Project 360: Week 3

I did some other posts with photos this week so we'll include those and here are some other ones.

1. My broccoli is finally growing and it's Jan.
2. The dining room (the light was 20 bucks!). We don't really have chairs and the table is waiting to be painted. Also we stained the floors awhile back.
3 and 4. The living room and the best cup of tea. Ever. Orange Cinnamon Spice. From By the Pound in Ann Arbor, MI. Doesn't look like they have a website but I linked their contact info.

ceiling texture

I've been slacking. Much has happened around our humble abode and I haven't felt like blogging about it. It's gotten bad enough that one of my sisters said I had to post pictures as skype was blurry. (Yes I wander around my house with the laptop pointing it at various and sundry projects.)

Anyway. I figured I'd start with a before and after of our ceilings. Kinda boring. Unless you've had to stare at a bad drywall/old plaster job for a couple of months. The light would hit the ceiling and you'd see waves. Big waves. Like think crashing ocean waves. Aaron has told me that if he ever thinks he should tackle a drywall finishing job again that I need to stop him. at. all. cost. It is awful junk. So we bit the bullet and rented a texture sprayer thingy. Yes, that's the technical term. It involved spraying and then smoothing it out. Here are the before and after with the before taken about 6' away from the ceiling and the after about 1'. Oh- and the after has been primed and painted. (The before was painted too but I don't really want to talk about all that work.)

It looks pretty simple eh?! NOT! This is what had to happen to the house to do this: (1. standing in the living room looking into the dining room. 2. the den. 3. the kitchen. 4. looooove.)

This is why we ate out a bunch. We didn't really even have a place to eat pb&j's:P

backpacking in our living room

Yesterday our new sleeping bags came. They are Big Agnes, Lost Ranger, rated to 15 degrees F, mate-able and down filled. The underside has no insulation, it just has a pocket that you slide your sleeping matt into. Likely more than you care to know about sleeping bags. Same here.

Aaron loves gear. Unfortunately when you grow up you can't funnel every single cent you make into buying gear so when we do buy something he gets really, really excited.

So last night we moved our living room furniture around, turned off the furnace, and crawled into our sleeping bags for the night.

I will never, ever again sleep in a sleeping bag if my bed is in the same house and unoccupied. Aaron slept well though. Here's our setup:

Then we work up early and headed to Menards to eat our free contractor breakfast. Biscuits with gravy, made to order omlette, chocolate milk, coffee and root beer.

Marriage does weird things to a person. I love it:)

aprons and wee dresses

I made an apron for Hannah's (my sister-in-law) shower gift and had some extra scrap so I made an itty bitty baby dress. I got the free pattern from made-by-rae and it's super easy- no buttons or zippers!! She also has a number of other tutorials and free patterns that look cool, although I haven't tried anything else yet.

The photo was taken on the living room floor. I cannot wait until it's refinished as it gives me a million slivers a day. Very annoying. I promise it looks way better on Hannah than on the floor but her schedule was too packed for a photo shoot.

Oh- by the way- we just went through a snow and ice storm so it no longer looks like spring:(

sea green/blue pretties

Aaron bought me a rug for our living room back in July for my birthday that has pretty much all the colours we planned on using in our house- dark brown, beige, red, cream, and sea green/blue. Check out the rug here (It doesn't include grey which we are planning on for the kitchen and den but I'll use colours from the rug to tie into the grey.) So far all the things we own are tending toward the blah colours in the rug- lots of browns and creams and not much else. But have you ever tried finding the perfect sea green/blue??! Yah. IMPOSSIBLE! Until C bought me the prettiest little vase in.... the perfect sea green/blue!

Now I have an item I can take shopping with me when I look for fabrics or paints. You can also look at the the link posted above for a picture of the chair that we intend to recover. I'm looking for an upholstery fabric with a large scale floral print with that aforementioned blue and some of the other rug colours on a crisp cream background. It's gonna be purdy! If I can figure out how to recover. That's a big if. I hate staple guns. They scare me. What if I shoot myself?! Here's a link to a recovering chair tutorial that'll I'll refer too. Unfortunately it doesn't come with staple gun instructions.

Oh- did I mention that that chair cost us ten dollars!!! Yah. TEN DOLLARS!! We love it.

(By the way- when I say "we", I mean "we". I can not do ANYTHING around the house without Aaron's aok. Not even move furniture. ESPECIALLY not move furniture. Fortunately he actually has really good taste. Hopefully he doesn't read this confession or I'll never hear the end of it.)

What company came to see!

This is what company saw when the walked through the door (Sorry for the bad quality picture- it was taken after dark):

All in under 24 hours. Becca (Aaron's sister) came over Thursday night and helped (!) cleaning up all the dust, then we painted, and painted, and painted. We finished painting at 4 pm on Friday. Aaron and I then cleaned, hung fixtures, installed electrical covers and ran around like chickens with our heads chopped off (well- he was pretty calm and moving like molasses in January, I was the chicken).

Dinner was 35 minutes late and as I was setting it out on the table I realized. I forgot to cook. Noodles. Chicken and sauce needs noodles. Anyway they forgave me. I was too stressed to take pictures. I did take a picture of what was left of desert though! See Aaron and I had to dip into it again after company left to have with our coffee (WHY can I not lose weight?!?!). Banoffee pie. First time I ate it was at the T's in Scotland. Second time my mom tried to make it the sweetened condensed milk blew up all over the kitchen (you have to boil the milk in the tin for 4 hours and the pot boiled dry) so I never ate it that time. And third, voilà:

Chocolate, bananas, toffee, whipped cream and heath. Good stuff.

Company is Coming

We're having company over. Tomorrow night. This is what our living room looks like:

Are we crazy?! But what this means is that a thing called PAINT will SOON BE UPON IT!!! WOOOOOOTTTTT!!!!! The window trim has been roughly sanded and all the staples pulled out. The mudding is almost done. One final sanding and then I need to somehow get three coats on it plus make a nice meal for tomorrow and clean everything. I'm thinking it may be a late night:)