Last Weekend of Freedom

Tomorrow is the big day.  School starts again.  On our last weekend of freedom, we were accompanied by my dad and his new girlfriend.  It was the first time that they saw our house, so that's super exciting for us.  We love having visitors!  And even more than that, we love having visitors come back again so they can see our house progress in person.  We went out to lunch at The Shark, my favorite restaurant, also mentioned here.  We spent some time shopping on the boardwalk, laying out at the beach, making awesome dinners, and watching movies.  We even met my Uncle and his daughter yesterday and went to the zoo.  My 7-year-old cousin was the flower girl in our wedding:

What a cutie!

After spending hours at the zoo, the only really great shots I got were not of any zoo animals at all.  I almost stepped on this beautiful butterfly:

And this photo of my cousin pointing to something on the underside of a fake piece of wood:

All in all, we had a great weekend.  My dad also surprised me with a gift he bought in Haiti on his cruise:

A scroll???  Nope....

Some original artwork painted on canvas.  It is really cool, matches some colors in our home, and has music stuff on it.  Not to mention that no one else in the world has it.  I am really excited to get it framed, but have never had anything custom framed before... any suggestions on where to go?

Before and Not-So-After: Dining Room

Post #2 in the Before and Not-So-After series.  Our dining room is connected to the living room and kitchen, it serves as a corner to the two.  It is the same yellow as the living room, but for some reason it always looks brighter in the dining room.  We were SO excited to even have a dining room!  We have only ever had an eat in kitchen or no room for a table at all.  TV stands were our dining room table for some time.  So when we moved in, we were excited to make our dining room look like a dining room.  Here is a picture of the first day we moved in:

What we like about the dining room:

1. The light fixture.  It matches the living room light fixture.  I also love the fact that it's not brass.
2. The crown molding matches everywhere in the house, including the chair rail in the dining room.
3. The openness... even though it's pretty small, it opens to the living room and kitchen through large entryways and no doors.
4. The openness continues with a sliding glass door to the deck with a view of our back yard

What we dont like:

1. It's very small.  No big table for us!
2. That's it.

Here is our Not-So-After/Current Dining Room:

Whoops... a little crooked.

The furniture is from my step-dad's step-mom.  She gave us the table and the china cabinet. We are really lucky that we haven't had to buy dining room furniture in the last few years.  But we are ready to have our own furniture now!

Goals:

#1. Paint.  We LOVE the look of grey dining rooms.  And it's something that we both agree on.  And it matches the color pallet that we chose for the downstairs.  We have lots of inspiration photos for grey dining rooms, including:

We really love the grey colors and the contrast of stark white against cool grey with dark wood furniture. I like most of those photos, but we want to go for a much simpler and less elaborate look than what you just saw.

#2.  Buy a new table.  Dark wood.  VERY simple.  Clean lines, pointed corners, rectangle

#3.  Get rid of china cabinet (sad, because step-step-grandma gave it to us) and install white floating shelves like these pics below.  This is where we would have some china, some glasses, some art, and some vases and brightly colored decorations.  Kind of like these:

The dining room will probably be painted before any furniture is purchased.  That's okay with us.  We are going to try to take our time and buy stuff when we can afford it.  Plus, it's not a huge priority because we already have a table to eat on. 

On a sad note, I start school on Monday.  This is going to be a super duper busy year full of making money, spending money, going to grad school, working a few extra jobs (more on that later) and balancing a home/social life.  YIKES.

I'm a Closet Blogger

Big News!  I am featured as a guest blogger on friend Mrs. Puma's blog today!   My closet is officially the first room in our house that is completed.  Check out my post on Puma Life:

Maria's Organized Closet Makeover

Before and Not-So-After: Living Room

I really wanted to show some updates to friends and family who have seen our house. It is coming along, slowly but surely. I titled it Before and Not-So-After because none of the rooms are actually "finished" (except my closet--I will post about that later). So my goal is to show the before and the current and to inform you about our to-do list for each room.  I will start with the living room because it is the first room that you see when you walk in (except the foyer) and the room that we spend the most time in (alone and with guests).

Our living room is the very sunny yellow color that prevails throughout the majority of our entire home.  Here is the very boring before picture:

Things that we like: 

• The carpet.  Although we would rather have hardwood here, we are happy with the color/style/cleanliness of the carpet that is here to stay.
• The blinds.  They were here when we moved in.  I don't know if they will stay forever, but they are very nice blinds and we were happy that the house came with them.
• The light fixture.  It matches all of the others downstairs.  So that's good.
• Yellow walls.  Not too bright.  Not too dull.  Makes me feel happy.

Things we didn't like:

• The size and set up of the room.  It is virtually impossible to set it up in more than one way (if you want a TV).  And we still wish it was a tiny bit bigger.
• The yellow walls.  I know I said we liked them, but there are also things we don't like.  We both have a similar vision for our living room and although we think the yellow is warm and happy, our vision doesn't include much yellow.

Here is the Not-So-After/Current living room:

Sorry about the color, I had a lighting issue with this photo

Things we have done so far:

• Bought new couches from Ashley Furniture.  This was an adventure.  Josh and I have a hard time agreeing on things like this because we have different tastes and ideas of budget.  But after many days of walking through many different furniture stores and bringing many different fabric swatches home, we finally agreed on the Ashley Zia Couch and Loveseat in mocha.  It was officially our first-ever furniture purchase together.  If this is a sign of what's to come, I'm terrified!
• New TV!  We just purchased and received our first ever TV purchase together.  We bought a 47" LG TV.  That's all I know about it.  If you're really interested, ask my hubby.

• We used our old TV stand pictured here and just took the top off.

This picture is from our old townhouse in Salisbury.

• We ordered a new TV stand! We actually just did this yesterday.  We had been searching online for the perfect stand for a while and finally came across it at none other than Best Buy!  We waited and waited for it to go on sale and when it finally did yesterday, we ordered it right away.  It should come in sometime next week.

Our vision for our living room and downstairs in general was a sort of beach-y look.  We wanted to incorporate cool colors downstairs and warmer colors upstairs.  We love the beach feel of homes and since we live close to the ocean now, it makes perfect sense.  Let me make myself clear: I like the feel of beachy-ness.  I want to create that through cool colors and simple but bright decor.  Not glass lamp bases filled with seashells or tons of dead starfish on the walls.  (I apologize to anyone who has one of those lamps with the seashells)

So, we found the perfect color pallet for our downstairs!  Sherwin Williams has a line of HGTV line of paint and one of their color collections matches our color vision for the downstairs almost to a T. It's called Coastal Cool.

Now, this isn't exact and it certainly is a bit limiting.  We would hope to incorporate a few brighter colors, too.  We don't know if we will actually use this brand of paint, as we don't know anything yet about quality or price.  But it's a good starting point.  Our kitchen most closely matches the green on the bottom called "Hearts of Palm":

This isn't the best lighting, but if you click on the picture and enlarge it, you will be able to see the green color.

We have been talking a lot about painting the living room a cool teal color.  We thought it would look good with the white crown molding and the sofas we picked out.  It turns out that on the Ashley website, our exact couches are staged against teal walls with white crown molding:

We would really like to paint our dining room a cool gray color in the future.  And our foyer and staircase are already a nice, cool beige color which we will be happy with for a long time. Our main priority is to get some paint on the walls in the living room.  But a few things need to happen before we can make that possible.  Here is our Pre-Paint To-Do List:

1. Wait for the TV stand to be shipped and make sure we like it and like the color of wood against a teal wall.
2. Mount our TV on the wall (mounting hardware is already purchased)
3. Install new in-ceiling speakers.  Yep, bought 'em yesterday.  Are you surprised?  If you know me at all, you are very surprised.  I will talk about this more at the end.
4. Run all of the wires through the wall and install all electronics. We definitely don't want to paint and then cut a huge hole in the wall to run wire.  But it certainly can't stay like this forever:

Those wires are driving me crazy!

About the new speaker purchase:  If you know anything about me, you know I am not a risk-taker.  So this post may surprise you in many ways.

1. I am actually going to paint my living room teal.  This is not in accordance with my simple, clean, white usual self.  I mean white as a metaphor to blandness.  Not to the color of my skin.
2. Because I am not a risk taker, it is unusual for me to spend money on non-essentials.  And it is unusual for me to spend a large amount of dough on anything all at once.  However, you have seen through this blog that we have made the following purchases in the last 2 months:
• A house.  Largest check I ever wrote.
• A new couch and a new love seat
• A new, large, flat screen TV
• In-ceiling speakers
• TV stand--the real kind of wood.  No pressed wood or laminate for us.

"How did you do that?!", you ask?  Well, because I am not a risk taker, I have spent the last two years working modest paying jobs (teacher and teacher) and I have literally saved every penny that I didn't need to spend (with the exception of a few trips to New York and Company and our favorite Italian restaurant).  Josh is the opposite in this respect.  He is a risk-taker and I am super proud of him for not spending a dollar more than he needed to in the last year of our marriage.  And because he did that part my way, he was happy to be able to pick out our TV, speakers, and TV stand.  He is really interested in those things and I left it all up to him.  Plus, I don't really care to know about the specifics of different LED TVs.  So, I am happy to spend some of our carefully saved moo-lah on things that we really want for our home.

Plus, once we get the room painted, it's my turn to spend money on decorations!

A Soldier Will Fight Long and Hard for a Bit of Colored Ribbon

--Napolean Bonaparte

Yeah, he quoted that.

***Disclaimer: No, I didn't actually do this project while on vacation in the Outer Banks of North Carolina.  I wrote this post a few days ago and just didn't get to post it until now. Enjoy!

On to the point... there is a blog called young house love that is all about home improvement and design.  I read it occasionally because there is some really cool stuff and the husband and wife that write the blog are hysterical. I found this post about a ribbon chandelier that the mom made for her baby daughter's closet.  So I gave it a go.

I wanted to find some ribbons that would go with my spring green theme and still coordinate with the ribbon that I used on the flip flop hangers.

So, as usual, I went to Michael's.  I happened to be at my mother-in-law's house at the time of the proposed project, so she joined me for our outing to the Michael's in York, PA.  We looked only in the $1 clearance ribbon basket and found these goodies:

Looks pretty good, huh?  I also found a 9-inch embroidery hoop while I was there.  I only used the inside piece and painted it white (on my MIL's ironing board).

After the paint dried, I strung some thin, clear bead ribbon around it from both sides.

I tried to cut the ribbon in the general length that I wanted, but still making them all different lengths. 

I used glue dots and little green sparkle things and hung it in my closet so it is the first thing I see when I open the closet door.

Now, I know what some of you are thinking.  I sound like a little girl, right?  This was originally something that was supposed to be for a baby's room, right?  Yes, yes, I thought of all of that.  And I dismissed it completely.  Because I smile every time I see it :-)