"She's Taking Nesting to a Whole New Level"

*Amendment: J informed me after he read this that it was actually J, not S, who said I was taking nesting to a whole new level. Either way...

That's what J said when our friend S came over to help J paint the living room and hallway* while BB and I were here:

(at the Garden of the Gods in Colorado Springs)

visiting these wonderful people:

seeing this:

(Pike's Peak)

And this:

(Kissing Camels)

And this:

(Garden of the Gods)

and eating this:

(Cinnamon roll french toast - we basically poured syrup all over a cinnamon roll - it was incredible)

here:


And running into these guys:

(Bighorn sheep at Glen Eyrie)

So while BB and I were playing here:

(BB playing at the Focus on the Family center)

J completed this:

Isn't it amazing?

J built that with his bare hands - I am so in love with it, and impressed with him.

And it looks just like this:

The piece we used free plans to build ourselves

(We may add those TV concealing bi-fold doors eventually)

We have reclaimed our living room!

Well okay, we've reclaimed it during after hours (aka bedtime). To snap that photo I actually just shoved all the toys to the middle of the room (as you can see in the pictures below).

I still have some accessorizing and storage-basket-buying to do for the media-slash-toy unit (all of that is stuff that we already had on hand), but most of it came out of the Office-Soon-To-Be-Nursery (the exodus of books and furniture begins! I am excited!)

J also decided that, because BB and I and In-Utero Baby Boy were all out of town in Colorado Springs and wouldn't be home to inhale any paint fumes, it was the best time to go ahead and repaint the living room and hallways the cool gray I have been wanting to replace our warm mocha walls with. (Before you all think I'm a total slave driver, I did tell J that painting was a fun idea but was definitely lowest on the priority list but he really thought that it was the best time to do it since we would be out of town.) It was a bigger project than expected, and our friend S and J's mom helped finish the job, which is when J delivered this post's title*. What can I say? Mama bird wanted new twigs and some storage for the nest.

I was initially apprehensive about the new paint color but after a few days of adjusting I absolutely love it. It was a shock to come home to such big changes - it didn't even feel like our house at first! The gray came out a little different than I expected, I think partly because we color-matched the shade of gray I was going for (so we could use VOC-free paint) and because this room has different lighting than our bathroom, where we also have the gray. But now we both love it - we feel like the living room looks a little more modern and now we feel more free to accessorize with other colors, and it's just a nice change after four+ years with our original mocha wall color. And the media unit is just beautiful, both in it's own right and against the gray walls. And the storage...oh, the closed storage. I can't adequately express my love for the closed storage.

Now that we're done with these projects, the office-clean-out-nursery-nesting begins on Wednesday!