Our house one year later.

I spent all of September and October working on our house (and part of August).  We've yet to finish the banister, but we did take down the wall of mirrors in the girls room, patch that wall and paint it and the baseboards in the girls' room, replace the carpet in the girls' room, the boys' room, Ana's room, the hallway and my bedroom.  I took down popcorn ceiling in all those rooms, and painted the boys' room completely and stained their baseboards and doorframe, and actually all the rest of the baseboards and door frames in the upstairs that we hadn't done when putting in tile.  Also painted Ana's room--it was supposed to be two walls but ended up being three when I tried to patch over some spot on her blue wall and the colors didn't match. And then when I painted the hallway ceiling that color didn't match the ceiling color in the rest of the living room.  Here's my Facebook post about that major stressor: I had this big fiasco a week ago trying to paint the rest of our upstairs ceiling when the exact same color, exact same paint from the exact same store didn't match what I had painted 8 months ago. They even came to my house to verify and "I've never seen anything like that in 40 yrs!" Was the response i got. But they had no solution to fix it. They called the paint company and they said it had faded. I will never buy their paint agian. So I drove an hour to buy Sherwin Williams, it doesn't match exactly but it's a heck of lot closer. Weird. And now today I finished Ana's ceiling and patched up her blue wall only the store I bought it from didn't have the same kind of paint, so they were nice and substituted a Benjamin Moore instead for the same price, only it doesn't match at all, so now I'll be repainting that wall as well. Errrrrr.....

Anyway, the ceilings in the living room and entryway still need repainted so it all matches and doesn't drive me crazy, but I have the paint to do waiting for when I have a ladder and the time.  I think I'll wait till when I can afford to replace the entryway light, it will be a while in other words.  

And then I stenciled my ceiling.  I thought it would take a week.  It did not.  Three weeks.  It took me three weeks and much pain and tears.  For anyone thinking of stenciling a ceiling, here's my tips.
1. Seriously rethink this idea.  Choose a wall instead.
2.  You need to wash the stencil fairly frequently because the paint will build up and weigh down the stencil causing distortion in your pattern.
3.  It doesn't have to be perfect but a little tiny paintbrush was my best friend for days and I still look at it and want to fix things.
 
4. Plan on it taking a long time because I found I tired pretty quickly and if I tried to keep going I just made more mistakes--that's really the main reason it took so long.  Also, book a visit to the chiropractor.  Being 6 months pregnant doesn't help either.
And that's it.  I like it though.  And Leo really likes it too.  So I guess it was worth it.  I still would like to do so much on my house, but it's kind of depressing because as soon as we fix up one thing it seems like another thing breaks, or I notice all the marks from kids on my newly painted walls.  It makes it much less motivating.
 
 I want to move this light into my bedroom

and buy this chandelier to go in the dining room, but that will be a while too.

Anyway, the rest is just a jumble of pictures.  Sorry, I just kind of dumped them all in. 

 

  
Ana's room no longer has orange carpet.  And the boys' room no longer has orange walls and green and orange carpet.