Looking back to our backplash (Aug 2010)

Well, since John and Sherry Petersik from Young House Love were talking about the tile that they bought for their backsplash, I decided to go back and post some photos of our backsplash that I did last year.

We started out with generic builder grade walls but after 4 years of living with it, the awful mess that trying to clean drywall (even semi-gloss painted drywall) behind a stovetop, we finally gave in.  After a few months of searching, we found this lovely tile and trim at Lowe's of all places.  We love that it is close in texture to the floor of the kitchen although the colors are slightly different.  Close enough to go together, but far enough apart not to be too matchy-matchy:

So once we had the tile, I did some layout work. But, between one thing and another, a few months passed before I finally got down to business.  I tried buying a tile cutting blade for my jigsaw.  No dice.  The blade was nowhere near hard enough to cut the ceramic tile.  So I rented a wet saw from Home Depot for a day and was able to cut and put up the backsplash and ended up with:

The hardest part was doing cutouts for the outlets, phone plugs, etc.  It took a little planning so that all of those would end up on the edge of at least one tile so that I could do the cutouts from the edges.  I have no idea how to do the cutouts in the middle of a tile.  It's amazing how easy this was with the wet tile saw.  I was able to do the whole wall in about 4 hours and the 8 hour rental was not that expensive.  We loved how it turned out.  The only problem was that we also had the other side of the kitchen which now looked unmatched:

So a few weeks later, we wanted to do the other side.  But in the months that it took me to do the first side, our tile had been discontinued.  Boo!  Hiss!  I hunted around and was able to find a great store in Wheaton, the Wheaton Tile Center, and they were able to hunt down 5 boxes of this discontinued tile in some warehouse somewhere.  They ordered 2 boxes for us and we were back in business.  So, one more day trip to Home Depot to rent the wet tile saw and we ended up with:

And now the whole kitchen matches.  We love the final result.

The Rainbow Connection

So, as we move into the next phase, I will probably only have weekly updates instead of daily updates.  And, of course, I'm already a couple of weeks behind, but that's life with twins.  But, since this is supposed to be a sort of diary for us later to remember what life was like now, it's fine for us.

Before I get into what our first week at home was like, I thought I'd take time to show off our nursery.  Many of our local friends got to see the nursery at our Open House.  However, since many of the blog followers are out-of-town family and friends, here is a set of photos to show the nursery.

In proper DIY fashion, I'll try to start with what the room looked like before we began.  It was pretty vanilla with all the walls in basic builder's white, with a few odds and ends furniture.  It was the extra room with work space for projects.  Nothing special.

Even before we knew the gender of the babies, we knew that we did not want to go traditional blue or pink.  We also wanted a room that could last for a while without redoing it.  So we thought of hot air balloons.  We found this wonderful large wall mural on-line and loved it.

With the vibrant colors, we also decided to add rainbows and do the room in rainbow primary colors.  Wonderful.  We ordered paint to paint the walls, we had an old set of drawers that had been left by the previous owner of my first house (16 years ago) and were dingy white with red handles.  We thought we'd repaint the drawers like a rainbow.  Then after we started, I tried to find the mural.  The first place I tried, had to reimburse my money because the mural was out of stock.  The next place I tried said that the mural was discontinued.  Hopefully someone would have one leftover in stock.  Not the third, or fourth...I tried six places (that's all I could find) and no one had it.  *sigh* back to square one.

So then after another couple of weeks of hunting, I finally found the wall mural that we ended up using.  And the room turned out fantastic!

Here's a close up of the wall mural:

But the best part of all of this is that the wall mural and the cribs are about the only things that we had to buy.  We found almost all of the rest of the decorations while going through decorations that we had.  For example, many years ago when Barbara was able to do more crochet, she crocheted the curtains and put them into storage.  The hot air balloon hanging over the brown dresser Barbara bought at the hot air balloon festival when she lived in New Mexico.  I got the idea to take the closet doors off and use a curtain instead from my one of my favorite DIY blogs, Young House Love.  The orange curtain that we used was actually Barbara's old bedspread from when she was growing up.

The colors in the room are brighter than they look in the photos.  They are bright, Crayola colors.  We had this odd bump-out in the corner behind the table.  So we decided to go with yellow on the long walls, blue on the short walls and have green stripes in the corners to transition between the blue and yellow.  We love how it turned out.  And then we used the same colors and added two more for the dresser drawers.  After cleaning it up and painting them, the dressers look brand new.  People have asked if we bought those for the room.  Talk about "use what you have"!

And now that the room is occupied, it feels even more right.