Royal Roundup

Have you had your fill of The Royal Wedding of the Century of the UNIVERSE yet?  NO???  Well you are in luck!

Here is Go Fug Yourself's Kate Middleton gallery.  I'm guessing she's regretting that she ever wore this:

Source:  Go Fug Yourself

Then of course, you can get your royal title here.

And when you're done with that, check out this gallery of royal hats.  My favorite is the butterfly one:

Source:  People 

Oh, and if you want to commemorate this very IMPORTANT occaision, you can get a little souvenier for yourself.  How about something tasteful like this?

Source:  People

But seriously, I am rather excited about the whole thing.  Am I waking up at 4:00 to watch?  Probably not, but I'll be watching as soon as I get up.  I was six months old when Charles and Di got married and while my mom and I did watch it together, I don't *exactly* remember, so this is really the first royal wedding I'll witness.  So I'm wearing a funky headband with peacock feathers and have a bloody good time doing so!  Cheerio!



Outdoor rug

Look who got an outdoor rug!  And a new door!  Wheee!  We still need a bit of outdoor furniture to make the screened-in porch a bit more habitable, but we're at least moving in the right direction.

Also, this guy followed us around outside all of last weekend:

His name is Demanding Cat because he is...wait for it...very demanding.  He meows at us all. the. time.

New favorite thing ever in the whole wide world

A salad!

Specifically a salad with the following ingredients:

Baby spinach

A handful of good, ripe strawberries, quartered

A handful of kumquats, thinly sliced

A handful of toasted nuts (pecans and walnuts work equally well)

A light coating of poppyseed dressing

YUM.  Try it.  Then come back to thank me later.

Wheee!

This week is full of exclamations isn't it? But this rug deserves a "Wheeeeeeeeee!" if there ever was one.

I ordered it on Wednesday last week and it arrived Friday afternoon.  Not bad, eh?  Anyway, here's what the room looked like before:

And the after (plus some cleaning and decluttering):

The quality is great and I'm thrilled with the pattern and the color.  Now this room just needs a bit more furniture and it'll actually be habitable for guests and napping in the afternoon sunshine (mainly for the cat, but whatever).

DONE!

Happy Monday!  (Is there such a thing?)  Hope everyone had a great Easter weekend!  I had Friday of and what did I do?  Stencil some more, of course.  (And then I did the same on Saturday.)  Seriously, this was the project that would. not. end.  But it did eventually end.  Thank GOD!

As a refresher, here's what the entry looked like before I lost my ever-loving mind stenciling (when I took photos for our one-year house anniversary):

Then after spending most of last weekend stenciling:

But it wasn't totally done at that point.  I had one and a half walls done, but two and a half left to do.  A day and a half more and ta da!

In my impatience, I didn't wash the stencil as often as I should have and ended up with some spots that looked downright sloppy.  I was too irritated at that point to take detailed photos, so you'll just have to take my word for it.  In the end I ended up getting out a small paint brush and touching things up a bit with the Sharkey Gray.  So, if there's a lesson to be learned, when stenciling, wash early and was often.  Kapiesh?

Also, the pattern doesn't line up 100%, but I don't really care to be perfectly honest.  Realistically, I'm probably going to be the only one that notices, so I'm going to let it go.  Ahhhhh...that feels good.  :)

Happy Easter!

From the Washington Post

Have you ever seen the Washington Post's Peep Show?  Check it out here.  (The one above is my favorite--I love Angry Birds!!!)  And while you're at it, have a happy Easter!

Weekend Plans

Hooray for three-day weekends!  I don't know about you, but this week draggggged.  By Tuesday I felt like it should be Thursday and that's just never a good sign.

Anyway, on tap for this weekend:

• Finish stenciling the entry
• Organize the upstairs storage room
• Hang some art
• Do some rug shopping
• Clean off the screened in porch so I can sit out there and read
• Download Tina Fey's Bossypants
• Cook

What do you have planned for the weekend?

Looooooook what I just orrrrrrrrrrrdered!!!*

* That was my attempt at typing a sing-song voice.

It's going in this room:

Which is, yes, a TOTAL mess.  I'm really excited about the chrysanthemum rug and the good news is that it'll work in almost any room--the master bedroom, the future kid's room, the guest room, or the living room!  So that means if it doesn't work out in FK's room, it might just find a home somewhere else.  Huzzah.

It's Tuesday...

...and I have nothing remotely interesting to say.  I didn't line up a post last night, so here it is at 6:30 and the coffee hasn't finished brewing yet and I need to get ready for work soon and put something on the ol' blog.  So here are some pictures of what's going on in our yard these days:

Chris calls the above flower "Chlamydia" and now I can't remember what it's actually called.  It's something close to chlamydia, but that's definitely not what it's called.

We inherited some beautiful irises with this house.  We have a nice little patch of them and they range from yellow to magenta to purple.  These are the first to bloom. 

Our huge japanese maple got its leaves a few weeks ago.  I love this tree.

We also inherited a ton of lily of the valley with this house.  I love the tiny flowers.

Done and "Publish"!

Tornadoes and a stenciling project from hell

It's kind of hard to write a post about stenciling the entryway knowing that 22 people died in our state this weekend from the 200+ tornadoes that ripped through the area.  We're incredibly lucky that we didn't have any damage when homes, cars, businesses and lives were destroyed less than 10 miles away.  Despite some heavy winds and small hail, our part of town seemed to have suffered no damage at all--the only reminders of severe weather are shreds of fiberglass insulation all over the place, likely carried from destroyed buildings miles away.

Despite the weather, I tackled stenciling our entryway this weekend.  On Saturday morning I headed out to get some paint and supplies prior to the weather turning.  If you want to try your hand at stenciling, here's what you'll need:

Paint, a stencil, and a sponge brush.  If you're going to make your own stencil, you'll need blank stenciling paper, a template, a Sharpie, a hard surface, and a sharp knife.

I printed off my template and then taped it to the back of the stencil paper so I could trace it on.

Then I slid the acrylic block under the sheet and cut out the pattern with the knife.

Starting in a corner, I taped the stencil to the wall and then it's time to paint away!

Here it is after about 10 minutes.

After about an hour or so (?).  It was surprisingly slow going.

I had to take a break while the power flickered, but here's what it looked like by Saturday late afternoon.

By Sunday afternoon, I had gotten two entire walls done, but my shoulders were aching and I was feeling over it.  More importantly, I was getting sloppy and there are a number of places that I'll have to retouch later.  It's taking much longer than I had anticipated, but all in all I'm THRILLED with how it's looking.  For less than 30 bucks, the entryway got a great little makeover.  It's a subtle difference, but I think it looks interesting.  Oh, and ignore the weird brown spot on the ceiling.  We had a roof leak last year but once I scrape the ceiling in here, that weird brown spot will be history.

So, what do we think?  How was your weekend?



Weekend Plans

The weekend is almost here!  So much to do in two little days!  On tap:

K9 3K Dog Walk to support the Wake County SPCA,

Settling down to dig into the new digital mag Trad Home,

Stenciling the entryway (I think I've settled on something like this),

Visiting the farmers' market and doing a bit of cooking and eating.  Fun fun!   Happy weekend everyone!  Anyone have any fun plans?

Weekend Project

This weekend I plan to stencil our entry way.  Wheeeeee!  I really like the idea of wallpaper, but that's not really in the budget at the moment.  I've found some great looking stencils (at Olive Leaf Stencils--there are a ton of cool patterns), but one is too big and they both require shipping and I'm really impatient.  So, I'll just have to make my own!  (I've done it before actually and it's surprisingly easy.)

Here's the entry way as it is now:

Stencil A, which I love:

The only problem is that the scale is HUUUUUUUUUGE:

I could probably find a way to make it myself in a much smaller scale.

Stencil B, which I also love, but I really want to stencil this weekend and I'm not sure how long it'll take to ship:

So, we'll have to see.  I plan on using some of the Martha Stewart Precious Metals paint in either Bone or Tin, so the effect will be subtle.  I'll be sure to post pics.

Up Next: The Living Room!

Sometime in the next year or so, I actually plan on finishing the living room.  We need to get rid of the massive over-scale red chair which has never gotten much use, then we'll bring in some side chairs, a rug, and some side tables.  I'd love to get a rug in there soon, but first I need to figure out what fabrics I'll use on the chairs (and then buy the chairs), and that'll guide the rug decision.

I used a neutral rug in this inspiration board below, but I'm also toying with the idea of bringing in some color from the artwork into the rug decision.  It'll be easier to pick the chair fabric first and then the rug than vice versa, so as much as I'm chomping at the bit to buy a rug, I know it'll be the smart thing to hold off for a little longer.

I Have To Have It: Spring Accessories!

Just browsing online a bit and found some things I might need to have this spring:

Summer straw hat, $34.50
Mini pearl supernova bracelet, $58.00
Summer watercolor floral scarf, $34.50
Swarovski crystal accented watch, $188.99
Turquoise horn bracelet, $48.00
Seychelles "Change of Venue" sandals, $94.95
Thin sparkle bangle, $19.99

Done! (mostly...)

After a few months of hard work, the front of our house is looking how I had envisioned.  As a refresher, here's what the house looked like in February:

It wasn't bad, but I didn't love the army green door and shutters.  So I painted the front door red and it looked better:

The yard was still a mess though.  Half of the lawn was ripped up due to my crabgrass removal project.  Good times!  Then we had even more good times when I ordered 10 yards of mulch (which in case you didn't know, is a LOT of friggin' mulch).

The mulch made everything look a bit better though:

The shutters were still that weird green, but I wasn't really looking forward to painting them.  Enter my parents.  Although it's my dad's birthday today, his idea of a fun birthday weekend was to come over to our place to paint our shutters.  Don't have to twist my arm!

So my parents got to work and instead of a weird green, the shutters are now a flat almost-black (Behr's Stealth Jet, in case you're wondering).  It's a very subtle difference, but I'm really happy with how the shutters turned out.

Last weekend my mom and I picked out some planters for the front door area and some of the beds and got to work.  I think the planters will look great once they start to fill in a bit more.

Plus, Mother Nature hasn't exactly been slacking off either.  The dogwoods are in full bloom and the grass is finally starting to fill in.  We still have massive amounts of weed removal to do, but we're making progress.