Birthday Calendar | Free Download

A few weeks ago, I gave you a peek at a project I did for a guest post at Just Us Four. Today I'm going to reveal what I made: a Dutch birthday calendar you can download and personalize for your own family!

When I wrote this post, I'm was still a little jet-lagged from our family's nearly month-long visit to the Netherlands, where all of my husband's family lives. It had been 2.5 years since our last visit, so what we lack in frequency, we try to make up in duration!

Because we get back to the Netherlands so infrequently, we tend to stock up on a lot of our favorite things when we are there. There's one thing I like to stock up on that is uniquely Dutch, brilliant, and just the thing to share with you by way of introducing you to my love of organization, my attempts to reduce our use of paper, and my appreciation of Dutch culture. I'm  talking about the verjaardagskalendar, pronounced ver-YAR-digh-CAL-en-der

A verjaardagskalendar is a perpetual birthday and anniversary calendar. (Dutch lesson of the day: verjaardag = birthday). Instead of filling out birthdays and anniversaries on a new calendar every year, this perpetual calender has lines and dates, but no days of the week. Pretty smart, right?

Now, here's the brilliant part. I've been in many Dutch homes, and the birthday calender is always found in the same place. It's not the kitchen, or by the computer or office area, as I might have guessed. Nope, it's in the main floor bathroom. Every.single.time. (Because most houses in the Netherlands are built up rather than out, the main floor usually has only one bathroom, right by the front door).

One of the fun things about marrying someone from a different culture is discovering those things that seem so ordinary to one, while being rather surprising to the other. When I asked Niels why the calendar is in the bathroom he shrugged his shoulders and said that it's the one room in the house that's used every day, and when you are there, you usually have a moment to sit and think. (Clearly, we had this conversation in our pre-child days!)

We have added a verjaardagskalendar to our powder room, with a little note inviting friends and family to add their information.

In a few weeks, our son will be starting pre-K, and his world will start to include friends from school. We brought home a special birthday calendar for his bathroom.

Now that D is potty trained, he has little book shelf  doesn't need to quite so many books to entertain him while he's taking care of business. 

So, if you don't happen to live in the Netherlands, or have family there to visit, how can you get your hands on your own birthday calendar? Fortunately, Amazon has started to carry a few, like this sea glass-themed birthday calendar (<---affiliate link). If you have a lot of time on your hands, you can make something like Alissa at Crafty Endeavor's bottle cap birthday calendar. Another option is to make a trendy chalkboard birthday calendar like my friend Lauren at The Thinking Closet. A little-known gift lurking in your Microsoft Word program is a selection of birthday calendars. When you open a new document, search the online templates for "birthday calendar." As I write this, there are three options.

Or, as a special gift to you, I have created a custom birthday calendar for you. 

You can download this pdf  for your personal use. 

Just print on card stock, and add your own 4x6 photos, like this:

Add birthdays and anniversaries. If known, I like to add the year, as well.

I blurred the names of the innocent.

Punch a hole, add a ring, and you are ready to go!

If the bathroom seems like a strange place for your calendar, consider another area you see every day, like the frig. 

A big thanks to Shannah at Just Us Four  for letting me guest post. You can follow her on Facebook,  Pinterest, Blog Lovin', Google+, and/or Twitter,

And if you aren't already, you can follow us, too! 

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Color Selection

This is a bit of slow season in our build as the electrical/plumbing/HVAC finishes up. There's been a little bit of insulation blown in and then we're see the drywall going up. At the point, our house will really start to look like a home.

We've handed off our flooring selections, and the folks from Charis will do a little research so see if we can get the costs in line with our allowance. 

The other big batch of decisions we made this week was selecting the colors for our soon-to-be walls. Sue, from Charis, came over with her big book of Sherwin Williams color swatches and we got to work. Our allowance is for six colors, though we could always pay more for additional colors if we wanted them. Our current house has five colors (mostly one outside the bedrooms), so we figured six was plenty.

In our current house, our base color is what I call "chocolate milkshake." When we put in on almost 5 years ago, it really reminded me of a Wendy's Frosty. But as we've been looking at models and watching HGTV, we've been won over by gray as the new neutral. It works with our modern bent and our steel appliances and fixtures, so we think it will look nice. 

Thanks to the Sherwin Williams Color Visualizer, we're able to get a large scale sense of how the colors will look.

We'll use the darker gray as the base on the first floor for the kitchen, great room, dinette (maybe, see below), foyer, mudroom, office and maybe in-law bath (if we don't go with the room color). We'll  use the lighter gray upstairs in the guest bedroom, hallway and our bath, with a transitional treatment using both hues on the stairway. 

SW Classic French Gray

SW Light French Gray

The next decision was the in-law suite. We knew that it would be the same (or Sherwin Williams equivalent) or our current master bedroom colors, which is sage green and chocolate. I was happy to keep those colors (since we have all the accent decor) for our new master until my awesome hubby said we could use plum: my most favorite color! So here's the color for the in-law suite (and laundry room)

SW Dried Thyme

So, our room will be this pretty plum color! Our wedding colors were platinum and plum, so of course, I love that subtle reminder in our bedroom. What can I say, my husband is the greatest!

SW Expressive Plum

Just for giggles, I did this rendering for the dining room. It looks a lot richer/deeper than the rendering of our bedroom. Interesting. Our dinette will be very bright because it has windows on all three sides (and open on the fourth), so I think we could play with a darker color if we wanted to be crazy with it.

SW Expressive Plum

Our 2.5-year-old son's favorite color, for quite some time has been yellow. When we asked him what color he wanted his new room to be, he has quite consistently requested yellow. However, yellow is not really the calm nap/deep sleeping-inducing color we have in mind, so we're sticking with blue like he has in his nursery, but more of a "big boy blue. We saw this particular color in another Charis home and we feel in love with it.

SW Bracing Blue

So that leaves one last color. We had to decide between the vibrant orange Dutch bathroom I put off in our current house because we needed to be neutral or yellow for our amber-obsessed son. After looking at pictures of my Dutch decor, we decided that the yellow would work, so this is the yellow for our powder room and D's bath. The power room will have orange tulips for accents, and D's room will have blue accents.

SW Bee's Wax.

We made all these selections in our home, at night, under warm lights. Sue, our interior designer, is ordering larger samples that we'll bring to the new house to view with natural light. If needed we can adjust the tones.

I can't wait to see it all come together!

The Toto Package

We're really getting into the nuts and bolts of selections now, so here I am doing a post about toilets.

To start, we knew that the green choice was to go with WaterSense toilets. Much like EnergyStar, WaterSense is a program that designates green home products. In order to be labeled as a WaterSense fixture, the item has to be certified to be at least 20 percent more efficient without sacrificing performance. 

Toilets today do use a lot less water than the toilets of decades past, but with dual flush toilets, a user can conserve even more water by selecting the amount of water needed per flush. My first experience with dual flush toilet was at my in-laws house in the Netherlands, where I saw something like this when I looked for the lever:

Dual flush wall buttons

I quickly learned that the little button was for liquid waste and the big button was for solid waste. Pretty easy to remember! Obviously, more water is used for solid waste removal.

Dual flush toilets are not common yet in the States, though we do believe they will be in the coming years. We choose to install Toto Aquia toilets.

Toto's Aquia line

For most of the bathrooms, we'll install the Toto Aquia CST416M, which is standard height.

In the in-law suite, we'll install the similar Toto Aquia CST412MF, which is ADA compliant as it is a little taller.

Here's a fun little fact about Toto toilets: they don't come with seats...

Just compare the Amazon picture below to the Toto product picture on the left. Good to know, eh? So, make sure you order them or it'll make for an interesting sitting experience... ;-)

Cleaning Up

The decisions are coming fast and furiously now. Yesterday and today's agenda included shower and tub fixtures.

D's room was easy. We went with a standard Aker by Maax shower/tub kit. It will be very nice to have a standard tub in our family bath. Our current one is only a shower, which made bathing our toddler interesting at times!

Standard 60" shower/bath kit.

In our room, we have a 60" shower with bench, also by Aker by Maax. We opted against the tile showers that are so popular right now because 1) I'm not a fan of cleaning grout lines, 2) it's much more expensive, and not a cost we want to spend, 3) if we do want to upgrade later on, it won't be very difficult to do. This is the same fixture I had in my townhouse, and I look forward to not having to do acrobatics every time I try to shave my legs!

60" Shower with bench.

For the tub, we chose a nice big 60" soaker tub with jets. We have only one tub in our current house, a big honking triangle shaped Jacuzzi tub. The jets are nice, but the thing is a bear to fill and clean. This choice is still a splurge, but a more reasonable one. At this time, I'm not sure if will be 32" or 42" wide, but I know we'll like the rectangular shape much better!

60" x 42" soaker tub with jets

The originally plan for the in-law bath was to have a custom shower that a wheelchair could wheel in, if needed. While we are keeping universal design in mind, in reality, this much-less-expensive option will work just fine for our current needs: our parents visiting, and bench seating for anyone recovering from surgery or broken bones when going upstairs might be more difficult. Niels found this 60" shower with adjustable bench late in the game or else we might have done this for our bathroom as well. I love the extra niches!

60" shower with movable bench.