Dear bloggy buddies, I need your help.

I’ve been searching for a grass greenish and white, graphic print area rug for our office.  I want a modern yet classy print, along the lines of this…

Happy Trellis Rug in Sprout from Shades of Light, approx. 5’x8′, $578

Yes, five-hundred-and-seventy-eight dollars.  So I set out to find a cheaper alternative.

I checked West Elm and found two favorites…

Zigzag Rug from West Elm, 5’x8′, $229

West Elm Andalusia Rug, 5’x8′, $229

Okay we cut the price in half! I love the Andalusia rug, even in yellow, but I don’t want yellow for the office. And neither are available in green 🙁

On to Target!

DwellStudio for Target Orbit Rug, 5’x7′, $139.99

Have I ever mentioned my love for DwellStudio? Especially their kids’ stuff? Love it.  It’s fail proof.  And I love the price of this rug and though the pattern isn’t as repeated-graphic-design as I originally wanted, if it was green I’d be all over it. But it’s not :::Snooki cry:::

Then there was this one, which I originally spotted in person at Target…

Target Home Medallion Wool Shag Rug, 5’x8′, $129.99

It’s like the less expensive, more neutral version of the above West Elm one.  I spotted this before I got the green idea in my head, so I almost pulled the trigger.  But it is very very fluffy.  So much so that I was afraid that Darwin would mistake it for one of our washable puppy pads and would pee on it.  TMI, but true story, we’ve learned from experience.  Oh and it’s still not green…

Then there was a glimmer of hope when I was browsing Pottery Barn Teen…

Pottery Barn Teen Double Dot Jacquard Rug, 5’x8′, on sale for $129.

I wasn’t sure about the dots, but I ran it by Mike to assess the girlyness and he declared it acceptable.  Not my ideal pattern, as I wanted something a little more sophisticated, but the size, price and colors were right.  So I got all set to order when I saw that the GREEN WAS SOLD OUT.

So I’m back to square one.  Has anyone seen any green and white patterned area rugs out there? Do you know of any rug retailers I haven’t thought of? (ps- I’ve been checking HomeGoods whenever we go, but they are so hit or miss) Or has anyone used those carpet tiles to build your own area rug?

Any help would be very much appreciated! 🙂

This is another spontaneous, I-had-other-plans-but-couldn’t-resist-this, post. I opened my house pictures folder and was curious to see what the house looked like a year ago.  Turns out that a year ago last week, our house was framed and we climbed in it for the first time.

I was just going to share some pictures, but even better! I have a video tour of the first floor! No second floor because if you notice, we had no stairs yet…

The video starts in the entry way and the first room I go into is the office, then formal living, dining, kitchen, powder room, family room, laundry room and finally the garage.  I took the video because it was hard to tell what room was what in just pictures….there was absolutely no sense of depth between the studs.  It’s still slightly confusing in the video between the powder room, laundry room and office areas, but you can tell the office because Mike is staring at it and making note of where are the studs are so he could run all of his fancy networks 🙂

Oh and we do speak, we just purposely kept quiet because nothing is worse than having a good video, then watching it and thinking I SOUND LIKE THAT?! I didn’t think of this blog then, so I never thought that maybe I should say out loud which room I was walking in.

Oh House, you grew up so fast.

Yesterday we did it.  We completed the first item on our pre-Christmas list and cleaned out the garage… for the most part.  Though I had dreams of it being completely done and organized in a day, we quickly realized those expectations were extremely high. Once again, the before picture…

The process was completely overwhelming and we often felt like we were getting nowhere.  Those small boxes on the bottom left of the picture? Full of random papers/clothes/unorganized things that were packed in the last minute.  So we’d get through a small box, only to look up and see a mountain of things that remained.  One of those crates contained nearly Mike’s entire sock collection. Quite funny.

I didn’t go into detail about how our garage got to look like this.  When we moved out of our condo, we were completely organized and the process was seamless. Boxes packed in an organized manner, labeled nicely and put into storage while we all moved in with Mike’s parents for 10 months.  The majority of this mess isn’t from our condo move, it is from the move from my in-laws’ to our house.

Six weeks before we decided to sell our condo, our worst nightmare came true and Macky began having seizures like his brother that we lost less than a year before.  We believe stress triggers them for him and long story short, Sunny once had a seizure while in a cat carrier with Macky and he is know terrified of carriers.  So when we moved Macky from our condo to my in-laws’, he had a seizure while en route.

So for 10 months, we dreaded moving to our house because we were terrified of losing Macky the way we lost Sunny.  We had a very detailed plan, which was to not put him in a carrier and instead put him in the back of my mother-in-law’s SUV with me.  It was only a 5 mile drive and we could move him from their garage to ours, without him ever going outside. (Note: I do not recommend this under normal circumstances.  A cat carrier is equivalent to putting your kid in a car seat, so please don’t try this at home) So we set a date about 2 weeks after closing because we didn’t want to move him anywhere near the anniversary of Sunny’s illness, which happened to be the anniversary of Macky’s first seizure AND which happened to be their 4th birthday.  April 27th is a bad luck day for us and sometimes I am a crazy worrier, but when I told Mike that if our closing date fell near the 27th, we needed to wait to move.  He agreed.  Two years of bad birthdays for Macky was enough.

So we planned, closed on March 30th, emptied our storage unit into our garage and began unpacking.  We would unpack after work, then go back to Mike’s parents’ and sleep there with the kittens.  Then we got a phone call that the week we planned to move the cats, our driveway would be paved and we wouldn’t be able to drive on it for 7 days. Cue the panic attack.  So we ended up moving the cats on during bad luck week.

Because of our garage to garage moving plan for Macky, we had to be able to park a car in there.  So we quickly pushed things over to one side, moved some things to the basement and managed to get him in the house. We decided not to bring any boxes in the house for a few weeks, so he was as comfortable as possible here.  Also so he didn’t know what was going on, we didn’t move any of our things out of our bedroom at Mike’s parents’ before we moved Macky. Elaborate scheme, I know, but he means the world to us.

Turns out he moved perfectly fine, though I was crammed in the back of a CR-V with him and had bruises all over my legs from his pacing back and forth, but he didn’t have a seizure!  In fact, within a few hours he was roaming the house like he’d lived here all along.  Finally, FINALLY, we could be excited that we closed on our house and our whole little family made it here with us.

We would run to my in-laws’ after work and quickly throw some of our belongings in a random bag/box.  I believe I emptied our bathroom there into a grocery bag in about 5 minutes.  I found a shoe box of things that were in my nightstand, which was not only my nightstand while we lived there, but my desk, medicine cabinet and wedding planning station (Yes, we also got married in the midst of this).  Most of this stuff ended up in the garage.

Spring came and went, the hottest summer ever made our garage 100 degrees most days. Plus it was just so disorganized from our hasty box consolidation that two bikes and a dresser blocked all of our smaller boxes.  Not something we were looking forward to tackling.  AT ALL.

Yesterday we managed to at least organize the space, find where things were and get Mike some damn socks to wear…

It isn’t completed, but it’s a huge step.  Most of the stuff left in this picture is old office furniture we plan on selling/donating.  The bikes are going to get hung on the wall.  At one point, Mike pointed out that we were just moving the stuff to other rooms, which was true.  But it wasn’t trash… so the boxes labeled “office” were put in the office to be sorted and we got rid of very little.  Our small piles of trash/recycables…

Though at the time we didn’t appreciate what we did, we now know that if we need to, we could fit our two cars in the garage and with some shelves/organization system, we’ll be done.

It’s a start, which is usually the hardest part…. and it feels pretty good to close the “living out of boxes” chapter of our lives.

ps- it’s ironic that the longest day ever resulted in the longest post ever… sorry about that guys 🙂

I mentioned in my last post that we are trying to not attempt any new projects before the holidays, as we have so many cans of worms we’ve already opened.  We have 6 weekends before Christmas (since Thanksgiving is like, 2 weeks away, I know that goal is totally unattainable) so here is my wish list of things to finish in that time….

1. Finish Unpacking.  Yes we officially moved in here almost 7 months ago and unpacked hardcore for a few weeks.  But once the spring came along, we decided to enjoy our time here and not stress about getting every single thing unpacked.  Fast forward 7 months when winter is quickly approaching and we’d like to be able to park our cars in the garage if it snows….

But this heaping pile of stuff is in the way.  No one has ever seen this.  People aren’t allowed in the garage.  It looks like a garage sale because we often pick through the boxes and containers of things in there.  It’s really not as much stuff as it looks like, as nothing is consolidated.  I’m an all or nothing type of person, either it’s organized and color coordinated, or I wait until I have the time to do so.  We have this project planned for Saturday since it will be nice out, wish us luck.

2. Caulk and paint new trim upstairs. I think this one is pretty self-explanatory.

3. Paint this little spot. We had a curtain rod, then decided to go with roman shades and never finished it up.

Btw, that is our formal living room area.  Those shades are about all that is in that room.

4. Finish organizing the office.

That picture is the current status, as of like, 10 minutes ago. We haven’t worked on it in a few weeks and it could use some love.  And organization.

5. Hang items already purchased, yet never hung.  This applies to two things I can think of.  The  arrangement of frames in our family room…

And the shelves we purchased months ago to hang on this dining room wall…

6. Grout backsplash.  That pretty little backsplash that shows up in my cookie jar pictures? Though we had it tiled by a professional friend about 2 months ago, he didn’t have time to grout it and we figured we could tackle it on our own.  We just haven’t done it yet…

Sidenote: I’ve been told that pictures make the backsplash look way more gold than it is.  I think it’s because of the under cabinet lights.  It’s not goldish like it looks in the second picture.

7. Plan out some holiday decor! I’ve mentioned my desire for a runner and table scape, but it is also our first Christmas in the new house, so we need to figure out where to put things.  Including a tree… oh and we have an entire outside of a house now.

Images via this post from Hooked on Houses.  This was funny because I did a google image search and noticed a blog I read came up in the results.  I had to use these pictures after reading the awesome post about the Christmas Vacation house and the entry linked in there about the house from Home Alone.  What kid didn’t dream about living there?

8. Work out a solution for family room window treatments. Seriously, this situation has gotten beyond ridiculous.

Crinkled paper blinds.  ‘Nuff said.

9. Learn how to be Martha Stewart.  I bought a cookie cookbook because I have always wanted to try some different cookies for Christmas.  And I suppose this could go under #7, but I want to figure out how to make a wreath out of ball shaped items…

I found directions here, though it’s not exactly what I had in mind, the assembly should be the same!

I suppose this is what a Christmas list looks like when you’re an adult….

On Friday we had some friends from college over (Hi Lindsey and Jon!).  They brought us these cute little birch votive holders from Crate and Barrel…

Which go so nicely with my little Crate and Barrel pumpkin-scape…

My favorite part of these candles is that they’re stitched up the back, corset style…

I put the candles with the pumpkins, which are all still on my buffet since I tried setting the table on Halloween and Macky highly disapproved.

And by disapproved, I mean he rolled all over my clean table cloth then proceeded to knock coasters off the table. He also apparently tried to carry the mini pumpkins off the table, as evidenced by this bite mark I just noticed in one of the pictures…

You know the book/movie Marley & Me? I think I better start writing Macky & Me.

Okay enough with being photo detective and back to my fall table! We have some place mats and I recently picked up a brown table cloth, but I would like a runner.  Our dining room chairs are shades of browns and blues, so anything too holiday themed isn’t going to compliment the room.  Which is probably good, because I’m not into typical holiday colored things.  So I was excited to see this runner that I could use year round and also goes with my little pumpkin/candle accessories…

It’s the Eastleigh Green-Teal Runner from Crate and Barrel.  My only problem with this is a) aren’t there enough things from Crate and Barrel in there?  I know I love the place, but I’m looking borderline obsessed and b) it’s pricey considering I’d probably need the largest size with both extensions in my table.  So chances are, I’m going to pass on the C&B runner, but I figured I’d share it until I find an alternative 🙂

ps- please excuse the lighting in these pictures… the dramatic lighting in the dining room doesn’t make for the best photo ops!