This and That

1.  Put the white couch cover on and I'm completely in love.  Also pretty enamored with my new Savannah toille pillow.  Maybe having the white cover will inspire me to be better about keeping the floors clean?  Oh, and I still can't decide which color to dye the other one.  Oh, and if this one looks a little dingy it's because it's the one from the as-is bin and I just haven't washed it.  Probably going to get some kind of weird communicable disease or something, but I was tired of doing laundry.

2.  Yesterday was a day dedicated to doing nothing except eating, watching Parks & Recreation, and assigning a Hogwarts house to everyone we know.  In short, if you are awesome, you go to Gryffindor.  If you are kind of awesome, but more nerdy than awesome, then you go to Ravenclaw.  If you are dumb, you go to Hufflepuff.  And if we don't like you, you go to Slytherin.  And just to make sure that our assessments are accurate, I just took an online quiz, and I'm totes Gryffindor.  Duh.

3.  I think there should be a "correct pronoun usage" challenge on the Real World/Road Rules Challenge.  Also, CT is hot.  Crazy, maybe has rabies, but hot nonetheless.  Matt thinks I have bad taste and that CT eats his young.  Have we talked about this before?

That cut above his eye is probably from fighting a helicopter or trying to bite the head off of a rhinoceros.

4.  Mitch is still the cutest dog on the planet.  I think he's a little mad at us right now, though, because we have yet to buy him his own lake house and boat.

5.  I can't watch that Sarah MacLaughlin commercial (that's on right now, but I'm averting my eyes) with all of the dogs and cats because it makes me cry like a baby and then I just want to buy a farm and just adopt dogs and cats and be crazy.

6.  Made Spicy Pork Stew for dinner the other night, because apparently I'm on a spicy pork kick, and because it's actually one of the most healthy things we make, besides, you know, lettuce and ice cube popsicles.  The original recipe came from some diabetes website, and Cassie says that I should just call it diabetes stew, which would set really low expectations, and then when people eat it they'll be amazed at how good it is.  (Kind of like the movie Hot Tub Time Machine.) It's really good.  It's even better with this cornbread.

7.  If you haven't checked it out already, go to Cassie's bee-log and learn how to make mayonnaise by watching her vee-log.  I hate mayonnaise, but I kind of want to make it and then make some fancy chicken salad or something.

8.  Are you on Pinterest yet?  Come play with me on Pinterest, already!

9.  I took a shower this morning (amazing, I know), and my hair is still wet 14 hours later.  Oh, delightful Savannah humidity.

10.  I think that if I don't watch my favorite HBO movie, It's Complicated, RIGHT THIS SECOND, the universe might implode.

Hope your Friday is the bee's knees!

Decisions, Decisions.

What up?  We're on vacation right now (but there are rabid wolf/alligator/murderers guarding our house so don't rob us unless you want to be drowned and stabbed and then chewed up after you contract rabies) and just enjoying chatting with friends and family.  Plus, there's an elliptical machine here, so Matt, a.k.a., "fitness fool" is able to get his fix.

Vacation's been pretty quiet and gluttonous.  Yesterday, though, Matt's mom and I made a trip to IKEA because I wanted to pick up an extra couch cover for our couch.  And I lucked out like a mofo because not only did I find my white cover, but I found an extra one in the as-is bin for only $30.  So for $80 I got two couch covers.  They look like this:

[source]

White cover pros: awesome looking, fresh, clean, pillows will look awesome on it.  Cons: a dog sits on the couch, Wal-Mart feet, general feelings of anxiety about f'ing it up.

Here's the plan.  One of these covers will stay white until it becomes too dingy or stained, at which point I will dye it grey.  But the other?  Oh, the possibilities!

[source]

Grey couch cover pros: general awesomeness, looks very adult, won't show Mitch fur, won't show dirt, will look cool when contrasted with bright and colorful pillows.  Cons: not all that exciting, kind of dullsville.

I need your opinion here.  Keep in mind that I will already have a couple of serious grown-up looking covers, so this one is for fun and general awesomeness.  Also, the color needs to be a shade that is not too dark lest it show too much Mitch fur.

So I've narrowed it down to green, orange, pink, purple, or turquoise.

[source]

Green couch cover pros: so fun, bright and happy, won't show Mitch fur too much, will look good against the wooden shelves.  Cons: maybe a little too bright, too similar to the turquoise in the kitchen and elsewhere in the house, lots of my throw pillows are green.

[source]

Orange couch cover pros: so fun (!), wouldn't show fur too much, would look good with my pillows on it, is a really fun contrasting color to the turquoise that's everywhere else.  Cons: I already have a bunch of orange accents in the room, and this could be overkill; it will be up against the kind of already orangey wooden bookshelves.

[source]

 Pink couch cover pros: it's pink, it's so incredibly fun I can't even stand it, would look really fun with my pillows, would look great contrasted with the turquoise elsewhere in the house.  Cons: it's pink, could be a little too warm since it's going up against the wooden bookshelves, perhaps overly girly.

[source]

Purple couch cover pros: school spirit, purple is awesome, there's really not any purple in that room already, nobody has a purple couch, would look awesome with my pillows, Matt will think it's blue.  Cons: could be a little too dark, people might think that we are royalty and be nervous around us.

[source]

Turquoise couch cover pros: um, beautiful, would look great with my pillows, would look great against the bookshelves, wouldn't show dog fur too much, it's basically my favorite color, isn't overly obnoxious.  Cons: I have already painted three rooms in our house turquoise and it might be too much.  What if I start to hate turquoise at some point.  Hell, it happened with hunter green.

So, I need your input.  What should it be?  

I See a Brown Table and I Want to Paint It ________.

I'm really challenged in the grown-up furniture department.  There are like three pieces of furniture in our house that are not from IKEA or Craigslist (even though, who cares, right, because IKEA and Craigslist are awesome!), and the few actual nice things we have came from Matt's mom.*

Anyway, we used to use this little computer table as our end table between our two recliners (one from Goodwill, one from Craigslist), but then it was always covered with cords and Reese's cup wrappers and coasters and cameras and crap, so I decided that we needed something that had storage.

Then, a few months back, I picked up this little fun table at a used furniture store by our house for $10!  And Matt and I both love it, except that I would love it more if it were painted.

Are you so jealous of Mitchell fur tumbleweeds?

It should be noted here that Matt does not want me to paint the table, and it's only been after several weeks of, "Yeah?  You're sure you want to keep that table that ugly shade of scuffed up brown?" that he's even been worn down and agreed that I can paint it.  But his agreement is all accompanied by eyeball rolling and slow head turning and shoulder shrugs, and now I'm a little conflicted because I want Matt to want me to paint the table.  And at that point we're basically Vince Vaughn and Jennifer Aniston from that crappy break up movie, and even though we look like them (totally identical twins), we don't really want to go down that path because if we broke up we'd have to change our Facebook relationship statuses.

So you know what?  I don't care if he wants me to paint the table.  He's not going to be mad at me if I paint it, and there's a good chance that he'll realize afterward that I was totally right.**

Now, I've got some options here, and I want your opinion.  This table will be going in our ultra-white-with-bright-accents living room, and I can't decide if I should be conservative with it and paint it black.

Or if I should be more bold and do something like yellow?

 [source]

 Or orange?

[source]

Or turquoise?

[source]

Or purple?

[source]

And now I want your vote.  What should it be?  The grown-up black?  Or one of the more colorful, exciting, fun alternatives?



*Without Matt's parents and our wedding registry, Matt and I would basically have an office chair and a rusty knife.  Sounds like the scene of a scary movie, huh?  


**See, also: parmesan cheese really does taste better when you shred it yourself; we should have an adventure honeymoon instead of an all-inclusive one; the dog should sleep in the bed.

Mantle Makeover!

Thanks for being patient with me while I threw a hissy fit yesterday.  Today, per the recommendation of a friend (who likely doesn't want to look at my leper face while we celebrate the birthday of this great nation), I went to the doctor, who loaded me up with more steroids.

I f'ing love steroids.  (It was so easy to ellipt tonight*.  After I finish this post I'm probably going to go pick up a car or pull an airplane with my teeth or something.)

Oh, and I'd also love to show you one of my other favorite parts of our new living room.  Have you ever noticed our mantle?  The smoker's-off-white/gray brick/white brick/red tile mantle?  No?  Here it was.

Note:  I totally took a bunch of actual good before pictures and neglected to load them onto the computer before I deleted the folder.  So you get a bunch of blast from the past shots.  Shooooot.

This one's almost unfair because it was from Christmas, 

and everything is cuter during the holiday season.

Please notice: awful curtains, even more heinous cornices, boring mail slot, and blah mantle.

And here it is now, after I removed the screen, scrubbed and scrubbed and scrubbed the inside, painted the inside and the red tile black, scrubbed and scrubbed and scrubbed the outside brick, and painted the mantle itself ultra white.  (Martha Stewart's Picket Fence, to be exact.)

Shoot yeah!

Oh, and, inspired by this photo from Pinterest (why aren't you playing on Pinterest with me?), I decided to get some sticks from the back yard from this bush I hacked to pieces a month or so ago and have yet to throw away, paint them crazy orange, and put them in a $3 vase from Target.

Fun, huh?

Inside our new fireplace is the trash can from my house in college, now full of Iris and Opal's toys and a Magna Doodle, a bit of an homage to my Friends.  I watched two full seasons of Friends while doing the living room last week.

The little mantle makeover cost less than $20, if you don't count the mirror (that was $30) that I got with a free giftcard during last month's HomeGoods adventure.  The biggest expense was the $15 quart of heatproof paint that I used to paint the inside of the fireplace and the hearth.

You may also notice that the curtains are different.  Cassie actually gave them to me a while back, and I hung them high and wide, just like Sherry and John say to do.  They've drastically changed the feel of the room, and I'm in love with them.  The curtains, not Sherry and John (even though they did help me out after that dream drive-by paintball shooting).

All in all, it's brighter and whiter and happier than it was before.  What do you think?


*Also, it may interest you to know that Dylan is having a really hard time deciding between Kelly and Brenda, and Cindy is afraid that Jim is going to have an affair with his secretary.  Donna is still gross.

Living Room Novella, and Some Cheap Art

Okay, so I had grand plans to paint the living room yellow.  The living room project included about one bajillion small little jobs, most of which were kind of grueling and miserable (spackling and painting a ceiling is a job for masochists), so even though I'd been planning on painting the room since the moment I finished painting the kitchen (in SEPTEMBER!), it took a long while for me to muster up the energy to tackle the project, and to finally select a yellow color for the room.

This is going to sound weird and George W. Bushian, but when I'm looking for something, whether it's a pair of shoes or a new camera or a husband, when I find the one I want I just know.  It's this weird inner assurance, kind of like a little click inside of me that is like, "Oh, there it is."  For example, I hunted and read reviews and stressed about which new camera to select, and then when Hugh showed me the white Pentax Kx, I was all, "Oh, that's my camera."  And there was no more looking. Once I have that realization, I don't go back.

And the problem with the painting living room yellow plan for me, and probably part of why I put the whole thing off for so long, was that I just didn't have that "There you are, Peter" feeling with it.  Once school was out I soldiered on, though, started painting my trim, and selected my yellow color, Custard by my friend Martha.

I painted a little swatch of it on the wall, decided that it was good, and kept painting trim.  I was trying to envision a more grown-up looking room, since there's no place in our house that looks like grown-ups live here.  I was going to do yellow accented with gray and black--you know, something more subtle, more sophisticated.

But the problem with that plan, and the reason I didn't have that inner click about it, was probably that I am neither subtle nor sophisticated.  And Matt doesn't care because he's colorblind and even if he wasn't he wouldn't care.

So when Cassie was here last week, she threw out a suggestion that I should paint the walls ultra white with lots of brightly-colored accents.

Oh, there it was.  The click.  Bangarang!

Now, this plan was kind of terrifying to me.  All that work just to paint walls white?  Shoot.  Plus, the room was white to begin with.  Well, not really white so much as an off-white-smoker's-paradise-dingy-used-to-be-white grossness.

Painting walls white was actually about the most bold thing for me to do in a room.

So, anyway, that's the inspiration for the living room.  And if you're reading this (still!? not so much into the brevity today, huh?) and you're asking yourself if I just do everything that Hugh and Cassie suggest, well, I would say, "Not everything."  Just like 90%.  What can I say?  They make good suggestions.

Now, I'm not showing you everything just yet because the finishing touches are not yet complete.  BUT!  You get a fun preview.  I just couldn't do everything white, so I painted our little entryway/alcove/foyer the same blue color that I painted the kitchen.  (Because I totes had leftover paint and I am more obsessed with this color than I was with hunter green in 1995.)

And then the space totally needed some art.

Well, about four years ago I bought these pictures at Target because I got all four for $15, and although I didn't love the pictures, I figured I could use the frames.  Four years ago.

Cris, post-wrist-surgery, posing with ugly cheap Target art.

Then I had an idea.  I really want to point out that this was actually my very own idea and that I didn't steal it from anybody.  I steal like 99% of stuff I do from other people, so I'm really proud to have come up with something on my own.  

And it was quite simple.  Cheap frames.  Free downloaded fonts.  Some M's.  An exacto knife.  Yep.  That's about it.

Look how fun!

But is it as fun as our mail slot?

Kind of in love with this room now.  More to come.

Summer!

SUMMER!

SUMMER!

SUMMER!

It's technically been summer since Monday, but I've had things to do all week (puppysitting, classroom moving, attending a training that sucked my soul out of my body as though it was a cat and I was an infant) so today was the first day that really felt like summer.  And you know what summer means?

It means sleeping until I don't want to anymore.

It means eating cereal for breakfast when I decide to get out of bed.  (Don't eat breakfast during the year because I wake up approximately 12 minutes before I leave for work.  There's no time.  Hush, Cassie.)

It means calling Caitie in the middle of the afternoon.

It means thunderstorm Kongs for neurotic pups.

It means projects.

It means watching crappy movies on HBO.

It means chillaxin.

And as fun as it is to chillax, after a while I start to feel like too much of a blob, so I need direction.  It's time for the ol' summer to-do list.  Here's mine for the next two months of my life.

Summer To-Do

• Clean out and organize office (house catchall for all crap, junk, and things I don't want)
• Move white dresser into guest room; rearrange if necessary
• Re-do living room (major project)
• New curtains for bedroom?
• Ellipt for 4 hours each week
• Take Mitch for 3 walks minimum each week
• Get tan responsibly
• Get a haircut--too hot outside
• Plan for next year's classes
• Buy and dye new couch cover
• Master new camera lenses
• Paint furniture in living room
• Have fun with Chloe
• Go to the lake
• Go to Atlanta with Matt (FLIP BURGER!)
• Put together gallery wall in living room
• Put together gallery wall in bedroom
• Touch up paint in kitchen 
• Learn to sew
• Catch up on Parks & Recreation on Netflix instant (whilst ellipting?)
• Put quarter round down in Lagoon
• Freshen up Lagoon
• Learn to do yardwork
• Make back yard a place where people could hang out
• Make front yard a place that doesn't embarrass us and our neighbors
• Become a person whose car is not filthy 
• Read five books

So, that's what I've got right now.  Three cheers to a productive and relaxing summer!

I'm Basically Bob Vila.

So, a couple of months ago, I read this blog post where this girl took an old funky dresser and jazzed it up by removing the drawers and painting it. It was kind of awesome, and I thought it was something I might be able to do myself.

And just a couple of weeks after that, I was browsing the free section of Craigslist and I saw this dresser that was missing two drawers. Perfect! It was a little busted looking, but it had good bones, and I thought it had some potential for awesomeness.

After I picked it up from a very nice lady named Penny, I brought it home and put it in the office/junk room/catchall for everything in the house that has no real place. And there it sat for two months.

But then last week I got motivated. I removed the hardware, borrowed a sander from a friend, and went to town. In the house. Note to self: do not sand a dresser in the house. Seriously. It was a very stupid idea, but Matt wasn't home and the dresser was too big and cumbersome for me to move it outside myself and I wanted to do it RIGHT THEN and I, on occasion, lack patience. I'll be wiping up brown dust for the next year of my life, and I may or may not have made myself sick with inhaling all of the dust that was laced with Ebola or something comparable. Oops.

So after I sanded the dresser and filled in the wood holes, I primed it and gave it two coats of paint (The same paint that I'll soon be using on other house projects, so none will go to waste. The color is slightly off-white, Martha Stewart's color Talc from Home Depot. I plan to put the dresser in our guest room, and it'll be joining the IKEA Expedit shelf which is a little off-white as well.) I also added new hardware (which I found at Target on clearance for $13.98).

The last thing I needed to do was figure out how to do the bottom part. I considered baskets or some other kind of solution, but ended up just lining the inside with some fabric that I got from IKEA last year.

Anyway, here it is now. I'm in love.

Yeah, you can still totally see where the old hardware was. Also, I don't care.

And here's a breakdown of the cost:

• Dresser: free
• IKEA fabric: I had it already, but I paid $4 for it originally
• Paint: $15, but I only used like 1/10 of a gallon, and I'm using the rest for other stuff. So this was like $3 worth of paint and primer.
• Hardware: $13.98

Total: $20.98