Home Improvement: Or, the Basset, the Plaid and the Handyman

I do genuinely enjoy home improvement.  Primarily because I live in the home I'm improving.  If I didn't get to enjoy the product of my labors, I probably wouldn't take up the activity.

So, in all fairness, I enjoy having a nice house and not spending a lot of money to achieve it.  When Em and I bought our house almost three years ago, the former owner had a certain...unique relationship with color.

While a bit garish, it did bring out the olive tones in my complexion.

That room ultimately became our master bedroom.  And despite my repeated protestations to retain the plaid wallpaper cutouts, my wife prevailed.  (Protip -- gentlemen: pick and choose your battles.  Plaid wallpaper is not one worth bloodshed.)

The upstairs has three bedrooms.  The canary/plaid monstrosity, and two others.  One room gets the morning light better than any other.  It has the most windows.  Unfortunately, when we bought the house, it looked like this:

Just out of the screenshot is the sparkle popcorn ceiling.

Somebody liked her blue.

Personally, I didn't see that much wrong with this one.  Given the contrast of the plaid/mustard nightmare of the master bedroom, I'd argue this was nowhere near as bad.

The thing is, I'm an executor of projects.  Not a planner.  Not a designer.  You might think of me as one of these guys:

Epic mustache is epic.

So when Em wanted to paint it and rip out the carpet, I was game.  We were left with this:

You know what you are asking yourself right now. Just what, exactly, is in that closet?

Okay, so in all fairness, she painted it well before removing the entire carpet.  The hardwood floors were in decent shape and, in all honesty, if you've going to throw it out anyway, why not use the old carpet as your dropcloth?

Serenity.  Thy name is pistachio green.

Several projects later, we had this in our hands.  I swapped out the ceiling lamp in my first foray into electrical work.  Please note that my ability to continue to write this blog should be ample evidence that I was capable of turning off the electricity.  And the lighted fixture in the picture above is evidence that it works. Or, at the very least, that it worked at least once.

No.  Just... no.

Now, I personally think it's pretty easy to find out you are having a girl and find yourself somewhere in the territory of a room not terribly dissimilar from the room pictured above.  Which I'm pretty sure has been scientifically proven to produce something like the below:

While "Veruca" has a nice ring to it, we avoided the
correlation at all costs.

True story.

So, the objective was to get a theme that wasn't over the top girly but still managed to not be something along the lines of chainsaws and pit bulls.

So we settled on vegetables. 

Now, before you pass judgement, check these out:

Minimal pink = no Veruca Salt

Broccoli Man!

All of the sudden we have a nursery on our hands.  Or, at least it seemed that way.  Em did most of the planning and I just carried it out.  

Some days I came home and she was something like this:

I think the woman wants some chocolate.

Which would lead me to believe that she was in need of chocolate.  Because I'm a good listener like that.  But it is also possible that she was just frustrated with our photobombing basset hound, Ruby:

It is physically impossible to be mad at those eyes.

 Someone is a ham for the camera.

So, I'll continue to do home improvement projects.  If only to ensure that my dog has a multitude of photobombing opportunities at her disposal.