Project House Update: Front Room Part II

So when we last left the front room, it looked something like this:

The room was painted except for one corner due to those pesky termites. After first setting up an appointment to find out that, yes, we did in fact have termites and then waiting several more weeks for them to send someone to our house to actually treat them, the termites were gone. Well, kind of. The treatment may take up to six months to thoroughly kill them all, but I wasn't going to wait that long to finish painting.

Since the corner wasn't that large, we flew through finishing painting.

Yes, I paint in my pajamas

With walls clean and fresh, the light fixtures went back up and the single ceiling recessed light was painted to match. More importantly, we could move all the furniture back from the entryway and dining room.

When we were moving furniture back in, we went through it to get rid of the stuff we just didn't feel like holding onto anymore. That's what happens when you're college students/newlyweds, you get every piece of furniture that someone else is moved past. Did we really want to hold onto the dated entertainment center I inherited from my college roommate's former roommate? A trailer full of stuff to GoodWill later, the room is pretty, but sparse.

Dan's not a big fan of the sconces, which came with the room, but I kind of like them now. They're a little too bright, but nothing some etching cream couldn't fix, right?

This room still needs A LOT of work. And we'll get there. We pulled all the old trim off to paint and new trim will need to go up at some point, probably after we redo the floors.

On the schedule sooner is to redo the fireplace. With the small stone tiles on the curved front, a solid piece as the bottom step, and a dark wood mantle, it could look something like this (and yes, I used Paint, but I love Paint, so shut up!):

Oh my god. This is the worst picture in the history of the internet. I showed it to my husband and I don't think I've heard him laugh that hard ever. Yes, it's terrible, but it's beautiful in my head.

Please trust me.

This is just awful...

I don't know why this makes me so happy...

...but every time I'm sad, I watch this gif. Seriously, it's bookmarked on my computer. I love it that much.

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Project House Update: Prepping and Polishing

Since the few nice weeks of Arizona weather are about to start, it means our lives are going to get really freakin' busy. Part of that craziness? Houseguests!

My aunt and cousin flew down to spend some quality time with our grandparents and our house seems to always be Base Camp.

Before they arrived, the guest room still needed some more work. Last we left it, it had been freshly painted and the ceiling fan upgraded, but the list of to-do's was full and long. While we didn't get it all done, we got enough done to make the room feel more home-y.

• Hang curtain rod, curtains, and new blind blades. When we painted, we lowered the blinds so that there would be enough room for curtains, it was now just a matter of pulling the trigger. After switching out the old beige slats for crisp white ones, I began my epic search for curtains. Because it's the guest room, I was more comfortable with the idea of some big, bold curtains. Also, this room will be the future nursery, so I didn't want the curtains to be too girly, which is apparently a big problem with the percentage of floral, flowery curtains. I kept finding curtains I loved, but because they need to cover 96 inch sliding doors, only a handful were long enough. I thought about making my own, but fabric is expensive, especially enough for giants curtains. After a bit of research, I came up with a plan I believe is genius. Do you know what is 96 inches long? Bed sheets. Twin and full bed sheets are 96 inches long. So I found some sheets that tied in the yellow in the bedspread and the gray in the walls from Target. 

• We bought a curtain rod from Home Depot and the clip-style curtain hooks and hung up those sheets, er, I mean curtains. {Sidenote: if you plan on hanging curtains over a sliding glass door with blinds, you may need to space the curtain rod out farther from the wall than the brackets allow. Dan routed out some wooden spacers and painted them the color of the wall to make up for the difference.}

• I'm hoping that with time, they will hang a bit more gracefully and look more like curtains. I am concerned that the pattern is too small for the scale, but for $40 and some extra sheets and pillow shams, if I end up hating it at some point, it won't be the end of the world to change it. 
• Finish turquoise night stand. Even though the end table has been turquoise for months, it was getting a bit beat up without a good layer of sealer. After three coats of sealer and letting it sit outside for 48 hours to cure, it came back inside and returned to it's place next to the bed. With its little turquoise lamp. I love lamp...

• Hang some art. In spite of the fact that we've had two years to fix Dan's giant world map picture, it still sits broken and unable to hang above the bed like I wanted. However, I did manage to doll up the walls a bit. In addition to the ticket box, I purchased this really cute print from One King's Lane. It features a hot air balloon and the quote "Not all that wander are lost" and the teal background goes great with the turquoise accents of the room. The bird print is actually four bird flash cards that I got from my mother-in-law for Christmas, hand matted in some craft paper in a half-off frame from Target. (Upon further review, this photo is terrible and I'll come back and add a better shot of my art when I have the chance.)

Rusty knows he's not supposed to be in this room...

• Hide the bed frame. This one wasn't on the original list, but since I knew we weren't anywhere close to upgrading the headboard, I had to do something to pretty up the bed. Seeing the castors had to end. So I just picked up this cheap bed skirt from Target, figuring a bed skirt is a bed skirt, right? Wrong. Cheap bed skirts look cheap. This one is basically see-through. It's good enough for now, but I plan on spending some more for a better one in the future. (Oops! I forgot to take pictures! Since the room is currently occupado, I'll add some later!)
• Displaying toiletries. Are you like me and when you see something absolutely adorable in the dollar section of Target you have to have it, no matter how ridiculous it is. For example, a tiny, clear plastic bathtub? I refused to leave without it even though I had no idea what to do with it. It sat on our kitchen counter for days until I finally had inspiration. You know how everyone hoards those tiny soaps and shampoos from hotels and no one ever does anything with them? Well, I filled up the tiny tub with toiletries and displayed it in the guest room bathroom, like a hotel.

So, we still need to makeover the headboard, refinish the half-moon end table, fix the world map and hang it, and do something with the pink loveseat. In spite of the work still to be done, the room is definitely a room now, not just a dry wall box with a bunch of hand-me-down furniture. A room with a bunch of hand-me-down furniture.

The Cotton Anniversary

Last week, Dan and I celebrated our second wedding anniversary, which is apparently the "cotton" anniversary. Who knew?

Anyway, our wedding anniversary is actually pretty inconvenient since it falls almost two weeks after Valentine's Day. It's the last holiday our holiday season, which lasts for a grueling five months. It goes a little something like this, starting in the middle of October:

1. Father-in-law's birthday
2. Father's birthday
3. Halloween
4. Dan's birthday
5. Thanksgiving
6. Mother-in-law's birthday
7. Dating anniversary (which we don't really celebrate anymore)
8. Grandpa's birthday
9. Grandma's birthday
10. Christmas
11. New Year's 
12. Sister's birthday
13. My birthday
14. Valentine's Day
15. Wedding anniversary

That's a lot of presents to buy and card's to fill out.

On our actual anniversary, which fell in the middle of the week, we went out for a nice Italian dinner. As a more official date night, we celebrated over the weekend by going to this really great Mexican fusion restaurant (mmmm spicy mac and cheese) and seeing star demonstration at the planetarium.

I love that the star projector looks like a giant cootie from the game "Cooties"

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See? It's a cootie! "Don't spill the beans! Don't break the ice! Ants in your pants and Cooties!"

Every year, we debate whether or not we're doing presents for Valentine's or our anniversary. It really doesn't make since to do them for both, but there's always a miscommunication and it spirals and we both end up scrambling at the last minute and doing both.

This year, Dan gave me two necklaces (one for each occasion) from etsy. I gave him a pair of Valentine's boxers, my little tradition. For our anniversary, I got him some sort of saw (it was on his amazon wish-list) and I made him a Food Passport. It's a little notebook that has 50 restaurants listed that we haven't tried yet. I included their location in town, estimated time to drive there, what type of food they serve, and how much it roughly costs ($, $$, or $$$). My favorite part is that I attached a book of star stickers so he can rate them as we go to them.

It wouldn't have taken so long to make if I'd known how hard it is to find a small notebook without ruled lines. It took me three days to find one and I eventually broke down and overnighted this one from amazon.

It'll be nice to have some weekends now where we won't be celebrating something and we can get back to working on the house. Speaking of which, expect some update posts soon! (Nothing major, but progress is progress, right?)

The Trivia Trifecta

First things first. We won trivia again last week. According to the scoring, we were down by two points going into the last rounds, but we only missed one point on the movie round and only two points on the random trivia round allowing us to win by three points!

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Secondly, Dan won the bonus question, adding another shot glass to his collection! I have no idea why he collects shot glasses since he doesn't drink, but it was a fitting win for him.

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Lastly, our team name from the week before was declared one of the best team names of the week in the national trivia blog. I was very proud for coming up with the name "I like blizzards better when they taste like mint chocolate chip" in honor of our little blizzard.