, I hit the jackpot with this one which was just the right size, didn’t cost us much and is like new.

Shelving

Since this room had no closet or shelving, we had to put some in place. We got this shelving from The Container Store (best. store. ever.) with a matching desk. Ordering shelving online and picking up in the store has some perks: you can use online discounts AND they’ll have all the parts assembled and ready to bring to your car.

Everything else

I got the light-filtering curtains at Ikea, the trunk (which holds all of the bedding for the sofa bed) was from 1 of our former living area and the shelf is from Target and used to be in Payton’s room.

Future plans

I plan to get a rug to go under the trunk to kind of ground the living room-ish area. My mom got us a couple of large, framed photos of bridges (I love bridges!) that will go on the wall where the dry erase board currently is. I also hope to get a drum shade to use as the light fixture in the room and get lots of matching document boxes to make the shelves look less cluttered and more cohesive. Oh, and some cord organizing. Those crazy cords under the desk must be driving Kam cuh-razy! Me too.

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I realized that we don’t have a little lamp that can be used by guests for some bedside lighting so I’m off to get one before our guest arrives! If anybody wants to come stay with us, please let us know. We officially have a place for you!

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Before and after pics of our new under-tree garden

April 18, 2011

My part-time – often full-time – job has become gardening. If you’d told me a few years ago that I’d be doing so much gardening, I would have thought you were crazy. Like everything else in this house, the outside is taking a lot of work. We bought the house last year after spring and we had to work on the inside first so we could move in. This is our first season to work on rehabbing the gardens in this house. The first garden took us a total of 30 hours. The second one took me maybe 6 hours.

And then there’s this garden which we actually created from scratch. Our Bradford Pear tree had giant exposed roots in our yard and lots of bare spots in the soil so we had to figure out how to deal with it. Our solution was to create a big under-tree garden.

Here’s what it looked like before…

Not sure the extent of the exposed roots can be seen here but basically, everywhere you see bare soil had roots at the surface.

And here’s the after…

Here’s a breakdown of what we did.

Here’s the order we did things in.

Victorian Edge

I didn’t want to use landscape edging on this garden because it’s such a large part of our front yard and it seemed like it would look like a big barrier. I kept seeing pictures of gardens without edging and couldn’t figure out how they were doing it. I finally found out that it’s called a Victorian edge so that became the plan for this garden.

I laid a cord all around the perimeter of the garden to see where we wanted the border to be and then I dug a trench along that line. My first pass was dug with me facing the tree and the second pass was dug with my back to the tree. The idea is that the garden will slope down into the trench so the garden stays contained without needing to put anything else in place.

Newspaper

Our next step was to get rid of the existing grass and weeds within the garden area. The trick with creating a garden under a tree is to get rid of the bad stuff without hurting the tree. We did this by using lots and lots of newspaper that we got from a community paper recycling bin. We took a single-wide section of newspaper that’s about 6-8 pages thick and dunked it in a bucket of water, laid it in the garden area and then dunked another section, overlapping slightly with the previous piece and so on. Andy called it garden paper mache.

Soil

After we had roughly a 6×6 section of newspaper laid down, we dumped soil on that spot. The point of the newspaper being wet is to keep it in place without blowing away. The wetness won’t last for too long so you need to dump soil on it as you go. We created about 4 inches of depth on the soil which ended up being 50 bags. In hindsight, we should have had a truck deliver the soil to our house.

Mulch

We laid a layer of mulch over the soil and then ran the sprinklers. This bed has 3 sprinkler heads around it and we used them to add moisture to the soil before we started planting.

Pavers

We set the pavers down on the damp soil, using the mulch to help level them.

Plant

We set the plants out all around the garden until we were happy with the placement. We planted per the usual instructions. This was a little trickier because the holes were dug right through the soil and newspaper we had just laid and into the ground which often had roots. We had to adjust a little here and there when we ran into a root.

Mulch again

We laid another layer of mulch again, making sure to put some around the pavers so they didn’t look like they’re sitting on top of the garden but were more flush with the ground (though they are still sitting on top a little too much, we know they’ll get pushed down as we walk on them). We also went around the edge and made sure to put mulch into the trench to create a nice border.

More water

New plants always need water so we watered some more to get them started.

Future plans

We don’t have much left to do but we will be adding a bird feeder this week per Payton’s request (she’ll be picking one out at a local feed store that has a lot of nice ones) and I want to add something with a little bit of height next to the mailbox.

Whew! That was a lot of work but our neighbors have been super excited for us and really encouraging (one neighbor lady said “when you said you were creating a garden, you weren’t kidding!”). They’ve lived next to a house that wasn’t maintained for so long (the HOA used to routinely put notes on the door to tell the previous owners to maintain their lawn) that they’re really happy to have somebody who cares.

We haven’t even touched the side yard or backyard so we have a lot to go but like everything else with this house, we just have to take it a step at a time. Three gardens down, five to go!

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Trip report from my visit to the Pacific Northwest

April 4, 2011

Kam asked that I write my Washington trip report on her blog so it’s just been published…all 4,178 words of it!

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3 new sites – want to see them?

March 22, 2011

Internet,
I’ve been so busy with work lately! I’ve also been working on the house a lot and we have a couple more rooms completed. House stuff will have to be in a separate post.

For now, let’s take a look at 3 new sites I’ve recently worked on.

CocosCuckooworld.com

 
I originally designed Courtney’s site but she wanted an update with new pics in the header. She’s one of my favorite people to design for because she sends me some ideas and then lets me do my thing. She loves my crazy collage headers and I try hard to include things that mean something to her. Nearly everything in her header means something to her (for instance, the sign is a replica of the chalkboard she has in her kitchen).

 

CaisBook.com

 
You may remember my interview with Caissie (which seems strange to say now as I feel like she’s a friend and you don’t interview friends – you just…talk to them.). Well, Caissie has a book coming out in May called Jane Jones: Worst. Vampire. Ever. (watch the trailer here and pre-order here) and I was so thrilled to be able to do the site for the book.

 

KellyClinger.com

 
Kelly, another friend I’ve met through Twitter and interviewed on my site, wanted her site redone. She had a blog and site as separate things and she wanted to bring them together and put a focus on her current work. Fun fact: we originally connected on Twitter because KC knows JT and when he Tweeted me about my ridiculous squeeing about him, she thought it was funny. We don’t talk about him much but that was where it all started. So excited to finally be meeting in person soon!

You may notice that I don’t include any info on blog design pricing on this site anymore. I discovered that my most successful projects were via people I know and not somebody who randomly Googled me. For now, this system has kept me steadily busy and working with people that I like.

I’ve got this week booked with work and then I’ll be out-of-town next week. If you know anybody that needs a site, I’d be happy to get started on it in 2 weeks. Just shoot me an email (shannonbarnesalbert at gmail dot com) and we can take it from there.

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Regarding negative comments

February 24, 2011

Some of you may have noticed a negative comment that appeared on the last post for a few days (and in the sidebar where recent comments are shown). The comment didn’t bother me (though it contained the “c word,” the most offensive part was the misuse of “your”…..TWICE!) so I left it up and even joked about it on Twitter. Ultimately, I decided to delete it because I wasn’t comfortable with having a vulgar word appear in my sidebar.

What has surprised me about the whole thing is the response I’ve gotten from other people. People who were shocked that I didn’t delete the comment right away, people who kept asking me who I thought it was (as the comment and IP address indicated, it was somebody in Wichita who wrote it) and people who said they’d be so upset if somebody had said the same thing to them.

I wasn’t upset, I didn’t take it personally and I had forgotten about it the next morning until I was reminded by someone. I’ve been online and participating in online communities for 15 years. Back then, the Internet was like the wild west. It was pretty much 100% anonymous and people said whatever they wanted to. I had people track me down at my job and harass me based on comments of mine that they didn’t like. I’ve had insults hurled my way on message boards. Many of these things bothered me a lot then but over the years, I’ve learned to deal with it. I’m actually shocked it doesn’t happen much, much more often than it does.

Here are my thoughts on dealing with negative comments:

  • “Nobody can make you feel inferior without your consent” is something Eleanor Roosevelt once said. Nobody can offend you unless you allow them to. If you find that something does offend you, it’s a chance to evaluate and figure out why. Don’t give your power to somebody spewing rude comments anonymously online.
  • Not everybody is going to like you and that’s OK. I love the concept of finding your “right people.” The more you are open and yourself, the more you’ll attract people who are right for you. The flip side of that is that you’ll also turn many people away. Would you rather have 1000 people reading your blog posts who kind of like you or 500 people who are big fans?
  • What if they are right? Not all feedback is wrong, especially if you seem to be getting enough similar feedback. It may not be fun to hear the negative comments but it might be an opportunity to learn something.
  • It’s your blog, you can do whatever you want. I tend to be a non-censoring blogger. I don’t approve comments before they are posted and I have to think reallly hard before hitting delete on a comment. On your blog, you can do whatever you want. Just as you make the rules in your own home, you can decide how to handle things in your online “home.”
  • If negative comments are frequent, you might be part of the cause. There are some people who claim to often have issues with “haters” online and seem to always have some drama around them. That isn’t the norm so if you’re running into it a lot, you might be putting out the wrong messages to invite that kind of feedback.

Everybody online has had to encounter this at some point. What kind of rules or thoughts do you have on dealing with negativity online?

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Mourning what could have been

February 23, 2011

I was just reading Meg Duerksen’s love story about how her marriage started off in an unexpected way and they gave up a big part of their youth but have come a long way since then and are more in love now than they were 16 years ago.

I did too.

My 20s were spent fighting against every natural desire I had to go do crazy fun things. I thought all moms had that natural instinct to want to stay home but I learned later than many don’t. I’m thankful to have had that.

Though I did graduate from college, I didn’t have a traditional college experience. Driving through a college campus still gives me a lump in my throat.

Our relationship has always involved a child. I often wondered what it must be like to have some one-on-one time without children.

I’ve driven a mini-van for 10 years. I’m not sure I’m a typical mini-van mom but it’s super convenient. A fun car that zips around town might have been nice to have at some point.

In my 20s, I always thought that my 30s would be my time to go out and be a bit more carefree. By the time I turned 30, I didn’t want to go out. I didn’t live vicariously through anybody else. My own life was just fine and I didn’t feel the desire to flee from it.

I’ve mourned many things that I’ve missed out on but realized I’ve gained so much more.

I get to spend so many years with my children.

I’ll get to spend so many years with our grandchildren (yes, I’m 36 and speaking about grandchildren. I’m in no hurry but damn, I think it’ll be fun).

We’ll be empty nesters at 45 and have plenty of years together (alone!) and still be young enough to enjoy it.

Our kids have been able to travel with us. Though we’ve only done a couple of trips alone, we’ve had many family trips. They’ve seen some great things.

I will have my first non-family car someday.

And I’m really content with all of that.

I mourn what could have been but celebrate what is.

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