Pinterest-Inspired Christmas Decor

Just a quick tour of our house's decor, inspired by Pinterest!

Our dining room table, ready for Christmas dinner:

Christmas Cards and Our First Tree

There was only time this year to accomplish a couple of Christmas-related things. But the big one is definitely the one I am most happy about. We got our first Christmas tree!

We'd never bothered getting a tree in the past because we don't usually spend Christmas at home, and when we were renters we didn't want to have to worry about storing a fake tree and ornaments. But my husband always promised that when we bought our first house, we could finally get a tree. Just looking at it in the corner of our family room has made me so happy the past few weeks, even if it's only for 15 minutes while I scarf down dinner, only to have to go back to work for the rest of the evening.

Our kitties have been loving sleeping on (and messing up!) the quilt batting I used for a tree skirt. Next year I plan to make a prettier tree skirt that will stay in place better. I've got all of the supplies I need, but it just didn't happen this year.

I Seem To Have A Problem...

....a problem with buying stuff with a certain theme!

I just can't seem to help myself from buying cute things with deer on them. Or just deer busts!

 Fawn of Your Style Necklace from ModCloth

I now officially have 6 deer themed items that I've acquired since April. Yes, it's becoming a problem. But I think I'm just going to keep telling myself that it's ok....animal necklaces are totally in style right now! Right?

Haha, I guess if I've got to have a deer shopping problem, they're at least low cost splurges. And I'm not into anything with a disembodied deer head or deer mounts, so that should help keep my deer collection down to a reasonable amount.

Have you recently become obsessed with collecting any themed items? Anyone love animal necklaces? I don't even like shrimp, but I've been in love with the shrimp necklace that KJPugs posted ever since I saw it!

{Nature Photos} 3 Bucks!

Man, I love our yard!

While sitting at my desk yesterday, I spotted a beautiful juvenile buck out my office window. As he walked around the side of the house, I grabbed my camera and had the perfect vantage point out our bonus room windows, above our garage.

Look at the cute little horns!

 But he wasn't alone, and a moment later two other young bucks appeared next to him.

I've never seen this many male deer together before. The family that has been coming by a couple of times a week usually only has two bucks. I wonder if these are the same ones, or a whole different group. Either way, I appreciate them trimming our weeds, at least until we get around to landscaping our backyard!

Seriously, How Perfect Is This Dress For Me?

Today at lunch, as I was shopping Modcloth's end of summer sale, I stumbled upon this.

Just a regular old cream colored sundress, right? Until you look more closely at the pattern. Deer!

Deer To Your Heart Dress

Naturally with my love of deer, I had to snap it up, especially since it was under $30. I also scored a couple of pairs of shoes, each under $15. Sadly, after I'd added it to my cart, a really cute purse sold out--I guess I'm not the only one who was tempted today after receiving their email about the sale!

I can't wait to wear this dress, even if we really only have about a month and a half left of sundress weather here. But it would also be cute with brown knee high boots and a cardigan this fall. Ahhh, I hate wishing away summer, especially when "second summer" (aka, once it cools down enough to enjoy the outdoors again) has just started...but I do love my fall boots!

Have you scored any good deals in end of summer sales?

 

Vintage Ceramic Deer

First, I just wanted to thank you all for your condolences after the loss of one of my pets earlier this week. It really meant a lot. Losing a pet is never easy, no matter what the species.

I've been trying to keep my mind off of things, by going to a concert on Wednesday night, and taking yesterday off from bathroom renovations to do something completely different, planning another vacation itinerary. I know, I know, we still haven't booked any of the fully planned and budgeted out Grand Bahama Island, Florida Keys or Belize vacations I already shared! But having one more option can't hurt, now that we're actually a lot closer to an appropriate booking time frame for next spring.

Another thing that has distracted me this sad week is the arrival of two little vintage ceramic deer. I'd ordered them ages ago, and forgot, but they finally arrived. I think they look perfect, nestled in the planter behind our fire pit terrace wall.

I think the sleepy one is my favorite. She goes well with Bernard. But the awake one has such a cute expression on his face, like he's cooking up some mischief--just like the three baby deer who frequent our backyard.

I know, I've said it before, I'm not really a ceramic animal type of person. But when I saw these little guys, I just knew they would be a perfect compliment to the stone carved deer on our deck. I can't wait for another month to pass, when it will finally cool off enough to actually use our fire pit again, and I can enjoy looking at these new additions to our deer-decor family. At least this time around, we won't have a few back-breaking weekends of hard work before we can have a fire!

Are you a fan of ceramic animals? Do you like any and all ceramic animals, or are there just one or two types of animals that you make an exception for? And happy Friday, hope you all have a lovely weekend!

Home Office/Craft Room Organizing

Our bathroom renovation has been kind of all-consuming these past couple of weeks, but I did get one evening off from bathroom stuff, while we waited for the asbestos test results on our vinyl flooring to come back.

So I took full advantage of the break to work on something with a little quicker payoff, my first steps at getting my home office/craft space organized!

This is what it had been looking like since we moved in, cluttered, with opened boxes of craft supplies on the floor that I've been rummaging through, making things messier and messier.

Sewing machine hogging my cutting mat space, and yes, I was even using a table lamp to precariously hold my x-acto knife. All I'd really done with this space so far was to paint the walls and trim, set up my desks, and just kind of live out of moving boxes.

(Sorry for the darkness of the above two photos, they were taken during a brief mid-day power outage we had--gotta take advantage of down time from work any way I can with as busy as I've been lately!)

Baby Deer Wishes You a Happy Friday!

Happy Friday!

We have a family of 7 deer that have been visiting us the past two weeks, ever since they discovered the new salt lick I mounted on a tree down by the old access road that runs behind our property. There are 3 babies, 2 juvenile males with little nubby horns, and 2 adult female deer in the family. But this morning is the first time I've been able to get a picture of one of the babies, because usually they're running around like crazy, chasing each other, jumping over the creek and being silly, while the older ones take turns at the salt lick. This morning though I finally caught a shot of a baby!

Hope everyone has a wonderful weekend. We're in for another tiring and dirty weekend, working on the bathroom, removing the rest of the damaged sub floor, scrubbing/sanding any surface mold on the joists, pulling a thousand nails out of all of the studs to prep them for fresh drywall, and a whole bunch more tedious prep work. But I hope we'll have a bit of time to watch some of the Olympics this weekend too. What are you guys up to this weekend? Any home projects planned? Who is excited for the Olympics?

 

{Recap} Anniversary Weekend

We had such an amazing weekend! Hope you guys all did too!

Here's what we were up to, celebrating our wedding anniversary.

As I'd mentioned last week, we had dinner Friday night at the Angus Barn. It was definitely in my top 5 all time favorite meals, the food was that good. Expensive, but so good (as in "1/3rd of a coffee table expensive," as the hubs said).

(I wore my wedding jewelry with one of my dresses I bought for my Chicago trip. I was thinking about wearing my wedding after party dress, but my hubs didn't want to wear his tux T-shirt, which was his after party outfit 2 years ago, so it wouldn't have been quite as fun to wear my old dress.)

Why Can't My Cats Do This?

Make friends with a deer!

I'm so in love with these sweet photos I saw on Reddit of a deer and a cat being friendly, that I had to share. Now my kitties need to step up their game, and make nice with our own backyard deer so I can see them more!

Photos from Imgur via Reddit

So stinking cute! Maybe I need to start rubbing salt licks on my cat's heads, to entice the deer to lick them, LOL.

Happy hump day! 

In Progress

Do you ever feel like you're working on a ton of projects all at once? That's how we're feeling. We really need to get more organized, rather than bouncing around from project to project. But when everything needs to be done, it's a little hard not to just work on what you feel like at the moment.

However, that means I don't have any shiny new completed projects to blog about yet. So instead, here's a quick look at what's in the works.

Remember when we tore out the railing and post separating the breakfast nook from the family room, but it left holes where the tile and laminate floors met?

Well this weekend we started working on fixing the transition and patching the holes. Unfortunately, the two little transition strips that we needed to span the 12' 9" space were about $30 each, which was more than we wanted to spend on this fix-to-get-us-through-until-we-put-in-hardwood-floors. But since hardwood floors are a couple of years away, we bought the expensive transition pieces. And some $0.25 flooring samples to use to patch the holes in the floor itself.

We were expecting to just be able to pull up the old transition piece, insert the new pieces, glue them down and be done. But no, like most things, it took longer than we thought. For some reason the gap between the tile and laminate wasn't uniform, or even big enough for the T part of the transition piece to fit in properly. Once we looked at the back side of the old transition, we found they'd cut the T part off in a lot of places....which would explain why it never did a good job of staying in place. My husband did it right though, and used the circular saw to shave off the laminate flooring to give us an appropriate and uniform sized gap across the width of the room.

A New Kind of Backyard Friend!

Y'all know by now how much I've LOVED spotting wildlife in our yard ever since we moved to NC. Well I found a new type of animal to watch in our new backyard!

Do you see it? Between the slats of the deck?

How about now?

It's a gorgeous hawk! We've seen this guy a couple of times a day, flying through our yard down to the little runoff creek and up along it, searching for food. I've even seen him flying with a little snake in his mouth!

We Survived!

I can barely type, my fingers are still so sore (along with every part of my body!), but we did it. We survived our 8th move in 11 years!

I asked my husband which he'd rather be doing on Saturday, unloading our 3rd and final load from the 17 foot Uhaul, or driving 12 hour days across the country, like our last move. He said unloading, but finally agreed we should hire movers again next time. Moving everything ourselves from a split level house to a two story house took about 15 hours total, and toward the end we just started piling stuff in the dining room, to save ourselves a trip up another flight of stairs.

Yesterday we played with the kitties and let them explore their new house (they've figured out how to do laps up and down the two staircases, so that's fun to listen to), got our desks set up in both our offices so we'd be ready to work this morning, and got our couch, coffee table and TV unpacked. Baby steps, until our muscles aren't so sore. After all, we've got the next 30 years to unpack!

Anyway, just thought I'd check in. With work this week, slowly unpacking, and just adjusting to our new house, I don't have many interesting projects to blog about, but I do have some recipes from Easter I've been meaning to share, which hopefully I'll have time to type up later this week.

For now, I'll leave you with a picture of my new view out my office window. I feel like I'm in a tree house, and hopefully before long I'll be spotting some deer while I work!

Hope everyone had a much more restful weekend than we did! And has anyone else moved more times than we have (8 times in 11 years)? I am so looking forward to never moving again if I can help it!

A Birthday Backyard Baby Deer

Recently I won a $50 gift card to Home Goods, and with all of that money burning a hole in my pocket, I decided that on my birthday this week, I would go spend it on something for our new house that we completely didn't need. Hey, free money has no rules, right?

So I wandered up and down the aisles of Home Goods for a solid 45 minutes, weighing my options. $50 bucks can either go a long way, or not even cover half of one item in that store, and you just never know what you'll find. And with no real idea of what I wanted, it took looking at everything they had to make my decision. I was just waiting for something (or multiple somethings) to jump out and grab me.

At first I lingered near the entrance, drooling over pretty vases for the many built in shelves in our new house. But when I wandered by the garden section, this little guy definitely jumped out at me.

Introducing Bernard, our new little stone carved baby deer, so we'll always have a deer in our backyard!

I Don't Know What It Is About Our Back Patio...

....but for some reason animals really seem to love it!

Remember back in November when the friendly fox visited us?

And we've had deer, bunnies and turtles come by too.

And I'm constantly being distracted by more common animals, like squirrels, birds, and our cats running around. But today we had a new kind of friendly backyard visitor, an opossum!

(Sorry for the cell phone quality pics!)

I know not everyone thinks they're cute, but being the animal lover that I am, I'm always happy to see another backyard friend! And they remind me of growing up in Washington State, where we would see them all the time. I don't think I ever saw an opossum the whole time we lived in California.

The best part of all? I totally thought it was just my blue point Siamese cat when I first spotted it out of the corner of my eye! It cracks me up just thinking about how insulted Hailey would be, that I thought she was a scruffy opossum.

Here's hoping we have just as many, if not more animals in our new backyard after we move!

 

It's Beginning To Look A Little Like Christmas

Not a LOT like Christmas, but at least a little!

Some of the other decorated houses out in blog-land put mine to shame, but I wanted to share anyway. If anything, I can look back on this post next year and be happy about my progress. I've already informed my husband that next year, along with getting our first tree, we will be spending at least $500 on decorations (I would hit up the after Christmas sales this year for like 70% off of that $500, but then we'd have to deal with the pain of moving all the boxes of ornaments and possibly breaking some before they reach our new house, so my hubs said he's OK with paying more next year to avoid all of that).

Our stockings that I made, hung on our downstairs mantle, along with the paper snowflake luminaries.

Under the mantle are the mostly-for-looks "presents." AKA, a couple of gifts, mixed in with empty gift bags, for the illusion of festivity. Am I the only one that does this? It just looked too sad without more gift bags though, since I let my husband open his gifts early, and my gift from him isn't tangible.

And the whole fireplace set up.

Upstairs, on our entertainment center, we have lights on our TV, and garland and more luminary candles in front of the TV.

The front of our house. Since a 2 story ladder isn't something we own (and is on the very long list of things we don't want to buy until we own a home), I just taped lights to the inside of the windows on the second story of our house. It gets the job done, without having to climb up on a ladder, and I've got them all set up on light timers, so I don't have to go from room to room, plugging them in every night.

I really do love our front door (and the felt wreath I made). The detail around it is so pretty, and I hope we can do something similar once we buy a house. Plus, it makes it easy to line the door with lights!

Also, guess what I spotted when I opened the door to go outside and snap these pictures? Two deer on our front lawn! It's not the best picture, since I had to use the flash, and they were moving, but still. Hooray deer! :)

Have you got all of your holiday decorations up already? Is anyone planning on hitting up the after Christmas sales to stock up on decorations for next year?

WEverb11 #15: Surprise

WEverb11 Prompt #15: Surprise

Surprise.   What event of 2011 affected you in an unexpected way? Contributed by Kimberly Michelle [kimberlymichelle.com]

I have been thinking and thinking about this prompt since Monday, when this week's prompts were published. And I keep coming up with a blank. I guess I haven't really had a surprisingly eventful year.

A lot of this probably has to do with my compulsion to plan things. I'm not often left surprised by anything (since of course, I always have contingency plans at the ready). I'm not the kind of person you plan a surprise party for, and I'm OK with that. Usually, if my husband is going to get me a present, it's from the Victoria's Secret catalog, where I've circled options and written in my size. The unexpected is something that needs to be researched to death, so it becomes the expected.

I know. My personality probably annoys a lot of people.

But hey, if you're my friend, you can always rest assured I've picked the best restaurant for us to eat at. And if you're going on vacation, I'm happy to put together some suggestions or an itinerary for you. Or if some snafu arises when we're together, I've got you covered. So while us type-As are annoying, they can also be your peace of mind!

Anyway, all of this is to say, I can't think of any events that impacted me in an unexpected way. That's just not how I roll. The only thing I can think of that barely qualifies is when we finally discovered deer and a fox that live in the woods behind our house. That was a pleasant discovery, although I wouldn't say it was that unexpected, since our neighbors had told us months before that there were deer around.

Oh well, I'll insert some cute animal pictures now, and just move on to the next, hopefully easier to answer prompt!

*****

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WEverb11 #7: Travel

WEverb11 Prompt #7: Travel

Travel. Where did you travel this year? What was your favorite part? If you didn’t get to travel, where do you want to go next year?  Contributed by Allison [hisbirdiesnest.blogspot.com]

I was lucky this year in that I got to travel a fair amount (for me at least, since I'm not very well traveled). In 2011 I traveled to:

Florida in March



Drove through California, Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Tennessee and North Carolina in April, while taking a photo every 30 seconds with a camera mounted on our dashboard, which I turned into fun timelapse videos

 

NOLA with fellow Bees in April (only 6 days after we moved into our new house in NC)

The Smoky Mountains in June

 

The Beach in July (first time to the Atlantic Ocean)

Northern North Carolina in August

 

Virginia in September

 

And back to San Francisco for Thanksgiving

I definitely can't pick a favorite trip from 2011, but overall my favorite part of traveling anywhere is getting to see the local wildlife. From gators, manatees and pelicans in Florida, to deer, turtles and lizards around NC, seeing animals is always a high point for me while on vacation.

For next year, we actually don't have any travel plans set in stone yet (gasp! I know, a surprise, given me and my planning). Of course, I already have detailed itineraries and budgets planned out for amazing vacations in South Africa, the Bahamas, the Florida Keys and Belize. But with 2012 comes our first opportunity at home ownership, and all of the time consuming house hunting and unpredictable expenses, it makes sense to prioritize that over travel.

So we'll see where 2012 takes us--if nothing else, I'm sure we'll be able to fit in a weekend camping trip or two!

*****

For more info on #WEverb11, or to join in on the fun, click here.