Monday night we managed to put our two new desks together, despite the fact that we purchased the wrong legs and had to go BACK TO IKEA AGAIN. Last night we (or rather Mike) put our 4 shelves up. Our soon to be organized space has almost all of it’s basics, besides a bookcase or two. Now for the challenging, makes-me-scratch-my-head part of making it look like ours!

We’re approaching that time! The time where we will all try to carve the greatest pumpkins ever.  Well, I’ll just fail at it really bad — I can’t carve or sculp for the life of me.  But the wife, Rebecca, can sure carve a pumpkin.

Last year, Rebecca carved Macky’s mug into a pumpkin.  Macky has excellent features, strong contrasting colors and solid lines — perfect for carving.  After Rebecca’s co-worker helped her create the Macky stencil (maybe using these tips?), she was able to carve the perfect Macky.

But the moral of the story is to get creative with your pumpkins this year.  While the whole “pumpkin-throwing-up” thing is insanely funny, it’s been done before;  so this year is the perfect opportunity to start thinking outside the box with those pumpkins.

Darwin helping with the office makeover.  He was adopted, so it is quite possible that he has some Swedish roots….

This weekend we planned to enjoy the fall weather, maybe take a few pictures locally and get some small things done around the house.  On Saturday morning, I walked into our office to print something for my sister and law and this is what I saw…. (cue the horror movie music)

Not that I didn’t know this catastrophe existed, but I guess it’s just been bothering me more lately since this is my desk….

Yes.  There is no glass in that frame.  And my husband has been using it to store a bunch of empty boxes from things we have ordered.  So since my physical ‘desk’ is that, I tend to take my laptop and sit myself here, in the timeout chair…

While Mike sits here….

Now we’re both to blame for this mess.  The office has been a very neglected portion of our house, mainly because we had such big dreams for it.  The room is probably my favorite in the house… it has the bay window, french doors and loads of light.

Because it has doors that can be closed, it has become the “keep things from the cats” area.  So it stores tools…

And failed design projects, such as this large mirror from our condo I planned to hang over the fireplace…

And as far as storage, we had this piece of furniture left over from our condo, which I am fully to blame for cluttering…

Now the office is mostly Mike’s space, he spends hours in there each day so I wanted to make sure he got the dream office he always wanted.  I use my laptop and got used to having it on my lap while we lived with my in-laws, so I didn’t miss having a desk until I recently went back to school and started this gig.  Our original idea was to someday do custom cabinetry, where Mike could have an L shaped desk and I would get an extended portion of one end.  We even went so far as to sit down with some cabinet designers at Lowe’s who came up with this…

We planned to do some dark wood cabinets with my favorite countertops, the Eco ones from Cosentino.  However when we got the estimate, it came out to be a small fortune.  But we knew it was an investment and with all of the work Mike does, we wanted it to suit our needs.

Turns out we had another pressing project to put our money towards.  Next week we will be getting hardwood floors in our upstairs hallway and bedroom, as well as adding a wall up there.  More about that later, but we decided to put the office project on the back burner for a year or so.  Until yesterday morning…

When I was attempting to print, sitting in my timeout chair, a little light blub went off in my head.  I knew we needed more storage, so I told Mike that we should go to Ikea to get one of the Expedit bookcases I’ve loved for years.  I knew it would fit nicely inbetween our desks and we would get some much needed storage.

So Saturday afternoon it was off to Ikea.  We picked up this bookcase and headed home.  Fast forward to this morning, when Mike had the idea to just get two desks, which would face each other.  We bounced ideas off of each other and ran back to Ikea.  We found a bunch of things that would work for us, but they were out of some of the pieces.  So we ran to yet another Ikea, the third location in 24 hours.  Luckily they had everything we needed to finally organize our office… for a very small fraction of the price of cabinetry.

I’m actually more excited about this spontaneous change of plans then I was for the original one.  I’m always up for a challenge and in the end I guess we took our own office advice…

To be continued, office!

Back when we lived in our condo, my husband and I consumed mass amounts of water… in bottles.  When we began to think about our new fridge, we decided we wanted one with a water dispenser.  We went with the GE Profile, french door, bottom freezer, water/ice dispenser fridge…

We originally were just going to do the water dispenser, since it was nice and flat and so pretty, but we decided it would be more practical to include the ice dispenser.  We purchased some glasses from Crate & Barrel that were on clearance for $1 each and got some reusable water bottles for when we’re on the go.  Thinking about how much plastic we have saved makes me feel guilty that we didn’t do it sooner.  I’m very proud to say that water bottles are officially banned from the lil house!