Showing posts with label Tommy Boy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Tommy Boy. Show all posts

Thursday, February 27, 2014

Living Room Re-do

In the past year, I've redone my kitchen, my dining room (2 different links there so you can see the rearranging of furniture and the new color!), and Curly Girl's bedroom (which you can see here along with her birthday celebration).  Which meant my living room was looking pretty drab.  Kind of beige walls, nail holes from previous owners and where I had moved pictures, no real sense of design.

Driving me crazy, it was.

So we did this:
The lighting is BAD here, really bad, and I somehow don't have a better before picture.  But we went from beige-y blahness to fresh pineapple.  A bright yellow, not too bright.  Honestly, not really my color, but looks awesome with the rest of the house.


We have this little side area in our living room I call the "office offshoot."  It needed something more than just a coat of paint.  So after 2.5 weeks of trying tons of different things, we went with just nice big diamonds.  It honestly makes me wish I would've done it on another wall too (the one our front door is on), but it gives this nice area a sense of purpose and design.  AND this is a better representation of our actual wall color throughout the living room.











 And then I decided to decorate.  So using a technique my friend taught me (scrapbook letters on canvas, paint over, pull off the letters), I made this sign with a fantastic Tommy Boy quote to hang in the middle of the 22 (yes TWENTY TWO) family pictures I had printed for the wall.



 This is my new favorite room in the house.  Our hallway.  I had to completely clean it out to paint, which meant the million boxes waiting to go up to the attic, had to go.  And the toys by the bedroom doors had to go.  And it had to be vacuumed after I finished pulling all the nails out of the walls (pulling out original lathe and plaster with them) and then plastered all the holes.
Anyway, I painted it the same fresh pineapple as the living room (this hallway is off our dining room, but you can see it from the living room), using the same marshmallow white as the diamonds above to paint white frames on the wall to give me my own little version of an art gallery.
You can barely see it, but on the right hand wall, above most of the pictures (which are all family shots of siblings and parents with some old dating and college things thrown in) is the beginning of the Ferris Bueller quote "Life moves pretty fast...." I free-hand painted that on the wall with acrylic paint and a tiny paint brush.  It isn't quite centered in its square, which might drive Mr. Curly crazy.  But I found out when trying to scrub off the crayon I had used for practice, that the blue acrylic will wash off pretty easy.  So we might fix it in a week or two.

So. Living room and hallway done.  Now I'm just trying to convince Mr. Curly that we've had the same bathroom design/linens/color for six years and we should redo it.  And pull the wallpaper out of our bedroom.
But maybe I should give him a break from changes first.









Thursday, July 29, 2010

They're huge and they're sting crazy!

Otherwise Titled:
How to Stop Bug Bites
or
New Uses for Hand Sanitizer


Here in my little corner of the world, we've had more water then the ground knows what to do with. With standing, stagnant water in the ditches and still in some fields since April, the mosquitos are making quite a run at taking over the world.

At the beginning of summer weather, we could throw down some bug granules, or spray the yard with bug spray and enjoy many hours outside. Soon, we were adding bug spray. At first, just homemade bug spray (1 tbsp vanilla with 1 cup water - spritz away, smell good, be bug-free). Then we added Cutter Family (deet free for the babies) spray on top of the vanilla.
Now, the mosquitos have become immune. It doesn't matter if you have 2 different types of bug killer on your as-short-as-you-can-mow-it grass with 3 layers of bug spray on and citronella candles burning everywhere, they are going to find you and suck your blood.


Mosquitos - the true vampires of the world (next to the vampire bats).

Mr. Curly ignores bug bites, he's completely impervious to them. Curly Boy seems to have inherited this trait. Curly Girl and I, not so much. Our bug bites grow whether acknowledged or not. And I have absolutely no ability whatsoever to ignore a bug bite. I scratch them until they're huge; I scratch them until they're open; I scratch as they heal.

Curly Girl cries at night that she wants to take her bug bites off before she goes to bed. We bought a benadryl spray because she doesn't like to have hydrocortisone cream on her skin. Mr. Curly suggest aftershave, as the alcohol will kill the itch, but it can burn as well and we don't want to hurt her!

I, however, rather appreciate the burn after scratching open a bug bite, but I don't want to go around smelling like men's aftershave (even though Mr. Curly smells wonderful). So I have turned to hand sanitizer. The cheap stuff is basically alcohol only, the more expenisive stuff adds a nice scent to it. So when I find myself scratching uncontrollably, I break out the sanitizer, dab some on, and grit my teeth through the burn. I figure I'm getting a two-fold use out of it - no more itchy bug bites, and I'm disinfecting/cleaning the area in the process.

What do you do for irritating bug bites? Any other ways to keep yourself from buggy scars?

And if you're interested in more mosquito rants, simply google "mosquito vampire".

Title from Tommy Boy