Room Planning: Home Office/Craft Space/Closet Bedroom

A while back I shared our plans for our guest bedroom, in fact, I had that room all figured out before we even got the keys to our house! And I'm finally going to be starting on that room soon, since we might be having guests sometime later this summer.

But today I want to talk about another room that I had all planned before we moved in, my home office/craft room/closet bedroom.

Yes, that is a whole lot of function to cram into one bedroom! But I'm making it work because a) I love having extra space for all of my clothes and shoes, and b) because at our last place it was a pain having to share my office space with our guest space--it was always a scramble to clean up my messes when my BIL decided to stay the night without warning. So it's nice now to have my office and crafting space in the same room as my clothes, so I can have one big messy room that is all mine. :)

And it's quite the mess right now, with fabric scraps on the floor from sewing patio chair cushions, and open boxes of crafting supplies all over, that I keep digging through, because I don't have very good storage at the moment. But that's about to change, because I'm getting organized and ready to start working on finally getting this room really set up.

First, let me show you my floor plan. This took a bit of work, to make sure I could fit everything in the room that I needed too. What I've done is basically split the room into two areas, the desk side of the room, for my home office space and crafting space, and a closet side of the room, for all of my way-too-many shoes and clothes.

Spray Paint Patio Furniture Makeover

This past weekend I was inspired to do something about our ugly patio chairs. If you remember from this post, I've been dying for new patio furniture for, well, a decade. Ever since my husband found these chairs under his apartment building in college. I still can't believe he's convinced me to haul these ugly things around with us for so long.

But no more! I gave them a little makeover:

As a refresher, this is what the chairs looked like before I started. Chipped paint galore, and aging criss-crossed rubber that always pinched my legs when I was wearing shorts.

4th of July Yarn Wreath

I'm back at it again, making more wreaths!

I don't know why I didn't end up making a 4th of July wreath last year, but it gave me the perfect excuse to make one this year! And a nice little hands on project like making a wreath was just what I needed, to unwind after all of the bigger, more consuming projects we've been working on lately.

Washington Apple Martini

You guys probably don't know it, but I grew up in a north western state where it rains a lot. No, not Oregon, Washington State! I've learned since moving away from there 12 years ago that you have to always follow Washington with "State" otherwise people will think you're from D.C. Probably because they can't wrap their head around voluntarily living somewhere where it rains 9 months out of the year. (This is not a joke. It rains a hella lot up there. Only ever visit in July or August, otherwise, bring at least 2 umbrellas.)

Anyway, I'm from Washington State so I can make fun of it. I also love the place, but only in the summer. I also happen to newly be a fan of a martini inspired by the state fruit, the apple (apparently 42% of of the apples grown in the USA are from Washington). I discovered this drink a few months ago and made quite a few of these for people in our hotel room on my recent Chicago trip, but since after drinking one you might not remember the recipe, I thought I'd post it here. Usually this is served as a shot, but I prefer it as a martini.

Tree Stump Side Table

Yesterday I mentioned that we were able to sneak in a little project this past weekend, in between our anniversary celebrating, and it was this little tree stump side table:

For those of you who are following along, you can probably tell that this little table was built out of the one tree stumps we left, after cutting down the trees around our fire pit terrace. 

 

{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.)

Friday Fly By

Whew, what a week!

Things have been a little quiet around here because I've had some crazy-busy days. Thursday-Sunday I spent in Chicago, which was an epic trip. Seriously, best trip ever. I've been in a funk because I want to go back and do it all again. I spent the weekend with some amazingly funny, smart and beautiful ladies, and we crammed in so many activities and late nights that I felt like I was gone for more like 2 weeks! My throat was hoarse for days after returning home from all of the girl talk at loud places. And of course, work has been kicking my butt this week, while I try to catch up from taking time off.

Then Tuesday was our 2 year wedding anniversary. My husband had a late soccer game, but I surprised him by driving 20 minutes each way to pick up Pita Pit for dinner when he was at his game. We had a late dinner of pitas and red wine, followed by him opening his present of t-shirts. Totally a legit 2 year anniversary present--they're made out of cotton, and he needed them! Our real present to ourselves was our new fire pit though. :)

This weekend we're doing our actual anniversary celebration with a nice dinner out tonight at the Angus Barn. Jill highly recommended it to me when we first moved here, and I'm excited to finally try it! Saturday our plan is to chill on the deck and do nothing, except maybe read a book with a drink (I've had this book for a couple months and have been dying to read it). Then we're going to have a BBQ dinner and a fire. I've been a little burnt out lately on house projects, so a day of rest sounds perfect. Next week it will be back to working on projects as usual, since I'm hoping to finally tackle painting the wood trim in our entry hallway. That's been hanging over me for like 2 months now, and it's just one of those dreaded projects that I've just got to bite the bullet and finish, so I won't feel guilty every time I walk by the frog-taped-but-not-yet-painted hall.

And since no post is complete without a photo or two, here are some highlights from Chicago. I don't feel right posting pictures of my travel partners without their permission, but the city and food were just amazing.

After 2 Years...

To my wonderful husband,

After 2 years of marriage and 12 years of friendship, I love that we still look at each other the same way we did on our wedding day. With love and joy and so very happy to be sharing our lives together.

Summer Vacation Style: Weekend in Chicago

I used to blog about fashion somewhat frequently. Remember that?

I still love clothes and shoes, but have been in a bit of a rut lately. Working from home, combined with the fact that most of my "fun money" lately has been going to house stuff, has meant that I haven't been paying that much attention to fashion. Nobody sees what I'm wearing, so no need to buy anything new.

But that's changed, at least for the moment! I've got an upcoming girls weekend trip to Chicago, so I took the opportunity to buy some cute new summer dresses, and put together my weekend outfit plans. And since I've kind of been OD'ing on the fire pit/house posts lately, I thought it might be fun to change gears and share my summery outfits with you all. Everything in this post is either clothes and accessories I already own, or close substitutes I found online if I couldn't find the originals to link to.

Thursday Daytime: Travel Outfit

I like to be comfortable and casual when I travel. In the winter that means lots of layers, since I'm usually freezing on planes, and in the summer it means shorts, because I am usually hot on planes. I also like to bring a good sized tote bag with me as my carry on, so I can stuff things like my laptop, book, etc inside it, and also have room for a smaller clutch that I will use while traveling as my purse/wallet combo.

Coral shorts, comfy platform flip flops, big earrings, The Sak tote bag (received it for Christmas), blousy satin top (I have the same one in purple)

Come On Baby, Light My Fire!

Sorry for the corny post title, but I just couldn't help it. We finally got to use our fire pit! Whoo hoo!

It's still not 100% done (even phase 1 still needs a few finishing touches, and it will be a while before phase 2 happens and we go back and put down paver stones or flagstones on the surface area), but it's finally a usable space.

We went from this three weeks ago:

To this on Sunday:

Just go ahead and ignore that big pile of dirt in the background. And the tree stump. The dirt pile will be going away (or leveled out and covered with leaves), and we're going to turn the tree stump into a little side table, once our supplies arrive in the mail.

Back To The (Rock) Drawing Board

Whoa, it's Friday already! I love short weeks that just fly by, even though it usually means I accomplished less than I normally would.

After the back breaking manual labor all last weekend, we had to take a couple of days off to rest. But Wednesday night we went in search of ground cover options for our fire pit area, and last night we tried out some samples.

And they were all sort of a fail.

(From left to right: Multipurpose Decorative Gravel, Pea Gravel and Lava Rock. Also, we still need to pick up our huge pile of roots behind the retaining wall.)