home repairs and then some...

we've been doing some decorating this week. i don't know if it was the hot weather that we recently had or just the fact that cole's toys suddenly seemed to take over every square inch of the place, but we've really felt an urgent need to declutter, streamline and put all the toys into some kind of (even temporary) order. we spent last week putting old baby stuff up for sale on craigslist, counting our newfound cash, reorganizing the storage locker and this week so far building things from ikea. i would like to be a little less fight club narrator-esque, browsing the ikea catalog late at night in a futile search for orderly satisfaction, but i have limited furniture-buying funds and i just happen to have a store-copy-only catalog...

we moved a large (very comfortable!) la-z-boy from cole's room and replaced it with a new chair. thank you gramma b for the new chair (and the old one) - cole loves it! it's given us back a good chunk of floor space and more view of the window.

which reminds me - curtains... the curtains we have up are some nonsense that i made before cole arrived and they're horrible. they're thick - i started out with some kind of canvas material from ikea which proved not thick enough to cancel out the light from the georgia viaduct. i added blackout fabric, but while that works for the light it also makes the drapes about as thick as that lead apron you wear at the dentist. and they're stained from water since our new-building-windows have some kind of winter condensation issue. am sewing more as we speak. they have birds on them!

we also put together a new desk today. it's been about a year and a half that i managed without one but i gave up the ghost and crammed one into the living/dining room after rearranging things. it's a super cheap deal from ikea and i don't have a photo of it yet. it's not that exciting anyway. and since i can't figure out how to attach the table top to the drawers or how to attach the drawer sliders to the drawers themselves, it only appears to be a finished desk. but i did have a lot of help putting it together from my little helper.

he loves to hammer! truth be told, we used that little mallet from one of this pounding toys to put the thing together, since i didn't want to go down to the storage locker to get the actual hammer. he added the robin hood hat himself...