Easy Peasy Spring Wreath

One of my quirks? I love wreaths. I blame my mom, who instilled in me the necessity of having a wreath adorning every exterior door of your home when I was young. I even have a whole section of pinterest devoted to wreaths I like.

 So last night, after a quick google search, I decided to use my burlap remnants to make a spring wreath like this tutorial from WhereTheHeartIs.This was about as easy as a project can be. I took an old wire hanger, straightened it and made it into a circle, and then started cutting strips of burlap. I folded it and stuck each piece through the hanger. I didn't have quite enough burlap to make a big wreath, but I like it anyway. I didn't have any ribbon, so I went to Michael's and bought the green and yellow you see in the pictures and a black and white check that I decided not to use. Both cost $2.50, so the total for this little project was about $5. Cute, inexpensive, quick!

Project: Painting the kitchen cart

One of my favorite practical things in our apartment is the Ikea kitchen cart we bought to hold everything our tiny kitchen cabinets can't. We use it for pots and pans, and though I'd prefer to have everything out of sight, I don't mind this.

It's still raw wood, and I want to paint it (except the butcher block top, of course), but I don't know for sure what color. 

I initially thought I wanted to paint it white, but do you think that would be too boring? I am also throwing around the idea of another fun color. One idea I had was to match the coral from the agricultural map of France that hangs over the cart and paint it that color. So far it's the one I am leaning toward, but I'm just not sure. Here are a few of my favorite color ideas from Pinterest.

Greens or blues:

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Reds or corals:

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So what do you think, blog world? Should I play it safe and go with white? Or pick a totally different color?

A dream backyard

We have a sweet tiny patio at our apartment with two comfy chairs and a cute Weber Q, and I love it, but sometimes I yearn for a backyard. Sprawling, lush and comfortable, I dream about our friends and family just popping in and enjoying a meal and time together. In my dream world, this is where we could all meet...

on the deck, overlooking the water...

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in the backyard, surrounded by trees and with soft green grass underfoot. If you've never felt the difference between icky southern grass and soft, fine grass, you have to experience it...

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steaks or burgers fresh from the grill...

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especially this one:

via Crate and Barrel

and I'll never turn down a view like this:

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or this—I adore the fire pit:

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and for Aaron, who dreams of this. I can see us here:

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enough room to relax with those you love the most. That's what's most important.

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I love each of these. If there's one cohesive style, I hope someone will point it out to me.Where do you want to unwind at the end of a day or enjoy a cup of coffee when the sun is still sleepy? 

[All of these images from my outdoor rooms board on pinterest. If you're on pinterest, I'd love to follow you, too.]

Home Tour Tuesday

Many of our friends and family live far away and can't visit us in person. 

For the next few Tuesdays I'm going to take you on a tour of our apartment and show you the place we call home. I hope you enjoy! 

We'll start with the guest bedroom/office.

The guest bedroom was the first room to be put together in our apartment. It is both a bedroom and Aaron's office and a repository for all of Aaron's work, props and other miscellaneous film school stuff. It's also where all of Aaron's instruments and amps live. 

My favorite parts of this room are the posters and art above the bed. The top left is a rubbing of the epitaph of William Shakespeare's grave. My mom gave this to me years ago, and it's one of my most prized possessions, especially because you can't take a rubbing from his grave anymore. I think it's funny under the bed. Right underneath the epitaph is a poster I gave Aaron when we were dating from Film Streams at the Ruth Sokoloff Theatre in Omaha. This poster from their European 60s set makes me smile every time I see it; we watched many of them in class together during our undergrad days. The poster on the right is from Aaron's thesis film from undergrad, It is Well. That thesis is so different from the movie he's doing for his graduate thesis. I'm excited to add that poster to ever-growing our collection. 

This isn't all Aaron's mess. The bookcase on the left is mine; and it is packed to the brim. I need to straighten it up! Aaron's movies are alphabetized and cataloged. He is meticulous. I would like to organize the movies by color of case. I think it'd look cool. 

You can see in the last picture a few more frames I haven't found a place for. Under the bed are about 30-45 more movie posters. I could do a whole additional post about them--- maybe I could sell a few! 

Goodbye to Grandpa Bud's headboard

Lately the motto at our house has been "leave no wood unpainted." On Saturday I painted our headboard, which Aaron acquired from his Grandpa Bud when he moved to Florida for graduate school. 

Here's the original wood headboard. It has this strange decoration in the middle: a clam shell with vines surrounding it. The vines are growing honeysuckle flowers. It is interesting. 

I couldn't decide if I wanted to paint it black or white, so I called my mom. She suggested white because of the scroll-like carvings and the more country vibe of the headboard, so I did what she said. 

I took the mattress and box spring off and found a golf club, an ax, three empty water bottles, movie ticket stubs and a book. My husband is weird. That's his nightstand on the right side.

I bought a quart of paint and primer in one at the advice of my dad. Actually, he told me to Kilz it and then paint over it, but I was overwhelmed by the Kilz options so I went to my standby of Behr P + P in Heavy Cream, a more yellowy white, but not dingy. 

First coat:

Second coat:

And a closer view:

I had to wait for Aaron to get home to paint around the bottom of the bed frame, which is why it's unpainted if you look closely. It only took two coats, although if any of the dark wood bleeds through I have enough to go over it again. I like the satin finish, and I'm happy with how the ugly brown has been transformed.

Before:

After:

Total cost: about $12 for a quart of paint and two hours total, but about a 45 minutes of labor. I let the first coat dry completely, painted the second coat, and then let it dry. We had brushes and obviously the headboard. Totally worth it to transform something that stuck out into something we can live with.

Update: Should I stay or should I go?

Remember last month when I told you we were considering downsizing from our two bedroom, two bath apartment into a studio carriage house?

Well, we decided to stay put.

Here is our half-chosen, half-destined explanation as to why we didn’t move in to the carriage house:

For months I’d been craigslisting carriage houses, and the same few kept reappearing. I made a note of the properties and the contact information of the realtors representing them, and Aaron called the realtor who represented three of the four properties. The realtor seemed very hesitant when Aaron told him there would be two tenants. Along with that, the realtor said there would be no guarantees of parking, internet and cable (unlike what the posts said), along with an astronomical pet deposit and monthly fee. Ultimately, the realtor flat-out told Aaron he was uncomfortable with two people living in such a small area, and he/the landlords did not want to rent to someone in February, when our lease would run out and we would be able to move.

After this conversation, it was incredibly clear that we weren’t supposed to move. All of the potential benefits of moving to a carriage house were squelched. We weren’t really fazed by it, to be honest. We knew that we had a very limited time period – one week – to make a decision about moving anywhere because of our plans travel the last two weeks in December.  We decided it would make more sense to stay put for now, and we are happy with our decision. The only thing we don’t like? A $40 increase in our monthly rent.

I would have really liked to move. I wanted to purge all of our belongings, save money, and move somewhere new. But as I’ve become a regular patron of our property’s fitness center, I’ve realized how much I enjoy not paying to do this. I also like not forwarding our mail, change-of-address forms and not hiring movers (because Aaron is in production I would have done all of the moving by myself hired strong men to move the furniture).
Though we're not moving, my purging, organizing and selling furniture and other stuff is an ongoing to-do. I was re-watching my favey Flipping Out last night and Jeff's top advice was to take 1/3 of all of your "stuff" and put it in storage; I plan to do just that starting this weekend, although I instead of putting it in storage, I plan to sell/donate it.

In the end, all's well that ends well.

A living room idea.

One of my goals for the spring is to organize and decorate our living room. Here is one of my first idea boards. Obviously I need to work on making the images proportional. :) What do you think? I will add a collection of frames behind the couch, but my photoshop skills aren't that good yet.

Christmas Tour of Home

It's a little late for this, but the weeks leading up to Christmas vacation were so busy that I didn't get my act together soon enough to post pictures of our house decorated in time for Christmas. Well, two days back in town and I seem to have caught the plague all of the Nixes had last week, so I've been quarantined to the couch. Even though Christmas came and went, I'd still like to post about what I did to make our apartment festive in 2010.

The stockings were a gift from my mom. Aaron and I didn't have any stockings, so when we went to Texas for Thanksgiving, she made some for us. I love the green! 

My beloved nativity. Mom and Daddy gave me this when I was a little girl, and taking it out each year brings back so many treasured memories.

This year I started collecting a cardboard Christmas village.  I didn't do a great job displaying them, but at least I have a start! There's something so whimsical about the paper villages, and I look forward to adding to it for many years to come.

The ornament is from our honeymoon. We loved the bright red gondolas in Vail, which is where we spent our first Christmas.

It's a tradition in my family to get an ornament for each pet, so this year I found Olive and Toby an ornament. It was difficult to find a black cat ornament, but how serendipitous that the single ornament I found was wearing a sweater. Poor Olive Suh.

So, that's what the apartment looked like this Christmas. I loved having my own home to decorate! We'll spend this weekend, Epiphany, taking down all of the decorations and storing them for next year.

Living Room renovations part 1 - The Dark Ages

After four paint colors, I have finally decided to go with my initial instinct. Funny how that happens, huh? When we moved in to our apartment, each room was painted the standard-issue “apartment tan.” Since then I have painted our bedroom and the living area.

The process for choosing a color for the living room has been difficult for this indecisive girl. I initially laid out my ideal plan for the room, furniture placement and all, which you can read about here. The furniture is still the same as it is in that post, but we have sold the love seat and are hoping to sell the pine entertainment center – we call it The Alamo – soon. Wish us good luck that someone will be searching Craigslist for one!

Below is the color our living room/kitchen/dining area were painted before we moved in – the typical apartment tan.  One thing we didn’t really consider when we moved was the positioning of our furniture in the apartment. With the sale of the love seat, our living room feels wider, but it’s at an in-between size that makes it a little precarious. It is definitely something we’ll take more seriously in the next place we live; we were so eager to get the heck out of the old apartment that we were perhaps a bit hasty in the choice of the unit we are currently renting.

Here are some pictures of the next layer of paint. It was Behr’s color-matched version of Benjamin Moore’s Kona. I was impressed at how precise the color match turned out, and I think if our living room was a bit bigger and an enclosed space (meaning it wasn’t open to the kitchen), I would have loved it. I did not paint all of the walls, which was totally an eyesore, but from the beginning I felt non-committal to the color.  Yikes, look at that splotchy paint... I knew it wouldn't stay this color for long (OK, long is relative, it was painted in May and I FINALLY repainted in September!).

Here you can see how enthused Aaron was about repainting it all with me.Please pardon the mess... we moved most of the stuff in the living room to the middle of the room so we could work around the sides and not clear out the room completely. In the picture below, you can also see our halloween mantle! Like I said, we didn't get to this project until September.

As you can tell from the picture below, I removed one set of cabinet doors, I had a hare-brained scheme to paint the cabinets white to match the trim, or try out open shelving in the kitchen, but I decided against both, citing cost and how long we’ll be living here as reasons to just deal with it. But you never know until you try, right? You can also see the color I tested above the stove, which was actually a color we did not choose for our bedroom. It was a little too loud for our tastes. Again, never know what it looks like until it's on the walls!

You might also notice the hack-job I did on the trim painting. My poor daddy, who is a perfectionist by nature and a home remodeling expert (thus a fantastic painter) would be so embarrassed if he saw these pictures, but, rest assured, I have the trim paint and will make it right. In the picture below you can actually see the paint color we chose for living room and kitchen, Behr's Paint and Primer in one in Vast Desert... Aaron tested the paint on the side of the faux bar. 

Isn't he a happy little helper? Ha! He actually didn't mind too much. Please pardon the mess you see through the door right behind him - that is Aaron's office AKA the room I never go in AKA where we will put you if you come to visit us. 

Coming up later this week, the process of painting our living room! 

To the mattresses!

"Do you want to sleep on the floor or in the bed tonight?" Aaron asked me at dinner time. I chose the floor.

Dear readers, I wish I was joking.

I've slept better sleeping on a pallet on the floor the past few nights than I have on our new mattress set for the past six months. Here is the sad, sad story:

The old double bed Aaron had when we got married was actually very comfortable, but it's not a standard double bed. It's smaller, oddly – too small for both of us to sleep well – but on nights when I can't sleep and I go to the second bedroom, it sleeps like a dream.

Newly married and eager to make our first (and to date, only) large purchase, we went to the furniture store and tested out mattresses, which was quite uncomfortable thanks to my husband, who enjoys embarassing me and making things awkward for the old, old, super old couple in the show room, and also because lying on beds for 15-minute intervals is just weird anyway. With wedding money from G-bud, we purchased a mattress we both felt would... um... do a good job, and had to wait two weeks before Ashley Furniture could deliver our Sealy Awful-pedic mattress and box spring (strike one).

This is what we got. *

I'm disappointed that this mattress set, which we considered an investment, has turned out to be a joke. We wake up achey and not well-rested (strike two). I slept like an infant on the four-inch-thick recycled mattresses in my college dorms, but now, with my VERY EXPENSIVE BRAND NEW FANCY PANTS mattress, I'm tossing and turning all night, having difficulty both resting and waking up (strike three). Cruel.

We're now debating whether to list the mattress and box spring on Craigslist {but isn't it too weird to buy – much less sell – a mattress through Craigslist!?! I'm sorry but I wouldn't do it} or do something else, like move the new bed to the guest room, get rid of the mattress currently in the second bedroom, and buy something like an Aerobed. I was talking to my mom about this, and she thinks we're ridiculous. But what else can we do? I thought about calling the hotel we stayed at in Orlando this spring and asking what type of mattresses they use, because I slept SO well. I am afraid to hear the answer, though. What to do, what to do? What would YOU do? I don't want to sleep on an uncomfortable bed for the next ten years, but I don't know if we have any other options.

The end.

The evidence. Our empty bed and the cloud pallet at 6:30 a.m. Note sleeping husband in left-hand side of picture. On the ground. Not on the bed. Because the bed is awful. Also, note the vintage Gpa Bud bed frame... anybody know if I can paint it?

The pallet. That's my husband curled up on the right side of the mass of sheets, comforters from two beds, quilts and pillows. If you look closely you can see his sleepy head.

*obviously, what you sleep on is very subjective. I'm telling you what hasn't worked for Aaron and me. If you love your Ravenswood Sealy Posturepedic mattress, I am happy for you (and a little jealous.)