Friday, February 27, 2009

This weekend my sister Courtney is coming to visit us for the weekend (with her new bf that we haven't met yet!).

Hahaha.

Next it's her turn!

Or hers!


I love having company - I feel domestic! Although - I'm pretty sure they are just using us for a free place to stay, due to our close proximity to Atlanta... :) But any family or friends out there - you are welcome to come use us - we are happy to have you!

Sunday, February 22, 2009

Oils

I won't get into the details about how I got into this situation - but let's just say that I ended up with Kilz completely covering my entire hands, front and back. I'm talking second coat thick.

Water? Obviously no.
Nail Polish Remover? Sorta, but mostly just well-primed lizard hands.
Goo Gone? Better, but mostly just non-sticky white hands.
Salt scrub? Getting there, can't feel my fingers they've been scraped numb.
Olive oil mixed with salt scrub? Yay!! And moisturized!

Not that I expect anyone would need this advice - you can't be as dumb as me...

Thursday, February 19, 2009

Discovery!

Well, I guess it's not much of a discovery if someone else discovered it - but I am super-excited to know about Scrapblog, which I found out about from Holly's blog. Now I know how everyone has these fancy elements on their pages! - that, or they are very computerly gifted. It is the perfect answer to my obsession with changing my header all of the time as my mood changes (sorry, but I only have like 4 people who read this, so I'm hoping they don't care about the lack of consistency!) Much better than me trying to paste and group in powerpoint!!

I only had a few minutes to play around with it and make this new header, but I know exactly what I will be doing once work slows down (when????).

Tuesday, February 17, 2009

A Windy Weekend in D.C.


Given that we had President's Day off yesterday, Tony, Kacy, Mikey, and I decided it would be fitting to head to D.C. for the long weekend trip we were planning (that, and Kacy's aunt and uncle live in the suburbs and we could stay for free!). So we were good citizens and explored our nation's capital. Of course I took about 200 paparazzi pictures, but I will only share a few.




We had big plans, but only got to about a fraction of the things we were planning on doing. We had a turbulence-filled windy flight in, took a tour of the capitol building, went to the Holocaust museum (I had never been - very impactful), saw alot of the monuments, popped into the Air and Space, ate $18 french toast (oops), went to Annapolis and visited the Naval Academy (Kacy's dad's alma mater), ate delicious crab on multiple occasions, hung out with Barack, ate a romantic Valentines dinner at a Five Guys that was invaded by punk teenagers, explored Arlington, mastered - and then got lost on - the Metro, and had an all around busy but eventful time. Kacy's aunt, uncle, and cousins were super nice and very accommodating (full breakfast for us every morning!).
So, thanks Abe for being born (200 years ago!) and granting us this day off work!


Wednesday, February 11, 2009

Purple Blanket

Geez...nothing exciting is going on this winter...thus you will have to endure more tales from fixing up our house..
So, I was totally sick of the standard yellow/cream/beige color that is in all of our house, and it was really bothering me in the guest room...


Purple Blanket. That's the name of the color I decided to paint on an "accent wall" in our guest bedroom (fancy, huh). I figured a whole purple room would be quite scary... and I'm still not sure if a 1/4 purple room is scary or not.

For Christmas, we got this fabulous black and white bedding set from my Grammy, and with the recycled black furniture from Tony's youth, I figured a pop of color would be a good thing. I kinda like it...and I'm kinda scared of it. Not quite sure yet. Does it scream Barney? Or is it bright and bold? You tell me. Keep in mind my camera has a tendency to make all colors crazy scary looking.


I painted the other walls Manhattan Mist. Turns out, with the tiny little windows and weird overhead lighting, about 89% of the time, the other walls reflect the purple and end up looking lavender. *NOT what I was going for.* Tony tells me it does look gray, but I'm pretty sure he's slightly color blind, so I can't trust him. I'm going to live with it for a while, and find stuff to decorate and put on the walls. If it still looks like a cupcake, I'm going to repaint a darker gray.


I'm also excited about making a headboard for our little full bed. I've been stalking others' creations for a while, and using the fabulous tutorials here, here, and here, I'm hoping to create a fancy looking piece for very little money.


Later on down the road I can repaint the furniture (what's funny is Tony painted it black as a teenager to be cool... and years later I actually like it black). And there is great potential for a dramatic window treatment.


So you tell me - scary blanket???

Sunday, February 1, 2009

When Shelving Falls On You....

Dust yourself off and fix DIY mistakes.

So, the people who lived in our house before us were definitely the DIY kinda people. Which is great. That's what we are aspiring to be (slowly learning as we go!). However, back in 1985 when they (probably just "he") did all of these projects, apparently there wasn't a concern for proper installation or issues of weight bearing. And apparently wall anchors didn't exist either.

All of our cabinets (garage, kitchen, etc) have that not-quite-perfect look of a DIY job. The garage was set up clearly as a wood workshop (way more pegboard, benches, shelves, etc than we know what to do with), and we think he utilized the heck outta that thing - making all of the "surfaces" in the house himself. Closet shelves are also included.

The first shelf that fell on me was in the guest bedroom - let's just say that a 14 foot piece of wood was involved and millions of shards of broken glass. That was a fun day.

Not a month later, I had to dodge another falling shelf, this one in the laundry room. It held drying clothes, towels, sheets, and some laundry supplies. Perhaps it was overloaded, but I think the fact that the screw was just put into plain drywall had something to do with it. Luckily no glass was involved this time.

This event forced us to move forward with the plans we had about redoing the laundry room. It's a big laundry room, but like most other spaces in our house, it was not designed for efficient use of that space. And the ugly, now not as much of a fire hazard water heater is stuck in there too. I wish I had taken a picture before - as there was a giant white cabinet, island type thing in there, making it very cramped (excuse to not do the laundry??). This is the before pic of sorts - but after the shelf fell and after we moved the cabinet out.


So we put up a new shelf for hanging clothes on the other wall (with brackets and wall anchors, etc - who would have thought??) and decided to use the other wall as a pantry of sorts. We only had one narrow and inefficient cabinet as a pantry before, and that wasn't really working out. (By the way, only 3 of our 22 - yes, 22 - cabinets in the kitchen are tall enough to hold regular drinking glasses upright. He was a woodworker, but not one with much foresight!).

So instead of opting for the multiple shelving units we were discussing, we went the lazy route and bought this chrome baby. Easy installation and the freedom of mobility - can't go wrong! And I love the fact that you can see everything - something we didn't have in the previous pantry. Of course, that will be not so great when Roxy decides she wants to nab the grits.

So now we have a more functioning space, with plenty of room for me to move around as I go about my laundering. Now I'm just waiting for the next one to fall on my head.
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