This Is...21?

Friday night was date night, even though I messed up and took a shift because I completely forgot what day it was. Having a constantly-changing schedule does that to me. After I got off work we skipped dinner and hurried straight to the movies to see something I was really excited about:

(You can watch the trailer here.)

 

And I was not disappointed. It was laugh out loud funny. I was in stiches at parts and desperately sad for them at others.  Even though I'm not exactly the target audience I could easily relate to the characters. I went in with low expectations because I had read so many bad reviews but thankfully it was funny. I'd give it an 8 out of 10. We'll definitely be buying it once it comes out, though that doesn't tell you much since Chris owns somewhere around the neighborhood of 2-3 hundred movies.

It's Beginning To Look A Lot Like Christmas

I sent out our Christmas cards super late this year. As in I mailed the last of them yesterday. #slacker. But anyway, I had really good intentions this year to have professional family portraits taken but that just didn't play out because, well, I'm broke. And a mom. And pressed for time when all 3 family members are awake and happy enough to be dragged to the mall for family pictures. So a week or so before Christmas I taped up some great wrapping paper to the back of the sofa and threw down a white sheet to cover up the garish green carpet. Here's some of the outtakes: 

 

...and the winner!

I took it over to Shutterfly and dropped it into a Christmas card and 3-5 business days later these beauties arrived in my mailbox: 

 

Then on Christmas morning we woke up to a very sick baby. She had a massive coughing fit just before this picture but she was so excited to finally rip the paper.

Gotta love matching father-daughter bed head. 

 

I hope everyone had a great Christmas! I know we did, even if it was a little chaotic hitting up three different houses in one day. I bought Chris an adult-sized Captain America shield and some DVDs. He bought me a new laptop, so hopefully that means I can start chatting you guys up a little more frequently from the comfort of my own sofa.

 

Saturday Food For Thought

 

 

 

I'll be back later this afternoon with another post!

Saturday's Food For Thought:

 

I had this conversation with a customer today. She had to wait behind a particularly bitchy customer and she told me she had been in restaurant-slash-retail for 7 years and understood my pain. Why are people so hateful to people in the service industry?

Humphrey Paints the Kitchen

Well, he didn't literally paint it. I painted it. I was worried I wouldn't have enough money between the Holidays to get anything around the house done but thankfully I read over on Young House Love that if you use a CoinStar machine to get a gift card instead of cash, they don't take out their 10% share or whatever it is. Which is cool, because I shook ole Humphrey down and ran to the nearest machine with a baby wipes box full of change.

When it was all said and done, it ended up being $131.41, which I promtly spent on four boxes of tile, a can of white spray paint, an extension cord, a gallon of paint for the kitchen, rollers, a paint tray, and the remaining hinges for the kitchen cabinet doors. (Finally! Now if only I could get Chris to hang them.)
Not even an hour after coming home I had the kitchen taped and the paint poured. I finished the next day and altogether it took about five hours to paint the whole thing. Ready for the reveal? Me too!

Just a reminder, here's what it looked like before:

Obviously I didn't do any staging for you guys, huh? I'm ashamed that my house looks like this almost on the daily.

And now: Drumroll please!

 

 

I love it. It feels so much more cozy and warm in there now. I just can't wait to do more. Maybe that backsplash? Yikes.

It's Beginning To Look A Lot Like Christmas

This Christmas is very, very exciting for me. I'm totally and 1000% into the spirit this year. Last year I was nine months pregnant, miserable, huge, and settling into a brand spanking new (to us) house. Not exactly in the holdiay spirit. So when my mom called me and asked if I wanted to go cut down a Christmas tree yesterday, I jumped. I had been itching for a tree for a few weeks already but had to resist because it would have died long before the 25th.

We went up to the Christmas Tree Farm and had a hell of a time trying to find a tree. I guess when it hasn't hardly rained all year and you have an obscenely long hot summer it doesn't do so well for the Christmas tree business. But the man there was super nice, and he was apparently open only for us, which made me sad. We've been going to this tree farm since I was nine or ten so I obviously hold it near and dear to me. Cutting down the tree was a major part of my childhood Christmases.

Anyway, now that I'm getting sappy (ba dum bum) about trees, I'll move on. We got the tree picked, cut, and netted and then hustled home to decorate it.

Bam! It's very tall, we actually had to give it a haircut just to put the topper on it. So since that was done, I started chomping at the bit to do our Christmas cards.

I bought some adorable wrapping paper at target this year and I thought it would make a great backdrop for a photoshoot/desperate attempt to get a card worthy picture.

 

 

I love the bottom, even though her arms are a little bit blurry. She's such a ham.

I have the card narrowed down to two designs on Shutterfly, now I just need Chris' imput. I'll be sure and post one when we decide!

 

In The Mood

Hooray, I finally made a mood board for the kitchen! I still have to run it by Chris but I think he'll approve since he's usually pretty easy going about the house decorating. I didn't spend long on it, so excuse the hurried look to it, but I just wanted to put it all together and see if I loved it as much as I thought I would. So without further ado, here's the plan:

Kitchen by superdupergirl on Polyvore

 

A few notes:

I can't decide on the pendant lights but I'll probably hang one over the sink and two over the bar.

The curtains are just a placeholder until I can find a funky ikat print that I love. I'll probably make six panels and hang them in the living room and in the kitchen to keep it looking cohesive.

I can't decide if I'll paint the bar stools or not but I'm pretty in lurve with them.

I want on old rotary phone so badly. Hopefully in a fun, bright color like this yellow one. We don't have a house phone but there's a box in the wall of the kitchen for one so I thought I would get a fun retro one that would be more for looks than function.

 

How was your Thanksgiving? Ours went pretty smoothly, but we didn't have to cook anything (I was definitely thankful for that!) Lily was great and pretty happy even though we kept her up through her afternoon nap. Two days before thanksgiving was our "housiversary" (infinitely fun to say- try it!) which I was incredibly excited about and also in a state of disbelief. We've lived in our ugly-cute little 3 bedroom for a year now. How crazy is that? This year is going to be the year of big changes though. Now that we're settled, it's time to change things up.

 

My Gigantic Room By Room To-Do List

Is it just me, or does doing one project make you itch to start another and another? We just put in a new front door (I can't wait to show you guys!) and now I want to start painting slash sewing slash tiling slash demoing everything in our poor house. I was at work all day today thinking about things I wanted to do to the house and in what order I wanted to do them and I decided to let the whole internet know, so here it comes:

 

The Front Yard

 

 

To Do:

• Work on landscaping
• Replace the storm door and paint the new door to match the shutters
• Get a mailbox on a post
• Replace the house numbers with some bigger, stylish oil rubbed bronze numbers to match the new porch light.
• Replace the porch light
• Get a new front door



The Living Room

 

 

To Do:

• Basically re-do everything we've already done! I want to replace the curtains which currently look like this:

yeesh, right? I'd love to replace them with a bright color or maybe even some blue or green ikat patterned ones.

• Hang (new) curtains
• Start a frame wall

• The paint color came out way lighter than I expected it to so I now want to repaint the walls a darker greige and replace our awful green carpet which you can see here:

 



• Spray paint the chandelier a bright color to go with the curtains and possibly add a shade, like this
• Whitewash the fireplace, which is making a very sad trombone sound. Womp womp.

 

• I also want to replace the "crown molding" around the top of the room, which is actually floor molding turned upside down.

The Kitchen

 

 

 

To Do:

• Replace the heavy, bulky, too-low drapery rod with a lighter one. It just looked like a big faux brass unibrow.
• Paint the cabinets white
• Paint a chalkboard on the side of my pantry (above) which is already getting a workout

• Paint the walls a khaki color
• Replace the flooring with a cherry wood laminate
• Retile the backsplash
• Get a new range hood- I've been looking at this one on amazon.
• Replace my awful countertops. I have three different ones and they're all ugly
• Put in a new pendant light over the sink
• Put in bamboo roman shades

The Laundry Room/Basement

 

To Do:

• I would love to stain the floors and maybe section off the laundry room a little better.
• I need more storage around/in the laundry area (which is right next to the stairs) so I was thinking of doing some shelving under the stairs. (see here for an example) 
• Make a clothespin chandelier for the stairway
• Paint thick, grey on slightly darker grey stripes in the stairwell

Bedrooms

 

To Do:

• Paint
• Rip up the carpet and sand/stain the gorgeous hardwoods underneath

• Replace the vinyl roller blinds with real blinds and hang curtains

 

Bathroom

Done:

Well... we've bought a vanity and a few towel rods.

 

To Do:

So Much. This is actually our next project and we'll probably be tackling it in the coming weeks provided we can work it around Thanksgiving. Mama likes her turkey.

In this reno (the first big project we'll be tackling together) we're going to be

• replacing the bathtub
• tiling a shower surround
• tiling the floor
• replacing the vanity and mirror
• replacing the door and trim
• frosting the window in the shower (I have no idea why there is a window in our shower, but I love the natural light it lends to the room so it's staying.)
• hopefully doing all of this within a few days because it's the only bathroom we have.

 

 

So there's my massive to do list (which is actually longer but I'm just doing this off the top of my head) and I'll leave you with some sunshine that brightened up my day (and my kitchen) 

 

That happy purple almost makes me forget it's 40 degrees outside.

Color Me Excited

I don't know why, but everyone here has had cabin fever all day long. Eleanor was going insane all day chewing on things and being a little too rough with the baby. Lily just crawls everywhere and has been kind of weepy. We went for a walk to try and cure it and man, am I out of shape. I walked a mile with Lily strapped to my chest in the Infantino and the pup pulling us along. My legs already hurt and it's only been two hours since we got back. I keep telling myself I'm going to work out and then find every possible excuse to avoid doing it. While I was walking though, I came to a realization. I need to start running again for 1. my sanity. 2. my body 3. my kid.

 

I'm a stresser. I worry about everything and at one time, running was my go-to mood booster. Now I realize that with a thousand more things to worry about (like my kid swallowing a marble) I need it more than I ever did. It probably wouldn't hurt any to lose a little weight either. I've lost all the baby weight but even before I got pregnant I was a few pounds over what I would have liked to be (plus, new clothes! Nobody says no to that). And with losing weight comes a healthier lifestyle. I have a daughter now who needs me to set a good example and eat right and excercise instead of crash dieting and bingeing.

 

After missing it this year, I heard about the The Color Run (which will be in town in June of 2013) and was automatically intrigued. Could I handle a 5k by next June? Totally. Couch to 5k gets people running them in 10 weeks. I can handle it in 8 months. I just need the motivation.

 



Doesn't that just look like fun?



I hereby declare that on June 1, 2013. I will be participating in The Color Run.

 

Now, you all will have to hold me to that. All two of you that have seen my blog. Man, I need to start networking.

Pumpkins!

This is LONG overdue, but we took Lily to the pumpkin patch!

 

 

It was a blustery day. Really windy and cold outside, which is why she looks so miserable, haha. She really did like her little baby pumpkin.

 

When we got home we carved those suckers up. Chris went with the Bat Signal, and I decided to go with a B&C. I had never actually attempted to shave the skin off of a pumpkin but it came off a lot easier than I expected, which was good.

 

And carving pumpkins means pumpkin seeds. I'd never roasted those either, so I decided to try it. I rinsed them off and laid them out to dry on some newspaper.

 

 

 

I actually don't have any pictures after this point because my camera ate them. But I followed this recipe which I found on Pinterest. Chris said he liked them, which was good enough for me!

 

This fall marks so many things for us. It's Lily's first holiday season, our one year homeiversary, and Lily's birthday in January. I'm so excited for it!

Mud, Gloirous Mud!

 First, a little update. The past weekend we went down to the Ozarks for the Tough Mudder, a crazy eleven mile obstacle course that takes some guts to do. Chris ran the whole thing (cue crazy proud fiance) and didn't even break anything. I was impressed. And by the end, he looked something like this:

 

Lily had tons of fun people watching and wandering the sponsor's tents while we waited for dad to finish. She even got a Wounded Warriors tattoo.

When we got home I was inspired by all the mud there and decided it was time for a little "Dude, Get On That Already" Challenge, Young House Love Style. (More on that here.)

 

I grabbed the spackle (which is a hilariously fun word) and went to town all over the house. I even got the bathroom holes that I've been staring at for a year.

 

 

I was on a roll, so I finally found a place for this guy, who has been hanging in a poorly lit corner of my dining room since I got him nearly a year ago.

 

 

I seriously stressed out about this for a good ten minutes, then took a deep breath and hung him up in the kitchen. Instant relief. He looks much happier there, don't you think?

 

Please forgive my awful pictures, they were taken with a 7 year old point and shoot.

 

Then I threw some cookbooks on top of my cabinet. I think once get some more it will look less sparse up there. Plus, I love my seahorse bookend.

 

What have you guys been up to lately? Made any tiny changes around the house that make you smile?

I Went For It.

And by "it" I mean tearing out our sad mulch filled garden beds and making a game plan for some not-so-sad beds next year. Spoiler: It went horribly wrong.

This normally happens when I make a quick decision and don't think something all the way through, but they were taunting me. Every time we pulled into the driveway they screamed out "Look! You're the ugly house on the block!" So I did something about them! I grabbed my shovel and wheelbarrow and scooped all (well, some) the mulch out, then ripped out all the torn weed blocking fabric.

This is where things went wrong. Look what I came up against, you guys.
 

 

Those are shingles. Like the kinds that go on your roof. In my planter. The roof was redone about two years before we moved into our little house, and apparently instead of getting a dumpster they just laid them out in the planters. They were stacked in there five or six deep. Not great.

So, I grabbed a shovel and dug them all up. In all, it took about a week of on and off digging and cursing our former owners. And dealing with a view like this:

 

 

Now it looks much happier. We had a hosta on the opposite side of the porch, which gets direct sunlight almost all day long. Mr. Hosta was very unhappy throughout the 100+ summer we had, so I split him up and moved him to the shady side of the house.

He (they?) is/are much happier now.

 

 

So there's the game plan (and my first blog post, EEEK!)

I'll be back with another post tomorrow!