Blame it on the..

snow! (you thought I was gonna say rain, right?)

Yes, I'm blaming my lack of blogging on the several feet of snow we've gotten in the past month!

(looking out from the guest bedroom to the backyard..and this isn't even from the most recent snowstorm!)

But really..

I knew I couldn't stay away too long, so I'm back at it, thanks to some motivation from a few fellow bloggers.

Ok, so..where to start

-The half bath is 99% completed.. I haven't been able to finish painting in there, because of the stupid toilet. (The gross yellow one that needs to be replaced ASAP!) I will take updated pictures soon

-I'm realizing that we're sort of in a "house project" lull (again, blaming this on the snow!) but I'm happy to say that all the insulation we put in the attic this past November has helped tremendously with our heating bill and we are nice and toasty! There are a few little projects I'd like to complete over the next few months (mainly decorative projects, like hanging artwork, putting up some shelves, etc) but that's not going to sustain this blog!

Soo..it's time for this blog to undergo a conversion of sorts. I'm going to work on posting not only house updates, but also recipes, money saving tips, random thoughts, and the like.

I'm hoping this will help tide me over until the spring/summer when we can really tackle some large projects like:

-Working to transform our disgusting lawn into a yard worthy of a Scott's Turf Builder ad

-Painting our kitchen cabinets a crisp white

-Possibly painting our ceilings if we feel up to it

-Sand/restain/paint some furniture that's been lying around for awhile

Having said that, I'm about to post a yummy recipe I whipped up for dinner last night, so stay tuned!

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!!

Oh, hello blog!

Yikes, it's been over a month since I last posted!

Unfortunately, once December rolled around and the holidays got closer, our projects took a back seat.

But I thought I'd share some photos of how we decorated the house for Christmas

And here are a few from a recent blizzard:

Yup, the snow was up to his knees!

I'm hoping, after the New Year, we'll be able to jump into some more projects, namely, finally painting the downstairs bath, buying new toilets for both bathrooms (yay for a Lowe's giftcard from my sister for Christmas!) and figuring out a plan of attack for painting the kitchen cabinets - a project we'll most likely undertake in the Spring!

And one of my goals for 2011 is to blog more!!

And the painting continues!!

In preparation for our housewarming, we got about 90% of the house ready. A few projects had to wait, because, quite frankly, we ran out of time!!!

Today we finally tackled a few projects we had been putting off

Here's a before picture in case you forgot how lovely these built-ins looked:

We decided the brown just wasn't gonna cut it!!!

And so, we brought the rest of the family room into 2010 by painting the doors/handles/hinges/shelves. (You probably also noticed that we painted the gross white/brown tiles)

We also put another layer of insulation in our attic in preparation for the winter (no pics tho!)

Our next project on the "to-do list" over the next month (or 2!) is to paint the downstairs half bath this color:

Whew!

Splish, splash, I was takin' a bath...

Well, more like, I was taking a shower...and was noticing how grimy and gross our shower doors and showerhead were...

So I tackled the doors with some of this:

Because they looked like this:

Pretty, eh?

And after about 2 hours of scrubbing they turned into this:

Now, I realize the doors are still rather hideous (as is the tub itself!) but for now, until we tackle taking down the doors and putting up a nice, curved shower rod and new curtain (and eventually we'd like to put in new doors altogether!) this will have to do!

Oh, and here's what the old showerhead used to look like:

So I bought this guy:

It's a Waterpik Ecoflow and it's supposed to save us lots of $$$ because it has a "pause" button you can use when lathering/etc so you don't waste water..and it looks cuter too!!

This is what the cord was doing after I attached it! I unwound it and let the showerhead hang down, in an attempt to stretch out the cord so we don't get attacked in the middle of a shower!