Guest Bedroom & Odds-N-Ends

Guest Bedroom

Our guest bedroom looked pretty plain jane when we first moved in. And for the most part, it still does. It's main purpose is to store the ironing board and our bikes (now up to three!) I'm purposely keeping it pretty neutral because I recognize that eventually it will be used for other purposes if we decide to expand our family of two plus a spoiled dog. But, I did want to add a few new pieces for the time being. So, I got new bedding (on clearance at Target for $25) and a lamp & bedside table (both found at the HomeGoods section at Marshall's... that place has some great stuff!)

Before.

After.

Close up of the bedding, lamp, and table. I think it has a nice whimsical look.

If/ when we have kiddos I want to have white or ivory furniture and patchwork quilts and textiles. I think this is pretty gender neutral and could be worked into any design.

Master Bedroom Pictures

When Jason's mom visited a few months back, she gave us some of her photos. We finally framed a few and put them up. These are on the walls of our master bedroom. Check out more of her stuff at http://www.dkharvillephotography.com/.

The first framed picture is actually a silhouette of Jason and I that I got for him this past Valentine's Day. I found it on http://www.etsy.com/. Search for "Paper Cuts by Joe" to see more of his stuff.

This was the inspiration for the silhouette.

Special Wine & Dinner

This is my wonderful husband. He has been cooking dinner for me all summer. I love him bunches and bunches for doing so.

The other night we decided to splurge and drink our "special wine" that we brought back from Sonoma. It was our last remaining bottle from our wine country trip, and we decided to go ahead and enjoy it. Jason cooked spaghetti for dinner, and we attempted to make it more of an occasion by making home-made meatballs. It was delish.

Close up of the spaghetti with meatballs and mushrooms. Yum!

Garden

Just a few minutes ago Jason found that our other pepper plant has been busy growing lately.

For scale purposes.

Sorry for the here-there-and-everywhere post. I'll have an update soon about some more changes to our master bedroom, but I'm waiting for some pieces to be delivered. For now, I'm going to go enjoy another dinner made by my wonderful husband. Tonight is cod fish with tomato sauce and vegetables. :)

Patio Set

While Jason was at the river with his family this weekend, I shopped. Hehe. I've been frugal all of my life (read: cheap, stingy - slightly to an obnoxious degree) and now that I have a house, I actually enjoy picking things out for it. I still shop deals, though. I picked out this patio set earlier this summer - it's one of the sturdiest sets I've seen and the price was right. (It's actually from Kroger, believe it or not.) I had a feeling it would go on sale towards the end of the summer, though, and sure enough when I stopped by the store on Saturday it was 25% off. I was hoping it would be a bit more on sale, but it was the last set so I snatched it up. I also convinced them to through in free delivery. (My job is 80% negotiating and I think it's paying off!)

So, here it is all set up in the backyard...

Nice, huh?

This patio set won my heart because of the tiled top. I like it much better than the glass top tables. The tiles are also removable/ replaceable which makes cleaning very convenient.

The chairs are a nylon fabric or something. They are comfortable and pretty easy to clean, but I am a bit worried about the durability of the fabric. I will probably get a patio set cover to help prolong the life of the set.

Another view.

I'm looking forward to cooler weather when we'll actually get to enjoy it a bit more. Ferryn & Steve came over for dinner the other night and we grilled hamburgers and brats and ate them outside. It was super hot though and the mosquitoes weren't too fun.

I bought a few other things while I was out and about this weekend, but I'm waiting on a delivery before I show all the pics. Other than bedside tables for the bedroom, we are almost done furniture shopping.

Painting & Grilling

Painting

I feel like a liar. Right after I tell you that we aren't really planning any more projects, Jason wakes up and says, "Hey... let's paint your bathroom today." So, off to Home Depot we go.

I really disliked the orange. According to color psychology, orange is supposed to make you feel excitement, enthusiasm, and warmth. It brought none of these to my mind. Instead, it only reminded me of my elementary alma mater - Hillcrest Lil' Yotes. Not exactly what I wanted to be reminded of everyday. So, we picked out a blue that would match our bath accessories and that would look good with the blue of the bedroom.

Step 1: Remove hardware.

Step 2: Tape the edges.

Jason is outside building the grill we bought when we were at Home Depot on our paint run.

Step 3: Prime.

Primer is done.

I was really worrying about our painting abilities after I saw the job we did priming.

Step 4: Enlist the dog to help.

You can tell how enthused he looked about the project. By the end of the day, he had all of his toys lined up outside of the bathroom.

Step 5: Cut in the edges.

Step 6: Paint cutsie messages for each other.

End of day 1. The first coat is up.

I woke up this morning and put a second coat of paint up and removed the tape. I was not thrilled with how the tape worked. I think I could have done better edges without it. Oh well, for our first paint job, I think it turned out okay.

The end result.

Much better than the orange. :)

Grilling

I've really missed having a grill. When we were up in the Woodlands, one of my co-workers let us use his grill when he was off in San Francisco for training. We used it probably once a week. Jason is determined to eventually get us a really nice wood burning BBQ pit. Since I knew that finding the perfect BBQ pit was probably going to take some time, I suggested getting a cheap grill to use in the meantime. We found this one for $25 at Home Depot on a 4th of July sale. It truly is only worth about $25, but I figure if we use it even a couple of times, we will get our money worth out of it.

Once again, the dog is trying to help. Can't you tell how useful he was yesterday?

We grilled steaks....

and vegetables.

Jason was worried they wouldn't turn out very good, but I thought he did a great job. Steaks were juicy and vegetables were very yummy.

Hope you had a wonderful 4th of July as well.

I am just thrilled to have a 3-day weekend. :)

TV Stand & Dining Room Rug

Sorry it's been awhile since my last post. We've actually had a chance to just enjoy the house lately instead of working on it. We still have a laundry list of things we want to do (install window shutters, rain gutters, french drains for the drainage issues, re-side the garage with hardy plank, paint the master bath, fix the automatic gate opener, etc.) but those things can wait awhile.

Trey and Melanie gave me a gift certificate to World Market (one of my favs) for my birthday, so I found a TV stand (on clearance) and put it to use on that.

Remember what was this?

And then this?

Looks a bit unproportional, huh?

Is now this.

Much more suitable.

We also got a rug for the dining room. It was more of a utilitarian issue than a decorating one - we just wanted something to keep the floors from getting scratched.

I've been meaning to get out and about in the neighborhood more, but with all of the rain lately, we have been a bit house bound. Yep, so in conclusion, our lives have been very boring lately. But with all the excitement we had in the first couple of months of being homeowners, it is kinda nice to be lazy.

;)

I still thought the house looked a little stark, so I went and got a few yard decorations.

How do you think this looks?

Front Yard

I took a few days off this week and Jason and I tackled the front yard re-do.

This was the front of the house before we moved in.

This was the front garden bed. We were not impressed. At first, we really didn't care for the yuccas, but I realized that taking them all out would be a huge endeavour.

So, we started to design around the yuccas. We weeded the beds, took out all of the other plants, and I trimmed back the yuccas to clean up the look a bit.

We wanted to go for a very low maintenance design, and I thought that white rocks instead of mulch might be a nice contrast to the orange bricks.

Jason shoveled over half a ton of rocks yesterday. God love him.

We put down landscapers fabric to keep any future weeds out.

Instead of planting into the ground, we decided to buy some colorful pots. They were having a 1/2 sale at Houston Garden Center last week. It took over 2 hours to pick out these pots. When we got up to the register, they told us our biggest pot wasn't 1/2 off. I kinda had a minor fit and told them their ads were misleading - I was tired and hot and the dang pot would have been really expensive if we had to buy it full price. So, we went to our car, potless, and started to drive off. The manager ended up sending the check out girl after us. Needless to say, we ended up getting the pots 1/2 off. However, I can't say that I'm a fan of Houston Garden Center now. We went to Buchanan's in the Heights for the rest of our gardening needs.

The result. The plants have yellow, red, and blue flowers. I'm so paranoid that after the whole pot debacle that they will end up getting stolen (not related to each other, of course, more of a karma thing), so we chained them to each other. We just hid the chains under the rocks. Any thieves will have a nice surprise if they try to take off with them.

We also worked on this bed.

I particularly like how this turned out.

Jason wanted a rock border around this plant, so we got boulders to match the other rocks.

The final result.

Last night I started having doubts about our design because I thought it looked too stark.

So I went and bought some patio furniture to soften up the look. (I found the chair, table, pillow, and pot at Target on clearance and spent about $75 on the whole set.)

The new final result.

We are going to hang some black shutters around the window on the left which should also help soften the look. Today, the look is growing on me. It looks nice as you drive by from the street and it is definitely an improvement from the beginning.

Backyard

We worked out in the yard today.

Remember how the herbs were planted along the garage? We weren't a fan of them being right there. They were full of weeds, and we rather just plant grass up to the garage.

So, we went to Lowe's and Home Depot and picked out some pots and potting soil.

Jason had a pretty good method of getting the plants out without harming their roots. Hopefully, they will all survive.

I also washed our $15 patio set and set it up.

Backyard end result.

We also started on the front bed. It just looks cluttered and messy right now.

Another view. I think we have decided to keep all of the yuccas and add more desert themed plants to match them.

We decided to replant some of the plants in the back.

All of the yellow speckled plants were moved to this bed in the back.