Week 43

Dec 30-Jan 5

Happy New Year! Unfortunately as far as New Year's celebrations go we don't really have any exciting things to report. I had to work that whole weekend and get up at 0445 so I wasn't about to stay up super late. Ed went over to Tyson's house and hung out for awhile. We had a busy rest of the week though...

I guess you could say we overhauled our house. The aftermath of Jack's first Christmas was literally taking over every room in our downstairs. We have been trying to think of a way to give Jack a "playroom" or at least some way of storing his toys nicely so that he had access to them, but also so they weren't the main focus of the living room or dining room. Our solution...

Clear out the storage "closet" underneath the stairs and make Jack a playroom. We LOVE it and so does he!! I bought some shelving at Lowe's. Now we can display his toys so he can just walk up and pick which one he wants instead of trying to rifle through the big toy basket we used to have. We made the big basket a "blanket basket" for the living room.

In order to make room for the things that were stored in the closet and also the Christmas decorations we would have to put away I bought all new Christmas storage bins at Lowe's. I also bought some more shelving for the garage. We put everything away and now we have one whole wall of shelving in the garage which is nice to pick up all of those miscellaneous things we're not sure where to put. This house is terrible as far as storage goes.

With all the rearranging and changing we decided it was really time for a new dining room table. The one we have now is fine, but there were no chairs after it survived Ed's old bachelor pad. A few years ago I bought some chairs at a thrift store and Holly graciously helped me paint them and recover them...but they are also starting to fall apart. We decided we weren't going for a full-fledged fancy dining room set, but more of a casual set that will go in our "breakfast nook" area when we buy a house. We wanted something that was solid and would last through kids. I preferred solid chairs instead of cloth because I'm thinking eventually the kids will spill things all over them. We got a round table, dark wood, with four chairs. We special ordered it so it will take 6-8 weeks for it to come in. I will post pics as soon as that happens!!

While we were at it we decided to give our living room a "mini-makeover." This house has never been comfortable to us, we hate the layout and the rules. We were told when we first moved in that we aren't allowed to put up any curtains. Well we have noticed in the past year of living here that almost everyone else has curtains so we decided we were going to put some up. When we bought our couch a few years back it was a chocolate brown with pillows that had turquoise accents. It was all the rage back then. We never really found pictures that matched the turquoise...it's just not really us. We decided to get new pillows and use some pictures we already had that we liked and change our living room accent colors to a deep red with a gold. We got curtains, pillows, lampshades, and a picture. The rest of the accents were ours that we already had. We were quite proud of ourselves.