costume progress and more house snippets

I have had a very productive three days!! I don't know why this sudden burst of energy, but I hope it sticks around :)  After being sick last week, I was extra motivated to get my house back from the hurricane that had devoured it, hahaha, then I moved on de-wallpapering our hall bathroom, which is getting painted and bead-boarded this weekend, yay! And, I've managed to whip out the boy costumes. Here's Obi-Wan:

It turned out pretty awesome.  We just need to find gray pants at black boots at a thrift store and Casey is good to go.  Oh, and see that pretty stair case to the right?  I finally painted those risers yesterday and I can't prove it, but they look so much better than the patched-up mess they were before!

I took the easy way out on Kelby's Yoda costume.  The only good cloak pattern I could find was two sizes too big and required a whopping 6 yards of fabric (more than Casey's! What????) So I bought an extra small women's v-neck, long-sleeved shirt and cut it up until it resembled a toddler's Yoda robe, hahaha.  A black ribbon and a flannel designed-by-yours-truly Yoda hat later, and we had this:
(terrible picture, I know)

So, it turns out I have time to make my clown costume after all!  Thankfully, I was able to use several pieces of the fabric a dear lady at church gave me, otherwise I probably couldn't have afforded to make all the pieces involved!

Since there was a rare moment this week when this media wall in our house was not a complete disaster, I went ahead and snapped a picture.  Let's face it, though, technology is ugly and not everyone's book spines are the same color (ahem, Crate & Barrell catalog), but this is where our family spends a lot of time and this is also the room in our house that required one of the greatest amounts of work, so I will show it off even if it doesn't look like a magazine!  Here is what this side of the family room looked like before:


And here it is now:

The wood panelling was around the entire perimeter of this room and we removed and retextured everything except for this area.  We didn't want to destroy the built-ins so we simply painted the paneling and the fire place white.  Even though there's a sliding door to the left, this room doesn't get a lot of light, so the changes we made made a huge different in the brightness.
Here's another before view:

And here's this door after:

This door used to be brown (to match the lovely paneling!) and so I painted it white and made a Roman shade (my first attempt, not bad!)  So there you have it :)