Making Over Downstairs

Project Summary: Since I have started blogging, I have also started following a few other blogs. One of my favorites is Young House Love. One of the things that they do that I love, is create mood boards to help people solve their design dilemmas. I thought this was a great way idea, and I decided to make my own mood board for our downstairs .

Before Pictures of Downstairs

The Mood Board

The walls: Currently, the kitchen is painted a color called Florida Mango. I like the color, but I find it overwhelming on so much wall. I was looking for a nice brown pallete, that would match well with the orange. I want to paint the small downstairs bathroom the mango color, and the rest of downstairs a mix of dark and light brown. The following is a color template suggested by Behr.


The other thing that we would like to do is put up chair rails on the walls. Since we have such high ceilings, this will help to divide the space. It will also dress up the room quite a bit.

Wish List: Large area rug, new dining table, bench for table, coat rack for wall, storage bench for shoes, coffee table, new pendant lights, new flush ceiling lights

All with a budget of a $1000?!?!?! That's right! We will purchase the rug and the blinds, but everything else we will be building ourselves! Our plans will come from my other favorite blog- Knock- Off Wood!

Thanks to Knock-Off Wood and Young House Love!

Better Photography: Lesson 4

For this lesson, I was supposed to use my flash outside on a cloudy day, to improve the lighting of the shot. But living in South Florida, I am so used to taking pictures when it is sunny out, that I keep forgeting to take my camera out on those cloudy days. Instead, I tried to do the same thing, when the sun was going down, but there was still lots of light outside. The picture in the previous post was one of the successes I had with this. Here it is next to a shot I took without the flash, so that you can compare. In my opinion, the flash helped to eliminate dark shadows, as well as freeze my fast moving subject :)

One note about these pictures: My subject was not cooperating so well! I guess I will learn tricks to overcome this when I get to the lesson on portraits!

Matteo is WAY to big!

Matteo is growing up SO fast- just way too fast. Next week he will be 18 months old. He already thinks he is a big boy, refusing to give us kisses in front of friends and saying bye-bye to run off and play. We are having to be very careful these days, as he is opening doors and escaping from the house! I took this picture earlier this week, as I chased him as he tried to run away!

More news about Matteo! He started gymnastics classes this week :) I know I am biased, but my kid is sooo cute and already such a little athlete. :)

New Lense for My Camera

As many of you know, I have been doing these online photography classes. One of the lessons I enjoyed the most was the first lesson on aperture. I really love photography with sharp foregrounds and blurry backgrounds. And now I have a new lens that does exactly this! It is a Sony 50mm f/1.8 SAM DT Lens like the one in the picture below.


Check out some of the cool pictures I took of Matteo and some flowers. Notice how blurred the backgrounds are! I put some recent pictures of Matteo that I took at the beach, so that you can compare the pictures taken with this new lens to the ones taken with a standard lens.

Better Photography Week 3

This was my favorite class so far. The lesson was about the color of white, and how to measure the light and then adjust your cameras white balance manually. You can really see the difference in the picture below. Basically, with this little trick, you can take a picture inside at night, and make it look like it was taken outside in the middle of the day! The first picture in each set was taken using the automatic white balance, the second with the tungsten setting, and the in the third I set the white balance manually (after measuring the light).

Better Photography Week 2

This week's lesson had to do with ISO and shutter speed. It taught that low ISOs should be used when there is an abundance of light and high ISOs when there is less so. The shutter speed can be adjusted to capture greater detail in the photo.

For this weeks lesson, I placed a vase in the sink and used different shutter speeds to capture the spray of the water in different aspects. I struggled to get good pictures in this lesson, and I think one of my major challenges was the amount of light available. My first attempt at shooting was done at night, but none of the shots came out well (even when I adjusted my ISO to 3200). Then I attempted during the day, but I still don't think there was enough natural light available. I would like to repeat this lesson outside with a brook or another source of running water. Here were my results:


This one is from my first attempt and was taken at night time. It is not a very good shot- due to the high ISO it came out very grainy.
1/100s, ISO: 3200, f/5.6 S

This one was taken during the daytime, and I think it is a much better picture.
1/60s, ISO 1600, f/6.3

This is my favorite picture of the set. With the higher shutter speed, you get a crisp shot of the water flow and water droplets.
1/160s, ISO 400, f/5.6

For a final experiment, I put my camera on a tripod and set the shutter to stay open for 1 second. As you can see, the flow of water looks solid with such a low shutter speed.
1 second, ISO 1600, f/36

Best of Friends

Matteo and his best friend Nathan!

Coppertone Baby

This year we celebrated Easter with friends. It was probably one of the best Easters yet- the weather was perfect and we hung out by the pool till the sun went down and then enjoyed a yummy bar-b-que. Matteo and his friend Nathan had a great time, and the spent nearly all day swimming and jumping off the sides into the pool. This is now one of Matteo favorite things to do :) He has NO fear, which is a little nerve-wrecking at times.

Check out this picture of my Coppertone baby:Nice Tan Line!

Better Photography

My friend Lindsay has been participating in these photography classes where she completes a new assignment every week and posts it on her blog. I thought I would follow suite, although I am a few weeks behind. I am using my Sony a200 DSLR to take all pictures in this course.

The week one assignment taught about the aperture, and how it relates to the amount of light in a picture. Basically, a high f-stop means that little light comes into the picture and vice versa. The lower the aperture, the more in focus the whole picture. Using a low f-stop (which is the same as a high aperture) leads to an in focus subject and a blurred background.

When I completed this assignment, it took a little practice to compose the pictures so that you could see the difference in the background details. Here is what I ended up with.

f-stop 22

f-stop 8

f-stop 5.6 (the lowest I can go with this lens at this zoom)

My Mother-In-Law Arrives!

Last Friday, my mother-in-law arrived from Chile! She has come to see her grandson, visit the US and to help us out a little. Hopefully, this next year is going to be a tough year. I say hopefully, because I hope to start nursing school in August. So we are going to need a LOT of help :)

We have been having fun so far, showing her around Fort Lauderdale and Miami, spending time at our pool(the weather has been perfect for this), and going to the park with Matteo. This Sunday we are going to celebrate Easter with friends- we have planned a pool day and a bar-b-que.

Check out the pictures of Tia Barbara and Matteo.