Ryley’s Room Makeover

We’ve lived in our house for five years, and Ryley’s room has always, always, always been an issue and point of contention. It’s constantly messy, and no matter how many “Come to Jesus” talks we have about how “everything has a place” and “please put things back when you’re done playing,” Ryley has struggled with keeping her room in any other state besides a pigpen.

In fact, she had this horrible “theory” that having a messy room is actually helpful, because if all your stuff is out on the floor, you can find it more easily.

She comes by it honestly. I mean, when I was little, my room was always a mess, too, and my parents finally gave up and started shutting my door when they walked past it. Yep. ;-) Sorry, Daddy.

But Ryley’s room is so small, and over the past few months, I have been brainstorming ways we could make it seem bigger. We also have had trouble with her big, bulky closet doors staying on the tracks, so when I came across some interesting ideas on Pinterest, I showed Ryley my idea, enlisted the help of my aunt Coleen, and started making plans.

First, Ryan removed the closet doors for us.

Then, Ryley and I had to clean the room. Because we could not walk in it:

I’m not even sure how I managed to get back into this corner to take this picture. I did end up needing a band-aid on my foot though, at some point during the process.

 

After it was clean, we rearranged the furniture yet again, moving the dresser into the closet, to maximize square footage in her room.

But we weren’t done yet! We left the room alone for a few weeks while we formulated the rest of our plan and did multiple online searches for 84” tension rods and 96” curtains….Finding nothing, we decided we would have to make our own curtains, from sheets.

So this morning, my aunt Coleen and uncle Paul arrived at our house with her sewing machine, scraps, and supplies. We took a little field trip to the fabric store, and soon the girls were up and running on the project:

They worked and they worked and they worked:

Notice Ryley’s new glasses? She got them this morning and is so excited! We think they’re pretty cute on her.

Coleen let Ryley do a good portion of the sewing herself!

Then, after hours and hours of work (during which Mommy and Daddy went to see The Avengers), the closet curtains were finally hung:

 

And then the window curtains too….

We also added some other organizational finishing touches to the room:

 

Voila!

We are so excited with how this turned out!!!!! Thank you, Coleen, for all of your help! You are so amazingly creative, talented, and patient. It turned out better than I had even dared to hope.

I might just have to post my own picture on Pinterest now!

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And one more bonus pic of Ryley reading….this time with glasses. :-)

Land of the Mighty Cornhuskers

This past weekend, we took a little trip up to Scottsbluff, Nebraska, to visit my grandma, “Honey.” We had such a wonderful time, though the trip did go extremely quickly! I wish we could have stayed much longer.

Honey certainly kept us busy!

Ryan had never been to the Riverside Zoo, though Ryley and I have been twice before. So that was our first stop:

I would just like to go on record as saying that Honey and I stayed true to form and did NOT touch or feed any animals while we were there.

 

It was slightly chilly, so we pretty much had the whole zoo to ourselves!

Then we ate lunch at my favorite Scottsbluff restaurant, Taco Town. They’re the “tac-0 the town.” Seriously. My family has eaten there every time we’ve visited Scottsbluff since before I was born, I think. Yum!

http://www.roadfood.com/Restaurant/Overview/5172/taco-town

Then, after lunch, Honey took us to the North Platte Valley Museum. Scottsbluff/Gering is right on the Oregon Trail, so there are a lot of interesting pioneer artifacts:

We had fun seeing all the weaving looms and ice boxes, etc., from the past. Honey shared lots of stories from her childhood.

 

The museum had a big display of Girl Scout history, so we browsed through that. Very interesting! Here, Ryley tries out Morse Code:

Any Brownies out there from 1985? This is a replica of my Brownie uniform:

And my Brownie book:

Funny how the brain works….I haven’t seen this book in 26 years, yet the moment I saw it, it all came rushing back to me. :-)

The museum was a great experience! Thanks for taking us there, Honey!!!

Then, because Ryan had never been to the top of Scottsbluff Monument (an Oregon Trail landmark), we drove up there, too:

Playing with fire:

You can’t really see it very well, but 30 miles behind my head is Chimney Rock and the town of Bayard, where Grandpa and Honey farmed and ranched for more than 50 years. Honey still owns the land. We used to spend our summer vacations there, picking sweet corn with Grandpa and helping him shuck it, helping Honey in her garden, learning to sew, riding 4-wheelers around the hills, and swimming in ditch banks alongside the cows. Lots of good memories. :-)

Then, crazy kids that we are, we hiked down the monument, while Honey drove to the bottom to pick us up. It took us about 45 minutes.

I fell behind a lot. :-)

Amber waves of beautiful Nebraska:

We had dinner with my aunt and uncle and attended church with Honey on Sunday morning before heading back to Denver. It was just a really nice , peaceful, fun couple of days.

Thank you, Honey, for letting us come up and crash your weekend! You wore us out in the very best way! We love you! :-)

Obsessions

Every now and then, I like to post about things that we’re into…to paint a picture of this particular time in our lives and the things that occupy our hours. :-)

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1. MUSIC -- We love the Denver-based band The Lumineers right now… I dare you to watch these videos and keep your foot from tapping to the beat. It’s happy music!  I could listen to their album all day.

Beware the hipsters: "Ho Hey"  and   "Flowers in Your Hair"

We also really like the Icelandic band Of Monsters and Men ("Dirty Paws").

And Gungor’s beautiful song "This Is Not the End" is so ethereal and full of hope about eternity.

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2. FOOD/DRINK – We made portabella pizzas tonight for dinner. They were delicious! The only problem was that our grocery store only had three portabella mushrooms in stock, and I bought them all. Really, we could have each eaten two or three! I didn’t take any pictures of ours, but this will give you an idea:

Grease a cookie sheet lightly with olive oil. Layer portabellas with pizza sauce, mozzarella cheese, and pizza toppings of your choice. I also added minced garlic, garlic powder, and crushed red peppers. Bake at 400 degrees for 12 minutes. Voila! :-)

I recently did a mini-cleanse juicing “thing” for spring. I wasn’t super militant about it, but I did drink lots and lots of fresh beet juice for about 10 days. I don’t know about you, but this was my first up-close experience with beets. They’re hairy and knobby and gross on the outside, yet such a pretty color on the inside! But when you drink the juice, no matter how many apples and carrots and grapes you shove down the juicer, the “farmy” beet flavor remains so, so strong.  I joked with my co-worker Leahh that I was “drinking the farm.”  I want a t-shirt that says “Schrute Farm Beets.” :-)  It was a tough pill to swallow, and I think my beet-drinking days are behind me, at least for this year.

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3. HOME IMPROVEMENT – Three weeks ago, Ryley was walking past our big juniper bush on her way to the van, when she came face-to-face with this:

It was just a garter snake, and it was sluggish, so I was able to snag it with a nearby stick:

It was pretty big for a garter! But what to do with it?? Ryley begged me not to kill it.

Her words: “You know, the life cycle and all that.”

I actually thought it might be near death, so I left it at the end of our driveway. When I told Ryan, he said, “No, it wasn’t dying. Don’t you watch the Discovery Channel? It just needed to warm itself in the sun.”

Sure enough, when we returned home, it was gone. I suppose I should watch more Discovery Channel.

So, the following weekend, Ryan took a chainsaw and took the bushes to the ground. It’s something we’ve thought about doing for years; the spiders are horrible in the fall, the bushes were so monstrous that they took over half of our sidewalk, and we couldn’t reach the water faucet or wasp nests behind them. But the snake was the final straw.

I took several pictures, too, of our property, hoping to enter “The Worst Landscape in America” contest on the DIY network. For a week, I planned to post the pictures with a long, detailed story of how we have two dead trees, a snake infestation, a rocky lawn where grass refuses to grow, etc. We’re a shoe-in to win!  But when I finally sat down to upload the pictures on the day of the deadline, I learned I had actually missed the deadline by six hours!

A free landscape make-over was just not meant to be. I guess we’ll have to do the work ourselves, darn it.

In the meantime, we have come across two more garter snakes (different sizes) within feet of where the first one was nestled in the bushes. Ryan was able to kill one of them.

I know they’re harmless, but it’s also unnerving to realize they’ve apparently been nesting in the bushes outside your front door!

We definitely have our work cut out for us in that area of our yard, but we are excited about the possibilities!

At the same time all this was going on, our friends Christie and Jonathan were getting rid of some old but nice furniture, which we became the grateful recipients of! That allowed us to move out a couch we’re not crazy about, and we took advantage of the opportunity to rearrange a lot of our furniture. I even moved the piano, which I hadn’t thought possible. My college German professor once told me that she theorized a lot of marriages would be saved if people rearranged their furniture more often and changed things up a bit. She would be proud!

We’re also in the midst of a project in Ryley’s room, and we hope to make some more progress this weekend. Pictures to come….

Our home improvement minds have finally come alive!

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I love Juliet when she’s clean and groomed! Unfortunately, that’s not too often, but we’re enjoying it currently!

She’s even allowed on the couch! Look how far I’ve come! ;-)

Stay tuned for pictures of our weekend trip to Nebraska. Good night for now!