For Your Viewing Pleasure...

The worst home tour video in history!

I am so used to regular photography that I totally didn't think about how you can't keep switching the direction of the camera. And don't you love the lighting-fast 360 view I give you at the end? And how my shot of the whole family was really just Adam's neck?

I sincerely apologize if this video makes you sick to your stomach!

Our First Home

This is the last night we'll be sleeping in our first home, where Adam carried me over the threshold and where we brought Claire home from the hospital. 

 This little apartment on the first floor of a very old house has been really good to us over the last two years. When we were engaged, we had a very, very short timeline for apartment hunting. We toured this place first and loved it so much that we didn't look anywhere else!

There were a lot of things we loved about this apartment, like:

- The price. {450 a month! What, what!}

- That it was pretty close to campus while being pretty far away from most of the partying action. 

- Our super nice landlord who was always prompt about fixing things.

- The big, eat-in kitchen.

- The backyard and back porch.

- The dishwasher! 

Despite all the wonderful memories we have here, we're not too bummed about moving on. There were also a lot of things we didn't love about this apartment, like:

- Our noisy upstairs neighbors.

- The old coin-operated washer and dryer in the basement.

- The lack of street parking.

- The impossibly hard to clean radiators.

- That there was only one door {to the bathroom} in the whole place.

- The literally trashy neighborhood. Littering seemed to be everyone's favorite hobby.

For posterity, here are some pictures of our first place, as it looked in March before Claire arrived and her stuff took over every nook and cranny!

Kitchen. 

Living Room.

Bedroom.

Bathroom.

P.S. Just in case you're interested, here's a {admittedly pretty terrible} video tour of the place taken right before we turned in our keys.

More Painting

Last week, I used some silver craft paint to give a quick makeover to the lamps on our nightstands {originally black} and the giant key hanging between the windows in our bedroom {originally wood-toned}.

I also gave the new-to-us rocking chair a quick coat of black paint. After hanging out in my in-laws' garage for a few years, it was a little beat up. And, crazily enough, I finally got some plywood cut to replace our tv stand's missing back. It's all painted and ready to go; we just need to borrow a friends' power tool to make a circular hole {for cords} before we can finish the project.

Although there are still a few things I'd love to get done around here, I promised Adam that I wouldn't make any more changes to our apartment. I'm itching to paint our dining set white, but that will just have to wait until the big move. Unless I'm somehow able to convince Adam we should purchase this table instead...

P.S. Adam's mom made us that beautiful quilt as a Christmas gift! My parents gave us a Flip video camera. Perhaps I shall use it to make a little home tour video eventually.

Painting Projects

Remember this mirror I found at Home Goods over Christmas break? It was on clearance because there was a small crack in one corner.



So, I painted over the mirror with chalkboard paint {the Martha Stewart kind from Michael's} and then painted the frame with leftover white paint.



It's now the perfect chalkboard menu in our kitchen! Our old menu board was actually just a decal. I was on the hunt for a different one because I thought the decal wouldn't really transfer well to a new apartment.



I also got around to one of my resolutions, painting our tv stand white.



It doesn't look like much now, but in the future, I'm hoping to make a little media center with our white bookshelves.



I can't quite cross this resolution off my list though. The tv stand is a hand-me-down from my parents and it's missing the back. Getting some plywood cut to replace it has been on my to-do list for, let's see, almost two years. I swear I'm finally going to get it done this week!

Recent Projects

So, we have an arm chair and side table in a corner of our living room, which we like to call our little reading nook.



Black chair + black table + black lampshade = too dark for our tastes. Something had to go. So, I whipped out a $2 sample jar of No-VOC paint and transformed the table into something a little cheerier.



Man, oh man, that table would have been so much easier to spray paint! I spent an hour and a half every night for four nights painting that sucker by hand. I mean, I was watching Parenthood the whole time, but still. Intense. While I was at it, I added another of my favorite turquoise Martha Stewart fabric boxes under the table to stash library books and such.

And, on to project numero dos. Enter, our boring beige desk chair. It's originally from Home Goods, purchased for $50 with a wedding gift card.



Well, it was boring. So I made a slipcover! I used some pretty fabric found on clearance for $5 a yard. I browsed a lot of tutorials on the world wide web and ended up following this one the closest. But I basically winged the whole project. I managed to sew the seat piece and the back piece just fine. Putting those together was the tricky part. There may have been some fabric glue involved in the end. The legs also got a coat of white paint, leftover from our nightstands.



I can just imagine it with our future white Ikea desk. We'll have to keep saving those pennies! Also, the globes on top of the bookshelf are new-ish. The smaller one is from the clearance rack at Home Goods and the larger one is from Ebay. It's from the 1950s. The history major in me thinks it's so neat to see how many countries have changed in the last fifty years.

I'm putting myself on a project ban till the end of the year. It is time for a break! I plan on doing nothing besides knitting my scarf for the next two months.

Another Sewing Project

The curtain-less window in our kitchen has been irking me for quite a while. Over the weekend, I finally did something about it.

Thanks to this tutorial, I ended up with a cheery little valance.



Pom-pom trim happened to be on sale when I was last in JoAnn's so, of course, I had to pick up a few yards. I think it gives the curtain the perfect happy touch.



I used 1/3 of a bed skirt found on the Target clearance rack for $3.24 and a $1.38 curtain rod from Lowe's. I forget the exact price of the trim, but it couldn't have more than a few bucks. Turns out sewing is actually pretty fun!

While Adam was installing the curtain rod, we somehow misplaced the screws and got into our biggest fight this calendar year. Maybe ever. It's the only time I can remember us legitimately yelling at each other. We both accused the other of misplacing them and of not doing enough to help look. Mysteriously losing things just tends to bring out the worst in people.

After looking through the apartment several times, one of us finally thought to check above the top of the microwave cabinet. Lo and behold, there they were! Oh man, we laughed sooooo hard after that.

Gallery Wall

While we were at Ikea picking up our nightstands, I grabbed a few more Ribba frames. Over the weekend, I finally got around to adding another row to the frame wall in the living room.

It used to look something like this...



But with $20 more worth of frames, it now looks something like this.



Want a close-up of our completely random art collection?



1. Katie Daisy print, bought with some birthday money.
2. A little painting I made of Texas with a heart over Houston.
3. Two photo strips mounted on card stock.
4. A vintage Orangina ad we found at a flea market in France.



1. A map of the British Isles found in Edinburgh.
2. A print from our anniversary trip to West Virginia.
3. A poster from Adam's dorm days, of a polar bear eating cereal.



1. Scrabble tiles mounted on card stock.
2. The American flag I was given when I became a citizen.
3. Another Katie Daisy print.
4. Another little painting of Pennsylvania with a heart over Pittsburgh.

If I could do it over again, I would move all the frames up a little higher. But it's definitely not worth all the extra holes in the wall to fix that!

The special state paintings were super easy. I just printed out clip art of TX and PA, traced them onto 5x7 canvases {a pack of three is only a few bucks at Michael's with a 40% coupon} and carefully painted around the state with craft paint. Up close they are far from perfect, I promise.

New Nightstands

This weekend wasn't the most exciting. Adam took the math subject test of the GRE {aka the hardest test of his life} and then had to spend the rest of the weekend catching up on all the homework he put off because he was studying for the GRE.

I, on the other hand, never have to study or do homework again! So, I got to spend the weekend working on a few house projects. We have been wanting new nightstands with more storage space for a while now. With a baby on the way and all the extra stuff that comes with it, we will take all the storage we can get.



When we had saved up enough moolah in our furniture fund {also known as our credit card cash back} Adam took me on a little Friday night date to Ikea, where we picked up two Rast chests for $34.99 each. They are solid wood, but came unfinished, which was perfect because I was planning on painting them anyway.

So, I headed to Lowe's for Olympic No-VOC primer and paint, matched to Benjamin Moore's decorator white. The primer only came in the gallon size, which was a bummer because it was $16 and there's no way we will ever use that much. But, pregnant ladies are only supposed to use No-VOC paint and, honestly, if I waited till Adam had time for this project, I might as well have waited till I wasn't pregnant anymore. He's a busy guy!



Then it was just a matter of applying one coat of primer and three coats of paint. But I wasn't quite done yet. I left some extra cash in the furniture fund for new hardware to help the nightstands look a little less Ikea-ish. The options at Lowe's and Target weren't stellar, so I decided to try Hobby Lobby. I thought I would have to wait until we were back in Texas for Christmas to finish the makeover, but lo and behold, a Hobby Lobby just opened in Pittsburgh.



Even better, they just happened to have all their hardware 50% this week. My options were pretty limited because I needed 12 knobs. I ended up choosing some pretty white ones for $1.50 each. Considering the cheapest knobs at Lowe's were $1.00 and they didn't even have 12, I am pretty happy with my choice.



The top drawer of the nightstands are devoted to our bibles, chargers and such. For now, we are devoting the other two drawers to baby clothes and blankets. But, when we move to a bigger apartment next August {when Adam starts grad school} we are planning to put our dresser in the nursery and use those drawers in the nightstands for our pajamas, socks and such. So we can avoid purchasing another dresser and so we can free up more space in our room, because we are planning to put our desk in there.

Whew! That was a really, really long post about nightstands. Can you tell I've learned to think about things a lot before committing to a purchase?

Brighter is Better

So, pretty much my favorite activity is getting an Icee at Target and checking out all the little clearance spots. Sisters are the preferred companion for this outing, but husbands will work in a pinch.

At the old Target, near the grocery store, you can only find an Icee of the fruit variety, which just doesn't compare with Coke, or even better, Dr. Pepper. But, luckily Pittsburgh just happened to get a fancy new Target, which just happens to sell the much missed Coke Icees.

Over the weekend, Adam treated me to a Target trip. As we walked around with our Icee, we stumbled upon a few gems in the home decor clearance aisle. Pillow shams, a bed skirt and an oversize key. Adam actually liked these finds and therefore let them into the cart without too much grumbling.

So, our bedroom went from this...



...to this.



Less black, more blues and greens. The bed skirt is hard to see in this picture, but it's teal with white polka dots. Also, the oversize key isn't officially a clearance item right now, we just came across a slightly damaged one.

It's definitely not a major change, but for the less than $20 price, I am pretty pleased.

The Wonders of Spray Paint

As I've mentioned before, our apartment is really poorly lit. So, in an effort to brighten things up a bit {and also to make things a little more cohesive} I recently took down all our black frames and spray painted them white.

They were mostly in our bedroom. Like over our dresser.



And above our laundry hampers.



And on the mantel. I also switched out the previously cream mat in the biggest frame for a crisp white one. Definitely worth the three bucks.



In the living room, the signature frame from our wedding was the last victim.



I completed the mini makeover with a felt flower garland that only ran me $2 in supplies. And some new house plants that were found for less than a buck each on clearance at Lowes. I was a little surprised to find that Lowes has a clearance section just for plants. I'm guessing they're already about 70% dead, but I thought it'd give 'em a shot anyway.

It's hard to tell in these pictures because I always forget to get out the camera when our apartment is actually decently lit, but the black-to-white transformation made a surprisingly big difference!

Home Tour: Bedroom

I'm back with the very last installment of our home tour. Whew!



Here's the view of the bedroom from the living room. I definitely didn't snap these photos during the best time of day, so sorry about the weird lighting. That window fan is our saving grace in the summer. The curtains are from Ikea and the curtain rods from Lowes - both were the cheapest options available. The art arrangement between the two windows is a bunch of polaroids borrowed from my parents.



The focal point of the room is, of course, our bed. My parents very generously bought us a queen mattress as a wedding present. When I burned our comforter by sticking it in a too-small dryer, we just picked a plain white one. The dust ruffle and pillows are from our old bedding. Except for the cute Texas pillow {with a heart over Houston} which was sewn by our friend Kailin.

The lamps and night stands are hand-me-downs from Adam's parents. We spray painted them, of course. And the leather storage bench {which holds air mattresses and Christmas decorations} is from Target. Under the bed, we each have a storage box. Mine holds wrapping and craft supplies. Adam's has tools and notebooks from old math courses.



The bed from the other side. We have laundry hampers {cheapies from Ikea} in the corner, one for darks and one for lights. Above the hampers are a clearance mirror from Home Goods {perfect for doing my hair & make up when the bathroom is stifling} and a canvas print of a favorite wedding picture.

Above the bed, we have three wire wall letters from PB Teen, spelling our initials. Although I actually sleep on the A side and Adam sleeps on the C side. Weird. We painted the red hearts on a high school date to a ceramics place. The frames on our nightstands hold engagement pictures. The nightstands themselves are pretty empty, we pretty much just keep our cell phone chargers and bibles in them.



Here's a shot of the other side of the room. Our tiny closet, mantel with no fireplace and dresser. I forgot to take a picture of our closet, but it's pretty basic. Adam has the top rack, I have the bottom, our shoes are stored in an over-the-door rack, and we keep our laundry basket {which holds our detergent and iron when not in use} on the floor. We keep our luggage on the shelf up top. Our clothes are arranged by color, just like our bookshelves.



Above the mantel, we have our favorite wedding picture and some Anthro dishtowels that are way too pretty to actually use. The mantel itself has some knick-knacks, a shadow box of Europe souvenirs and a frame holding two vintage postcards from Pittsburgh and Houston.

Here is our Ikea Hemnes dresser. I know it's small, but it's really all we need. We each have a drawer for pajamas, socks and underwear. The last drawer holds both of our shorts and swim suits. The left side of the dresser top has my jewelry box and perfume. The right side has Adam's cologne and a basket of random things - cufflinks, sunglasses and goggles. Above the dresser, we have two maps from These Are Things.



And I will conclude the tour in the far corner of the bedroom, where we have a trunk from my dorm days holding our extra linens and a colorful little storage box that my belts & scarves call home.

Bedroom To-Do List:
- Find or make a duvet cover. Or better yet, beg Adam's mom to make us a quilt.
- Paint all of our wall frames white. I'm just not liking the black frames.
- Save our pennies for this bed frame.

Home Tour: Living Room

I'm back with the second-to-last installment of our little apartment tour! Here are the yard, kitchen and bathroom tours in case you feel like checking them out.

We'll start with a shot of the whole room. Ignore the mess in the kitchen - I had cupcakes in the oven as I was taking these.



As you can see, the living room is kind of a hodge podge of stuff, but it's my favorite room by far.



Being tv junkies, we spend a lot of time parked on our Ikea Ektorp sofa. Adam's siblings chipped in and gave us a very generous Ikea gift card as a wedding gift. We used it to purchase this sofa, our dining set and a dresser. And amazingly only had to pay about $150 out of pocket.

We chose white because it was our favorite color out of the available options. It didn't hurt that it was also the cheapest! But, seriously, we have a snack in front of the tv every night {as well as the occasional breakfast} so we do spill quite often. Every once in a while we just throw the cushion covers in the washer with a little bleach. After air drying and some ironing, they are as good as new. And additional slipcovers are only $49 so it's totally affordable to grab an extra set. We've been meaning to do that...

Our coffee table was an ultra clearance find from Ballard Designs. It's the only new item of furniture we've actually purchased. We keep our favorite board games on the bottom shelf for easy access. I found that little tray for $2 at Micheal's and just gave it a few coats of yellow craft paint. It holds our coasters and remotes. Also, the pillows on the couch are from World Market. They have an awesome selection of colorful and affordable throw pillows.



Our tv was a wedding gift from Adam's parents. It has a built-in dvd player, which we love. The tv stand is a hand-me-down from my parents. We spray painted it black. The back is missing and we've been meaning to get a piece of plywood cut to fit for almost a year now. The cabinet holds more board games. And the little shelf {that's meant to hold a dvd player and such} is home to our Wii and a basket filled with Wii remotes. I found the basket for fifty cents at Goodwill, spray painted it blue and added a yellow fabric liner.

Above the tv, we have two canvas prints of family pictures and some anniversary date art. {Sorry about the glare!} The basket between the tv and the mantel holds some quilts Adam's mom has made for us.



On the other side of the room, you see...two doors. The door on the left is a small closet. It holds our coats and my dresses, as well as our vacuum and ironing board. My purses hang from over the door hooks and our sleeping bags reside on a little shelf up top. The other door leads to the front hallway/bike storage area and the basement laundry room. The handy coat hooks were here when we moved in. The cute rug is from Urban Outfitters. My sweet dad found it on clearance for $3.



The rest of that wall is devoted to an office space. Our tiny desk is a hand-me-down from Adam's parents. We spray painted it black. It's not perfect and we definitely can't wait to upgrade to something bigger, but that probably won't happen till we move. The parson chair was purchased with a wedding gift card to Home Goods.

And you finally get to see a shot of our beloved new bookcases! The bookshelf on the left is home to our yarn-wrapped letters. The other bookshelf has an iPod dock and three pretty frames with botanical greeting cards inside.



Above the desk, we created a photo wall with some bias tape, tiny 3M hooks and clothespins mod podged with pretty scrapbook paper. I love how easy {and cheap!} it is to change it up. The desk accessories are from the Container Store, the lamp is from Target and the computer was built by Adam thanks to a scholarship I won from the business school.



The top shelf of this bookcase holds some color-coordinated titles. The next shelf is home to Adam's textbooks. The middle shelf continues the color-coordinated titles. The fourth shelf has cookbooks and a box of office supplies {tape, envelopes, extra pens, etc}. The bottom shelf has two fabric storage bins holding even more board games. How did we collect so many of those?

The top shelf of the other bookcase holds a decoupaged box full of stationary. I have a mild addiction. There's also a budding collection of children's books. I love to scoop them up for cheap at Goodwill. The next shelf has a stack of yearbooks, scrapbooks and photo albums, as well as a file box. The middle shelf has box of computer cables and some larger books. The fourth shelf holds my sewing machine and sewing box. And the last shelf has two more storage boxes, filled with fabric and craft supplies.



The last corner of the room {behind the couch} serves as a little reading nook. We found the arm chair on Craig's List and reupholstered it. Probably the most trying moment of our marriage so far, but we somehow managed to pull it off. The side table was also found super cheap on Craig's List. We spray painted it black, of course. The lamp {from Target} was a Christmas present and I made the throw pillow myself.

I used some birthday money to stock up on frames at Ikea and created this gallery wall. Clockwise from the top left, we framed an vintage Orangina ad found at a French flea market, two photo strips backed with scrapbook paper, another Katie Daisy print, a Jackie O. portrait from the Andy Warhol museum, a poster from Adam's dorm days, art from old Scrabble tiles and a map of the British Isles found at an Edinburgh antique store.



We'll wrap it up with a shot of that whole wall. The white curtains are the cheapest available at Ikea and the silver curtain rods are from Lowes. Hanging above the mantel are the signature frame from our wedding and some Mr. and Mrs. letters that previously adorned the sweetheart table at our wedding reception. The focal point of the mantel is a shadow box with wedding memorabilia. The rest of the mantel is decorated with knick-knacks like an over sized hourglass and planters {with fake flowers} from the Target clearance rack.

Living Room To-Do List:
- Swap the Mr. and Mrs. letters for something new. {They are too lovey-dovey for Adam's taste and I am ready for a change.}
- Change the fabric flowers to something less...pink.
- Finally add a back to our tv stand, so all the messy cords are hidden.
- Add more frames to the gallery wall.
- Make a slipcover for our desk chair.
- Save our pennies to purchase this desk when we move somewhere new.