BUFF BY BC '13

It is exactly 142 days until BC '13 (5 years of BC BTW!) and my co-birthday partner in crime and I have decided to reward ourselves with new birthday bikini's from VS (our yearly "should we buy these" debacle) if we complete a simple task. 50 visits to the gym! We try to get to yoga on Tuesday's as much as possible but let's face it that's 4 times a month so in an effort to utilize the gym memberships we have more we needed a challenge. 142 days - 10 for ordering and shipping = 132 workout days / 3 workouts a week (we had to be reasonable in this choice and summer coming) = 44 workouts + 6 for a challenge is that magic number 50! We started today and let me say that my alarm going off at 4:55 to get to the gym by 5:15 was not fun but we met up and did 20 minutes of cardio and a 15 minute Nike Training Club ab workout that definitely showed me I need to put some effort into my gut to get it BC ready :) Only 49 until it's bikini time!

BC '12 - Gotta be better than last year! Our first cold and rainy BC :(

BC '11 - Chilly morning, but a perfect dock diving afternoon!

BC '10 - Perfect day on the lake for a dance party and a nap!

BC '09 - Inaugural BC 

NEW HEADER

Well not to overstate the obvious but after 9 months of this blog, I finally decided to make a header instead of having a terrible type only situation going on. I quick did a line illustration of our house and changed up the headline font to match our quirky attitudes and well ... there you have it. Just a little Spring cleaning going on, now if only Spring would really get here!

FOR THE LOVE OF ART

As Murph and I continue to work our little booty's off on the house (ok, this was another slow week I won't lie) I have started to see the "final" picture come together in my mind. Here are some things I am just loving for our walls ....

Oh, WillyDog!

Custom pet painting. Ok, I LOVE my dog. He sleeps in our bed, he kisses my face, he is a huge source of joy for both of us and I would ADORE a small custom painting of him to have forever. That face just makes me melt.

It's exactly what you think it is

I love quirky little things and when I came across this in a magazine last week I fell in love. Oh yes it is titled, "Deer in Gym Socks" and I think it's fab. I mean who doesn't love a deer in gym socks?!

My former home

Murph's former home

Our home

I love the map craze. I think it's because it's something (or can be something) personal. I'm on the perpetual hunt for a book of vintage Iowa county maps so I can grab these 3 pages out to hang as a set.

Not much, just a quick sampling so I don't forget these ideas. Our doors are just about to be done! Hopefully we will also order trim this week and I can finish up that pesky bathroom vanity and get to work on that space. I think we were so glad to have floors we fell of the renovation bandwagon a bit. Time to fire back up so when this weather decides to get warm we can hit the yard!

RENO WEEK 7

Week 7 at  Hawthorn Drive was a rough one, I won't lie. I was sick with a fever and terrible congestion and cough and finally passed it to Murph who suffered through 4 days of fever himself. Needless to say we didn't get much done :( 

We did manage to check off a little project though! Knobs and pulls on our cabinets! This was something I was really looking forward to as we had nothing on the cabinets and with them being white now I was eager to add some contrast and help keep dirty fingerprints at bay. Since I am an ORB freak we of course went with the bronze knobs and pulls too, and ended up with a basic pull after deciding it would be more convenient to be able to pull from both the top and bottom of the drawers rather than just the bottom with a bin pull. 

I am pretty sure this was an area I could have dropped a load of cash on (just head to over to Restoration Hardware and tell me you don't agree!) but ended up keeping it around the $80 mark for 21 knobs and 7 pulls. If the pulls weren't $4 each I would have loved pulls on everything but alas I was a sucker for saving $25 :) Here is what we went for from Home Depot, pretty simple but somewhat classic. I always try to focus on matching our purchases to the style of our home and in this case the cabinets. I love super sleek and modern cabinet hardware but in this case it just wouldn't make sense, so I opted to keep it simple. We love it already, such a simple and quick update especially since we spent the extra $10 on a cabinet hardware template making the job so much easier, seriously, I have no idea how we would have done it without the template.

Knobs for all of the doors

Pulls for all of the drawers

Super purchase! Templates for positioning of all types of hardware on cabinets, made the job almost too easy!

Hello hardware!

RENO WEEK 6

Well let's not dilly dally ... here she is!

Kitchen to Family Room - with a sad pup wanting somewhere soft to lay

Kitchen

Family Room to Living Room

What an amazing change! We are so happy to have floors back in our house and have moved a few pieces of furniture back in (thanks Holtgrewe's!). Of course there were a few little snafu's along the way but overall we are VERY HAPPY, and miraculously our fridge fit back into its home with not a hair to spare ... literally. Having the same flooring throughout the first floor makes it feel larger and far more cohesive, even if it does mean we see a bit more of Willy's hair around. The good news is it cleans up in a jif and I don't have to see a film of it on top of the berber any more :) I also think the white cabinets "make sense" now. They look fresh and clean and contrast the floors perfectly. When we get some hardware on them I will scream success, I am just sure of it. I also think the flooring helps tie our brick fireplace in to the house better. We had considered painting it white at one point but with the dark floors we am much happier keeping it au naturel. 

Other than the obvious, we also tried our hand at installing doors and frames last week. Wow. Not as straightforward as it seemed. The 3 doors took over 12 hours to install over a 2 day process and we learned our house is not square and we will not be doing the 9 doors upstairs any time soon. But we survived and no divorce papers were served so that is good. This week we hope to get the doors painted and hung back up. It will be so nice to use our bathroom again! I also hope to make some progress on the bathroom vanity so we can wrap that up too. Then I think we will just be left with trim and cabinet hardware and we can call this first floor reno a wrap!