Let there be light...

...or more accurately LIGHTS, four of them.

 

We've been talking about ways of adding more natural light to our living room forever.  Our backyard is so shady that even in the middle of the day our living room is dark.  At Christmas, a family friend was raving about her SolaTubes that she's had for years.  Our biggest concern was sawing a hole in our roof, but if Cheryl's has stayed dry for 15 years, I think we're okay.

 

So, we had our SolaTubes installed today, we've only had them for a few hours of daylight so far, but I LOVE them (Keith hasn't seen them in the daylight yet, but he'll love them too...on Saturday).

 

We ended up getting 4 total, two in the living room, plus one in the hallway and Parker's Bathroom.

 

Before:

 

 After:

 

Before:

After:

Before:

After:

 

We've been told that these guys can be kind of addictive, and I can already see how, my mind is already coming up with new places for more!

 



Today's Project ~ Civic Pride

So, it's no secret that I'm not much of a Seahawks fan.  It's not that I'm against the Seahawks, it's just that I don't really care either way.  However, one would have to be living under a rock (or outside the greater Seattle area) to not be excited about our home team right now.

 

At the risk of being (justly) called a fair-weather fan, I made a new banner for our entryway today:

 

 

 

Happy Birthday Cousin Wesley!

 

Wesley turned 4 on Saturday, so Denise hosted a Snowball Party.

 

 

 There were a few snowball "tossing" games, but the true chaos came out when the snowball fight started.

 

Our two kids ended up a little over-whelmed by the activity, but the older kids seemed to have a good time...and by that I mean the Dads.

 

The kids made hot dog/spaghetti spiders, which were quite the hit.  I'm not sure how many they ate, but they were fun to make (and Cecily ate ALL the left-overs).

 

Messy Eaters

 

Cute, yes.  Clean, not so much.

 

 

This is why I generally prefer to feed her in her high chair, it's a little bit more contained.

Dining Room Re-Do ~ The Chairs

In step one of looks to be the worlds-longest-dining-room-remodel, I have finished re-covering our dining room chairs.

After three years of Parker's torture, several of our chairs were in a sad shape & ready for recovering.  I went back & forth over what to do with it.  I would have liked a nice tapestry, but that would just be inviting more messes from Parker, but covering it in plastic seemed a little too institutional.  So, I settled on vinyl, I wasn't sure if we'd be able to pull off pleather on the chairs, but I think it turned out pretty good.

As a reference on how long this project is taking, I took the "before" photo in September, and I think I'd actually done a few chairs already at that point.

Before:

After:

It turned out pretty good, I think.  And they are really easy to clean, even when Parker spills his entire meal on the chair.  They are a little slippery and Parker has fallen off on more than one occasion, but it tends to be when he's messing around and not sitting down, so we like to call those "natural consequences".

Parker & Cecily