Showing posts with label home. Show all posts
Showing posts with label home. Show all posts

Tuesday, June 14, 2011

Baby Olsen's Room

I had grand intentions of writing my blog posts in the "proper" order (new house before, renovation, after with new paint, and finally nursery pics). Unfortunately, I don't have any good pictures of the house with the new paint job yet, so that'll have to wait. Instead, I'll just jump to the good stuff and post pictures of the baby's room. It's all ready for him and I'm just about 38 weeks, which means he can make his grand debut whenever he decides to. Until then, though, we'll let him cook a little longer.

For his room, we had our hearts set on a farm theme very early on. We found a super cute stencil set from www.mywonderfulwalls.com and were able to order both the stencils and the coordinating paint colors from them. We basically decided to do this whether we were having a boy or a girl. The nerdy speechie in me gets really excited about having baby boy's room be such a language-rich environment. We can talk about the cows and the rooster and the pig, learn about all the different sounds the animals make, and then go see the real animals on a farm someday! Yipee!

So we started by painting the whole room sky blue. Then once this was dry, we drew hills with sidewalk chalk and then painted the green rolling hills free hand.

Next, we had to make some decisions about approximately where furniture would go, and thus, where to place the barn. Once that was decided, we carefully stuck the giant stencil for the barn on the wall (using a level to make sure the whole thing was...well...level).

Next came the fun part- painting the barn red! It took a couple coats of paint, and some very careful touch up once the stencil was removed, but it ended up looking pretty good. Prior to removing the stencil, though, it looked like this:

After that, I stopped taking pictures at each step. We added some rows of corn, a fence, some cows, a pig, a goose, a rooster, a hen and her 4 little chicks, a mouse...etc! It was fun times. We definitely spent many afternoons after work adding various animals, and then touching up. But we're so happy with the results and think baby Olsen will love it too! Here are some pictures of the finished product!


Thursday, April 21, 2011

New house!

Well this post is long overdue...again. But better late than never, right? The latest Olsen news is that we bought our first home! We absolutely loved our condo and we will miss the wonderful community of people from our complex dearly, but with baby Olsen on the way, we needed more room to fit comfortably.

We actually started our home search before finding out that baby Olsen was on the way...in August. We knew that buying a home was something we wanted to do in the fairly near future, and figured with lowered housing prices and interest rates, it was a good time to buy. So began the process of pinpointing which neighborhood we wanted to live in/could afford. By early January, we had pretty much settled on Willow Glen (for the non-bay area locals, this is a cute, family-friendly neighborhood of San Jose). By end of January, we found a house we loved, put an offer on it, and it was accepted! We closed at the end of February, and it has been a very exciting/busy couple of months since then. We couldn't be more thrilled with the house, and know that it will be a fantastic place to raise our family.

Here are some pictures from closing day. I'll probably end up re-posting a lot of the ones from the inside of the house when I do a "before & after" post. We have been very busy painting and settling in, and the house is looking pretty different these days. So once everything is done, I promise I'll post new pictures! But for now.....

Isn't it cute??


Happy homeowners!

Entryway from our dining room


Entryway from the living room...kinda fun that you can see all the way to the kitchen!


Kitchen!


Family room, complete with wood-burning fireplace off of the kitchen


Hallway to bedrooms, with tons of storage space


Guest bathroom...the brown is now gone. We'll take guesses on what the new color is :)


Master bedroom

Master bathroom vanity (the rest of the bathroom is just to the left)


A garage to make any handy guy (or gal) envious...I have grand plans for all the canning I can do now with all this storage space!


We have a backyard now!! We've already planted potatoes, and tomatoes are going in this weekend! Yipee!