photo tour: guest room

It's been awhile since I've given you a photo tour of one of the rooms in our house. In fact, I've only given you a tour of one room... and that was almost four months ago! To be honest, I had been putting off any more photo tour posts until I had "finished" another room. I wanted to be done re-arranging furniture, hanging and re-hanging art on the walls, etc. Like I mentioned in the first (only) photo tour post, it's hard to make a fully-furnished rental feel like ours but I was going to try. And it's been harder than I thought! So I kept putting it off and putting it off... but I realized that the point of these photo tour posts (and this blog in general) is to give our friends and family back in the US a glimpse into what our normal, day-to-day life is like... and I guess that includes our un-"finished" home. :)

So... I'm going to take a deep breath, swallow my pride, and start posting pictures of our not-Pinteresty-enough-for-the-internet home for all of the internet the seven readers of this blog to see. 

We found our house on ecayTrade, which is a Craigslist-type site for the islands. When I first saw the ad, it looked way too good to be true: three bedrooms + an office, for the same price as many of the two bedroom places we had seen! And with Brett working from home, we were hoping to find something with an office. I figured there must be something glaringly wrong with it, such as no air conditioning or just really dumpy inside... but we had a friend check it out for us and she said it was great! (And it is!)

We feel so blessed to have so much space. I especially love being able to have a dedicated guest room so that we can host visitors. My mom stayed with us in January and we have Brett's parents here with us right now. It is really fun to have people stay with us in our home since we get to see so much more of them. (And Joshua loves the extra attention, too!) 

Here's a quick tour of the guest bedroom, which is on the first floor.

It kind of doubles as Joshua's "play room" a lot of days. One of my great fears about having kids was that their toys would slowly take over our home... and it's slowly coming true. So in the guest room we keep all of his books and the overflow of toys from the living room. 

The kid LOVES books. Sometimes he'll sit with me and read for 45 minutes! Often, it's the same book over and over and over again, but I'm just glad he's interested in reading. :) 

Which, I guess, shouldn't be a surprise considering how much his dad likes books. We keep Brett's overflow of books in the guest room, too. (Technically, this is his "Biography and Fiction" section... so if you come visit, you can feel free to browse the "library" in your very own room!)

This is also the part of the room that most screams "UNFINISHED!" to me... the empty white wall. One of the trickiest parts of decorating this house is that the outside walls are concrete... so it's a HUGE pain to try and hang anything on them. What I've been doing in the rest of the house is just using the nails/screws that are already in the wall - so just swapping out something they had hanging on the wall for something I brought/made. But this wall didn't have anything on it... and it has stumped me.

Here's a view from the other side of the room (I think the reflection in the mirror helps to give perspective, but the doorway out of the room is to the right of this picture.)

The room has a full bathroom connected to it, so does that mean I can call it a guest "suite"?

So that's a quick look at my very un-decorated guest room. It might not be the prettiest, but it's still functional... so come visit us! Maybe I'll rope you into helping me decorate. :)

photo tour: joshua's room

One of my main priorities (which, admittedly, doesn't get much attention since the higher priorities include caring for an almost-toddler and trying to keep him from destroying the house) is working on making this house feel more like our home. Since many (all?) of the rentals in Cayman come fully furnished - even down to the linens, dishes, and artwork on the walls - it can easily feel like we're just borrowing someone else's home. And it's almost impossible to feel really settled in a place where your home doesn't feel like yours, you know?

I mean, even simple things like blenders. Maybe you got married a few years ago and got to create a wedding registry (woo!), so you picked out the exact blender you wanted. Maybe you even got into a fight with your fiance about it in the small appliances section of Bed, Bath, & Beyond. Maybe. You spent three wonderful years with your wonderful blender... just to pack it into a storage unit and move away. And now you're using someone else's blender - that they picked out for their rental home, so, you know, it's probably not their favorite blender. Ugh. Anyway, this post isn't about blenders.

So, in an effort to make this place home-y (not homely), I've been slowly working my way around the house and making it feel more like ours. There are lots of things I can't change about this place that I wish I could (for example: the color of our kitchen cabinets, the couch that sheds leather flakes (I didn't even know that was a thing!), and the weird bumpy carpet) but by making little changes, this place is starting to feel like our home. I've been moving around furniture, taking artwork off the walls, putting up (the very few) pictures and artwork we brought from Kenosha, etc.

The first room that has really come together is Joshua's room. I think it's probably because I had fewer options in there since it was already furnished with two twin beds and two dressers.

Here's a "before" picture from the day we moved in, standing in the doorway. (The other dresser is out of view here. You can see on the right side of the picture that the there's a "nook" in the wall. The wall does the same thing on the other side, and the dresser is in the nook to the left of the frame).

And here's an "after" shot of the same view... Joshua's playing in the crib since it was the only way I could keep him from crawling directly to his doom the stairs (we really need to figure out a baby gate for up here).

We shipped Joshua's crib from the US, so we had to make room for it. We ended up bunking the two twin beds against the wall next to the doorway and moving one of the dressers (it's currently in the upstairs hall closet, but we have plans to move it to the guest room).

Joshua loves throwing Hootie out of the crib and then peering over the side at him. This is often the exact position we find him (and Hootie) in when we go to get him in the morning or from a nap.

I stumbled across this map online while I was pregnant and LOVED it. I gushed about it on Facebook, and it showed up on our doorstep from some thoughtful friends a few weeks later!

Seriously, isn't it adorable??

I think the biggest obstacle in this room was figuring out a way to hang light-blocking curtains above the half-moon window. Since the ceiling slants toward the top (wait, is it called a vaulted ceiling? I don't know...) we couldn't hang the curtains to be both wide enough and tall enough. And we couldn't drill anything into the wall to hang the curtain rods. Ugh. So we ended up getting some of those huge 3M On-Command hooks that stick on the wall with adhesive, and you can see that the curtain hangs just barely below the top of the half-moon window. Good enough!

Here's a shot of wall opposite the crib.

The shelf was already on the wall, so that made this part a lot easier. I hung a banner from our Going Away/Joshua's Birthday party in Kenosha before we moved, and framed some "artwork" (I feel like a fraud calling it that) I made on the computer.

The print on the right is of Psalm 1:1-2, which was our "dedication verse" for Joshua. The one on the left has his "stats" from birth.

Overall, I'm pretty pleased with the way his room is turning out. It's all about working with what we've got here, so even though there are some ugly bunk beds on the other wall that we don't even use, there are little pieces of "us" in here, too. Things that not only are more our style, but also remind us of friends and family in the US. 

Annnnd, I'll leave you with a glamor shot of his crib. Because I just love, love, love his crib and I'm so glad we brought it. It almost makes up for the blender... almost.