new year, new furniture

What better way to spend New Year's Eve than moving a large piece of furniture.  That's what you guys all did too, right?

I've been keeping an eye out on craigslist, at thrift stores, and the like for furniture we'd like to have in our new house.  A desk for the semi-finished basement.  More dining chairs.  They're things we don't necessarily need right away, so we have the luxury of waiting for just the right whatever-it-is.

The other day I found just the right desk listed on craigslist for $50.  I asked if the seller would take $40, and thankfully they took that and weren't offended.  Also thankfully, my parents have an SUV big enough to move furniture (and thankfully they let us borrow it).  The Awesome Husband and I drove over to pick it up in the evening on New Year's Eve.  It's bigger in person than I expected, but (one more time!) thankfully we found that the top and bottom could be moved separately.  We ended up making two trips, but we got the whole thing moved and set up in about two hours.  

I'm so stinkin' excited about this desk.  It's exactly what we didn't know we wanted to find, for a fraction of the price we were expecting to pay.

settling in means being festive

Let's take an intermission of sorts from the posts about our old house.  I suppose you could also call it an intermission from not-blogging.  That wouldn't be inaccurate.

We're about 90% settled in at the new house.  There are some boxes left to unpack, which drives The Awesome Husband nuts but doesn't phase me much.  There's some art left to hang on the walls, but I'd rather wait until we're sure of where we want things to go before we go hammering nails every which way. 

Thankfully the kitchen's pretty well put together at this point.  Pots and pans and mixers and appliances are all where they need to be, which made it much easier to make some festive treats last weekend.  There was this wonderfully adaptable recipe, which I made as cranberry lime bread.  And then, because I wanted to make something for someone allergic to eggs, peanuts, and dairy -- the horror! -- I also made a small batch of candied orange peels.  

I think they turned out pretty well.  And hey, in the background and stuff, that's our new kitchen!  

   

love letter to our house: living room

Whoopsie!  I showed you the before and after versions of the outside of our house, then completely dropped the ball on the rest of it.  Moving will do that to you, apparently.

So I'd mentioned in passing that there was some orange shag carpet when The Awesome Husband closed on the house and first clutched the keys in his very own hands.  That doesn't fully convey the amount of 1960s-ness that had to be eradicated from the premises.   Not only was there orange shag carpet covering every square inch of the floor other than the kitchen and bathroom, but there was wall paneling everywhere.  And it covered up wallpaper.  Which covered more wallpaper.  

There were also some pretty sweet window treatments. 

We tackled the walls ourselves with some help from friends and family, and once we gave the orange shag the boot, we paid to have the hardwood floors refinished.  We could have given it the ol' college try, but it wouldn't have looked as good and it sure wouldn't have been done in a weekend.  Best $700 we ever spent.

And then, you know, we put furniture in it and stuff.  Take a look! 

Before 

During

After!

we're ready for shoveling season now

How awesome is The Awesome Husband? He patched and sealed the driveway -- and did a fantastic job -- kind of awesome.

I don't have pictures of the finished product because it's raining and, honestly, it just looks like a new driveway. Pictures of a looks-like-new driveway aren't exciting. *Having* a looks-like-new driveway is exciting, but the pictures would be boring.

Shots of the patching materials, though, now that's a whole other story. More fun than a barrel of monkeys, amiright?

(I'd just like to point out that the blindingly yellow shed in that middle photos isn't ours. The one with the metal eagle on the door? Yep. Ours. But not ol' lemony fresh over there.)

Refinishing that which I'd already refinished.

Two posts in two days! Will wonders never cease?

This is a project I've been sitting on for a few weeks, actually. "Sitting on" as in "I uploaded pictures from my camera to the computer, but I haven't had time to write up a post because July has been cuh-RAZY," and not as in actually sitting in a literal sense. Although, it is furniture, so I suppose I could.

We've had a nice enough couch and area rug in our living room for a while, up until recently accompanied by what I can only diplomatically refer to as an ottoman. Oh, the cube of faded blue cotton served The Awesome Husband well for years before I met him but it was beginning to look, shall we say... "out of place." (It does fit in much better now in the semi-finished basement, with the dart board and Pearl, the drum set we're foster-parenting.* It's a long story.)

So, clearly the ottoman has been put out to pasture. We replaced it with -- what else -- a coffee table that had been collecting dust in the basement, waiting for us to be sufficiently nudged into refinishing it. Doesn't everyone have random pieces of furniture collecting dust in the basement? No? Here's what it looked like before. Colorful, whimsical, great back in 2007; each of those little squares is a piece of a magazine page, chosen for color and visual interest. It's not the best photo, but you can get a better sense of it here:

It did look pretty interesting, but it's definitely not the right fit for today. (Also, wow, there is noooo reason for you to poke around and read other 2007 posts. Or at least, if you do, please don't laugh too hard at me. k, thanks.)

The Awesome Husband was kind enough to sand down the layers of polyurethane and paper and paint for me, so I could do a couple coats of primer:

I also got lots of splotches of primer on the driveway. Go me!

When I did the actual painting, splotches of paint on the driveway weren't a big deal because I astutely chose black paint. It's the look we decided we wanted, PLUS we had black paint leftover from this project.

And really, doesn't it look great (which is to say, not what you'd find in a college dorm room) all dolled up and at home in the living room?

Of course, this time of year it typically has some pet hair on it.

*I ordinarily hate the use of "parent" terminology when one is not actually talking about human children, but in this case I'm being sarcastic and somewhat at a loss for how else to say it: we don't own the drum set, but we're letting it live with us. Hmm. Perhaps could have just gone with that phrasing. Next time!

It's going to look SO GOOD.

Some parts of the bathroom actually do look pretty good right now.  The floor tiles are in and grouted.  The new sink and its faucet have been installed.  The wall trim looks great with the paint we used. 

Showing you those things, though, would make the eventual after photos sort of anticlimactic.  In the meantime, I figure I won't give too much away with a picture of boring old wall tiles.  These guys are affixed to one of the three walls they're destined for, and not yet grouted.  So... yeah, it'll be a while for those Afters.

The Fruits of our Procrastination

Mr. Terrific and I can count on one hand the number of weekends remaining to wrap up the planning of our wedding, and that's getting a little, shall we say, worrisome. We've got a lot done in advance, but there's still a list longer than we'd like of things left to tackle. So what did we do last weekend? We painted furniture. Of course. Isn't that what you'd do when faced with a major looming deadline?

We've had two dressers functioning in an unfinished state for way too long, and last weekend was clearly the time to remedy that. I forgot to take a proper "before" picture, but I suspect everyone knows what unfinished furniture looks like. Just in case, here's a picture of a similar piece:

photo credit: Mill Stores

We sanded. We primed. We primed again. We painted. We painted again. We oohed and ahhed at just how darn shiny and sleek the separate dresser frames and drawers looked as they dried in the driveway, and we crossed our fingers that the final look of the finished products would be as impressive as we hoped.

I, for one, am quite pleased:

A more spatial project...

So this is a little late, but I realized I haven't posted about a rather big crafty project: revamping my living room. I painted the walls, made curtains, and swapped out some furniture (thank you, Andrea, for the donated stuff!)

Living room before:


And living room after:


Oooh!



Ah!



Aww yeah.