Lyla's New Room

As soon as we moved in we got to work unpacking and getting things settled.  A few rooms were on the agenda to get painted right away.  I started with Lyla's room because I wanted it to feel like home for her right away.  Her room looks very similar to her room in our last house (except smaller).  Here are some before photos:

We had a little break between when we closed on the house and when the movers arrived so I could of taken photos of the rooms without anything in them but I totally spaced it out.  The before of this room featured dark 70's wood trim and a very ugly wall color.

The walls are Behr Sparrow and the trim is Behr Ultra White.  There are a few changes of decor placement from her old room.  All of the decor that was behind the rocking chair as well as her little cubby are above the dresser.  Once I get a dresser for the nursery the diaper storage will go above the nursery dresser and Lyla's changing pad, wipe warmer and diaper pails will also move to the nursery. We figured it would be easiest to just have one changing area in the house instead of buying a second changing pad etc. The rocking chair will be moving to the nursery as well once that room is finished. This seemed especially wise since we don't know how much longer Lyla will actually be in diapers. The other decor change that I made in her room was that I moved her framed monogram to behind her crib. I have big plans for the that bifold closet door in the future by the way!

I am so happy that one room is done in the house.  The nursery and living room have also been painted as well and I will share those sometime in the future.  Right now my priority is getting the nursery ready so I hope to have lots of posts to share on that room in the near future.  Right now I am just happy to have finished Lyla's room in time for her 2nd birthday!

Dear House

Dear House,

You were our first house.  You have been an important part of our lives during these past 5 years. You saw us through many ups and downs in our lives.  In your walls you witnessed our celebrations, sorrows, frustrations, and so much love.  You were the home that we brought our first child home from the hospital to.

I often contemplate how many stories you have to tell about your 90 years of standing in this spot. How many other people have called you home over the years?  How many people have brought their first child home from the hospital to you?  How many important things have happened in people's lives within your walls?

Now we have to say goodbye.  Your next owners will be here in a few short hours.  They are a young couple who are engaged to be married.  You will now become a part of their story.  You will always be a part of ours, you will always be in our hearts.  You are not just a house but a home.  Goodbye my old friend.

And then we said hello to our new house.  We were greeted with this house warming gift from the sellers.  It was so sweet and thoughtful!  I got a card and a HomeGoods gift card for the buyers of our house.  Maybe if I would of had the time and energy I would of done something cute like this ;).  We just spent our 3rd night in the new house.  Most rooms are chaos right now.  The kitchen is pretty much fully unpacked and so is the dining room.  Most of Lyla's stuff is in what will be her little sister's room so that we can paint Lyla's room first.  The living room and all of the basement are just a mess right now.  We plan to get Lyla's room ready first and then the nursery.  Once the nursery is done the living room will get painted.  I will share a house tour once things get a little less chaotic around here.

Gift Card Bouquet Grad Gift

Hello!  Today I am taking a break from packing and doing laundry to write a short post on the grad gift that I made for my sister who graduated from high school yesterday.  2 years ago I made this gift card college survival kit for my brother when he graduated from high school.

I decided to stick with the gift card theme but this time I decided to make a gift card bouquet.  I started by buying a nice tumbler from the bookstore of the college that she will be attending in the fall.  I bought a bunch of gift cards for different things that might be useful or fun during her first year of college.

I slipped a piece of floral foam inside of the tumbler.  Next I traced the gift cards onto some scrapbook paper and cut out the pieces ( I totally forgot to take a picture of the back of the bouquet so that you could see it).  I taped a bamboo skewer in between the piece of scrapbook paper and each gift card.  I then stuck the bamboo skewers into the floral foam.  For the graduation cap I used some sparkly black scrapbook paper.  Normally I would of used my Silhouette Portrait to cut it out but I assembled this at work so I just found a picture of a graduation cap on Google and printed it and traced it onto the scrapbook paper.  If I wanted to be a little more fancy I could of put something decorative over the floral foam but I was running out of time so I just left it as is.

I hope you are inspired by this simple grad gift!  We have about 2 weeks left until we move into our new house so I have been spending a lot of time packing up our house.  The appraisal on our current home went well and it appraised at the selling price without any need for repairs.  We still have about a week until the appraisal on our new house.  It will really be cutting it close with the closing only a little over a week later.  I am hoping for the best though since it took a week to get the results of the appraisal on our current home.

House Hunters Fargo Round 2

I am finally back with an update on the selling of our current home and the search for a new home! The house pictured above will be our new home as long as the final steps in the process go well. I will get to that later though.

The beginning of March was when I first told you that we were selling our house.  Shortly after that post I went on a week long road trip so the process didn't really get started until the end of March. Once I returned from my trip we started the process of decluttering.  Mostly we just packed away extra things and tried to minimize the items in each room to make the rooms look as big as possible. I think that it is important for a buyer to be able to visualize how they can live in the house themselves and too much stuff can get in the way of that.  Too little stuff can also be a deterrent as well.

While we were decluttering, we looked at quite a few houses.  During that time we also figured out a more solid max budget for this next house and were able to define exactly what we were looking for. Our list included granite counter tops, open floor plan, double vanity in the master bath...oh wait just kidding...that would be like an actual episode of house hunters.  That show is so ridiculous sometimes!  Our real list of wants were: three bedrooms on the same floor, a fenced backyard, attached 2 car garage, a kitchen similar to the size we have now, a big enough dining space for our current table, and a family room that could double as a playroom and sewing/craft area for me.  The hardest part of that list of wants was the 3 bedrooms on the same floor.  We looked at a lot of houses that almost met all of criteria but decided that in the current market it would be better to sell first.

So I spent my 6 day weekend Easter break finishing up the decluttering process and deep cleaning the house.  It was a lot of work but it was great to get things moving forward.  Things really became real the day that the for sale sign went up in our yard.

  I was worried about how hard it would be to keep the house clean for showings and have to leave at random times especially with a toddler.  It turns out that we only had to deal with about 24 hours of that though.  Our house went on the market at 2 p.m. on a Thursday and almost immediately my husband was getting calls to schedule showings.  We had 5 or 6 showings that afternoon/evening and by the next day we had already had a total of 15 showings.  Our first offer came in at 9 p.m. Thursday night and we got a second offer Friday morning.  We ended up accepting an offer at 9 p.m. Friday night for $4,100 over our asking price.  It was a whirlwind and very exciting.

Unfortunately that excitement soon turned to frustration.  The offer had a contingency that we find a house to buy in 3 weeks.  We looked at a lot of houses and none of them were quite right.  By our second week our realtor had a lead on a house that might be perfect but the sellers were buying a house and that deal ended up falling through so they decided not to list it that week.  They ended up finding a house the next week and listing on the Tuesday of our final week (our deadline was that Friday).  Unfortunately they listed it for $10K over what their realtor had originally said so even though we liked it, it was no longer in our budget.

It turned out to be a blessing however because the next day the house from the top of this post went on the market and it was perfect.  We went to look at it that evening and loved it.  We immediately put in an offer but another offer came in that night as well.  I spent Thursday morning preparing myself to hear we didn't get the house but thankfully the news was the opposite.  So with one day left until our deadline on the contingency on the offer on our house we finally found a house!

It was a frustrating and stressful process.  Although it isn't over we have definitely gotten over some big hurdles.  The inspections on both properties went well.  The buyers of our house only asked us to clean the gutters.  We asked our sellers to get some electrical issues fixed and they agreed to fix all of it.  The appraisal on our current house happened yesterday.  We are hoping that it appraises at the amount that we sold it for.  I'm a little concerned since the competing offers ended up driving the price much higher than we thought it would.  We couldn't get an appraisal scheduled on the house we are buying until June 13th which makes the time tight with our closing on June 22nd.  We are crossing our fingers that all goes well so that we can still close on that date.

I had my 20 week ultrasound a few days after having our offer accepted on our new house.  It was nice to be able to only have that to focus on instead of finding a house!  We are proud to announce that we are expecting our 2nd girl!

 I can't wait until I get to show you our new house.  I already have so many ideas of projects for this home so this blog will full of house project posts in the future.

Movie Night Teacher Appreciation Gift

Hello!  I know this blog has been pretty quiet lately but we have been so busy getting our house ready to sell and searching for a house to buy.  I hope to have an update post on that front soon fingers crossed!

Today I have a very short post on the gift I gave to Lyla's daycare teachers for teacher appreciation week.  The first week of May is teacher appreciation week.  As a teacher I have gotten many great gifts from students during the first week of May.  Since I usually have a concert that week the little gifts really help to make my week brighter and a little less stressful.  I have been so grateful to the staff of Lyla's daycare because I can tell that she learns so much there everyday.  I wanted to show them a little token of appreciation so I decided to make them a little movie night gift.

I bought a bundle of 10 Redbox rental codes which you can purchase here. Then I found movie size candy for $1 each at Target.  I got a variety so the teachers could pick their favorite.  I bought a couple of boxes of extra butter popcorn.  Then I made a simple little tag on my Silhouette Portrait and tied everything together with a piece of baker's twine.

It was a simple gift to make and I hope the teachers enjoyed the gift! I have one more exciting thing to share before I finish this post today.

We are so excited to meet the newest member of our family around the end of next September!

Gold Fish Valentines and An Announcement

So I haven't written a blog post for over a month oops.  I've been bad lately but things have been crazy.  There are some big changes that are going to be happening for our family soon.  I can't talk about all of them right now but I can make one big announcement now.  BIG ANNOUNCEMENT ALERT: We are selling our house!  It is really emotional to write that sentence.  When we bought this house we imagined that it would probably be our forever home but now we are yearning for something a bit bigger.  I love this house and it will be hard to start over again but I am still excited about the adventure to come.  The goal is to have our house on the market by sometime in April so work on the blog may be a little light like it has been lately but I will try to pop in once in awhile with an update on the house hunt and an occasional project.  

Now that the big news is out in the open on to the main subject of this post: valentines.  Last year I made valentines for Lyla's daycare mates and I found it challenging since none of the kids in her room were eating solid food.  I finally came up with a non-food idea and was pretty excited with the outcome.

You can read more about the sock valentines I made in this post from last year. 

This year I was able to use food but I opted to do a non-candy option and created some punny valentines to accompany some bags of gold fish crackers.

I created the valentines in my Silhouette Studio software and made them into a print and cut design. Then I just filled in the names of her classmates and stapled them to a bag of gold fish crackers.

It was a super easy project and I think they turned out pretty cute.  I'm looking forward to many years of making homemade valentines and I can't wait until she is old enough to help make them as well!

The Petite Seam: I Opened an Etsy Shop!

At the end of my last post I hinted at a big announcement and I am finally back to share with you that I have opened an Etsy shop!  I have thought about opening one for a while now but when I got a big response to the car seat poncho that I made for Lyla I thought that it was finally time to take the plunge.

There are A LOT of steps that go into setting up an Etsy shop if you want to do it the right way.  I started by deciding what I wanted to sell.  For now I will be selling the ponchos, bow tie pacifier clips, and infinity scarf bibs.  I plan to add other drool bibs, bow tie/vest onesies, and fleece hats (and maybe mittens) in the near future as well.  I may add other items as well eventually depending on how things go.  The next step was to come up with a name for my shop and this was one of the hardest steps.  I wanted a name that would be cute, memorable and convey the idea of what I would be selling.  After several days of mulling it over the idea to name my shop The Petite Seam was born.

I found some helpful things on Pinterest on how to start a shop as well as a great ebook from another Etsy seller. Here are the links that I found helpful in getting my shop up and running: writing shop policies, an etsy pricing calculator, a domestic shipping guide, branding your etsy shop including a tutorial on how to create a banner for your shop, tips for choosing your etsy shop name, taking product photos, a step by step guide to creating an etsy shop.

I decided to start a Facebook page and an Instagram for my shop right away.  I plan to create business cards as well in the near future.  I created the banner for my shop on Etsy and the cover photo for Facebook in Pixelmator.

The car seat ponchos that I am making for my shop are a little bit different than the one I made for Lyla in this post.  I found size charts for children by age and created patterns for 3 different sizes: 0-24 months, 2T/3T, and 4T/5T.  The hoods use a 3 piece pattern which makes them rounded instead of pointing and they are lined.  Some of them are made with 2 layers of fleece and some are made with the outer fabric and a fleece lining. I am making them for both girls and boys,  The only difference with the boy ones is that they don't have fringe.

I won't bore you with too many more details on my shop but if you would like to check it out you can see some of the items that I have listed in my shop in the sidebar of my blog.  If you click on any of the thumbnails of my products it will take you straight to the listing in my shop!  I hope to be back with some sort of project to share on the blog in the near future but things have been crazy busy right now so I am not sure when that will be right now.