The Zorio Family

Monday, November 9, 2015

Making Our Home: THE LIVING ROOM

The living room needed a few renovations when we purchased our house.

Here's a picture of the sunroom (left) and living room (right) on the day we closed on our home. Simply removing the pink blinds in the sunroom and replacing them with white blinds that allow a lot more light to flow through was the first "change" made to our living room. This allowed A LOT more light to enter the living room which is great!

I liked the mantle and the brick on the fireplace. We repainted this mantle above white Behr paint in our trim color (White Dove), and then removed the brass fireplace screen and the glass. Doing this was really easy and gave the fireplace a bigger and updated look!

View from the fireplace across the living room.

In this room like others, after we painted the walls and the baseboards, we also caulked along the baseboards to create a clean line. Dawson LOVES to help with this!

(Also see the yucky air return grate in the side of the above picture, we replaced that! It wasn't dirty the paint had come off of it, so replacing it was the method of fixing it not just cleaning.

We painted the walls Shaker Beige (a Benjamin Moore color in Behr paint).

These pictures (above and below) are as we were moving our furniture in.

And now the finished room...

See? Much better without the brass and glass and with our tall Southern Living Fire place screen.

As I mentioned in the post about the Sunroom, I have high hopes of renovations for the wall dividing the sunroom and living room, but it has not been on our list of top priorities in the first year in our house. Soon...hopefully!

View of the living room from the kitchen.

The replaced return grate.

The final renovation we made to the living room, was having out fireplace inspected in August. Now we can enjoy fires in our living room which we are really enjoying!

Making Our Home: THE SUNROOM

The first time we looked at our house when it was on the market, the sunroom made me cringe! I cannot stand vertical blinds, but vertical blinds on three walls...IN PINK?!? TOO MUCH!

What I did love though were all of the windows in the sunroom (hidden behind these awful blinds!).

When we closed on our house, we agreed these blinds HAD to go before we moved it! I happily carried them down to the road for bulk pick up, and one of our neighbors who was outside jokinly asked why we would get rid of these blinds?! Haha! I'm sure our neighbors were relieved that we threw these out as these and the pink hue from them could be seen from outside the house!

Panoramic shot of the sunroom (left) and living room (right) the day we bought the house.

Lots of natural light could come through these huge windows hidden behind PINK blinds!

This is the wall that separates the sunroom from the living room.

This wall...whew what do you do with this wall except take silly pictures with it...

haha!

We have actually started referring to this as our "brady bunch wall"

So our first step in the sunroom was removing the ugly pink blinds.

The next step was having white blinds installed in all 9 windows and on the door. I did not want to do drapes, because I wanted to keep it really neutral and allow as much light to come through as possible. Where the vertical blinds were mounted in the wall, they had been pulled out of the sheetrock making holes in a few places (see that white area in the corner in the picture above?), so we had some sheetrock patching to do here.

In these pictures, you can tell we had also started moving our furniture into the house.

Our next step was to paint. We painted the white walls with Behr Premium Paint Plus Primer in the Benjamin Moore color Shaker Beige. All of the trim desperately needed to be painted too. We painted this with Behr paint again in the color White Dove.

Freshly painted walls.

No more pink hue coming out the nine sunroom windows and door from the blinds....now just a clean look from the outside.

Starting to get things settled here.

We were still working to patch sheetrock and I was shampooing the carpet with an industrial carpet shampoo. So many people have looked at our sunroom carpet and asked if it's new carpet. It isn't, but it sure looks like it after the shampooing and just all the natural light.

This was our first furniture arrangement as we were getting settled.

Look at all that natural light!

We have also had two of the 9 windows replaced in this room.

There are a few more we are going to have replaced in the next couple of months as we have some exterior work done.

It doesn't look great, but the "brady bunch wall" isn't quiet as bad now that it's freshly painted.

We have lots of dreams for this brady bunch wall, but that will have to be a future project as we have had lots of other projects going!

In preparation for Baby Clayton's arrival in March, we moved the computer (just last week) downstairs from the extra bedroom to the sunroom. I think the sewing table and the computer desk both fit nicely along our brady bunch wall.

We actually spend a ton of time in the sunroom because we all love the natural light!

So our big changes in this room were removing the blinds, patching wall holes, painting the walls, painting the trim, replacing windows, installing blinds on the 9 windows and 1 door, and cleaning the carpets....and what a difference it has made! The room actually feels bigger too!

Sunday, November 8, 2015

Carter is 3 AND A HALF!

On October 13, Carter turned 3 AND A HALF!

Carter is a Mommy's boy, and I love this so much! Dawson and Nora Kate pick Daddy if given a choice, but Carter usually picks me! He also loves to point out that we are the only two with brown eyes (and he goes back and forth on whether he wants Clayton to have brown eyes like us or blue eyes).

Carter is also a "feeler"...by this I mean he seems to feel (emotionally) everything much more than Dawson did. Dawson pretty even tempered-never getting too sad or too excited either...Carter, on the other hand, "feels" all of these emotions. When he's happy, he's REALLY happy and smiles and smiles and smiles and his eyes shine. He also feels a lot of emotion for others. He worries about if Mommy will be lonely (for example, one amazing day I got the chance to run to the grocery store on my own, I didn't want the kids to be excluded so I asked if anyone wanted to come with me. Carter really wanted to stay home but said, "Will you be lonely without me if I don't go?" SO sweet! He is also very good at reading your expression to know how you're feeling and will ask about it. He's also very tender (or at least at this stage) so when I get on to him I have to be careful to just correct his behavior and not let it hurt his feelings. Along these same lines, there is nothing Carter loves more than a good laugh...unless it's making other people laugh! He will do anything, ANYTHING to make others laugh. Now this is generally funny (we will see how this plays out when he starts school-hah!) He loves to be silly and say silly things. The sillier the better.

Carter is still our little singer. He memorizes songs faster than anyone, and he is constantly singing!! He still regularly sings himself to sleep. He also loves to dance.

Carter is really good at playing with other kids! He's outgoing and loves to talk and interact with other kids and adults, and this makes him happy. He's definitely an extrovert! He's great at playing with Dawson AND with Nora Kate, so he's used to playing with older and younger kids. I think having and older and younger sibling has made him really good at playing with others, because he really enjoys playing with others where ever we are-church, park, playdates at our house! Carter is also good at entertaining himself for short periods of time. This is SO nice for me too! He's really used to being around others though, for example when Dawson is at school he regularly says he's lonely without Dawson. If Carter ever (which is rare) goes to bed before Dawson, he always talks about how lonely it is to be in his bedroom by himself.

Carter loves to play with all his friends but loves to reference "Charlie Taylor" (always uses first and last name for him!), "Harper", and "Olivia."

John and I are constantly amazed at how smart Carter is. He picks up on things very quickly, and loves one on one time where we are teaching him anything at all. He's also really good at tuning out all the other noise when we don't have one on one time, but are still trying to teach him. He's not easily distracted when we are working with him because he's good at focusing.

Lately, one of his new favorite privileges is using technology...this is a broad statement, I realize! He's gotten really into apps on the iPad and is learning a lot from them, and is really good! He's also gotten into playing games on the Wii. His current favorites are tanks (he always beats me) and Mario Cart. And just in the past couple of weeks we have started letting him play educational games on two different websites on the computer and he LOVES them! At 3.5 I absolutely cannot believe how good he is with using the mouse!

Carter also loves to be read to. He also really likes art-painting, coloring, cutting, anything art related.

Carter recently had a doctor's appointment to get some medicine for his cough that had started from allergies, but his official weight at the doctor's office was 37 pounds on the dot (Dawson weighed 36 pounds 6 oz at this age for comparison). Carter currently wears a 4T and size 11 shoe (both are exactly what Dawson was in at his 3.5 year mark)!

Between turning 3 and now reaching this 3.5 mark, Carter has gotten pretty good at his big chore of making his bed. He's always so proud of himself when he's finished making his bed. This morning the boys both made their beds and then they snuck into our bedroom and worked together to make our bed as a surprise for Mommy and Daddy. SO sweet!

Here are a few of my favorite pictures of our sweet 3.5 year old taken over the past 6 months. Carter, please stop growing up so quickly!! We love this sweet boy so much!