Lighting! Lighting! Lighting! Part 2

A couple of weeks ago I showed you some lighting updates that we had made on the 2nd floor. Well guess what! There are more!

We replaced 2 of the builder grade fixtures on the 2nd floor. But 3 was just too many. There was a hanging boob-shaped lighting fixture that Scott convinced me we should keep. I didn't want to keep it but I couldn't find anything I loved to replace it and I really hated to get rid of 3 perfectly fine lights. So, we settled on getting rid of 2 perfectly fine lights and spray painting the boob hanger to match the new lights.

Before:

After:

Doesn't it look nice with the banisters? Just you wait until you feast your eyes on how it looks with the other light fixtures. Prepare to have your mind blown! Imagine if we could only get a little paint up on the wall and some art. It would be too hot to handle; too school for cool.

Let's back track a little and look at the "During" phase too:
Scott followed some on-line instructions for how to take down the light (I'm not recommending this... he is far from an electrician).

Here he is looking baffled:

 

We labeled pieces of taps and attached them to the wires so we would remember how they were attached. But then Scott spray painted and lost our precious information:

One tip for spray painting lighting fixtures is to make sure you spray paint all the tops of the screws and bolts that will be showing. 


Right after we moved in, we had pendant lights installed (more on that here).


Did you notice our sweet sweet dining room chandelier in the background? Here is a close-up:

No, that was not a standard fixture. I wasn't wild about any of their chandelier choices so they were nice enough to leave me with "the bulb" and give me a little credit. I bought 3 or 4 chandeliers trying to find a perfect fit. Finally, I decided that a semi-flushmount ceiling light was the way to go because there was too much competition with the pendants. Also, we wouldn't have to worry about the semi-flushmount light being centered on the table or hanging the light too low and having it in our eyes or ducking around it to see the person across from you.

Here is how it looks now:

Now it is time to take a look at how all the lighting goes together. Sheesh this is an exciting post.

Pretend like you don't see the pictures on the wall in the background. I am going to introduce you to those soon.

And, now you know all you will ever need to know about our 2nd floor lighting!

Introducing The Home Of Our Infamous Murphy Bed, Part 1

Do you all remember the saga of the Murphy Bed?

We bought it somewhat impulsively when we thought we were moving into a small house on the lake. The house fell through, there were tears and more tears. There was also now a Murphy Bed that we no longer had any use for.

Here is the pretty lady:

Then we found another tiny house and... tada! Ol' Murpherino suddenly became valuable to us again. The only problem was hiding an enormous Murphy Bed in bits and pieces around our old house while we tried to make it ready to go on the market. Somehow we managed to do so. In the process we broke it into as many pieces as we possibly could. There were quite a few people out there who had their doubts the Murphty Dumpty would ever get put back together again.

I am here to tell you that a miracle has happened and Murphenella is 98% put back together like brand new. There was a mattress mix-up and a little door snafu but otherwise, things are good in Murphy Land!

I debuted the plans for Murphy Doodle in this post. A few months later I am finally ready to show her off in all of her glory for real.

Change of plans... I just checked out how many photos it was going to take for me to get you to where Murphobama is now so we are going to go ahead and break this bad boy down into two posts.

Part 1: Take a look at the room, see some progress being made on MurhhyDoDa, and check out my to do list.

To Do List:

• Put up the murphy bed (somehow manage to get it back together, bolt the hinged bed frame into the concrete floor, get the lights working on it, attach it to the wall)
• Put away the 1,000 paintings that are all over the room
• Paint the room
• Put up paintings
• Put up art
• Put up blinds
• Pretty up bookshelves

Here is the room before we moved in:

Move in day explosion:

The door on the left is Scott's cubby hole of an office and the door on the right is the bathroom. Those fancy doors in the middle belong to everyone's favorite hidden bed, Mrs. Murphy. 

Wooooooooooooooo HOOOOOOOOO!!! One section of Murph-Town was officially aseembled!

Part 2 of Murphy installation- almost all of the parts were set up where they would ultimately reside. 

The room was even starting to get a bit more organized but I am not sure you can really tell that from this photo. 

While Big Murph was in the process of being assembled (we strung the whole process out over 2 months) our guests got to sleep on lovely mattress-on-the-floor-accommodations.  

Luckily, our handy man extraordinaire had a hammer drill/ air hammer/ concrete drill. I am not sure what the name for the tool really is but I made sure to always refer to it as something different. Whatever the tool is called, you need it in order to screw into concrete.

That is where I am leaving you off today. I know this has been a super exciting edition of Never Listless. Just you wait until the doors go up and you see Murphy shining in all of her glory. You are going to be begging me to come up with Part 3 of the Murphy Brown saga.

Lighting Lighting Lighting!

Wahooooo! The lights are up and looking good on our main level. We have been putting it into overdrive trying to get our house looking good before we take off lots of time to figure out how people manage to have 2 children. (ps I really ought to have 2 children by now. If I don't that means that I am 2 weeks past my due date. But I wrote this post a week and some change before my the new baby is due so who knows!).

Let's take a look at the lighting process:
When we moved in we had the regular builder-grade lighting. I do believe that the super technical term for these fellas is "boob lighting" although I usually go to extremes to avoid saying it.

Their Replacement:

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Here they are Replaced:
Before & After In The Hall:

The Living Room:

Before

After:

I like these lights a thousand times better but I think they are missing something. I finally realized what it was... a lot of drum lights like this have a little nipple in the middle of them (sorry for all the chesty references today, but I swear this time it really is the technical term).
Here is an example:

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Eventually (this one is getting put on back burner number 500) I plan to DIY a little nipple for these ladies

Are you all lighted out yet? Hold your horses there are still 2 more 2nd level lighting switcheroos coming your way. But you are going to have to wait because this post is getting looooooooooooooong. I hope to see you back next week!

Introducing The Cubby Hole Under The Stairs!

When we first moved into this house I showed you a glimpse of one of my favorite parts of the house, Cora's cubby hole under the stairs.

While the house was being built I showed you my plans for the Cora's playroom under the stairs. I am obviously obsessed with this type of space because when I was little one of my favorite toys was a staircase from my Fisher Price dollhouse that had a secret cubby under it.

I even wrote a whole post about it. And, another one about hide-y holes around the house.

Cora was excited about the idea of the cubby hole from day one. Every time we would check the house out while it was under construction Cora would run to her cubby hole to check it out.

My dad installed a doorbell for Cora that she thought was pretty fantastic!

We put her kitchen in there along with a little table and 2 chairs.

Then, I went shelf-wild. I wanted to make sure the storage was maximized.

I put up a mirror that I found floating around the house. Doing so made Cora refer to the kitchen as her bathroom kitchen for about a week. I guess bathrooms are the only place in our house that we have mirrors right now.

I put some hooks under one of the shelves for all of Cora's bags. Any time a random bag makes its way into our house she immediately tries to hijack it. She refers to all bags as her "work bag" and likes to load up as many as possible on her shoulder at one time. She decided one of her bags is Scott's work bag. Every once in a while when he is leaving for work she will run to get it for him and she will laugh to herself about how crazy it is that he could have almost left it behind had she not reminded him.

Whenever I come across a picture that I think Cora might like up on her cubby hole wall or someone sends her a postcard I put that up on the wall too. It is beginning to feel quite homey!

There are a couple more things that I would like to do in her cubby hole but, for now, I am checking it off the list.

I spent a lot of time looking around for cubby hole inspiration. Cora's didn't turn out like any of the ones below but in case you found this blog while looking for ideas for playrooms under the stairs, here were some of my favorites:

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