Pictures Lately

I've been pretty busy lately, so I think I'll just post some recent pics with short descriptions in lieu of a long, wordy post!

My BFF Jenn and I celebrating our 30th birthdays

Enjoying a donut with Dutch on Mother's Day

Installed Dutch's swing in the front yard

Meeting Jenn's son Parx for the first time!

Dutch having a blast at the splash table at daycare

Painting me a picture for Mother's Day

Dutch loves being outside

Attempting a puzzle

Eating like a big kid

Time for Surgery

As mentioned previously, my herniated disk is disrupting my life on a daily basis.  I went through two rounds of injections and they, unfortunately, didn't provide any relief.  After getting another MRI to confirm the situation, and going over the options with my doctor, we've decided to proceed with surgery.  It's a routine procedure with very minimal potential complications, and I get to go home the same day.  The doctor will make a small incision and remove the tiny part of the disk that is protruding.  I'm not worried about the procedure at all, but I am worried about the recovery.  For a few weeks, I'm not supposed to lift anything over 5 pounds.  In case you haven't noticed, my son weighs more than that.  That means I can't put him in his carseat, put him in his highchair, rock him to sleep, pick him up to change his diaper, etc, etc.  You pick up your child quite a bit throughout a normal day!  I'll have to rely on Meezy a lot during this time.  The surgery is supposed to happen next Tuesday.  Keep your fingers crossed this helps me get back to a normal life! 

Entry and Game Room

We've been at a bit of a standstill while we waited for our entry and game room floors to be redone.  We haven't been able to move the large game room furniture over from the old house, and we have had to stay out of those rooms completely this week while the crew was working.  I'm so excited that the floors are finally finished now, though.  Those rooms are completely transformed!  Our entry area before was horrible tile, atrocious wallpaper, and "antiqued" doors.  I hated every bit of it.  Check out what I'm talking about:

It's like they were going for a look of chunks of fossils or seashells or something

Why?  Just why?  They even wallpapered over the outlet and vent covers.

They were going for an antique look, but they just looked dingy to me.

I think you can see why I was ready to change everything!!  We opted for 18x18 polished porcelain tile because it was affordable and kind of looked like marble. 

The old stuff was a beast to get up!  

Shiny and new

I painted over the wallpaper with a beautiful green color called Promenade, and we went a bold route by choosing Black Bean for the doors.

  Can you even believe it's the same room?!?  It's so refreshing and modern now.  

As for the game room, it was carpeted and had salmon colored walls.  Here's what it used to look like:

Pretty boring stuff!

Entry looking into game room

We went with a 3" dark wood for the floors because we thought that would look good once a pool table and shuffleboard table were in there.  We still haven't decided what color the walls will be, but I think once we get the furniture in there, we'll be able to figure out what will work.  It's a huge room, so the color is a big decision!

Much more dramatic entrance to that room

I love wood floors!

Once we get the right color on the walls, this will pop even more.

This has definitely been the most exciting thing done to the new house so far.  I am so ready to get the last of our furniture moved over and really start the decorating. We're getting there!

More Projects

So much going on at the new house, so I thought I'd write down a few of the updates:

We decided to depart from the brown and blue color scheme in our previous bedroom and bathroom, and have switched over to greens with creams and browns.  Here's the new bedding:

 And we went with some new towels from Target:

Isn't that hand towel holder cute?  I snagged that from Bed, Bath & Beyond.

All of the fixtures in the master bath were brushed nickel, except for the mirrors.  They stood out like a sore thumb since they were gold.  I'm not a fan of gold to begin with, but especially when it doesn't match anything else in the room.  Here's what one of them used to look like:

I picked up some spray paint from Home Depot and voila!

Lastly, the biggest change of all was the installation of the new double ovens today.  The old ones were just that, OLD!  They were what you could call "vintage."  The top one didn't heat correctly, and the bottom one's door was hot to the touch when in use.  That's not good with a kiddo around!  Perfect excuse to update them.  The process for installing the new ones was quite difficult, however.  The cutout in the wall was just a hair too small for the new width, and we would've had to cut through brick to make it fit correctly.  We didn't want to do that, so Meezy and the installation guy spent more than 2 hours forcing it to fit! There were many times I felt like it wasn't going to work, but finally they had success.

 This was when I thought we were doomed

It worked!

Up next on the agenda is painting and new flooring.  The chaos continues!

Our Own Style

Don't get me wrong, we love our new house, but there are various aspects of it that don't mesh with our personal style.  Luckily a lot of it can be easily fixed, so we're knocking those items out one by one.  First up was the interesting blue toilet in the powder room.  It was running constantly, so we knew it needed new guts.  Instead of replacing them, we decided to just go ahead and buy a whole new toilet.  I know that doesn't sound frugal, but when you take a look at this beauty, I think you can see why we made the decision we did.

Yeahhhhh, that's just not going to work for us.  Luckily, toilets are pretty affordable, and we purchased a new one and got it installed by Home Depot.  It's a dual flush one, so we're feeling fancy.

Don't worry, that wallpaper is on the replacement list too.  Next up were the outlet and switch covers that were antique brass.  I replaced about 10 of them, because they were (luckily) only in a couple of rooms.  The crazy thing is that they probably cost the previous homeowner about $12 each.  Yowza!

Other cool stuff we've purchased lately has been for the backyard.  We're pretty excited about spending a lot of time by the pool this summer, so we knew we needed some outdoor furniture.  

I call that large chaise lounge the Queen's Lounger!  Haha.  That one came from Sears, the tan and red ones came from Garden Ridge (we bought 2 of each color) and the striped pillows came from Pottery Barn.

There are tons of other new things I'll be posting about in the coming weeks including tile in the entryway, wood in the game room, paint in lots of rooms, bedding, towels, mirrors, and rugs.  Okay, I just got a little overwhelmed by typing all that out!  It's a lot of work making this house our own, but it's going to be fun having a "custom" house at the end of it.  

Wordless Wednesday

Baby Shower Gifts

Apologies for the lack of blog posts - I have been going and going from morning to night every day for the past couple of weeks.  I wish I could say it's about to slow down, but I seriously doubt it!  Maybe I'll get a chance to catch up on a couple of posts when I'm laid up after my second spinal injection tomorrow.  We'll see.  But anyways, I wanted to give a shout out to my friend, Sara, who runs Cute Sewn In.  I ordered a few personalized items from her for my bff Jenn, who is due next month.

 
Jenn's son will be named Parx, and she is doing blues, oranges, and greens in his room.  I got to pick out the colors, lettering, and fabrics for the burp cloths from Sara's galleries, and then she brought them to life!  I also ordered an adorable onesie with an embroidered tie.  She has TONS of items you can get personalized, for kids of all ages, so check out her website!  She has very reasonable prices.  Happy shopping!