Porch Beginnings

I'm sweating. I drove home from work and couldn't believe that it was 101 degrees out. Well, yes I can. This is the valley.

Aside from not feeling too great and having to cancel dinner with a friend, I also am so exhausted. I put my car in park, gather the mail while peeking around to the side of my house to check if our hornets/wasps have come back to haunt the person that killed their friends and destroyed their houses. That would be my dad, my last Saturday's hero. Nope, no wasp-like creatures were flying around! I did see something moving on the ground. I walked up closer and it was a tiny lizard! But not like the other lizards I'm used to seeing here. So, instead of going inside, putting on comfy clothes and landing on my bed, I hurry Jordan off the phone, grab my camera and run outside to try and snap a few photos. I wish I could give you all a size reference but since I hate being too close to creepy crawlies I'll just inform you that this little guy was about the size of my ring finger, which is small. It's color was really interesting. He was a nude color with accents of random hues. Didn't come out in the pictures too well.

I left the little guy alone when he jumped (um, that's why I don't like creepy crawlies, sometimes they can jump!) into the dry soil pit in front of my porch. If he stays, I hope he doesn't turn into a ginormous lizard like that weirdo in the latest Spiderman. That'd be bad news. If you look closely, you can see it looks like the tip of his tail is missing. Just pointing that out...

About a week and a half ago I brought out an old table of mine to put on the porch. The tiles used to have images of cats. I used to be obsessed with cats, so my parents bought me a cat table. Weird. We bought regular white tiles and replaced the cats. Perfect for putting potted plants on! Here is my attempt at making our porch look welcoming for now.

The succulent pot was given to us as a house-warming gift. We actually received a second one that can be hung. He's hanging out in the backyard for now. The 2 little green pots are from a recent baby shower that I went to. I think they painted the pots green and put a plastic bag of soil inside along with a packet of seeds for various flowers. I took home two (another girl gave me hers) and planted them! I've been watering them every night and a few days ago Jordan asked, "Did you know you have some sprouts out here?" It was exciting. I fail at so many things... yet I had succeeded at growing a plant! Well, almost. We'll see what happens.

Meanwhile, inside... I decided I couldn't stand the paint splatter that I caused when I painted our master bathroom. Thank god for Rich at Sherwin Williams. He threw in a free razor blade when I bought some more paint & supplies. This is the lamest before and after but I am proudish.

Tada!

Oh, and can we discuss how I sprayed mildew cleaner on my sink and the glass shelf and before I could wipe it off, noticed that my new blue paint had turned neon?!

Oh well. It's time for bed for me. Stay tuned for more porch and bathroom updates. Things I want to do include:

1. Paint front door yellow.
2. Get two chairs for front porch.
3. Plant some prettiness in front of the front porch.
4. Hang mirror in bathroom.
5. Paint bathroom cabinet.

*No lizards were harmed in the posting of this blog.

What's Cookin' in the Kitchen?

With every free weekend that we now have you can find us working on our house. While Jordan was sanding one of our doors, I was playing in the kitchen. I took a roll of contact paper that I ordered over a year ago from Amazon (Metal FX Stainless Steel Contact Paper, 18" x 6'), and tried to make the kitchen a little bit more modern looking. I can't say I'm amazed with what I did but it works for now. We have a hand-me down basic white fridge that I wanted to give it a line of steel to match our stove and our microwave, which are both black and steel.

And after:

The backsplash tiles also needed a little modernization. This really was just my way of covering up the picture tiles... It's not that pretty now but at least those tiles are covered! I measured (poorly) and stuck the contact paper on.

And after.

We are going to see if we like this and figure out if we should add more steel tile squares, in a pattern. That might look cool! On another note, we finally got to washing our pots and pans yesterday. That means we were able to cook! Jordan cooked us an awesome meal tonight: artichoke, butternut squash raviolis, and a salad that I saw online and mentioned to him. It has avocado, corn, peas, and bell pepper. It was delicious!

Last week, I mentioned the electrician coming to install some of our light fixtures. Stupid me forgot to take before pictures. But here are some afters! I took 2 photos so you could see the brightness and then the actual fixture. We bought 2 of the round fixture for the kitchen and then realized how giant it was and decided to put the 2nd fixture in our closet, not photographed since it is still a mess!

And of course, an update on our bedroom lighting. We picked out the Cooper Lighting 310SN 6'' Recessed Fixture Trim and installed them into the ceiling. The white ceiling and blue walls definitely are interesting with the metal and black light trim. We really have a lot of light in here.

Tomorrow we may have doors for our bathroom and bedroom! We are having a handyman shave our doors so that they can actually open and close. He is also going to shave the front and back doors and install the thresholds for us. If we had the tools to cut the doors, we would do it ourselves. That's what Jordan was trying to do earlier by sanding the edge down. The sander just wasn't powerful enough. Luckily, it seems that the bedroom and bathroom doors only need a good wipedown. The frames, however, need caulking AND white paint. As do the rest of ALL of the doors in our house. And soon, SOON!, our front door will be yellow. No more poop brown. NO MORE!

Today, I also attempted to make our front porch not look so desolate. I put out a table, placed a potted succulent plant on it that was a house warming gift, and then I planted 2 tiny pots with flower seeds. Picture to come. Maybe I can document the flowers if they actually grow. The last time I tried to grow something was probably a 1989 chia pet. And those things are impossible to mess up.

That's all I have tonight. We're on a roll though, so stay tuned for more progress! There is a yellow front door, a closet barn door, and shatter-proofing/privacy-filming windows on the horizon. Ultra-fun stuff, I know... Good night!

My Current Viewpoint

Please gather 'round while I sit on the soft-carpeted floor of my bedroom and type this post. I'm sad to say that this post is a little bit of a filler while we try and balance exhausting 9-6 day jobs and life in general with getting things done in our house little by little.

Well, here I am (don't you judge the bags under my eyes!), sitting with my back against our bed, on the floor. That's because my laptop is currently plugged in here, under the temporary TV stand.

From this angle I have a lovely view of our bathroom, that still doesn't have a door, let alone a finished (by finished, I mean caulked and painted) door frame. Oh yeah, we also don't have a mirror in there yet. Oh yeah, and we (or maybe just me) are still trying to figure out a decent storage solution in here. More on that in another post.

To the left of that angle is our bedroom door... well it will be our bedroom door when we caulk and paint that door frame. Both doors also have to be painted.

To my right is our little Sony TV. This is going to be the TV we end up mounting on the wall in our bedroom. It's just sitting on the floor now, collecting dust until we figure where in the house to mount the bigger TV. We have an interesting living room space that is having us scratch our heads a little bit.

I guess the point of this post was to try to be current but to also try to light a fire under my ass to make a list. A real list.. on paper.. or um, on blog. Go room by room. Then start crossing them off as we go! I was thinking of making it another page, like the ones at the top of the blog, under the header. I think I'll title it "The List." Creative, I know.

Next time I update, I hope that my list will have been started. Lucky for us, the electrician should be coming by tomorrow evening to put up our remaining light fixtures and plugs, gfcis and what nots. If our house didn't have wiring from the 40s then perhaps we would attempt this ourselves. This time we'll leave it to the pros. I would love to show before and after photos of this but they will still be "in progress" since we're not done painting yet. I'm a little bummed. We bought a cool enough pendant light for our service porch, not realizing that the back door opens right into that space. So we are having to use the previous owners old nasty globe light for now. One thing at a time...

I will try doing an update on our fixtures tomorrow! Goodnight.

Sneak Peek: Master Bath

Our shower curtains have arrived! I ordered this curtain and another from the store the other week, and I have been patiently waiting for them to get here. The one pictured is the Raindrops curtain and the guest bathroom will have the H20 curtain. Here is a sneak peek of our master shower. This room is still in progress but we are getting closer to being a little more settled.

Sneak Peek: Master Bedroom In Progress

I thought I'd start a "sneak peek" series. Since we are slowly putting things away (okay, we haven't actually put ANYTHING away) the rooms are starting to come together. Starting with our bedroom, we have our bed all set up complete with TV and TV stand. A few things:

• 1. We have no door on our bedroom or the master bathroom yet. So that's interesting.
• 2. We have bald light bulbs just hangin' out. We took off the fixtures when we were painting and are thinking we want to get fresher looking new guys. We haven't yet looked up the prices to see what the cost will be.
• 3. The table that we used to eat on in our apartment is now the temporary TV stand in our room. The TV that used to be in our living room is now living in our bedroom hooked up to our DVD player.
• 4. Did I mention that we are trying to the whole we are not paying for television right now? We'll just watch shows on DVD and the internet. So far, not so bad. It's only been 3 days though. I honestly think we might be too busy to even care.
• 5. The old bedside tables (thank you, Ikea) haven't been put back together, yet.
• 6. A giant spider tried to eat my face off yesterday morning. While waking up, I opened my eyes and noticed a big black dot walking across the wall above our bed. I screamed. Jordan went and got a little box, captured the spider and put it outside. EW! It was bigger than a quarter! Now when I am in bed I curl up about a foot away from the wall and wake up every few hours to make sure there isn't a spider on me.

So, here is our progress:

*Sorry for the poor photo quality and weird filters. I was trying out the camera+ app and the HDR filter went a little crazy and made everything weird and green. Our bedroom is blue. Also, I am pretty sure I sized this right in Photoshop. Not sure why technology hates me today.

We are actually missing 3 doors. Our bedroom door, the bathroom door, and the closet door, which will actually be a sliding barn door when we get around to it! The windows have temporary vinyl blinds on them that we found at Target for $4.99 and $5.99. You peel off the backing and actually just stick it on the top of the window frame. For now it definitely serves our purpose for privacy while we decide on what to do with our windows. The only bummer is that until figure it out I can't paint the window trim... unless I buy new temp blinds. Seems like a waste of $$$.

Tonight we also bought a microwave. Target's selection wasn't big. And all we need it to do is heat up our food quickly. And we have gift cards there. So... now we have a microwave. It's cute and it kind of matches our stove. More on that in another post. Our bedroom is really all I have to show right now. The rest of the house is still crammed with unpacked boxes, big Hefty trash bags, and no true plan yet.

And because we are living off of DVDs right now, I'd say it's time for some Breaking Bad.

Goodnight!