2012 Was A Good Year

We're finally back from all the travel and holiday activities we've been up to lately. Time to get back to our boring everyday life, back to projects, and back to being productive. But that can at least wait until after the new year!

2012 has been a pretty great year for us. So of course, I must commence with the obligatory yearly highlights post.

January 2012

House hunting and making an offer on our house.

February

Negotiating the final price of our house and getting our first mortgage.

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.

Christmas Present For Ourselves

I feel like I start every post lately with how busy I am, but sadly, it's still true. This is the time of year where my job takes over and I've been working 12-14 hour days over the past few weeks. Last year I was able to prepare, by starting my holiday projects earlier, but with the charity event I worked on taking place the first weekend of December, I had no choice but to jump into work mode as soon as the event ended.

Oh well, Christmas happens every year, and there will always be time to get to the projects I didn't have time for this year. Not going crazy and taking on more than you can handle is important for your sanity sometimes.

So instead of spending time crafting and scrambling to make last minute Christmas gifts this past weekend, we did something for ourselves. We took a drive down to Charlotte and bought the very important first piece toward finally fixing up our family room, a new couch.

 Karlstad, by IKEA, in lindo beige

Downstairs Bath Renovation: Caulking, Vanity and Shower Faucets

Well, we haven't made much progress over the past month or so on our bathroom renovation, but we're getting so close to finally being done!

Our big goal for this past weekend was installing the vanity and faucets. But in order to put the vanity in place, we had to first caulk the baseboard, since it would be too hard to access it later. Same with the toilet, so we went ahead and caulked that as well.

I'm not really looking forward to caulking the rest of the bathroom, since it is kind of a pain. First, you have to tape off both sides of the line you want to caulk.

Then you have to caulk the lines, going slowly to make sure you get the caulk in the cracks.

Then, first dipping your finger in a cup of warm water, run your finger over the caulk, to press it into the crack and leave a nice smooth finish.

Pro tip that I read somewhere: leave about 1 inch not caulked at the back of your toilet, so if your wax ring ever fails, the water leak will come out the back of the toilet onto the tile and you'll see it and be able to replace it. Much better than caulking the entire toilet and having it leak down into your subfloor!

DIY Over Heat Register Pet Hammock

Do your pets love lying on your heat registers this time of year? My kitties were constantly seeking out the warm air blasting out of our heat registers, but it was blocking all of the warm air getting to me!

So I came up with a way that they could enjoy the warm air, without blocking the air flow.

Charity Event Decor Success

The charity event that I posted about last week was a big success! There were record breaking bids for the dessert auction portion, and I've gotten so many compliments on the decor.

Even with my husband's help, the set up took about two hours longer than I was hoping, but we still got everything done an hour and a half before the event started. And since I already shared the details of all that I'd been working on, I wanted to do a follow up to show the decor in action.

Unfortunately we were a bit rushed at the end of set up (and eager to get home, shower and change, and get back for the silent auction) that I didn't take photos until we arrived back at the venue, and didn't get to capture everything. But here is a peek at all of my hard work for the past few months.

First, this is what the ballroom looks like, taken from the venue's website. It is one big beige room, and you aren't allowed to hang anything from the walls or ceiling, making it a bit of a challenge to decorate on a tight budget that doesn't allow for uplighting or expensive pipe and drape.

Source

And this is how it turned out, with our tulle and twinkle light stage backdrop, to focus everyone's attention away from the boring beige walls.

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