Nesting...

This weekend was more or less spent nesting (that is, after the pagans left and Megan finished her case of beer.)  And despite the fact that we were supposed to have a staycation babymoon (that's right I said it) we managed to get a ton of stuff done.  

Primarily, my job was to get the pegboard up and ready to go...while I did this Megan assembled all the...god I don't know what to call the stuff...um...baby tech?

Anyway here is the MamaRoo, which is supposed to do wonders with a crying baby.  It simulates the rocking back and forth of a human's arms, but without having to touch the baby!  You can also plug your ipod into it so the baby can listen to whale song or crashing waves or Fleetwood Mac.  This was one of Megan's must haves.


I framed the pegboard first with some 1x2 furring.  We decided to put the board over an air vent...I figure the holes in the board will allow enough flow and this way we get rid of an ugly ass register!


Megan assembled the stroller that takes the car seat...again, I don't know the term for this...but that's it...right there.  And my butt is there too...


Trying to keep the pegboard spaced correctly and all level was kind of a pain in the ass.  I am probably off a hair or two in any direction but I feel like it's only things I will ever notice (oh and Megan of course spots these things right away.)


Megan asked me to stop with the pegboard for a moment and install the corner shelves...I did...they look nice :)  Not much story there


And finally the complete pegboard...all installed and ready to go...now we need to go to office max and get pegboard accouterments.



With the light on :)


These two didn't do a damn thing to help


And lastly, this awesome lid for the boy...we didn't buy it and I am regretting that...maybe we can go back.

Lala
T&M

Pagans in the yard

Let's see where to begin...

Friday afternoon I came home from work to a raging bonfire in my backyard.  The guys I had hired to clean up ALL the leaves (no small task I assure you) had decided the best method of disposal for some of the larger branches was to burn them.  Well who am I to argue? In the contract they were responsible for any citations and...well...it smelled nice :)


It's a good thing my neighbors seem to like me...in fact, I am relatively sure, it was a result of this conflagration that my rear neighbor came over to talk to Megan.  

Fade in: Int. WALL HOUSE aka Little Versailles (pronounced ver sails, cause this is Missoura damnit)

MEGAN sits in front of the computer intently reading pinterest.  A knocking is heard from the front door.  Butter the dog goes ape-shit.

Megan, using all of her strength, pushes her self up out of the chair, struggling against her huge pregnant belly.  She curses under her breath and mumbles as she waddles to the door, one hand on the small of her back.

Megan pulls open the door to show a blonde woman in her mid fifties.  This is NEIGHBOR.

MEGAN:
Yeah?  What?

NEIGHBOR:
Oh, um, hi!  I am sorry to bother but my name is Neighbor and I live in the house behind yours.  Anyway, I noticed you were doing some yard work and I was hoping you could do something for me?

MEGAN stares back at the woman, she bends down and pulls open an old cooler grabs a Natural Light.  MEGAN cracks the beer and keeping her hand on her back tilts her head back for a long and deep drink of the beer.  She belches loudly.
Sweetly she asks:
MEGAN:
What is it?

MEGAN wipes the back of her hand against her mouth.

NEIGHBOR:
Um...well you see, there's this poison ivy that is growing over your fence and into my yard and I was hoping you could take care of it?

MEGAN:
Well sure!

MEGAN slaps the NEIGHBOR on the back and walks out of the house.  The two women continue walking towards the backyard.

MEGAN:
Come show me where the problem is.  I'll have my husband take care of it when he gets home.  He's awesome.  Have you met him? Of course you haven't.  He's amazing.  He can do pretty much anything he sets his mind to.  And he is just insatiable in the sack!  Imagine if a really gentle jackhammer got together with Ron Jeremy with the body of Christian Bale in Batman...that's him.

NEIGHBOR:
Wow! He sounds Amazing!

MEGAN:
Yeah I'm really lucky.

At this time, MEGAN and NEIGHBOR walk past 4 men in their twenties dancing around a gigantic fire...they are all dressed as satyr complete with horns and goat hooves.  The women both look at them but MEGAN doesn't break stride.

MEGAN:
Yeah, sorry 'bout that.  We found them on Craigslist...but they were super cheap

They continue to the fence-line where NEIGHBOR points out the poison ivy issue.  Megan crumples up the now empty beer can and throws it to the ground.  She fishes a cigarette from the front pocket of her sweatpants and lights it.

NEIGHBOR:
You see how it's coming over the fence

MEGAN:
Oh yeah, that is a problem

NEIGHBOR:
So it would be a huge help if you could get that down.  I'm sorry to ask but it's hard for us to kill from our side of the fence.

MEGAN:
Well, I won't be doing it
she pats her enormous belly
But I will have Puck over there take care of it!

NEIGHBOR:
Oh thank you so much

MEGAN:
Hey...not a problem...beer?



Fade to black.


So I wan't there but I am relatively certain it happened that way.  The parts I am unsure of I took a little creative license with; for instance, I don't know if Megan was wearing sweats or not but I went with my gut.

Anyway, the yard is free of leaves now.  And as a result I am now painfully aware of the tremendous amount of work I need to do to bring this yard back to life.

But the journey of a thousand miles...






















OK...Catching you up on the last two years

We got married...it was awesome.  We bought a house in St. Louis and moved into it.  Megan is pregnant and due in the next 17 days.

That's up to today in the short and sweet of it.  Now, let's detail the present:

We have been working on Henry's room (baby's name by the way, Henry Orion Wall or Howie, Hank or Flipper for short...possibly Flip as well.) and it is progressing nicely.

Megan went to Lawrence one weekend which allowed me time to take down some horribleness and paint the room in the style we had discussed.  It was a tremendous amount of work, but proved fruitful.

The crib got assembled, the carpet put down...now is the question of storage.

Of course, we have the dresser, we have the end table and these things will serve nicely as storage, but there are somethings that need to be displayed!  You can't have your awesome books and collectible Fraggles just sitting in a closet!

So Megan and I bounced ideas back and forth for a long time.  We started thinking about pegboard.  How it would be an original use for the stuff.  After thinking about it for a while, I decided I didn't want my nursery to look like a garage so we moved onto slatboard.  Slatboard, for the uninitiated, is a type of hanging system that you see often in stores.




We thought about it, and even had a generous offer from John, Megan's father, to pay for the slat board, but it just wasn't quite right yet...something was missing.

I started researching magnets.  Magnetic paint, rare earth magnets, steel panels, I looked into all of these.  My plan was to embed rare earth magnets into pieces of 2x10's and somehow make the wall ferrous.  By doing this, we could have shelves that could be moved around the wall on a whim!  Pretty cool right?

Well it is.

The problem, however, is that magnetic paint does not have a high enough iron content to hold up a shelf, let alone the contents on the shelf.  The best I could find was that with 6 coats of paint, it would hold maybe 6 pieces of paper.  That would not work for this.

I looked into steel siding, steel panels, I even looked to see if you could buy Cadmium in sheets.

But this idea was not to be...not in this project at least.  At some future date I would love to make a magnetic wall with shelves, but it'll have to wait.

So we were back to square one.

Then Megan started looking at art for the walls.  What can we hang to take up some space?

Megan came across this bicycle tryptich hanging in someone's front hall and loved the idea!

So now the decision became, what to put on it?  We are not bicycle enthusiasts so that was out.  Megan suggested a camera.  I like photography and it is a cool image...so I did some mock-ups.

While these are certainly interesting and pretty, I couldn't shake the feeling that it just wasn't right.  I mean, I like taking pictures but it's not my livelihood.  Architecture is.

Which spawned these!





The first image is Villa Savoye by Le Corbusier, one of my favorites, and the second and third are sketches of the German Pavilion in Barcelona by the architect Ludwig Mies Van Der Rohe (my alltime favorite architect and building.)

But Megan thought these were too complicated, and especially was not fond of LMVDR's drawing of the female sculpture.

So what to do...finally we decided to emphasise Henry's hometown...what better image than the St. Louis skyline?


Now you may remember this drawing from a previous piece I did for Megan on our first anniversary:
Well that settled it!  At least in my mind...I think I asked Megan, but I can't be sure.  Anyway, it settled the question for me...and I carried forward.

But we still had the storage issue.  Well that was when I had one of those moments that makes design so much fun...one of those eureka moments that all the tumblers fall into place and the lock turns easily.

Why don't we do the mural onto pegboard?  Of course!!

Execution:

So I did a little research into transfers.  I remember having a friend in grad school who had done transfers for his drawings and had used wintergreen oil.  Essentially, he had xeroxed his drawings and using the wintergreen as a releasing agent, he had gotten the toner to jump from one drawing to another surface.  How easy is that!

I read into all sorts of techniques: gesso transfers, caulk transfers, heat transfer, I finally decided that xlene transfer would be the best option.  Xylene, the chemical found in older markers as a blending agent, works with any toner based printout (laser or xerox) and is generally used on wood, cloth or paper.

Well, here's the rub, I am transferring directly onto latex paint, and xylene, being more or less turpentine, will loosen the paint.

Oh well..where's the fun without experimentation!

So off to home depot...I bought the necessary materials and set to cutting the furring down.  Of course, I don't have a miter saw, so I went the old fashioned way...




I have a new found respect for the Amish.
The mitered edges will look cleaner in the long run...and I do love clean looks.

So after I painted the panels that color blue we love so much, and let them dry, it's time to try the transfers.

I plotted the image of the skyline on my plotter at work after breaking it into three parts.  Once the paper was arranged on the board it was time to begin the experimental transfer.


This is the nasty stuff that made me smell like a marker...

Well...the long and short of it is that it worked...it's not flawless, the xylene did pick up the paint a little bit, but I am satisfied.  Let's hope Megan is too!

Well that's it so far...this weekend I will hang the board...I'll post more about that later.

And I promise to be better about posting more frequently.  Every two years just ain't gonna cut it!

Lala

The Oread

There is a block of rooms being held at The Oread for our wedding, under the Lowdermilk-Wall wedding. This is just a reminder post that those held rooms are being released to the public next week-- April 29th-- so if you want to stay where the action is, don't forget to make your reservation soon!

Honeymoon Drama and Invitation Issues

GRRRRRRRRR....it would be so nice if everything could've gone off without a hitch. We were so close! Well, we recently closed the door on one set of issues only to have another stick it's furry little head up like the worst game of whack-a-mole ever!

Let's start with the honeymoon. IT turns out that about 2 months ago, they canceled some of our flights both to and from Tahiti. This would not have been an issue, had they not also forgotten to tell us! DRAMA! So what we had to do is push our honeymoon up a day on the front end and on the back end, we have to spend an extra 2 days traveling. We leave Moorea, sleep in Papeete, fly to LA, sleep in LA, fly to Texas and then to KC. This is why Megan and I have registered for a jet. You can find our registry for this at Gulfstream.com.

Well, after a few deliberately worded emails from Carol, this issue was put to bed without any additional cost to us.

Of course, like I said, this wedding is a whack-a-mole, so up pops the issue that it would appear that 30 percent of our guests did not receive invitations! I mean come on! I don't even know how to battle that one other than by sending out an e-vite! Blech.

So if you got an invite you might be reading this. And if you know someone who got a save the date and no invite, tell them to call us please :)

We hope to see as many of you as we can very soon.

La la
M&T

Engagement Photo Shoot

It was incredibly cold. In fact it was the coldest day this winter when we met Matt Frye of One Tree Photography to take some shots for our engagement. We were looking to capture memories of the time. Images that would only improve with age like a fisherman's best catch. Little did we know the experience itself would be the memory worth catching.

Click Here to see the slideshow of the shoot :)

Clearing up the details

In the interest of keeping the invitations as simple as we can (we don't like clutter) I guess some of the details of the wedding are up in the air. So let us clear some things up for you :)

First off, we have a block of rooms (all but ten of the entire hotel) reserved at the Oread Hotel in Lawrence. This is in fact the hotel at which everything is going to take place so that's convenient!

Also, people have wondered about our registry. The fact is we are registered at both Macy's and Crate and Barrel however, we are in desperate need of a new car. Now while we are still waiting for T. Boone Pickens' response card, I think we can safely assume that no one will just up and buy us one. So Megan and I have set up an account (which you can read about to the right) in order to allow guests to donate towards the purchase of a new car for Megan and Tom!

So that being said, check back here often as we will be posting more and more as our happy day approaches.

Take care everyone!

Lala
T&M

Copyright © 2009 - La La Love You - is proudly powered by Blogger
Smashing Magazine - Design Disease - Blog and Web - Blogger Theme distributed by FREE Templates 4U