The House on the Hill

TGIF for real. This week has been rough and I feel like I’ve barely gotten anything done at work or at home. Actually I’ve gotten nothing done at home other than finish the first season of Grace and Frankie on Netflix and start season 2.

Anywho.

1 – If you follow me on Instagram, you may have seen that Barley is spending a minimum of 10 days in a cone and a diaper.

She had a minor surgery on Tuesday and now we’re in recovery mode. We were supposed to bring her home on Tuesday evening but when they tried to get her out of the crate at the vet she busted her incision and had to stay the night. She’s starting to adapt to the cone but still bumps it or gets stuck sometimes. We’re dog sitting this weekend so that should be interesting. I’m hoping she’ll be out of this in 10 days but our vet stressed that 10 is the absolute minimum so it could be longer. We’ll find out next Friday at her 10 day check up.

2 – I recently starting listening to my iPod again which hasn’t been updated since 2009 or something ridiculous like that and have rediscovered my love of Dashboard Confessional. I’ve been listening basically nonstop in my car and on Spotify at work. Kyle never got into them much which makes me question our entire relationship.

3 – It’s supposed to snow this weekend which would be fine except for the fact that we’re supposed to go see Old Dominion tomorrow night which I’ve been looking forward to. If it does snow, the city will likely pretty much shut down (welcome to the south, y’all) which will mean the snow has ruined plans for 2 years in a row. Last year I was supposed to spend a weekend in Charlotte to see Wicked with my best friend but we ended up snowed in so I took my anger out on the parquet floors in our foyer. I doubt we’ll be equally productive this weekend.

4 – Why are things so expensive? I’m kind of in love with this mirror from west elm but I have a hard time paying over $400 for a mirror even though this one is huge and probably worth the price. It would look great over the cabinet we picked out for the foyer though.

5- I recently bought one of these glass infuser bottles and I’m kind of obsessed with it. Right now I’m drinking cucumber lemon water but I think I’m also going to try strawberry water. Ohhh maybe strawberry basil. If you like flavored water, I definitely recommend it. I used to drink a lot of water but have gotten really slack the last few months. I think this water bottle will help (when I remember to take it to work).

Hope everyone has a great weekend! If we are snowing in, I might try to get started on one of our projects but it’s also possible that I’ll just read or watch Netflix all weekend. Kyle has been sick this week and I feel like I might just need another weekend of doing nothing so we’ll see.

Happy New Year, everybody! We spent New Year’s Eve at home in our pajamas watching Luke Cage on Netflix with our pups snuggled up beside us. Well, beside me; they didn’t leave enough room on the sofa for Kyle.

2016 was quite a year and I’m hoping 2017 will be even better. Originally we had planned on renovating our kitchen this year but as of right now it’s been moved to 2018. Instead we’ll be tackling some smaller projects and potentially continuing our on-going exterior projects.

Right now our definite plans for 2017 look like this:

Make over the study.

The room we refer to as the study is actually what was built as the dining room. It’s a small room between the kitchen and the living room and other than getting a new light fixture and some paint when we moved in and new floors last year, we haven’t done much to it. We keep going back and forth with this room whether we want to make it the tv room (more furniture arrangement possibilities) or keep it as a reading/sitting area. Not sure when or if we’ll ever actually decide on this. Here’s a shot of what it looked like when we moved in and what it looks like now (not the same angle, sorry!):

We’re hoping to take care of this room in the spring; here’s our punch list for this room:

-Replace trim (baseboards/crown/maybe window?)
-Add built ins (shelves and drawers)
-Fix door frame leading into kitchen

It doesn’t seem like a big list but I think the built-ins may be a little tricky to figure out. I want the top half to consist of shelves and the bottom to be all drawers, including a custom drawer the folds out into a puzzle table. Let’s hope Kyle and I don’t strangle each other trying to figure that one out.

Eventually we’ll also get new windows and add recessed lighting but we want to do all of the windows in the house at the same time, if possible and we’ll do the lighting when we do the kitchen project since we’ll be doing a lot of electrical work then. We also want to get new furniture and add a rug at some point but for now we’ll work with what we have.

Redo the master bedroom.

This will definitely be the larger of the two room makeovers. Our bedroom is huge but otherwise not much to brag about. I love the vaulted ceilings but everything else is meh. The room was a yellow/beige when we moved in and I finally broke down and painted everything white. I also made a headboard and we made our closet into a little nook. We recently bought new night stands (not pictured) to replace the DIY fails we had but this room needs a little demo and a lot of love.

Here’s our plan:

-Remove closet (involves moving electric and possibly HVAC)
-Remove carpet and replace with laminate to match downstairs flooring
-Paint walls (navy, duh)
-Change furniture placement?
-Buy new bedding
-Build console table for dog crates
-Replace baseboards
-Install sconces

I would love to build some faux beams in here at some point to match the ones in the living room, add another set of windows, and install overhead lighting and a couple of ceiling fans to help with air flow. Also on the “Eventually” list: upgrade to a king mattress, buy a new bed (upholstered or wood), buy a big rug for under the bed, and add a seating area.

We’re planning on getting started on this project soon. Kyle wants to get the garage organized first which will be easier now thanks to the work bench/tool chest we just bought and he needs to check out the HVAC situation before we start tearing the closet down. We already have the sconces, paint, and flooring and I ordered the underlayment for the floors today.

Finish demo on the master bathroom.

Well, this is embarrassing. Kyle started ripping out our master bathroom floor earlier this year when we noticed water damage in our garage ceiling but other things became priority and so our bathroom floor still looks like this.

See that hole in the upper right corner of the floor? That’s where the floor completely crumbled when Kyle was prying up the concrete.

We’re lucky to have a functional hall bathroom that we’ve been using but I’d really like to at least finish demo on our master bathroom. We’re unsure at this point if we’re going to spend money on a band-aid makeover or if we’re just going to do without that bathroom until we can afford to do the big remodel we’re planning on.

Tweak the linen closet.

We have a small linen closet at the end of our upstairs hallway that drives me crazy. It’s not totally offensive but the bi-fold doors are constantly coming off the track and it’s not even a little bit organized.

We’re planning on taking the doors and tracks out, expanding the opening, and doing more of a built-in situation with shelves and drawers. We don’t really have a set plan for this as far as timing goes but it will most likely be in the second half of the year.

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We also have a few “maybe” items on our list if we have the time and money to put toward them.

Finish the deck and fence.

We’ve been working on the fence and deck in phases. So far we’ve built half of our deck and two parts of our fence and if possible, we’d really love to finish both this year. The nice parts of the fence make the lattice look even worse and I know the dogs would love to have even more space than they have now.

Make over the entry.

Our foyer needs some work. We have one wall that’s partially spackled, partially fuzzy from my failed wallpaper removal attempt, and partially painted. We talked about doing board and batten but I’m unsure right now. We definitely need to fix the fuzzy wall, re-paint, and redo all of the trim. We also want to buy a new rug and entry table. We’ll add recessed lights whenever we do the kitchen and we did the floors last year.The “progress” picture here isn’t current; we’ve switched out the door since then and our entry table is currently naked.

We also want to build a set of barn doors for the area leading to the bathroom/laundry room. This will give some more privacy for the bathroom and it will allow us to remove the door to the laundry room which will make carrying groceries into the house through the 5×6 space so much easier.

Buy new furniture.

This is going to be an on-going thing but I really want to start saving up and investing in nicer furniture that’s going to last a little longer than our Target and Costco pieces. I’m not saying we’ll never buy cheap furniture but I’d like to start getting some nice pieces.

So far, we’ve talked about getting something like this west elm console for our entryway instead of just building a new table.

At $1,000, this would be the most expensive piece of furniture we’ve ever purchased but I think it’s time to start adulting and that means buying grown up furniture. I’m also pretty set on this dining room table from Crate & Barrel which I think would look great with our chairs:

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I also have a few personal goals this year:

Be more social/invite people over more/go out more – The introvert part of me is hating me for this but the small extrovert part is cheering loudly. We’ve already purchased tickets for 3 concerts this year, I’m planning on going out for Taco Tuesday with some lady friends tomorrow, and I want to try to host a few dinners/parties this year. I used to host dinners and parties all the time but haven’t felt like it much in the last year or two.

Eat more good (for you) things, eat less bad (for you) things even though they’re delicious – I’m not setting a weight goal this year because last year I failed so hard but I do realize that my diet is horrific and I need to make some changes

Be active – I was active most of last year but after my half marathon in September I pretty much became a couch potato. Hopefully I’ll start running again this week.

Read 26 books – doesn’t matter if I own them already or not. I ended up at 19 books for 2016 (plus 1 I didn’t already own)

I’m so ready for this year to be over and I know I’m not the only one. Personally, it hasn’t been the worst year ever but it’s been pretty mediocre and I’m just ready for a fresh start. This is my last post of the year so I wanted to do a little look back to see what we got accomplished this year.

These were our 2016 goals, many of which got moved to 2017:

House:
-Demo current deck 
-Clean garage…again 
-Build new, bigger deck
-Refinish very old but new to us front door  
-Install front door
-Repaint the study (moved to 2017)
-Add built ins in the study? (moved to 2017)
-Add crown moulding in the study? (moved to 2017)
-Create new area for dogs (moved to 2017)
-Remove dog crates from master bedroom We’ve decided against this.
-Caulk windows 
-Paint master bedroom? (moved to 2017)
-Clean up side/back/front yards – In progress.
-Price out all aspects of kitchen remodel
-Stain fence 
-Extend fence
-Remove trees? 
-Remove shed?
-New flooring in entry/study/living room. – Mostly done! We just need to add the thresholds and then install the baseboards in the living room.
-Paint living room.
-Stain beams in living room.
-Build/stain deck 

We got pretty much everything done that we didn’t decide to bump to 2017. The yard still needs some serious work but that’s an on-going project. I really want to get rid of the shed but it’s not a high priority project so it’ll probably live on for another couple of years.

To start the year, we completely made over our living room. We ripped up all of the carpet, painted the orange paneling, stained the beams, put in new laminate flooring and got a new couch (sorry, apparently I no longer have access to my actual before and after photos!).

Then, we started on phase 2 of the new fence, ripped down/rebuilt our deck, and gave everything a coat of stain.

And we finally had some of our problem trees removed from the back and front yards.

To some people this might not seem like all that much to get done in a year but it’s huge for us. We also got a lot of smaller projects done like putting in a new to us front door and caulking all of our windows. I’m still trying to figure out what we can realistically accomplish in 2017 but I’m hoping to have a list of goals ready to go the first week of January. For now I’m just going to finish out the year sitting on my couch and eating cheese.

PS – I know I didn’t address the personal goals but that’s because I failed at most of them! We did go on an awesome vacation and walk the dogs a bit more but other than that I didn’t do all that great. I think my reading goal ended up at 19 out of 26 books (20 if I finish the one I’m reading now by the end of the day tomorrow). Technically I read 1 more than that but my goal was to read books I already owned so I couldn’t include The Girl on the Train which I read a few months ago. I think I may try for 26 books again in 2017 but I might lose the “already owned” criteria.

I meant to write this post a few weeks ago but time got away from me and then I was dealing with back issues and then I was just swamped trying to get things done before Christmas. We just got back from Colorado at 5:30 Tuesday morning and outside of work I’ll be spending the next few days packing up Christmas decorations and trying to put 2016 far, far behind me.

Moving on.

This last segment of my trip report is really just a few bits and pieces about the time we spent on the ship. We sailed on the Allure of the Seas which is one of the biggest cruise ships in the world (previously the largest but there are now one or two that are bigger). Somehow even on a ship with 6000 other passengers, it never really felt crowded. Of course we avoided the sales and parades in the shopping area and there were times when the pools were crowded but that’s to be expected. I was super impressed that I never felt overwhelmed with the amount of people. I think RCI does a good job of spreading things out across the ship and at least with the Oasis class ships, there are several different “neighborhoods” that you can visit.

Our stateroom was on Deck 6 which was the deck the Boardwalk was on. There was a hot dog stand, a carousel, and a Johnny Rockets just to name a few stops. This is also the deck where the aqua theater was which is where they did their diving show which was INSANE. Seriously, I can’t even explain it.

The other neighborhood I was most impressed with was Central Park which included a ton of live greenery. One of the nights on the ship we ate at Giovanni’s Table which is one of the specialty restaurants not included in the fare. It was only $25/person for dinner and included as much delicious Italian food as we could stomach.

During our stay we spent most of the time in the beach pool, on our balcony, or napping in our stateroom. We saw a few of their shows and we were impressed by all of them. Ocean Aria (the diving show) was my favorite but their production of Mama Mia! was really good, too. We also went to a show called Blue Planet which was good but weird.

The food was insane for the most part which was good because that’s the best part of a cruise. The hot dog stand was frequented every day, multiple times a day and we helped ourselves to plenty of soft serve. We only ate at the buffet a couple of times but had Johnny Rocket’s almost every day for breakfast. The main dining room dinners were delicious minus the creme brulee, which I’ll admit was disappointing. The drinks were great for the most part and we had enough of an on-board credit to cover most of the booze we drank, including this frozen strawberry daiquiri I enjoyed on our balcony.

We dressed up for both formal nights in the dining room which I enjoyed because I got to wear a new dress I found on Pinterest and my bachelorette part dress which I previously couldn’t fit in (and can’t currently fit in…darn cruise and holiday food). The second formal night was also our wedding anniversary so the servers sang us a song and brought out an extra dessert.

The only thing that really disappointed me was the Prohibition Party we signed up for. Part of this was just me being in a bad mood but it pretty much consisted of sitting in a dark corner and drinking overly sweet cocktails for 2 hours. On the plus side, I ordered a really neat 1920s style dress off Amazon for it and ended up really liking it. I had planned on just giving it to Goodwill after but I’m definitely keeping it. Of course I don’t actually have a picture but trust me, it was worth the $20 I spent.

All in all it was a fantastic vacation and I cannot wait to go on another! No idea when that will be since we will hopefully be making a couple of large purchases over the next 2-3 years but I guess that just gives me more time to plan. There’s a transatlantic cruise I am dying to go on so maybe I’ll go ahead and start looking into it a bit more.

I just have one more post lined up for this year but I’m hoping I’ll be motivated to blog more consistently in the new year. Time will tell.

 

I tried to finish up the second part of my trip report last night but WordPress keeps turning my portrait images into landscape shaped images and it’s driving me insane. I’ve had this issue with photos from an iPhone before but never my camera so I’m not really sure how to fix it. I may end up just having to omit those photos but we’ll see. I have an idea that might trick the system so I’ll try that tonight and if it works I’ll post the trip report tomorrow instead of a Friday Five (since I haven’t been great about posting those anyway). Here’s one vacation photo to hold you over since I know you’ve all been on the edge of your seats.

We haven’t done much around the house lately. We finally built stairs from the kitchen to the deck but we still need to build some from the deck to the ground. We also still need to build the fence gate and add in a couple of lower boards in some areas so the dogs can’t squeeze under the fence. We probably won’t do any more projects on our 2016 goal list since we’re short on time and we’ve been spending most weekends doing fun stuff instead of house work. Spending our weekends having fun means our floors need some serious attention and our Halloween decorations are all still piled on the dining room table. Maybe we’ll get to it this weekend.

Last weekend we made an impromptu trip up to Charlotte to see friends and it was so much fun! My best friend/college roommate Kathy and I went to this huge Christmas Expo while the guys went to a couple of breweries and then Sunday we made a trip to IKEA.

Speaking of IKEA, I’m 99% sure we’re going to end up going with IKEA cabinets whenever we renovate the kitchen (2018? Fingers crossed!). I need to do an updated kitchen plan post. I’m pretty sure I’ve only really talked about our kitchen plans once and it was when I first started blogging when I thought we were white kitchen people. Spoiler alert: we’re not. Here’s a hint at the direction we’re going now which is even different from the plan we had a few months ago:

Yes, those are gray cabinets. I wanted navy and we actually had navy solid wood KraftMaid cabinets priced out but I think the gray IKEA cabs are going to win. I’ll go into more detail in a later post.

Can you believe it’s almost Thanksgiving? When the crap did that happen? I need to look back at our 2016 goal list and see what’s leftover and figure out if there are things we want to do next year or not. I know a couple of our plans have changed but I’ll elaborate more on that whenever I make my 2017 goal list.

I think that’s pretty much it for now! Like I said, not a whole lot going on in these parts. We do have two exciting projects coming up in the beginning of 2017 that I’ll tell you about soon!

I’m probably going to break this up into 3-4 posts so that the pictures don’t bog down your computer/tablet/phone/whatever. Also, the saga of actually getting to the airport will basically take up this entire post; no pictures yet just a pile of word vomit.

Like I mentioned in my last post, we just got back from vacation not long ago. Originally, we wanted to go to Iceland but our vacation budget was limited this year so we decided to go on a Caribbean cruise instead and I am so glad we did! A lot of people have asked me what my favorite thing that we did on vacation was but we honestly didn’t really do much of anything which is why it was so wonderful. This is the busiest time of year for both of us at work so a solid week of relaxation was much needed.

We had our eyes glued to the weather a few days before we left because our flight to Fort Lauderdale was just a couple of days after Hurricane Matthew hit but it didn’t end up being an issue. Let me tell you, nothing makes you feel more like an entitled first world brat than the possibility of a life-threatening hurricane interfering with your vacation.

We pretty much always fly out of Atlanta even though it’s a 2.5 hour drive to the airport because I’m super cheap when it comes to flying. Our flight was at 8pm so we left around 2:30 because I always like to get to the airport 2-3 hours early, especially in Atlanta. Normally it’s not a big deal, usually a little traffic when we drive through downtown or sometimes there’s an accident or road work to deal with but normally we still get to the airport with plenty of time to spare. Do you see where this is going? Minus some initial traffic woes trying to get onto I-85, the drive started off fine. At some point after we crossed into Georgia we ran into some major traffic. I’m talking stand-still, what-the-eff-is-going-on-? traffic. I can’t even remember where we were but it was still quite a bit away from the airport and even though we left in plenty of time, we started to get a little concerned since the estimated stand-still time was around 45 minutes. Once we edged close to an exit, we got off the interstate because we realized we could detour around and get back on the interstate about 7 miles south of where we were. The detour went great until we got about 3 miles in and then we started craaaaaaaaaawling along. Turns out, we weren’t the only ones who decided to detour and the part of town we were in had traffic lights ever quarter of a mile which kept everything backed up; a lot of it due to 18-wheelers, my favorite! We finally managed to make our way back toward 85 but we caught a glimpse of traffic and it was still TERRIBLE. We think this was due to road work but we’re not 100% sure. So anyway, we decided to continue our detour about another 3-4 miles south and our GPS brought us around to the road that the Mall of Georgia is on which is always busy. This area also has a million +1 traffic lights so it took forever to get back to 85 again. And guess what? It was still backed up. As in, it took us 30 minutes to get from the beginning of the on-ramp to the actual interstate. At this point we had about 45 miles left and 90 minutes to get there, park, check our bags, go through security, and get to our gate. We finally broke through traffic north of Atlanta but ended up running into more downtown and put me at panic level 20. We probably parked at the airport right around 7 and basically ran through the parking lot and into the ticketing area, checked our bags, went through the short (thankfully) security line, and made it to our gate 7 minutes before they started boarding. It wasn’t the most relaxing way to start our vacation but luckily it was the only really stressful part.

ANYWAY. We flew into Fort Lauderdale Saturday night and took the hotel shuttle to the Hampton Inn Ft. Lauderdale/Plantation which we cannot say enough nice things about. The hotel was nice and clean and the staff was probably the friendliest hotel staff I’ve ever encountered (other than Desiree from Hotel 1000 in Seattle who is my favorite hotel employee ever in the history of hotel employees). They also had a complimentary hotel and cruise port shuttle which was awesome. We missed out on our chance to stop and grab dinner on the way to the airport so we walked the half mile over to Smokey Bones for a late meal and then headed back to the hotel and called it a night.

In my next post we’ll actually get to the part where we were on a boat! I can’t promise less words but I can promise more pictures which I know is what most people really care about.