Wishlisting again

I had to stay out of the house today so I wouldn't wake up my hubby (he's working nights this week). That's usually dangerous for me on a Saturday. It started out fine - I took Murray to the dog park for about an hour. That was as long as I could stand out in the cold. After that, I went to Target, Costco, the mall, Pier One and the library. I wasn't too terrible of a spender, after all, I'm a Dutch girl and have a hard time buying anything that isn't on sale or if I don't have a coupon ;)

This was my worst offense of the day. My first North Face jacket. I have wanted one for a long time and finally broke down and bought it today. I sold some junk on Craigslist recently, so that was my rationalization for it. 

I also bought this book at JoAnn's. With a 40% off coupon of course. I've been eyeing it for quite a while now and today was the day. It's full of midcentury modern ideas, which is a style I definitely lean towards. I don't know if you could really put a label on me though. I like a lot of random things.


Other than that, the only other things I bought today were groceries, so I guess I wasn't too bad. I also got a big stack of travel books at the library that have been keeping me busy. We are planning to hopefully take a trip again sometime in the fall and we're not sure where yet. Boston and a few other east coast options, Tampa, and Canada are a few places we're considering. I want to go to Montreal and Quebec really badly some day, but I'm not sure we will be able to do that this year.


Oh yeah, we had the Honeymoon from Hell last month. Ted and I delayed our honeymoon by about 7 months so it wouldn't conflict with his work schedule and so we could go somewhere warm in the winter. Long story short, we were at a total of 10 different airports in a week's time (7 in 2 days!!). It sucked big time, but that's a story for another day. Basically we ended up with free flights that we have to use before the end of the year, and they have to be in the US.


So that brings me to my wishlisting. These are my top 5 want its right now.

This book series is the best I've seen for travel guides. I like the DK Eyewitness ones too, but these seem to have really good pictures and are very easy to read.

So of course I want this one too. Some people probably rely on their phones for a lot of travel help now, but I still like having a book to flip through for ideas and maps. 

The Shins are one of my favorite bands. Coldplay too, but these guys have a new CD coming out next month, which will be their first new release in yeeeears. I hope it has some good stuff. 

Some people may think it's gross or creepy, but I've wanted a mounted butterfly for like ever. We stopped at this amazing gallery called The Butterfly People in Puerto Rico last month and my eyes were practically "bugging" out of my head haha. They had these gorgeous display boxes filled with different colorful species and they were so cool (and expensive!). I found a company on Etsy that sells them single style and they're a lot more affordable that way. 

Lastly, I want this spinning hairbrush/hair dryer thing. I'm so uncoordinated when it comes to holding both a round brush and a hairdryer at the same time. This thing just seems revolutionary! haha, anyway, here it is on amazon. I think I might try it one of these days.


There's a lot more stuff I want right now, but I'll try to work on being happy with what I have for a while. Maybe a day or so ;)

Photo Art

Ted and I have done a lot of traveling in the past couple years. I tend to take a ton of photos and usually end up with at least a couple I want to frame from every trip. The problem with that is that I'm running out of wall space for everything. There are a couple solutions to this problem I'm considering.

One would be something like this. I could do a wall in our basement or the guest bedroom like this. You could use 4x6 frames to really maximize the space. Apparently all of these frames were held together with duct tape on the back, so you don't have to precisely line everything up. That would be a nightmare!

Another option would be to make a random gallery wall similar to this. It could be all different shaped and sized frames, even different colors. I'm definitely planning to do something like this in our basement with a bunch of Ted's golf pictures and memorabilia. He collects ball markers and scorecards from all the places he's been, including The Old Course in Scotland and several other of the world's top 100 courses.  

I'm no professional photographer, but all the art in my house means something to me. Most of it is either handmade, or photos I've taken that remind me of happy times. 

San Juan, Puerto Rico - Honeymoon Cruise 2012

Garden of the Gods - Colorado Springs 2011

Picture Lake - Bellingham, Washington 2011

Folly Beach - Charleston, SC 2010

See what I mean? It would be impossible to take a bad picture in any of these places. It was just beautiful everywhere, and I want to be able to look at them everyday. 

I used to be all about scrapbooking, and I hope to get back into it someday. I certainly own enough paper to last me a lifetime. Until then, I better get busy hanging some frames!

*The first two pictures are via my pinterest boards. The rest are all my own.

Crazy Murray

Just for fun, I thought I would show the world how ridiculously crazy our dog is when she's riding in the car. 

Haha she was jumping around in the backseat and all of a sudden I looked over to see that she had stuck her head through the passenger seat headrest. I quickly snapped a picture of her with my phone when I got to a red light and laughed my head off until I made it to my parents' house. It took a little work to get her big head out of there. You know how kids stick their heads through railings and stuff? That's exactly what this was like. What a moron :)

Then we have this lovely video of her escaping out of the back of the Subaru. Ted bought this gate thing from the internet thinking there was no way she would be able to get past that. HA!


Long story short, for whatever reason, Murray freaks out in the car most of the time. She's never been good about it, but for about a year we had to tie her up with her leash to the door handle or something, or it was impossible to drive safely with her. She's been getting somewhat better lately, but she still usually whines the entire way to our destination. If we ever have to take her for a road trip some day, I'll probably either have to drug her or myself to make it there. Sheesh.

Bedroom Furniture

Our master bedroom set is from my old room at my parent's house. I picked it out sometime before my senior year of high school, and when I bought my house, my parents let me take it all with me. The set consists of a headboard and two nightstands and they are stained in sort of a honey maple tone. Which of course goes with nothing else in my house. And isn't really my style anymore. I appreciate the fact that I've been able to use it all these years, but now I've been thinking about replacing things and giving it back to my parents. They only have a twin size bed in my old room (now a guest bedroom), and some day we might not live in town and want to stay with them.


So, I've been researching new bed options. A few styles I've found so far that I like are shown below.

This one is from West Elm. I like the finish and the fact that it looks sort of rugged or industrial.

This is also from West Elm. I like the idea of an upholstered headboard for leaning against and reading in bed. I also have always liked button tufting detailing, and this looks really similar to our living room sofa.

I love this bed from Crate and Barrel. It would never look right in our current house's small bedroom though, so I think it will have to go.

I think the style of this one (also C&B) is really artsy and cool, but when I started thinking about the comfort factor, it doesn't seem like it would be very good to lean against.

This one from West Elm is also a contender in the upholstered category. I like the nailhead trim detail, but would probably go with another color fabric. 


After deliberating about it for several months, I've decided to go with....none of the above. Well, sort of anyway. I decided to make my own upholstered headboard, similar to the one in the second photo. I found this tutorial online, and lucky for me I have a dad who is great with tools and is willing to help me with building the frame (he doesn't know it yet, but I know he'll do it lol). 


As far as the fabric I'm planning to use, I have my heart set on one, but it's fairly expensive - around $50.00 a yard. And I think I'll need about a yard and a half or so. 

It would go perfectly with our bedspread and the color theme I'm trying to stick to. This image makes the pattern appear quite a bit larger than it looks in real life. I found one of it applied to a chair for a better idea of the scale.

The pattern is called True Path 62037 Lime from CF Stinson, which is a commercial fabric manufacturer that I use all the time at work. It's heavy duty stuff, so I know it would hold up well. The fabric is also treated with anti microbial and anti bacterial resistant finishing, so that's an extra bonus.


I love the colors, but the only thing besides the price I'm not sure about is how it would look with button tufting, and whether I would be able to keep all the stripes aligned and not looking wonky. I'm an amateur when it comes to this sort of thing, and I don't want to regret spending the money to have it not turn out how I imagined it. 


So anyway, I will probably get to work on building the frame soon and once I've determined exactly how much fabric I need, I'll put more effort into finding something I know I'll love for a long time.

Living Room Progress

My living room has been a work in progress since I bought the house. It started out as a big, tan empty box with dirty walls and badly worn floors. Something like this

So far we've replaced the HUGE picture window to the energy efficient Pella vinyl style we used in the rest of the house, and replaced the warped wood front door with a new steel one. We lived with the badly scratched wood floors for about a year before we finally had those refinished too. That was a smelly process, but worth the results. The walls are painted in Behr paint's Underwater, which I love with the white trim. The room gets a lot of light, and is broken up by the large window, and a couple doorways, so the darker color hasn't been an issue at all.

I have to say, Behr paint has been a great find for me. It's what I used throughout the whole house and it has great coverage. I was able to paint over the existing taupe paint in one coat, which I thought was pretty great. The only paint I wasn't happy with was the ceiling white, which seemed a little runnier and didn't cover as evenly as the regular stuff.


I had a wool rug from Lowe's in here originally that Murray eventually chewed up. It was recently replaced with one I've been stalking at West Elm. I'll have to get a new picture of that soon.

These pictures were how the room looked shortly after I moved in. Funny how clean it looked before I had a husband and dog living there haha. Actually I hadn't met Ted yet at this point, and we got Murray shortly after we started dating. You can see that the curtains are actually taped up with painters tape. It took me a while to figure out what to do with this window. I'm still not totally happy with it, but don't want to spend a fortune on it when I know we'll only live here a couple more years.


The furniture is from the following stores:
Sofa and side chair: UBU in Rivertown mall
Coffee Table: Crate and Barrel (no longer available)
End Tables: Target
Lamps: Sears
TV Stand: Cost Plus World Market
Ottoman: Target


The only thing I regret was not opting to have the couch stain treated. It would have been an extra couple hundred dollars, which at the time seemed like a lot, but now with a dog sounds like a great idea. It's amazing what I've been able to vacuum off that thing though amazingly enough.

These are how the room looks today on the left side (minus my awesome new rug). Murray was looking at me like she was mad I was interrupting her nap time. As you can see by the lovely couch cover that never stays in place, we've had to find an alternative to a very light colored fabric + dog feet. 


I've never been happy with the brown sheer curtains since I've put them up. It looks so much brighter and nicer without them on the window, but then we have NO privacy. Normally, I'd just pull them open in the daytime, but the window is so wide we needed three panels to cover it, and the support poles get in the way of shoving the middle panel to one side. Therefore it looks dumb to leave them open, so they just stay closed all day. I also don't love the fact that the couch covers up a lot of the window, but alas there's no other place for it in the room.

This is a view of the other side of the room. I loved the fireplace and built in shelves when I bought the house. What I didn't realize was how tricky it would be to find things to put on the shelves, which are only about two inches deep. I didn't really change much about the fireplace, except to add new 6" slate tiles to the surround. Several of the original red terra cotta tiles were badly cracked and didn't fit my vision, so they had to go.

This is Murray's Mur Monster face. Had to sneak this in here :)

I have a few pieces I've found here and there for the built in shelves, but I'm still not happy with the cluttery look they have going on. Ideally, I'd like to find a bunch of milk glass pieces to use here, but the search hasn't been productive so far. I think the white would stand out nicely against the paint color, but again, the shallow depth has made things tricky. So far, my very favorite thing I've bought for them is my Jonathan Adler ceramic weiner dog.

I love him :) I wish I could afford a bunch more of the stuff in the animal series, but sadly they're not in the budget. The rest of the stuff in the shelves is a hodgepodge of random stuff that I would love to replace as I find things I like better. So anyway, it's a work in progress, along with most of the rest of the house.