When life hands you lemons...

Yesterday the new washing machine got delivered! YAY!

But they couldn't hook it up because of some "plumbing issues!" BOO!

However, as this blog title suggests, sometimes you gotta make something out of nothing..er, lemons.

So instead of doing oodles and oodles of laundry in our fancy pants machine, I started tackling the walls that desperately needed paint.

This is the last room in our house that has yet to be painted (the sunroom off the kitchen has decent walls that we can live with, for now!).

Let's take a walk down memory lane and check out the befores:

(At the inspection)

(Housewarming party)

I've said it before and I'll say it again: It is simply AMAZING what a coat of paint can do!!

(Work in progress!)

(I literally had to hop up on the dryer, swing my feet over the washer, and hop down into that tight space to paint the wall adjacent to the toilet - quite the acrobatic feat!)

I had forgotten how tiresome painting can be - hence the "I'm too tired to finish rolling this little bit of wall!!!"

I'm loving how the light color is making this tiny space feel a whole lot bigger!

I'm also loving that my Dad will be here shortly to finish hooking up our machine and then I can play Laundry Princess for part of the day!! Yippee!!

Another one bites the dust...

And for us, that "one" would be the washing machine..

It came with the house, as did all the other appliances, and it seemed to be in pretty good shape when we moved in 6 months ago:

(This was during the home inspection)

Well, about a week ago, I washed some bathmats and other scatter rugs and apparently the rugs were too heavy and caused the machine to become unbalanced, which then caused it to pull away from the wall. This stretched out one of the hoses and created a semi-large puddle on the floor. When my husband saw this, he immediately thought it was a leak created from the hose.

After pulling it away further to inspect it more thoroughly, he discovered that part of the bottom of the machine was completely corroded:

We talked to my Dad about it, but he said the cost to repair it, plus just having someone come out to look at it, would be about the price of a new machine.

So, even though this wasn't in our financial forecast for 2011, we figured it made sense to just upgrade the machine now and not have to worry about it for at least another 10-15 years

We took a drive down to Sears and found a great machine at a great price (plus we could use our Sears card to get even more of a discount and great financing, and they gave us a rebate to mail in for the cost of the delivery fee - score!)

As of Friday, this baby will be part of the family:

I love that it's going to save water, $$ and get our clothes even cleaner than before!

New Year = New Look

Now that 2011 is officially here (woo hoo!!) I decided it was time to start switching out some of our old furniture. I'd been spying these ottomans at Target for the past several months (and had been patiently waiting to buy them!!) so when I got a few gift cards for Xmas, I knew I could wait no longer:

I love that these have dual functions as a coffee table and ottoman and extra seating when we need it. Sidenote: they are the perfect height for playing the drums in RockBand, so says one of our close friends who tried it out last night at our New Year's Eve party!!

So I switched out our old glass top coffee table - which was really not meshing with the rest of our decor -

and now it looks a little something like...

Oh and they are sooo much easier to move around than our former table, which always seemed to take up a ton of space too.

Now I just pray that our cats don't attack them and claw them to pieces!!!

Don't let the cuteness fool you!!!

Happy New Year everyone!!