I didn’t plan on decorating the inside of our house for any holidays other than Christmas (see our outside fall decor here), but when I spotted these pumpkins at Crate and Barrel I had to have them.

I bought one of the medium sized ones and two of the mini sized ones.  I planned to use them make a whole centerpiece arrangement on our table for our first Thanksgiving.  Then we decided to do an impromptu Halloween gathering Saturday with both of our families, so I figured I’d put them out early.  Problem was, I didn’t have the rest of my table scape ready!  I ran to Target to find the runner I wanted but they were out, so I decided to just stick the pumpkins on our Ikea Stornas buffet for the day.

Then I remembered that we had some tiny pumpkins from the farm I could mix in…

If I only had this blog to document the Ikea dining room furniture fiasco back in April.  Someday I will have to go back and cover the dining room stuff we already have!

At like 11pm on Friday night I decided to make chocolate covered pretzels.  Mike thought I was crazy, but I love decorating…and decorating things I can eat?? even better! So I set out to do the pretzels on my own, but Mike ended up enjoying the process and helped out.  Maybe even dominated the pretzel game…

We started getting creative along the way and decided to smash up some of the halloween candy we bought…

So now we still have more than two full bags of halloween candy, leftover pumpkin pie, chocolate cake, pumpkin roll, pumpkin cake, chocolate covered animal crackers that my mom bought and some chocolate covered pretzels left.  The next kid to ring the doorbell gets a piece of cake….

Happy Halloween everyone!

Two days ago we ordered a cord of firewood.

I came home from work to see this giant pile at the end of our driveway.  We have a wood burning (obviously) fireplace that we are very excited to use for the season.  We had one in our condo and since it was a third floor unit, we usually didn’t put the heat on until December.  So we knew we definitely wanted one again, but when we got our house option sheet, it wasn’t offered!  Apparently people don’t really want them and prefer gas? Insanity! Luckily, our special request was granted and we got our wood burning fireplace.  The smell is so wonderful and cozy, plus the kittens love it.

We ordered the wood locally (from a place around the corner) and we were excited to hear that all of that wood came from our very own development when they chopped down trees to build houses.

You see, I really try to be as environmentally conscious as possible, I was raised that way.  So I never thought I’d buy a new house and once shook my head at the thought.  But the ignorance won and it was just better financially.  So I still feel very incredibly guilty every time I think of all of the animals I left homeless.  It felt a little better to know that we will be using the wood for an alternative heat source (that maybe creates smokey pollution) but at least it didn’t travel far and is being used practically.  It helps me sleep better at night okay?!

So what are we doing to do with all that wood? We ordered some outdoor wood holder thingys off amazon and for the inside, we bought a little basket from Target.

Since we love our recycling baskets, we thought we’d get a bigger one for the wood.  It has nothing in it and still has the tag on it actually…

All this time I thought that said “arabica”, like the coffee beans.  Whoops!

Our fireplace is one of our many works in progress.  Right now it has an awkward, I-wasn’t-thinking-creatively, candle holder in it, which I do like.  But I’ll probably step up my game in the off season 🙂

And since my friend Laura told me today that she enjoyed my background/foreground pictures, I figured I’d give her another one…

The fireplace itself is currently half tiled with some of the tiles we used for our kitchen backsplash.  I wanted to include them in the family room because of our open floorplan.

It still has to be grouted and we have to figure out what to do with the rest of the fireplace.  I found some high heat paint for the black metal parts and I plan on changing out the gold hardware.

But the dilemma is what to do with the black slate bottom piece (that is ugly and cloudy in this pic)..

I wanted to paint it a shade of brown, so I don’t waste a good piece of slate, but I’m worried about the VOCs in many of those concrete type paints that the guy at Lowe’s told us to use.  It’s our family room and we and the kittens are always in there (here, I’m here now…)  Does anyone have any experience with painting interior slate?

Anywho, we’re definitely looking forward to the holiday season where the 5 of us are cuddled up the fire.  If only we could have gotten a fireplace in our bedroom too!

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.