A discussion came up on Twitter a few days ago about whether it’s better to schedule blog posts in advance or post spontaneously.  I always have a idea of what I want to talk about and I’m constantly jotting things down, but I prefer the spontaneous route. Things change by the day and sometimes a great idea comes out of the blue.  This is one of those spontaneous posts.

I logged into my Twitter feed, where I receive updates from HouseBlogs.net, which gives new posts from their group of house bloggers.  This post from The Box House popped up and I had to immediately read it.  I know I’ve mentioned losing our part Maine Coon kitty Sunny here and there, like my new appreciation for the color orange, our wedding favors or how we ended up with the cat who ruined our carpets. For the most part, I’ve tried to keep this blog house related though it’s hard not to mention something that has impacted your life as much as Sunny did.

When I started this, many of my friends reminded me that this was not indeed my first foray into blogging… my cats once had a blog, macandsunny.com.  We stopped posting after Sunny died because it just didn’t feel right.  But since I know so many people enjoyed reading it and I am thankful that it is saved forever on the internet, I figured I’d share it with my new friends.  Gives you a glimpse into us crazy people a little more 🙂

So tomorrow, I will give you my newest Sunny-inspired house addition.  For now, hug your pets, make your pets hug each other and if you have some loving words for The Box House, please head on over. I’ll leave you with this picture of Sunny’s beloved brother Macky…

Yes, he is in my wood basket and no, he does not belong there. Someone is going to end up with a splinter in their you-know-what….

They grow up so fast :::sigh:::

Yesterday was our first wedding anniversary.  We always have to be different, so instead of doing the 10/10/10 thing we went for 10/10/09.  Actually, I was aiming for 10/3/09 but we couldn’t get the date.  So the 10th it is!

In honor of our anniversary, I decided to post a few (okay, 25) wedding pictures that cover more of the design/style side of the wedding and less of the hey! look at us! side.  How does this relate to the house? Well as I’ve mentioned before, we did all of our flowers and most of the wedding design on the same day as we chose our interior options for the house.  And coincidentally, the foundation of our house was poured on 10/9/09… the day before the wedding.  Here’s a picture of the house on 10/4/09, the last chance we had to take a picture before the wedding….

So without further ado, our wedding, in mostly pictures so I don’t bore you 🙂

(Pictures courtesy of our phenomenal photographer, Zlatko Batistich)

We got married at a very small, little known bed and breakfast with an organic farm not far from where we live.  It’s nestled so far back in the woods that we had driven past numerous times and never knew it was there.  We attempted to time the date so that the leaves had began to change, but of course those things never work out and it was mostly green around the farm.

The wreath our florist made for the door

Our DIY menu cards…Mike used the font from our invites (which we had to purchase and also appears in the title for this site) we printed them on textured cardstock, glued them to green scrapbook paper, hole punched the corners and tied some twine in there.  We made quite the team.

Hey look, it’s me! Coming down the stairs of the old house, which dates back to 1750.

My bridesmaids and I, walking to meet Mike in one of the gardens with old water tower in the background.

There is an old cottage on the grounds and it was one of the reasons why we chose this place.  We had our cocktail hour in this area and since it got chilly at night, the owners lit the fireplace inside.  Definitely one of the highlights of the wedding.  We didn’t even think anyone would go in there, but it was jam packed.

Walking through one of the gardens.  My dress and shoes were filthy before the wedding even started. I’ve never claimed to be very glamorous.

My favorite series of pictures.  I wanted a location with a dirt driveway for this reason.

My bouquet. (Side note- this picture is completely candid, I had no clue it was taken.  How’s that for an awesome photographer?)

Bridal party… girls’ dresses were from David’s Bridal (unbelievable right?), guys got suits from Macy’s and wore striped ties to compliment Mike’s solid tie.  The florist didn’t listen to anything we said about the bridesmaids flowers.  I hate leaves in arrangments.  But when the day comes around, what can you do? I’m no bridezilla.

Always connected…

Mmm cake. The florist “forgot” our topper, so we had a naked cake.  But I kinda like it like that.  Maybe a new trend?

One of the table arrangements

Our DIY menus, with our DIY favors/placecards

The first tag on the favor box gives a name/table number.  The second tag said this…

And was filled with these…probably my favorite part of everything we did.

Farm signage

Every wedding needs a cute kid, I believe we hit the jackpot.  Complete with ring bearer pillow via Etsy.

Ceremony view

Every good party has guacamole!

It rained in the morning, which was very nerve racking, but it cleared up by the afternoon and left us with this beautiful sunset.

The reception was in a tent, which I know a lot of people consider to be a turn off, but it was something we were looking for.  A blank canvas 🙂

And I was dying to hang paper laterns, which don’t exactly go with a ballroom

We specifically asked our caterer for mini ice cream cones, being that we’re pretty well known for being ice cream lovers

Another thing that was huge to us was the music.  We did nothing traditional for the ceremony and didn’t want any group dances, slow dances, etc during the reception, which made for one hell of a party.

The old house at night

All and all, I’d say our wedding was pretty cool, though I suppose I’m a little biased 🙂

Happy Anniversary, Husband.

Once we got through choosing the exterior options of our home, we were sent to the design center for the interior.  This place was ginormous.  There wasn’t even a hole dug for our home yet, and the model we previously walked through had been sold, so it’s safe to say we had no clue what we were doing.  Plus our wedding was less than 3 months away, so we were up to our necks in those choices.  In fact, since we were short on time off, we did our floral/table design for the wedding, then shot over to the design center for our house options all in one single day.  Yes we are crazy and that is why I got a case of the shingles shortly after…TMI.

Anywho, we arrived at the design center to hear that they did not have our appointment in their book.  Read above blurb about limited time off.  So the “design” person we were supposed to work with had another couple in our time slot.  There was nothing they could do for us that day, but told us we could work on our own.  And with that, we chose almost all of our options that day, without any help, decoding the crazy builder price sheet.  It took us more than 3 hours.

We had remodeled our condo a little less than 2 years before and we were really pleased with how our it turned out.  We had awesome Pergo flooring, which was not too brown, not too cherry, in about a 3.5 inch wide plank with beveled edges.  Apparently they don’t make it anymore…

We also added a wide baseboard, which we loved.  I always wanted dark wood cabinets, but with the dark floor and the lack of windows in our condo kitchen, we went with white….

I apologize in advance for the quality of some of these pictures, they were taken from my husband’s iPhone right before we handed over the keys to our condo.  We are currently trying to get the pictures our realtor took of the place when it was actually decorated.  Here’s the part of the other side with the stainless appliances we also added…

So we definitely had ideas in mind.  I wanted a very similar floor, and with my desire to keep the place light and airy, we decided to go with the ‘antique’ colored cabinets, which are slightly less white than the…white ones.  For hardwoods, it was much, much harder.  First of all, the pricing list may as well have been in Spanish, so we had no clue what anything cost the first time around.  Second, of the hundreds of flooring samples, I wasn’t in love with a single one.  They just were not rustic enough for me.  That being said, once we found out the pricing, we decided to go with the least expensive option, in the darkest color and widest plank available.  Which was the Bruce oak floor in Cherry, 3 1/4 inch plank….

The other options, some of which are shown in the top pic, were a little too 1970s looking for me.  They weren’t a modern brown, more of a Brady Bunch brown.  I previously did not like cherry, but it was the darkest option they had in that price range.  So I sucked it up this time.  The countertop sample shown above with our cabinets is Corian in Bethany.  Corian came standard in our kitchen, and there were only two beige options, so that choice was cake.

We rounded out our design center visit with some basic carpeting choices…

This one was pretty simple as well.  The carpet on the right of the wood is a standard choice.  The colors we had to choose from were that, pink, blue or WHITE.  There were millions of carpet choices, but only 4 which were not upgrades.  Since I had a budget, I think it is the most beautiful carpet I have ever seen.  But not beautiful enough to put downstairs, which we upgraded to the berber one pictured on the left…

Then we chose this master bath cabinet and tile, the latter which blew the bathroom budget but I had to have it….

We also stuck with the stainless appliances that we loved before.

Flash forward 7 or so months when we finally got to see how everything we chose worked out…(note: the house had yet to be cleaned in the following pre-closing pictures, the random dust and crap around is not ours)

We are very, very happy with the way the hardwood floors turned out.  Ecstatic even. They are no where near as red as I thought they would be and have a great variation in color which I love.  In fact, we are very, very happy with the way every one of our choices turned out, even that standard upstairs carpet that I thought was gold.  It’s actually quite nicer than I thought!

Our closing is on Tuesday.  After 10 long months, we will finally have a home again.  We’re painting within the week, as well as doing some other small projects, so expect many more pictures as we make our house a home!

I’m going to go backwards every now and then to fill you in on how we got where we are today, without putting anyone to sleep….hopefully….

We chose our house because of the wonderful porch and stone facade.

Of course there were considerations of location, price, blah blah….

We then had to choose our lot, which had to be wooded to meet our ideal house criteria. We basically choose the lot that had the most dense woods behind it, to act as a buffer between existing homes. That way if we eventually get a pool, I can feel free to belly flop into it without getting the backyard neighbor’s belongings wet. I kid I kid, it was really for the feeling and view from the bathtub…

Okay so this picture is not so accurate. When we signed our contract we had chosen a different lot because it was the largest one available that was wooded. After a week we decided to lose the whooole extra .05 of an acre in return for more dense trees in our backyard. A smart decision, now that it’s winter and we can see the house behind our original choice.

The day we signed our contract, we also had to choose our exterior options. This part was easy, because how many colors of siding exist? Or rather, how many colors of siding would the builder offer? I knew I wanted something really earthy looking, maybe something that could fit in the Pacific Northwest, so we choose a brown on brown scheme with a round river rock type stone…

Our roof is also a shade of brown, but apparently that’s something I neglected to take a picture of… whoops.

We wanted to keep the stones in the brown family, and that lil red stone in the bottom right corner made me nervous. I definitely did not want large versions of that on my house, but we were told it depends on the lot of stones. We went through this process back in June and a little less than a month ago, our stone finally went up. We couldn’t be happier with the results!

We still don’t have shutters up or our door painted, but so far we’re very pleased with how all of our choices came together. Here we are currently, about 7 weeks before closing….