Apartment Therapy, the love is mutual!!

I was told by a helpful reader that my coat closet redo landed on Apartment Therapy today.  What an awesome surprise!  Since this feature is so soon after the veggie bin makeover feature, I think it's safe to say that Apartment Therapy and I are officially 'going steady.'  Check out their lovely post here!

Snowy anger

Pretty much the day after I cleaned out the backyard and unearthed all my plants, this happened. 

You gotta be kidding me.   

We held up newly-shorn Lucius to check out the scene.   

And he was just as upset about the snow as I was.  Or maybe he was pissed that he's cold all the time.

I must say, I'm loving having only one cat's worth of hair on my bed at the end of the day.

And he looks REAL CUTE, of course. 

I've been featured!

Hey, I just found out that Re-Nest posted about my veggie bin makeover.  I had no idea until I got an email from a lovely new reader.  Check it out here! 

My backyard tragedy

As you can see in my header, I have a beautiful little Japanese maple tree in our backyard.  So, I was horrified when I went outside to de-leaf and de-crap our planting beds last weekend and discovered this:

A huge branch was snapped off my beloved tree, which was a gift from my mom in 2009. 

And a few other smaller ones also fell off.

And now my poor little tree looks like this.

I hope losing such a large portion of branches doesn't cause problems for the tree?  I can only imagine this had something to do with Snowmaggedon, or maybe some fatass squirrel was jumping onto the branches, I'm not sure.  I'm also not sure what I was smoking when I left all this mess last fall: 

This area usually looks nice and tidy, like this....

It looked like the Silver Reed grasses were coming to strangle me with their tenticles! 

It took me hours to cut everything down, and clean up the mounds of leaves from the ground.  I think it's extremely unfair that we have NO large trees in our front or back yard, yet we have leaves EVERYWHERE!  BAH!

Glimerace the frog was pretty much buried by the time I got the lawn bag out.  Stupid leaves!

The only good thing I saw during my cleanup was this:

My hydrangeas are already starting to bud!  Champions, I tell ya.  I'm guessing I still have about 48 hours of cleanup ahead of me on the other sides of the backyard....

Tub full of mud and water?  Oh, hell no!  Sara from last fall: you suck. 

Project fail/redemption

I have this thing I bought.  I don't know exactly what it's called, but I got it for $14 at a thrift store last summer.  Isn't it cute?

I knew it had to be painted, because while the piece is cute, the wood was not.  The obvious choice would be white.  But you see, I had this little area in my upstairs hallway that I didn't really like.  It was so....boring.  And I'm trying to add more color to my life.

So, I did this, with the intention of replacing the little white IKEA table:

This is the leftover paint from our front door (and the same color as our dining room), Behr Antique Red.  Awesome color.  With the addition of the new red bin thingy, the old white mirror was not pleasing my eyeballs.   

I decided I needed something different, outside of my comfort zone.  I found what I thought would be perfect, six (small) gold bamboo mirrors from Burlington Coat Factory. 

Good potential, eh?  I spent lots of time cutting out same-sized cardstock and hanging them up and see where I wanted the mirrors to be. 

And when I got them all hung...eh.  Me no likey.  Too small?  Too low?  Too gold?  Not enough mirrors?  Not sure, but I really didn't like it. 

So I decided to throw up one of two Target mirrors I had laying around the house. 

I liked it, so I did it one better and put up both stacked on top of each other.... 

YES!  LOVE!  The old knobs were replaced with these guys from True Value:

I sprayed them with Rustoleum in 'Lagoon.'  They are too cute. 

If you're wondering why I didn't paint those little blocks red, it's because I tried painting one and it looked like a child's toy box.  So they stay wood.  I added a little tray for my watch, earrings, etc.  I'm always losing those damn things. 

I think the mirrors look delightful with the frames I already have up on the other wall. 

Also, friends, something really stupid has happened to me.  I lost one of the knobs that I had just bought an hour earlier.  I've looked everywhere for it, can't find it.  I'm praying they just didn't put it in the bag, otherwise I'm the biggest scatterbrain ever.  I will figure that out later!  This makeover cost me 8 bucks for the knobs, that's it.  Provided I actually get the third knob..doh!  The little gold mirrors cost $20 total, but I'm returning them.

I'm so happy with my dramatic little wall!  What do you think?  I plan to store TP in the bins, as we are desperate for a spot for it.  Tres chic, right?

My house made me fat

Let's get real.  Homeownership has made me fat.  Ok, I'm not *really* fat, but stay with me here.  Did anyone else suffer the 'renovation 15?'  Before we bought our house in 2008, I looked like this:

Feel free to whistle at the gams.  After we bought the house, I completely stopped all exercise that wasn't related to the house and promptly put on 15 pounds that have not gone away since.   You know, because extra pounds just tend to 'go away' on their own. 

Check out the the t-shirt pulling on my back fat!  Sweet.  I also got promoted to management the fall before we purchased the house, and stopped eating meat.  None of those things helped matters.  Think vegetarians are naturally thin?  All my daily carbs beg to differ.  I'm happy to say I feel like I've finally got a handle on the stress-eating, the too-frequent drinking....

(Oh dear lord, what a horrible picture from our Vegas trip last Sept!  GAH!)

...and the strong desire to spend all my free time working on the house instead of on myself.  I don't post daily, and I'm fine with that.  I don't have lots of free time and I choose to blog for fun, not for followers, or swag, or ad revenue.  So that means I have time for things like this:

(trying out my tripod right before a chilly outdoor run yesterday)

Which will hopefully bring me back to this:

Minus the fabulous red hair that was a monthly dye-job, of course.  Wait a minute....maybe that hair color was keeping me skinny?!  Dang it. 

ps - Since January, I've lost 7 of the dreaded 15 lbs - almost halfway there!  Then I'll probably get pregnant.  Dang it.

I've been featured!

Hey folks, check out Kirsten at 6th Street Design School's 'Friday Feature' today - it's my house!  She did such a great job, I love it.  Friday smooches to you all!

See the feature HERE.



Invitations

So, I'm sick as a dog.  If I had a dime for every cough, I would be able to pay for our entire wedding by now.  For the last week I've been miserable, so I hope you forgive the sparse posts!  I thought I'd share our wedding invitations because you all seem to like this wedding stuff.  Here is the pocketfold all put together:

I designed everything in Publisher using free fonts from dafont.com, and my sparkling wit and creativity.  The Tiffany Blue pocketfold, white cardstock, and red envelopes are from paperandmore.  I highly recommend them, the 80# cardstock went easily through my home printer and looks wonderful!  Here is how I closed them up:

My new last name will be Hilton, in case you were wondering!  The inserts:

I made this map using a google map pasted into powerpoint, and the 'curve' tracing tool in the program.  It turned out super cute, in my opinion!

And my favorite, the RSVP.  I stole this wording from somewhere online, I couldn't resist making it funny!  I realized too late there is no place for the guest to write their name, and also there is not a date to RSVP by.  We numbered the backs according to guest, and are planning to make some phone calls if we haven't heard from people by end of April. 

Everything was cut (by me) after printing, I got the 'Making Memories' paper trimmer from Michaels and I'm quite happy with it. 

Shaun has logged a lot of hours positioning/attaching the red mats and invites to the pocketfolds.  He looked so cute, I had to snap a pic of him in action.

So, internets, feel free to show up uninvited to the event.  I thought about blurring out some things, but decided I'm sick, lazy, and I'll just be nice to any stalkers or crashers.  That would make a pretty good blog post, eh? 
Oh, and if you are interested, our wedding website is http://www.loveonrussetstreet.com/, sign my guestbook if you wanna!

Why am I not surprised

Let's talk Boozy Susie.  If you are a new reader, Boozy Susie is what I like to call our home's previous owner.  Her name was Susan, and I felt compelled to give her this nickname after fixing 75 of her 'renovations' that included painting over several rooms of wallpaper and painting all the trim (and banister) in the house either terra cotta or maroon.  This latest discovery occured a couple weeks ago when I was on a kitchen-cleaning spree and decided to remove this crazy light that we've lived with for the last three years:  

It didn't really look that bad the way we had it set up, but I was pretty excited to put up the new fixture I had purchased about a year ago, the Bryant flushmount from Rejuvenation.

I spent about 30 minutes running up and down the stairs to the basement, flipping off breakers trying to find the correct one to turn off the power to this stupid light.  None of them did.  I finally got smart and turned off the main power to the house because I was sweating and pissed off!  Then I started removing the fixture. 

Uh, what the hell?  What is this?

Is this really old, a commercial thing, or what?  I've never seen anything like it.  And I've also never seen anything like this:

This is a couple wires, that apparently aren't on any of our circuit breakers, are fished through a tube, with no electrical box, and no support whatsoever, with the previous crossbar SCREWED INTO THE PLASTER CEILING.  No wonder the old light used to sway in the breeze.  DAMN YOU BOOZIE SUSIE!!!  Needless to say, there is no light by the windows anymore because I'm too cheap to call an electrician.  On a happier note, here is my cat Lucius in a box:

You're welcome.