Little Expedit bookcase is up and running!

The printer has found a new, much safer home.  Though we may move the bookcase to the other side, by my desk so that you don’t see the printer as much from the doorway.  We have yet to decide 🙂

Yesterday, Sara from House Bella posted this entry about making pom flowers. What’s a pom flower you ask?  Well I asked the same thing and luckily Sara included a picture and some links…

I watched the YouTube video and saw how easy it was to make these adorable and stylish pom flowers.  I think I am going to have to make some because…

a) my cats eat flowers

b) Mike is allergic to many flowers

c) I kill all plants/flowers

Prior to Sara’s post, my solution was to buy some fake hydrangeas.  I don’t like fake flowers, but I love hydrangeas and though we planted some, I will have to wait until the spring for them to bloom. I figured fake hydrangeas don’t look all that fake, so I’d give it a shot.  I stuck two on our mantle in vases to test them out…

That vase is the Mira vase from Crate and Barrel, which they currently only have in purple. Which means I may have to buy another one in purple…

A close up of the fake flowers.  See, they’re not so bad afterall…

Some of my failed missions in flower owning include: (pictures via iPhone)

The time I bought these flowers, which you may recognize as the blue version of the flowers I used for my sister in law’s baby shower…

Macky chewed them so they were photographed in the bathroom, where they were safe.  Until they caused Mike to have a sneezing attack so bad that we had to leave the house.  The flowers walked out with us and went into the trash.  I tried. The vase is from Ikea a few years back.

So then I got a few Ikea plants, which we had in the condo and I always called Miss Leafy.  We bought 3 when we moved here to line up on our mantle. As of 2 weeks ago, this is what was left of them…

The fake hydrangeas are my mantle substitute… for now.  I think I’m moving them… I have house A.D.H.D.

So special thanks to Sara for the suggestion and accompanying links!  Families like us need some stylish fake flowers. Especially since I once killed this Ikea cactus…

Really guys, I couldn’t make this stuff up.

I finally have some real progress to report…yesterday our new floors were finished up!

As a recap, before…

And after!

Top of stairs before…

And after!

We obviously still have some finish work to do. That wood piece up there needs to be stained, the riser needs to be touched up with some paint, all of these nail holes need to be caulked and the new molding painted…

We are going to be very busy the next couple of weeks since we hope do this all on our own!

View from master before…

And after!!

Notice a theme here? My cats (especially Macky) are total photo bombers.  I think we’ve trained them to pose for the camera so that the minute I pull one out, they are all over me.  Many times during this whole photo session I suddenly saw Macky’s snout in my view finder…

And now for the elephant in the room, our new wall! It’s not done being spackled, nor is it painted, but it’s there!

Empty bedroom before…

And after!

Our room is still plenty large.  Our friend Chris did a great job making the wall look like it’s always been a part of the room.

Here’s the in-progress iPhone shot of the wall again…

So we still have two windows in the sitting room and plenty of space. Unfortunately, we have no light fixtures in the sitting room and I rarely get home before it’s dark, so the pictures of that part of the room are crappy. Oh and that part of the room is also dirty, since the drywall isn’t done and there are still some materials in there.  Hopefully I can snap some better pictures this weekend…

You can still see a little bit of the structure from the inside of the sitting room, but I’m sure we can come up with something to do with it!

Hey and there’s a glimpse of Darwin and our awful paper blinds!

Cue a panicked blurry Macky since he was closed out of a room for about 2 seconds.  If you’ve seen his carpet shredding skills, you know he does not like being left out…

So now we have to caulk and paint the hallway molding, touch up some scuffs, then do the same in the bedroom, paint the new french doors, paint aaaall of the walls, get some window treatments (finally) and figure out what the heck we’re doing with this space! But more on that later… 🙂

I am completely exhausted from last week and this weekend, so I just don’t have the energy to write about all the things I planned to right now.  But since I am a blogaholic, I just dragged myself out of bed to take pictures of some (very little) office progress.

We finally moved our large Ikea Expedit bookcase into the room, here’s a lil peek since it’s full of clutter right now…

Hey there’s me in my pink pajama pants! The piggy bank is from Target a few years ago and Mike laughed at me for buying it.  It got a little banged up during the move, but I had to include him. I seriously took a pile of random stuff from my desk and stuck it in one of the cubbies until we get some more storage….

We stuck the printer on top of the bookcase for now, but it’s probably not staying there.  It makes the bookcase a little top heavy and though we’re probably going to bolt that thing into the wall, the printer will probably be more functional if lower. We got the little linen storage bin from Lowe’s this weekend, but that level isn’t staying in there 🙂

I’m currently using the other linen bin to store my camera stuff on one of our shelves.  Yes that still has a tag on it.  Apparently we do that a lot until we’re sure we want to keep things.

And we started putting together our other Expedit bookcase.

Now my pink pajama pants and I are crawling back into bed! 🙂

Yesterday we got around to stacking all of that firewood we got last week…

And then we covered it up so it’s nice and dry.

That’s an eight foot rack and we’re definitely going to need another, we hardly put a dent in that ginormous pile.

Earlier in the day we made a trip to Lowe’s for a wheel barrow and found some fireplace tools we actually liked.  They’re from the Allen + Roth line which is always so good to me.  I’m pretty sure I love all of their stuff.

They’re actually the bronzey-brown color I was hoping to paint the slate.  So with all of the materials we needed plus a chilly night, we were able to light our first fire in the new house.

It wasn’t exactly roaring at this point, but you get the idea 🙂  And the house still smells so wonderful!