My grown-up rock collection

This is possibly my new favorite art. I know I said that just yesterday about the Fancy Nancy thing, but I've wanted to do this for YEARS now and it's finally done. It feels good.

Hold onto your butts (Jurassic Park, anyone?) because here it is:

{The sample I had for the upper left frame was just a tad too big, so I have to decide what to put there instead.}

It's rocks in shadow boxes! Hence calling it my grown up rock collection.

A bit of background- I got my bachelor's degree and did my graduate work in geology and I LOVE it. Seriously, it is so cool. I even worked at a nearby university for a couple years, teaching the intro to geology course as an adjunct instructor. Because I've been a geologist for so many years, I have a giant rock collection. Just tons and tons of rocks. When I was first married I kept the best ones out on a side table dedicated solely to rock displaying, but then we had our first little one and they got packed away.

As I mentioned before, I've wanted to do this for a long time. Even before we had drywall up, I had this section of wall earmarked for the rock collection and just a few days after the basement was completely finished I had the shadow boxes I had up and ready to roll, with the 4 remaining spaces being reserved with pieces of paper cut to the right size. On Monday I finally got to IKEA and bought the last frames I needed (the Ribba 10" shadow boxes, online here).

Here's how the rocks are mounted:

I took the chipboard frame backing and folded a piece of normal, 8.5" by 11" cardstock over it. I thought about painting the frame backing or cutting out cardboard and painting it white and gluing the rocks to that, but this was much easier and should hold up well.

Then I used the hanger clip to hold the paper in place. Easy. 

{Sorry it's blurry. Nighttime photos, right?}

 Then I flipped the mats around (the mats that come with the Ribba frames were a little bit off-white, but the back is as white as the cardstock I was using), centered the rock inside of it, on top of the cardstock, and just used hot glue to stick it there. Since the cardstock wasn't secured to the backing except for that little clip at the top, the whole thing was kind of floppy until I got the frame all put back together. And now they're all fine. And awesome.

See?

{Don't mind the distracting surround sound wiring- that's going to get moved up by the ceiling and out of my way.}

 Here are some close ups of my favorite samples:

     






















And since the scientist in me just can't resist, from the top left and going clockwise, it's kyanite, muscovite, rhyolite (some people call this variety "wonderstone" because of the banding) and a quartz geode.

Another cool thing- I didn't have nice slabs of all of these, until I thought of it while we were renting the tile saw for the downstairs bathroom. After we were done with the tile, I had a little fun with all my samples.

I did one other thing before I mounted them, too. A fresh cut surface of rock is very dull compared to polished rocks, but I didn't have any plausible way to polish these (in a lab I'd use a series of finer and finer abrasives on different lapidary wheels) until I realized that I could use baby oil for a fake polishing effect:

{Before and after, of course}

Anyway, I couldn't be more pleased with my grown up rock collection.

Indoor cat door

This may seem like a weird thing to some people (or maybe an obvious thing, I don't know), but putting a cat door on our storage room door was genius.

To explain, when our basement was unfinished, Danger (the cat) could just run downstairs to get to her litter box and her food and water. We had a door at the top of the stairs with a chain lock on it, so I would keep that on but the door open and Danger could slip through that little 6 inch gap and my daughters could not. Our stairs looked like this,

{These are some freaky steep stairs, folks.}

so it was really important to make them inaccessible to our toddler.

Well, I started thinking about how I would handle the littler box and the cat food as we got closer and closer to finishing and one day it occurred to me that we could just put a cat door on the storage room door to cut off toddler access to those things (Eleanor is still 2 or 3 inches away from being able to get an actual grip on the door knob, so a closed door will be enough of a deterrent for awhile yet). I wouldn't have to worry about having the door open for Danger and closed for Eleanor. Brilliant!

The installation was very straight forward and simple. I followed the instructions that came with the cat door we got (it was this one) and basically just found the center of the door, traced the shape of the cat door so it would be centered, then cut it out with a jig saw and screwed the door in. So simple.

My jigsaw lines weren't perfect, but the cat door has that little casing bit that covered them up. I'd do a whole hallway shot, but right now the hall leading up to this door is so full of junk that if I backed up much farther the cat door would be obscured by boxes. Hooray!

So, now that I've shared my genius plan, what do you think? Would you have cut a big ol' hole in your brand new door? 

My daughter's favorite things about her new room

Mim absconded with my phone the other day and took some pictures of her favorite things in her new room. (That's what she told me she had done after I got my phone back from her)

The light is my favorite thing, too. 

There's just a few more finishing touches that need to happen and then I guess I'll do a full room reveal. (I feel pretentious saying that, since it doesn't really feel that grand.) Stay tuned.

MOAR MOOD BOARDS!

{Polyvore link with source list HERE}

 What's happening in the family room is different that I originally planned, but I'm loving it. Instead of doing a built in entertainment center, we ended up with a dresser in the little nook that's there. It's one I had in our garage from a yard sale last year.

It's not in the best shape, but it really grew on me and I'm just going to go with it.

{Link HERE}

 We needed a new comforter and we still don't have any rugs at all in our bedroom, so I decided to try and take that on this year, instead of finishing anything that's already in the works. (Seriously, what's my problem?) Anyway, I have pretty strong feelings (possibly inappropriate) for the exact quilt in the picture and was heartbroken when I saw Anthropologie didn't have that color in stock anymore. I had a brainwave earlier this week- ebay! I got a great deal and it'll be here soon, I hope.

{Link HERE}

The living room was left pretty blank after we got the lovesac downstairs (hallelujah) and sold our old entertainment center that was too big for the nook downstairs. I want that exact chaise lounge and those curtains, but I hope to find a buffet/dresser on Craig's List and possibly diy a display coffee table like that one.

Sometimes progress is just a big giant mess

A giant mess with holes and dust and dirt and rusty pipes EVERYWHERE.

I've mentioned before that our basement isn't finished. Well, it just might be by the end of the year!! I've been insanely excited about it. Like when I heard the plumber could move where our water line came into the house, it MADE MY DAY. I told him that about 10 times, too. And while thinking about having the basement finished just gives me happy hives, sometimes the mess does put a bit of a damper on things. Here's what the last few weeks have looked like:

{This is a plumbing mess.}

We were getting two new floor drains (the existing one is in our family room space) and the bathroom fixtures roughed in. It was an entire day full of dust and noise.

Don't worry about the giant pile of dirt that's overtaking the walk up to my front door. I don't. We (which, in this case, is pretty much just my little brother) had to dig window wells so people could come cut giant holes in the foundation of our house with giant saws. Four giant holes, four giant window wells (they had to be dug 4 feet back from the house, a foot on either side of where the cut needed to be made, and 18 inches deeper than the bottom cut).

Dirt was (still is) literally everywhere.

Oh no! The water pipe!

It's cool, just dig down 2 more feet. That's what we needed to do to have the water line entrance moved and still be good to go, code-wise. Small price to pay to have the window be where I wanted it. I could have stood at the bottom of that hole and been buried standing up.

Then they came and cut the big giant holes. You may have picked up from my tone that I was kind of nervous about this, despite the fact that they were ready to go with the steel lintels that would take the weight of the house. It's just... a big giant hole in the load-bearing concrete wall your house is built on. Right? That's scary.

Things were fine, though, and now you can stay tuned for part 2, when progress actually looks like progress.