Exterior Face Lift

The latest project in the Walker household has been trying to give our house a little face lift.  MUCH needed if you ask me.  I'm not loving the pinkish trim and can't wait to paint it!!!  Seriously though, it has to be the one rainy week this summer that we decided to get started.  So maybe next week we can start again. Here are some pictures from Sunday's work:

Not sure what he's looking at but thought he looked pretty cute in the pix - Super serious. You can see we are having to replace a bunch of trim and a few panels. 

Yep, D had to hang out on the top of the house to get the siding off.  I'm sure that's totally safe, right?

There we go.  Luckily we got this all replaced before it decided to pour Sunday night. 

Oh, and did I mention that I ripped up our dining room carpet since I wasn't much help outside.  I'm using a Dremel tool to cut off the nails that were put into the cement.  It was pretty fun!  I'm planning on pulling up all the carpet in our living room and possibly painting the floor until we can afford some nice hardwood. 

Now just waiting for everything to stay dry so we can keep working.
Love B. 

Summer Projects

Is it Friday yet?  This week seems to be dragging for me, and yet, I feel summer in the air.  I'm ready for the long days of summer where your only plan is to lay by the pool and relax.  I need some me time.  It's like I can taste it and I can't wait to have a little down time to start on some projects I've spotted recently. 

Another HUGE item on our to do list is to pick out paint for the outside of our house. We've been waiting for Lowe's big rebate sale on paint and it's finally here.  We have until Saturday to take advantage, so I'll be sharing colors soon.  I can not tell you how much I am dying to paint the outside of our house!!!! 

How was your weekend?

What lovely things did you do this weekend?  I must say my one 'free' weekend was filled with projects and plans.  My mom and I started the weekend with some shopping where I got these ADORABLE plates

And this amazing rug for my pretty bathroom - Love the design. 

I was so excited to take the parents and B to the farmer's markets on Saturday morning.  We got some butter lettuce and leafy greens to plant - my big weekend project.  I also snagged some yummy Strawberry Balsamic Pepper Jam for the boy. 

When I saw a poster for the Wiener Dog Races this last weekend, I knew I had to go.  It was hilarious, and B loved it.  There were all kinds of puppies for her to love.  Her favorite are the great danes!  I tried to talk D into getting one, but we decided we'd need a bigger car first.  :o)

My big project for the weekend ended up being my new little garden!  We bought wood and the boys built 2 for me.  We searched for all of our plants, and I stained and water proofed the wood.  By Monday, I had these little beauties!

 If you are wondering why these are so tall... Have you met B lately?  Gotta keep the pups out.

D did such a good job sanding them - Even in the dark

How beautiful are these? 

And yes, I am the person that makes labels for her garden! 

Well I have to post an update of our bathroom.  Really, not much has changed.  However, the shiny new fixtures are all on and we just have to save up to get the glass on the shower.  Any day now... 

Love how it looks!! 

Happy Tuesday! 

xoxo. B

Project - Canvas

When my parents moved down to Austin, so came all of our 'crap' that we had stored at their house.  Now that I have a house, I figured I should relieve them of their storage duties.  My brother had this huge canvas that he didn't want anymore and offered for me to place it on my fireplace mantle.  Browsing through numerous blogs, I remember seeing this design, and I knew it would be perfect on my own fireplace. 

Luckily, I had all the grey paint, tape and Killz for the project.  The only thing I really had to make was a stencil for the design.  I basically took an 8.5x11 piece of card stock and cut it in half length wise.  I taped them together in an over lapping pattern, and I was set to go. 

{Step One} Killz the entire canvas - three times.  Yes, my brother had some interesting colors on there before hand

{Step Two} Trace out the pattern with a pencil

{Step Three} Tape over the lines - showing the ones that I would paint grey

{Step Four} Paint the grey stripes - two times

{Step Five} Possibly my favorite part - pulling off the tape.  How can you not love that beautiful line

{Step Six} Followed by my least favorite part of using a small brush with the white paint to fix any bleeds from the grey paint.

I love the results!!!  Thoughts?

Who is excited for St. Patty's day?  Make sure you wear your green! Love B

Busy. Busy.

We had such a busy weekend with all the projects we've got going on.  I found this wreath online, from House of Smiths Blog, that I just had to make for my front door.  I've made these flowers with fabric for a pillow that is on my bed.  I under estimated the number of flowers needed to fill the size of foam I got.  However, tissues flowers are way easier to make than fabric ones.  What I thought would be a day project, is now a week project!  Finished pictures to come.

What I am most excited about is what has been happening in our bathroom.  TILE!!!!!!!!  That's right, we finally got the time to start on the wall.  We hope to finish it tonight and grout tomorrow..  Here are a few pictures and I'm off to get started!

The subway tiles look green in this image, but they are grey.  The shelf is not really blue, just covered in tape and those are pretty glass tiles in the shelf.  We are getting stuff done!!!  Love B

Happy Rainy Saturday

Hope everyone had a great Saturday!  Although I'm starting to feel a little under the weather, I didn't let that stop me.  D and I actually got to sleep in a little bit this morning, which was a nice change of pace.  We started our morning off by hitting up my favorite coffee shop, Coffee Bean, and then took the pups up to pick out some new bones and chew toys.  We watched KU sneak by with a win, Rock Chalk Jayhawk, before we headed up to Ikea.  Between all the terrible drivers and the rain, it was our longest trip to Ikea ever. 

The hilarious part was that we bought our couch and thought for sure we could get it in Scott's car. Well we could... after about 45 minutes of playing with the boxes in the rain.  The couch came with 4 boxes, and we got 3 of them inside the vehicle and one had to go on top.  We wrapped one of the boxes in tarp and tied it to his roof rack.  Thank goodness Ikea is prepared with all the essentials to do this!  About 3 hours later we were ready to head back home with our brand new couch.  Did I mention that since we had all these boxes packed in the back that I had to sit on D's lap the whole way home.  So much fun!  Here are pictures of our adventure and our beautiful new couch.

 They barely fit in the back of the FJ - BARELY

Now the fun part was tying up the last box on top in the rain

 

The boys putting together the sofa.  It was more complicated then you would have expected

You can see the extra storage area that the sofa has. Love it.

It looks like it's black, but it's actually a blue-gray tint.  It's supposed to be the 'man' room. Sorry hubby I had to put some pillows on there for the pictures.  

Love B

Productivity

This title about sums up my weekend! Yesterday D and I spend the majority of the day cleaning out our 'office' room, aka my dad's bedroom for the next month or so.  It felt good to finally go through it all, but it's one of those things you never look forward to doing.  We are hoping to have a garage sale in the next few weeks!  Currently my dad is roughing it on blankets on the floor, but we are planning on getting this sofa-bed from Ikea to put in there.

It's really nice because it pulls out to become almost a full bed and will be one more check off our list of things to get. 

Today, however, has mostly been spent on my work.  You could find me here today...

Looks like my next project is to get my desk reorganized! :o)  My blog music has been keeping me going all day.  Oh, and that big cup of coffee I indulged in!

Here's to productive weekends.  Love B

Never too late to celebrate!

So even though we moved into our house, oh, five months ago, we finally decided to have a housewarming party.  Initially it was to show off our finished master bathroom, but we were not able to get it completely done.  Never the less, we decided to celebrate.  We wanted to thank everyone that came out to see the house last night.  We had so much fun.  Here are a few pictures to show everyone else what our current house looks like, missing a few rooms, but you get the picture.  :o)

 Our delicious spread of the evening.  

 My mini pumpkin cookie pies.  If I haven't made these for you, you might be missing out.  I'm just saying. 

 My attempt to make mini blueberry pies.  Everything mini is always better.  They turned out pretty good! 

 Bella bear was SO excited for the party.  I LOVE her. 

 She did pretty good and helped 'clean' the floor with all the guests there.

 This is the view from our front door.  We rearranged our living room.  SO much better.  My parents brought down one of their chairs that I will attempt to reupholster.   Thanks to my amazing family for helping get the house ready for the party!! 

Our dining room.  New addition was the place settings and the fabric on the wall.  I took 2 pillow cases and made these for the wall.  They were the perfect color to match my theme in the living room.  It's so hard to find good patterns at the fabric stores with out ordering, so pillows were the next best thing!  I want to get a 'dresser' and repaint it and place it in the bay window.  So many projects. 

 The view from the dining room.  New front door from the break in.  I have SO much wall room that they still look empty, but we are getting there.  

Our bedroom.  Finally got the boxes and tubs out of my room.  I forgot how much space we have in there.  Found the perfect lamps and picked up the chairs by the fire place at a garage sale.  We are thinking about reupholstering them in black leather and I'm hoping to order yellow curtains for the windows. 

The new additions to our mantel.  Since we have not tested out our fire places, we just put candles in them.  I LOVE the chairs and they are so, so comfortable.  Best part was that the two of them were only $20. 

 I had to take a picture of the flowers I got for the evening.  I think they are gorgeous. 

Sadly we did not get our chairs done for the evening for our breakfast nook.  We are hoping to do that tomorrow while my mom is here.  New curtains that I'm obsessed with.  They are amazing.  

Love B

Just another day in the neighborhood...

It's never a good thing when mid day both Darrell and Scott are calling me multiple times.  Of course it would happen at an inconvenient time where I can't answer my phone.  The worrier in me automatically goes through my list... Well both of them are calling so in my head I knew they were both semi-okay.  Since we don't children, my next thoughts go to our pets.  Since Bella is on a new medicine, I start thinking it could be her or maybe I left my iron on and the house was on fire... You see where this is going.  Needless to say, of all the things my brain can come up with in the 5 minutes I was unable to call home, being robbed was not on my list.  

Yep, our lovely home got robbed this afternoon.  From 11 a.m., when my brother left to go mountain biking, to when he got home at 1:30 p.m.,  someone decided our house was a good target.  This leads me to believe that someone was watching our house and knew one: we didn't have a security system and two: that no one was home.  It's sadly humorous that they had to literally kick in our front door to get inside.  I know for a fact there are much easier, faster ways of getting into our house.  Thank God no one was home.  Upon coming home, my brother saw that the door was completely kicked in and started the search for what was stolen.  Again, I thank God that they did not take Bella.  Even the cops said that we were lucky because most robbers will normally take the dog if it was there.  We always put her in her kennel when we are gone, so when he was in our room she had to be in there either barking or whining for the person to let her out.  I know my kitties and they were probably under the bed before the person could even see them.  

So from our knowledge this is what happened...  The person knew that the house was empty when Scott left.  (If they had been watching the house or just happened to be at the right place/right time -- I highly doubt.)  Thus, he just came walking up to the door and kicked it in.  It had to be only one person on foot because he really did not make off with anything big.  He must have not really 'planned' this one out too much because he used my pillowcase as his bag of choice.  He managed to take all of my jewelry out of a box I had and my camera on my desk.  He got all Darrell's game systems from the living room and some games, but because he could not figure out all the cords he left some of the stereo system and some of our blu rays.  He went into my brothers room and took his 2 computers, 1 smaller camera and his really nice camera, and his old iPhone.  Over all totaling probably around $6,000+.  Awesome. 

Truly, I'm just  glad that no one got hurt and our babies are okay.  The worst part is the feeling and knowing that some random nut job was roaming around in our house and touching God knows what.  It really makes me want to buy a gun, and we will definitely be amping up the security in our house.  Needless to say, I don't want to be in my house alone, but the boys are getting stuff to fix our front door.  We of course had to buy a whole new door and completely fix the frame.  I'd say the boys did a pretty good job picking out the new door at Home Depot. 

We'll see if the cops can actually get this guy.  He left finger prints all over the place, but I guess the best one was on my jewelry box.  I don't get into this one much, but he sure did.  Not that much will actually happen if we did find him.  All the things he stole could easily be sold immediately with little to no trace of where they went.  All the black is from the finger printing.  So much fun to clean up.

Night all, keep some mace under your pillow!! Love B