No Slip, No Slide

Let’s talk about new-parentisms.  You know the ones.  You have your first baby (or babies) and high-alert kicks in.  You use baby detergent and only baby detergent on anything baby touches/wears/smells/spits up on.  You check and recheck car seat installation and then you don’t even leave the house anyway because you never know what might happen if you do…bad things.  You don’t let anybody come within a five foot radius of the kid because germs are now your worst enemy.  A request to hold the kid?  Your worst death stare is doled out.  You cry along with baby when baby gets shots.  You get a security system on your house in your safe neighborhood or you up the ante on the one you already have.  Clothing baby with new clothes that haven’t yet hit the washer?  Ha!  Get real.  That’s right.  You know exactly what I’m talking about.  One of the weird isms we had to take care of before the twins were born was the comfort factor of our living room rug.  It was a low-pile rug which also translates to pretty hard and more for aesthetic purposes than cloud-like comfort for footsies.  Definitely not cushy enough to lay our soon-to-be bundles of joy on it.  So, the hunt for a rug pad was on.  It needed to be fairly cheap and add a little padding.  Cutting to the chase, we ended up finding a good enough one on super clearance at Kohl’s.  On clearance meaning we paid $30 for it.  [In case you needed a visual.]
It was one of those cut-to-size ones that I ended up having to trim a few inches off.  Under the rug it went and lay baby after baby we did.  End of story. 

But not really.  A few weeks ago, Rug Pad USA asked me if I’d want to try out one of their rug pads in return for writing a review on it.  Funny timing too because my mom was here the week before and was constantly telling me how I really should do something/get something to make our kitchen rug stay in place.  The girls are constantly beating it with their wheeled toys and other toddler paraphernalia and it usually just ends up all bunched up by the baby gate.  So, naturally, I asked Rug Pad USA if they’d send me one for that rug.  They happily took the measurements (because you can get whatever size you want!) and I had the pad under the rug in a week.
   

They sent me their Premium-Lock pad and it is awesome.  Seriously.  I didn’t even know rug pads like this existed!  Our other rug pad is screaming in jealousy and I’m screaming at our old rug pad for not telling me there were better to be had.
 

Not that I really minded the flat-woven texture and zero cush of the kitchen rug in the first place, but adding this rug pad made having a rug over tile so much more gratifying.  It’s so comfortable that I’m guilty of picking the rug up and moving it the few inches closer to the sink when I do dishes because it gives rest to the weary feet.  With that in mind, did you see Mandi’s (from Vintage Revivals) latest DIY, no sew floor cloth?  Freaking amazing!  It’d be a perfect idea to pair with a Rug Pad USA rug pad anywhere in your house, especially that pleasant sink area where dishes pile up.  Get rid of those ugly rubber floor mats and whip up your own rug comfortized (so not a word) with one of these rug pads!  You can have form and function and THAT is a beautiful thing!  :)
Coming full circle though, I didn’t even think about laying Sebastian down on our kitchen rug whilst I did my domestic duties, but with our new pad, now he’s down there at least once a day.
And the girls?  Well, they’re still movin’ but our rug ain’t movin’ with them anymore.


A few other things we love about this rug pad (and btw, Rug Pad USA didn’t ask me to say any of these):
-It has a rubber backing so if I ever decided to move our kitchen rug to a carpeted area, all we have to do is flip the pad over so that the rubber side is touching the bottom of the rug and bada-bing.  No bunching on carpet.
-It’s made from 100% recycled products.  We’re big fans of conservation and recycling/repurposing so the fact that Rug Pad USA is lessening the fill in our landfills is A-o-k with us!
-You can get whatever size rug pad you want!  Have an odd-sized rug like ours?  Our kitchen rug is 71 x 32 inches and Rug Pad USA cut the pad to fit perfectly.
-Going along with the previous point, you don’t have to worry about buying a rug pad and messing up trimming it to fit.  Give them your measurements then buy it, get it, lay it.  That’s it.
-They cut pads for any shape rug – round, rectangle, oval, runners, and square!  My dream rug for our living room usually is a round one in my head and there is no way I would attempt cutting a round rug pad for it myself.  Enter Rug Pads USA and I don’t have to.
-And random but, it doesn’t smell like chemicals.  I remember taking the rug pad we purchased at Kohl’s out of its package and how it had a strong, chemically smell to it.  I pulled this one out of it’s packaging and it smelled like oatmeal.  No joke.

All in all, I really love the rug pad.  I have nothing bad to say about it.  Head over to Rug Pad USA and check out the different kinds of pads they have.  There are pads for every budget and rug in any size and shape you want.  P.S.  Rug Pads USA is offering a 15% discount to all of our awesome readers whose rugs are in the market for a life partner.  Just use code pr15off at checkout!

When Rug Pad USA contacted me about the review, they said it best when they said “it’s not the most glamorous thing to write about” but let me tell you, my feet think otherwise…and our babies bottoms, backs, bellies, etc…
 

Have a great week!

My How They’ve Grown

The girls turned two this past Wednesday and it’s caused a lot of happiness, anxiety, sadness, and confusion to swirl around inside.  We’re not sure where the past two years went even though sometimes it seems like they’ve been the longest of our lives.  I guess that’s where the confusion comes in.  Anyway, there’ll be a whole ‘nother post unpacking all those emotions and some birthday fun but for now I thought it’d be fun to take a little jog down Memory Ave. with a month-by-month pictorial.  I was going to put together the sweetest little slideshow but I’ve currently got a whining babe on my lap, drool all over my leg, and one hand to work with so, yeah, no slideshow.  So, through the (two) years we go: 

Birthday

One Week

Two Weeks

Three Weeks



One Month



Two Months


Three Months

Four Months

Five Months

Six Months

Seven Months



Eight Months



Nine Months

Ten Months

Eleven Months

One Year Old

Thirteen Months

Fourteen Months

Fifteen Months

Sixteen Months

Seventeen Months

Eighteen Months

Nineteen Months

Twenty Months

Twenty-One Months

Twenty-Two Months

Twenty-Three Months

Two Years Old


Anyway, I’m off to cry buckets over the fact that they’re two and off to college soon and rejoice in the fact that we’re over the spoon and breastfeeding, mid and late-night wake up calls, immobility, and zero communication.

Go Bold or Go Home

Congratulations Jamie!!!!  You guessed it and you’re ten points richer courtesy of my imagination.  Our front door is now a bright and bold orangey-red or reddish-orange…oraned, reorange, oranged…you know, I thought since gray + beige = greige and Angelina + Brad = Brangelina, I could surely make something work with orange and red but no-go me is thinking.  Back on the color track though, our newly painted front door:

Redange?  Hand slice to the neck Sheena.  Okay, sorry.

The door, the door, oh yes…the door.  Before it was a nice navy but a bubbly navy.  For some reason the navy paint had bubbled and I hadn’t noticed just how bad it was until I went to prep it for paint.  Look:

The decorative moldings were the bubbliest and simultaneously the worst/hardest parts to sand which was just great.  More on that later.

So, I mentioned in the previous post that when I got the hankering to paint the front door it was because I had to have a bright orared (?) door.  So began the month long process of finding that perfect red with a hint of orange.  It had to be bright, not dull and not muted but not screaming ‘Nickelodeon’ either.  After grabbing a few swatches at Lowe’s one day, I taped them up and left them there for a month so that I could see them in every light God said “Let there be light” to that there ever was…
   
After much deliberation, the top swatch won out.  Until, that is, I went to Home Depot to get the paint mixed (had a gift card I wanted to use) and out of the sea of reds was thee color I had been looking for all along.  It’s called Red Hot by Behr.  I didn’t even take a swatch home to make sure.  I got it mixed right then and there.

So, itching to get that paint color on our door, I started the process of prepping it.  Here’s where I almost lost my sanity and definitely threw out my trait of perfectionism.  My plan was to lightly sand the areas that weren’t that bubbly and really sand the areas that were, like the moldings.  We had a spray can of stripper in our possession that I thought would help that process go a lot faster.  Let it be known that I also thought that the decorative moldings on our door were wood moldings.  Wrong and wrong.  They’re fiberglass.  Fiberglass and stripper don’t mix, in fact, stripper eats fiberglass and fiberglass dies.  Or maybe it just can’t put up a fight so it just boils in the stripper’s wake.  Either way, I totally ruined one corner of one of the decorative moldings because of this critical info I didn’t know.  I didn’t know how to fix it so I just painted over it and painted over my perfectionism as well.  You can see the damage here:The moral of the story:  paint stripper is tough stuff.  Make sure you know what you’re stripping before you use it.
Back to the prep though.  I learned my lesson, put away the stripper, and forged on in the old-fashioned way – my hand, a piece of medium-grit sandpaper, and a narrow, metal putty knife.  It took me literally three hours to get to this point:
A.k.a. not very far.  And it took another two to finally get to the point where I could call it sanded and begin painting.  Still, I didn’t sand the door down to the metal and it’s not the smoothest door I’ve ever seen but I’m hoping the bright color detracts from the imperfection?  Tell me it does, please…

Next up, paint.  I dedicated an entire day to painting the door (two Saturday’s ago while Anthony was home to entertain the tots) and opted to paint it while it was open so I could get it all done in one foul swoop.  So, I taped off the doorway with some painters’ plastic to keep the great outdoors at bay…
taped off the window glass to keep rogue paint at bay…and used our sofa to keep curious toddlers at bay.


Then, because of all the dings I made while scraping off paint with my metal scraper in too big of a hurry, I filled in those little dents with some spackle, let it dry, and sanded it smooth.


Finally, as you may have spotted via Instagram, I had a nice, long, much needed session with my therapist:

She and I went to town priming the door with some gray-tinted Kilz we had left over from painting the dining room in our first house and it felt glorious.  (P.S.  I love my Wooster paintbrushes!  I’ve had this particular one for five years now and she’s still going strong!  However, I wash my brushes right after painting and take really good care of them so I know that plays into it but still, Wooster’s are awesome!)

Enter my second, maybe third helping of frustration involved with this project.  I mean, seriously, all I wanted to do was paint our front door – a 24 square foot space!  That is, it took me four coats of paint!  I expected one maybe two.  But four?  Ain’t nobody with three kids under two got time fo dat!
 
[Oops, didn’t get a ‘1 coat’…must’ve been busy face palming.]
I’m blaming it on the paint.  This is my first time using Behr paint and compared to my normal go-to’s (Olympic and Valspar) it was so thick.  I used exterior paint so I imagined it’d be a little thicker than the interior stuff but sometimes it felt like I was painting on layers of Elmer’s glue.  So annoying.  Anyone have else experience with exterior Behr?

So, like I said, four stinkin’ coats and I was done.  The door could probably use another but I’m probably the only one who notices and it’s probably my perfectionism slinking back in and talking.  One thing I did that I love is paint the inside edge of the door.

I love that little surprise that awaits just by cracking the door open.  I’m tempted to go around and paint the inside edges of all the doors in our house now…  :)

I also took the opportunity to spruce up the door hardware by giving it all a coat of oil-rubbed bronze spray paint.  After Anthony took everything off the door for me, I first sanded the hardware down just a tad and then I wiped it all off with some liquid deglosser I had left over from our little kitchen overhaul.

After I taped off all the areas I thought paint shouldn’t touch, I gave all the pieces a thin coat of primer (Rustoleum Clean Metal Primer) and a few thin coats of oil-rubbed bronze (Krylon).


They turned out awesome!  I’m hoping they hold up and I’ll be sure to keep you posted!

But back to the door itself, I really want to paint the inside now too.  The only thing stopping me right now is the fact that I’m not a huge fan of the taupe wall color plus the oragned…yet.  I whipped this up in Pixlr just to get an idea of what it’d look like:

Should I or should I just stick with the white?

While I was at it in Pixlr, I also did a little pretending with my ideal front door.  I like our front door but I’d love more light to come through it by way of a larger glass area.  But right now it’s just a dream.  We actually spotted a glass door just like this at ReStore last year and I really, really, really wanted to get it but it was $120 that we didn’t have to spend on a door at the moment so it’ll be forever ingrained in my mind as the door that got away.  :( 

I could go on and on with tangents here and there but I’ll stop now.  In summary, I painted our front door and I love it and that’s it.  I’m also planning on painting the other outside doors on our house but those posts will come another day.  :)

So, have you ever painted an entry door?  Was it a rough experience like mine or was it easy peasy?  More importantly though, what color did you use?!  Bright and bold or cool and laid back?
 

[Love is an open doooooorrr…so sorry, I had to.]