Craft Supply Photo Art

I've finally got some artwork up on the walls in my home office/craft room!

And it was DIY photo art. Which is perfectly fitting for a craft room!

Autumn Decor Inspiration

I can't believe it's almost October already. And that means it's almost time to kick off the holiday decorating season!

Unlike retail stores, that had their Halloween decorations out since before Labor Day, I always try to hold out until the first week of October to start decorating. But this year I'm so excited to decorate our new front porch, that I started gathering some ideas early.

If you remember from when we closed on our house in March, this is what our front porch looks like. It's not very big, and doesn't really have much of an overhanging roof, but it does have some stairs and pretty brick that I can work with.

And I do want to try to use the Celestial Pumpkins and the candy wreath I made last year.

But other than that, I'm completely open to new ideas for this year! So I wanted to share some pretty autumn decoration ideas I've found so far. I'm leaning toward doing something more fall-inspired, than strictly Halloween, so I can use most of the decor for Thanksgiving as well.

Downstairs Bath Renovation: Drywall, Lighting and Some Tiling

Time for an update! And this is going to be one long, photo-heavy post. Because quite frankly, I'm not working on anything else at the moment, and since I've been up working on the bathroom until 11pm the last two nights, I haven't had much time for lots of little updates.

So you're getting it all in one shot. :)

But first, to remind you/catch you up, since it's been a couple of weeks since I posted about our bathroom renovation, this is where we started, back when we were just going to take down the wallpaper and paint the walls, and do a full renovation sometime in the future.

But then we found moldy drywall under the wallpaper, which prompted us to just move forward with the full gut and bathroom updating plans now. So we ripped out pretty much everything but the tub, and had to remove some subfloor when we found it was rotting too. Things got messy.

So we started rebuilding. We put in new sub floors in the bathroom and laundry room next door. We picked out new shower and sink faucets and redid a ton of the plumbing, including raising the shower head about a half of a foot. But we still had an annoying gap next to the tub to deal with. And it took forever for our lighting, tile and premium thinset to arrive, causing a couple of weeks of delays.

Kitty Approved Bathroom Lighting

Hooray, our bathroom lighting finally arrived! It took over three weeks for the build time (build-o-order) and a week in transit to get to us, but this weekend we can finally do the lighting installation.

In fact, we will be doing a whole lot of installation in our bathroom this weekend, so I will have lots to share next week. I haven't posted much about our downstairs bathroom renovation lately, mainly because there hasn't been much going on, because we were out of town, and because we were having difficulties getting our supplies. Tile that we were told we could always have by a Friday if we ordered by Tuesday? Yeah, that took until the following Thursday to arrive. Ship-to-store special order through Lowes that was supposed to take a week? Uh, yeah, that stuff never arrived after three weeks, after Lowes supposedly called three different vendors. I ended up going to a contractor supply shop and they let me buy from them, for WAY less than through Lowes.

So next week, expect a lot of bathroom updates. We've figured out our weird tub-gap situation, we've got some walls up, and we finally have all of the supplies we could possibly need (including some fun new tools, like a laser level and a tile cutter) to move forward with the next phases.

And we should also have lighting in place by the end of the weekend too. I can't wait to see how it looks installed, but the kitties are already enjoying the lighting. Err, the packaging the lighting came in!

It was comical, pulling out foot after foot of packing paper--it just kept coming out of the box! But the kitties are really enjoying their ugly pile of trash new toy. Why do I spend money on cat toys from Petco, when I can just spend a couple hundred dollars on new bathroom lighting, wait four weeks for it to arrive, and then unpack it?

Ah, well, the rest of our downstairs looks like a whirlwind, ever since we started our bathroom project, I might as well let the kitties have their fun until I'm ready to pick up my own messes! But I really feel like we've been on a rollercoaster with this bath project, and we're now finally at the top of the highest peak, about to speed down the other side. At least, fingers crossed that it will all be downhill from now!

What are your weekend plans? Hope you all have a great one!

    

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!

Spicy Broiled Bacon Avocados and 20 More Days of Meal Planning

Yep, still trying to eat healthy!

Here is what we will be trying over the next 20 days:

{Recap} Scenes from Bald Head Island

This week has been incredibly busy (well, so have the previous two weeks, but the end is in sight with my big work deadlines), but I couldn't let it go by without fitting in a recap of our wonderful little Labor Day Weekend getaway to Bald Head Island.

Seriously, this place was awesome!

It's a small island off the coast of North Carolina, about 45 minutes south of Wilmington, or about a 3 hour drive from where we live. Which meant that on the way there, we got to visit Wilmington for the first time. We walked down the Riverwalk and back, which was pretty deserted for mid-day on a Saturday.

Update on My Primal/Paleo Diet (with Recipe Reviews)

I did it! I cooked for more days in a row than I ever have in my life. I tried some new things. I devoted a lot of time to meal planning, and the cooking itself. But it feels good to know that we ate a lot less processed junk and a lot more veggies than normal!

So I think I'm going to give it a go for another couple of weeks. Maybe taking it slow, committing to short time lines will make it easier. Because it is a big commitment to eat healthier. Making sure you have enough food in the house to avoid the temptation to just go drive thru and grab something. Devoting at least 45 minutes to an hour of your evenings to food prep and cooking. Plus add in the 30 minutes 3x per week I've been doing the C25K program and shower time, I am losing a lot of time I would normally spend crafting or working on house projects. I'm sure most of you guys already spend a lot of time cooking, so my complaints are just something you get used to, but it really is an adjustment to no longer be able to shove frozen dinners in the oven and have a good 45 minutes to do other things around the house. I haven't had time to vacuum since I started this diet!

But struggles with the time suck that eating real food is aside, I wanted to do a little recap of the recipes I tried over the past few weeks. Mostly as notes to myself on what to try again, and what I would change, but also in case any of you are interested in trying any of these recipes. I thought it would be fun to jump on the Instagram bandwagon and take photos of the meals, but then I realized how annoying only being able to take a square photo is. So I snapped these photos with my phone, but added the photo filters on my computer with Pixlr-o-matic instead. As a reminder, this was our meal plan from my previous post: