Happy HOLLAdays

My Christmas cards may have been lost in the mail, but it didn't stop me from making the house festive this year, especially since last year we were right in the thick of moving and tiling at Christmastime. I dug up all the light strings I could find and bought several LED strings for the front yard and went to town making the house feel cheery. I may never want to take my living room lights down! They really make it feel cozy.

Our Christmas mantle. Eventually I'd like to knit up some nice stockings for us and the pup.

Presents!

I just love Christmas lights!

Our holiday welcome mat

This is an Italian stone pine tree we bought this year with hopes of re-potting it and using it every year for Christmas (with a cute dog standing next to it for size comparison)

This may not look Christmas-y, but Nick installed this nifty outlet beneath the flood lights out front so I could plug my Christmas lights into it! We only have a few trees wrapped this year, but I intend to add more lights each year and eventually have a ridiculously bright and awesome front yard.

Nick's mom gave me this lovely sconce for Christmas and I think it looks really festive. In spring I plan to replace the votive candles with tiny colorful succulents!

I hadn't made paper snowflakes in years and it was really fun to do again!

Google "auto-awesomed" this photo for me to make my Christmas lights on the tree outside sparkle!

A Tale of Two Microwaves

Once upon a time, we had a lovely microwave in the kitchen. We used it before we moved in to warm up cold pizza while we painted the walls and ripped up the floors. Then one day, the microwave broke. We called the manufacturer, who told us our warranty was good, so they sent out a technician to diagnose it. Sadly, the technician informed us our warranty was in fact not good, and we had to pay him $75 to tell us that he couldn't fix it without a lot more money. We took down the microwave to see if we could do anything to fix it and discovered that there was nothing we could do, so we plopped it in the garage, where it stayed for months and months. Finally, almost a year later, we bought a shiny new microwave! And we all lived happily ever after.

Nick installing the duct work

This is the microwave from our apartment that we've been using in the meantime. It's not ugly, but it takes up SO much counter space, which we really don't have that much of.

So much more space, and moving the knife block over to be with the other knives means the right side of the sink is completely clear!

Nick also installed this amazing outlet! It's amazing because the former owner had cut off the plug of the old microwave cord and connected it directly to the wires in the wall. I can't even imagine how it could possibly be easier to do that than to just install an outlet. The shortcuts these people took were unreal.

No gaping hole above the stove! So pretty! AND IT MATCHES.

Jungle House

We recently had to bring in all of the potted plants from outdoors when it dropped below freezing stayed there each night, and now our house is a jungle wonderland! I'm going to have a tough time giving them all back up to the porch when the warm weather comes back around, so I might just have to get a bunch more for in the house year-round to fill up the empty spaces.

Aside from the plants, there is another new addition to the master bedroom...

It's this little light switch in the corner. We have several flood lights on the back porch, but the one that is between the living room and our bedroom only had a switch in the living room, so if we forgot to switch it off before bed we would have to go all the way back through the house to turn it off. Not any more! Nick cut a hole in the wall and wired a switch up to control the same light using three-way light switches in both rooms.

Another recent electrical project was finally replacing the extension cord that has been draped across the ceiling to power the garage door opener since we first moved in. A few months back Nick replaced the old chain opener with a new WiFi-enabled belt opener (that we got on sale for under $200 including tax!), and now it's got a fancy new outlet in the ceiling to just plug into directly. This picture is from right after Nick installed it so the cord is still hanging down and it's not super pretty, but you get the idea. Hooray for safe electricity use!

We Have a Blue Kitchen!

It's not blue because it's sad; it's blue because it's happy because I finished painting it two weekends ago! I just wanted to set the record straight that it was early October that I finished it, which kind of beats my prediction of October in general that I made when I started painting in mid-August. I'll take my pats on the back now, thank you. I was going to wait to post about it until I took pictures with a real camera, but two weeks later and I still haven't taken those, so phone pictures it is!

It took me so long to do this because I only painted a couple of hours at a time. Since everything needed 2-3 coats and there was SO MUCH cutting in to do, it took much longer than it normally would for the same area. I knew this would be happening, so I went to my friend Google to find out how to save my brushes so I wouldn't have to rinse them twelve different times and dump all that paint down the drain. I found that wrapping them in Saran wrap and storing them in the fridge was the number one suggestion. It absolutely worked! At one point I had my brush in the fridge for over a week and when I took it out it was like I had just put it in; the paint was not dried out one bit. I will definitely use that trick again in the future.

We also hung these super cool totally awesome prints that I got for Nick for his birthday. See how totally awesome and super cool they are? They are vintage-inspired travel posters for Middle-earth destinations, made by Steve Thomas.

Up next in this area should be grouting, but let's be serious; that's not going to happen next. You can probably tell that I didn't do the best job of cutting in around the ceiling, and that's because we'll be adding crown molding in here at some point. But before that even happens, I got this harebrained idea that I want to add paneling on the vaulted ceiling in here, along the lines of this: here, here, here. So if I get my way, that will probably come before grouting.

I also have dark brown paint at the ready for the ceiling beam in the living room to make it look at least a tiny bit more like wood instead of like a big beige blob.

Paint color is Sherwin Williams Amalfi

Kitchen Progress

So after almost a year I picked a kitchen paint color! I had two swatches taped to the wall for months and months and when I finally went to Sherwin Williams to get my paint I picked a totally different color. Luckily my impulse color picking worked out this time. I know it's going to take me forever to finish this paint job so I figured I might as well post some "progress" shots, in other words I painted the easy parts and now I have to get the giant ladder in here and move a fridge to finish the rest. 

The undersides of the lowered ceiling still need painting because they were painted the same musty yellow as the rest of the kitchen and dining area. Also imagine that the door is painted white!

This part looks done! This picture best shows the actual color of the paint.

I should have started off with this one since it actually looks finished! I could have fooled you all!

And not so much. This is the point where I got tired of painting and stopped for, oh, three weeks or so. Lucky for us we have friends who don't give a darn if our beer and cheese tasting parties are in a fully painted kitchen or not.

Here is our list of what we have done and still have to do (which is obviously mostly what we still have to do; I guess the kitchen isn't too high on our priorities list just yet):

• Remove the poorly installed crown molding
• Paint it navy <-- It turned out kinda close to navy, but I think I like this better. Halfway done with painting obviously!
• Improve storage in the deep but narrow pantry -- Added shelves to the door but more needs to be done to make it really useful
• Add new white crown molding
• Paint the baseboards & door frame white
• Replace the brass 90s light with a more modern chandelier -- Something is in the works for this! We got a light from a friend who didn't want it and I'm going to paint it and see if I can get some prettier bulbs than the generic chandelier ones for it to see what I can do with it
• Paint the door to the garage white
• Add matching blinds to the dining window?
• Replace the over-the-stove microwave -- We didn't really want to do this but the existing one died about a month after moving in :(
• Build a window seat with storage for more dining table seating
• Replace the old over-the-sink window with a greenhouse window; I didn't even know this was a thing until I saw one in Nick's parents' house and I love it!
• Probably paint the cabinets eventually since they're not terribly pretty

Living Room Changes

 I really love the way our living room is turning out. Here are a few things we've added lately...

A snake plant in a pretty new pot from The Natural Gardener

A cool metal "h" that my future cousin found on the side of the road (??) that I painted bright shiny red!

The most exciting thing we've done in here recently is add a GIANT decal to our GIANT mirror that's right smack-dab in the middle of the wall (which makes it very hard to decide where the TV should go, by the way).

Before: No decal, just the most humongous mirror anyone's ever seen.

Half up... And it stayed this way for a good three weeks because we were so reluctant to do the other half.

But finally... it's done!

The decal was delivered in two pieces, one for the city-scape and one for the tree-scape. This is not a re-positionable decal, so we basically had one shot to get it right. The first (top) half was a disaster. It started going on wonky really fast and before we could do anything it was stuck and there was really nothing we could do about it except smooth out as much as possible and cry over some really bad wrinkles. Nick was so upset that he wanted to repurchase the darn thing and start all over!! We got it on sale the first time, but I was definitely not game for spending another $50 only to have the same thing happen again and also have to deal with removing the first bit we put down. Mr. Perfectionist had to just deal with it.

Then we waited until we could work up the motivation to do the other half. We knew the top half was all kinds of crooked in the middle so there was no way the bottom half was going to line up perfectly, so we cut that sucker into three pieces and put them each up individually, which really helped save our sanity this time. We ended up with two extra seams this way, but the benefit was not wanting to strangle each other the whole time. Nobody got strangled and we got all the trees up pretty smoothly, so everything turned out OK in the end. Nick just has to stand really far back when he looks at it so he doesn't get angry every time. :P

Nick finally got the crown molding removed from the beam in the middle of the living room (yes, you read that right, crown molding on a solid wood beam) so my next project will be painting it brown so we can pretend it's pretty stained wood instead of a potentially gorgeous beam that someone painted BEIGE of all things.

From Grandma's House

Three months after falling off the blog train I'm back with a post I actually wrote in June but never posted! 

My parents were up in Ohio about a month three months ago clearing out tons of stuff from her basement, closets, cupboards, etc. No storage area was left untouched! When my mom came to visit me last weekend, she brought several of these things with her, and now we have all of these lovely reminders of my grandma around the house, which makes me really happy.

My grandma collected these chickens in every color!

This plant stand was in a box in her basement. It was clearly assembled at some point but I don't know if I ever saw it. Somehow every last little piece except a single screw end cap was still in the box.

We don't know who crocheted this afghan, but I love it! (We actually have moved this bed upstairs and now have a borrowed full-size in here.)

I'm somewhat concerned that this may be the beginning of a map collection. We already have an Austin city map hanging in the guest room and a world map that has yet to be hung up anywhere so if Nick isn't careful I might just sand down the walls and wallpaper them with maps when he isn't looking!

The globe is old enough that it still has Egypt shown as UAR and has a bunch of other interesting differences from how the world looks now.

I promise I won't disappear for another three months this time. Summer is ending and we've already taken our annual overseas trip, so we are gone for fewer weekends and there's finally time to work on house things again. Plus, I've started painting the kitchen!

Can't Hug Every Plant

I've gotten some kind of plant fever lately, and I mean that in a good way. I can't stop planting things! We finally ventured over to The Natural Gardener this past weekend while my mom was in town, and I got two of the plants I've been pining for practically since I moved to Austin and a couple others that I didn't know I wanted until I saw them.

Nick picked this one out, and it is so awesome! It's marked as a Century Plant, or agave americana, but it's so much spikier and more dangerous than any agave I've seen before! It's probably a safety hazard, and it's awesome.

This one I fell in love with immediately because it looks a little like a hydrangea, which has somehow become one of my favorite flowers despite never owning one, but unlike a hydrangea it's native to the area! It's an Imperial Deep Blue plumbago ariculata and it's been blooming like crazy since we planted it.

This guy you've seen before, but he has quadrupled in size since we first got him back in April! He needed a bigger pot so he gets to come up front with the other big succulents :)

Now for the most exciting part! We are calling this phase three (I think) of our front yard landscaping masterpiece. Phase one was putting up some hanging plants in the tree out front. Phase two was planting irises in the flower beds along the front of the house. Phase four is already planned out and will be adding a rock border to this area so it looks a little more finished and "landscaped" if you will. Since all of our in-ground plants are relatively young, we have added some potted plants between them to fill in the spaces. All of these can get up to eight feet wide, so we wanted to plant them with space to grow into. I won't tell you how much Nick, my mom, and I sweated to dig holes big enough for these... the ground here is basically solid rock. Thanks mom! This was my first time ever putting mulch down for anything. Who knew something as simple as mulch could make someone so happy?

The fern-like plant in the front is one of the ones I've had my heart set on forever. It's a Pride of Barbados and though I don't think it will bloom this year since the rest in the neighborhood are blooming like crazy and it doesn't even have buds, I am very excited for it next year.

The other shrub I've been wanting forever is the Yellow Bells Esperanza, the yellow one in the middle here. We have some in the neighborhood that are about seven feet tall! I'm absurdly excited for how big and bold it will be in a few years. Looking at these photos I'm a little concerned that we planted them too close to the walkway, but they really don't look this close in person.

We added this Variegated Heart Leaf Iceplant to our hanging plant collection out front as well. I've never seen anything like it before and I'm in love with it and its delicate little flowers! Bonus: it's a succulent! Everyone knows I'm a sucker for a pretty succulent.

The rest of the changes this weekend were in the backyard. Home Depot was having a 20% off sale on patio furniture and since I would walk by the French doors and wish I had a place to sit to eat breakfast on the deck at least twice a week, I figured that would be a great place to start our patio furniture collection. I've already had a few breakfasts out here since we got it and I am even more in love with our backyard now. If only Nick didn't wake up at ungodly hours (I just can't force myself to get out of my supremely comfortable bed before 8am most days) we could have breakfast together every morning!

As soon as my mom and Angela got it put together, I added a plant (of course). This one is from Nick's parents, but it doesn't have distinguishing blooms so I don't really know what it is. The pot it's in was also made by Nick's dad!

Another project I've been meaning to finish for quite a while is these herb planter boxes. I nearly killed the basil by keeping it in its original tiny container for too long, so I decided it was finally time to plant the poor thing. He's paired with a cilantro, which I think we will use the heck out of for fresh salsa! The smaller planter has two kinds of mint in it, spearmint and some other kind that I forgot. No matter what kind it is, it's darn good in a mojito and that's what matters! I may end up moving these over so that we can instead put some hummingbird-friendly flowers in boxes here since it's right in front of the window, but for now I'm just trying to finish some projects :)