wil and kris (and gracie and ava)

we decided to completely rearrange the entire first floor today on a whim…and not just moving around some furniture, but completely changing the way we use our house.

fun!

i LOVE impulsively rearranging things every once in a while, and when WIL started thinking out loud of moving the tv, i totally jumped on the chance of moving everything around. i don’t know if it was spurred on by this reason or not, but either way, we had a great outcome- i have wanted a piano for quite some time, but the way the house was, we literally had no spot for one. oddly enough, our living room lacks any walls longer than 4 to 5 feet (minus the one 7 foot wall that has the air return right in the middle…thanks mr cheapo architect)…and while the dining room and the den had longer walls, they were already in use by some key pieces that couldn’t relocate: the buffet and the bookshelf, which served as our media cabinet.

i had pretty much accepted the fact that we weren’t going to be able to get a piano (and i’m talking a real upright….not some dinky keyboard or something) since we didn’t have the space, nor the flexibility to create space since i figured everything major was where it had to be. but bravo to wil, who recommended moving the tv (woohoo!) as well as some places for these tricky items, our entire house was able to be moved around to create a completely new function in each room.

our dining of course is still the dining, but with all of our great stuff on display! maybe i’ll use my china more than the once or twice in our two years of marriage! our “living room” is now our casual/tv room, and the previous “den” is now the living room…but you could get fancy and call it the music parlor since we could potentially have the piano in there…

i put a handful of pics up on flickr, and here they are, but definitely go to flickr as i have much more commentary and notes on the pics, as well as ‘before’ shots. but if you’re sick of all my over explanation at this point (i am a queen of over explaining), than this blog ought to suffice.

i don’t know what it is, but i have become obsessed with midcentury furniture.

maybe i’ve been watching too much mad men, but all the sudden, i cannot get enough of that retro, danish, streamlined, warm wood, 40’s-50’s-60’s finds…

wil and i have decided to cut back our spending (we hardly spend any as it is) just to be more frugal and try and be smart with what we do pay, but i still am sifting through craigslist to see what i can find. i was too late on some amazing two tier side tables to refinish for only 20 bucks a few weeks back, and i was only a few hours late today on this really cool desk for 50 bucks. (i hate calling on craigslist things, but i probably could have had this if i had called, instead of emailed, since i emailed about an hour after the listing went up and got no response, but found out it was sold when i called about an hour ago)

i really feel like i don’t want to buy new cheap things anymore, but instead find some awesome cheap old things to revive or refinish (if necessary) to have in our home.

it really didn’t help that this last week, i was in atlanta with my boss to go to the design center and a huge antiques market. this market, is two ginormous warehouses full of vendors that come from all over to sell antiques. we wake up at 5:45 (4:45 nashville time), and walk around while most of the booths aren’t even there yet or are just setting up…if we go any later, all the good things are gone! but for alcott, we are looking for entirely the opposite of my taste for my own home. french and italian pieces from europe from the 1800’s…interesting chests, gilt mirrors, sconces and lighting from ancient churches and homes, etc. we have vendors we frequent, a handful with thick french accents as they tell you what little village they got that particular piece from.

anyways, every 4 or 5 booths though, something catches my eye, and it seemed like this month, there was an abundance of great mid century finds. one booth had an amazing pair of chairs with curved wood arms and a rusty tweed fabric. oh so great…in alcott’s terms, they were a good price…for me not so much. but i saw so many side tables, chests, nightstands that were within reach (like a pair of nightstands for 200 bucks!). i wished my strongest of wishes i either had the money or had a place for them.

seeing these midcentury things, only makes the desire stronger…and unfortunately, i have a few blogs that i have come across that i frequent… this one being my favorite. she makes me wish i lived in an older bigger city, because every few posts or so, she has a picture of something amazing that she found on craigslist for a great deal. our nashville one just doesn’t have much of a variety on cool vintage things…and if so, they are snatched up before i can get to them like the last few things.

*sigh*

the parents are coming into town!!! woohoo! mom and dad are gracing tennessee with their presence next week and i am more than thrilled. but i haven’t figured out what we should do while they’re here…they’ve been here enough times that there aren’t too many touristy sites that they haven’t seen, so i guess it’s just going to be a visit through a local’s eyes.

anyone have any ideas of what we should do? if you were visiting nashville next week, what would you want to do?

with a parental visit, comes housecleaning! and we’ve definitely got a few projects around the house to finish up. nothing like a guest to motivate you to get the house into tip top shape (as dena also observed last week). this weekend will be filled with deep cleaning and sprucing up to make it appear as though we keep our house in prime condition every day! : ) come on…we live with two giant goofball dogs, i doubt we’ll ever be that pristine.

the welcome mat is unrolled for anyone else that wants to visit whenever, also, just to let ya’ll know.

i had no idea it was labor day this weekend until about thursday or friday of last week…which means i did not realize i had an extra day off. woot! it was a nice surprise to say the least, but when sunday night rolled around, i had no idea what i was going to do with this free day.

with wil at work, i sipped come coffee after waking up (at a very respectible hour mind you…i can’t seem to sleep in anymore with these two maniac dogs), and i decided i felt crafty. i went out to the garage, found some pieces of board and planned on painting some pictures. i was done priming, and i walked back into the house, and the kitchen screamed at me… “paint me!”

i’ve wanted to paint our kitchen since the day we moved in, but always talked myself out of it since i knew the entire job was just cutting in and trimming. bleh. but this morning, with the whole day ahead of me, i was ready to take on the job! (besides when moving into to new places, i’ve noticed that i seem to paint rooms on random whims…odd) the color is not something i necessarily picked out…the dining room walls have this color under the wainscoting, and then in continues into the adjacent ‘hall’…so it only made sense to keep that color going through the rest of the kitchen…especially since i have greens going on in the den that it’s open to. (*note: it looks quite baby poopish on the screen…i promise it’s better in person, and i bet people who have been here didn’t even notice the color in the existing spaces)

still in my pj’s, i set my coffee down (forgot about it till about an hour ago!) and went straight to it. by one i was pretty much done except for putting some of the hardware back up. it felt like a great accomplishment and so glad i finally convinced myself to do the work and deal with the labor.

i was still in the crafty mode after finishing up so i still painted my painting that started it all…just something fun to hang in the den.

yay for paint! our friends are moving into a fixer upper this week, so let’s hope the affair with painting lasts, since i’ve offered my hand and brush!

happy memorial day everyone.

this weekend has been unexpectedly pleasant…i hope yours has been nice as well. with the surprise that i didn’t have to go to work today, i have relished the three day weekend, and actually have been doing things besides my normal weekend routine of laundry and cleaning the house!

saturday, cassie and i went to the nashville flea market and the farmers market. the flea market was huge (it’s once a month i think)…at the fairgrounds inside and outside of about 6 buildings. it was very entertaining to see just what trinkety junk people try to sell, as well as lots of cool old antiquey stuff that you know has potential for greatness. we stepped away not buying a thing…we were proud since we shouldn’t have been spending money anyways. the farmers market on the other hand (in downtown) was very neat and i do hope to make that a fairly regular thing (it’s open all the time). farmers markets have become one of my favorite things in this world, so i was happy to finally go to ours…got some veggies and a rosemary plant. i was hoping for more berries besides strawberries, but i guess they’re not in season yet here locally. but i am excited that i found good size trees for really cheap though, as our neighbors tore down their bush that previously gave us privacy between our yard and their screened porch. : (

when i got back from the market, i was happy to see wil at home…and after doing a lot of walking all day, the first thing i wanted to do was sit. so we watched a whole disc of scrubs episodes all evening. : )

sunday did not disappoint either…i decided that i wanted to do a project, so we took some gift money and headed to our new favorite store: home depot, for some lumber. but an unexpected invite to the pool quickly trumped my project, and we had a great afternoon laying by a pool, taking a few dips and burning into little crisps. wil and i are so excited to have discovered our friends who live practically across the street (well, once you’re out of our neighborhood, they’re across old hickory) have a pool at their apartment. we had such a good time we thought we might have to make it a sunday tradition. i am also secretly happy about the fact that even though i work all day during the week, i won’t be pasty white as if i didn’t do anything but work indoors 24/7.

coming back home, i worked on my project, but it got put on hold again, since we had the same friends (nick and ‘nic’-ole) over for grilling out. what’s memorial day weekend without bbq?…we’ve put our new bbq to great use already, and it gave us another yummy dinner. we had great conversation about building homes, the dogs (they have a little lab mix), and the like, and after a couple rounds of the last word, we said goodbye, and i got back to the garage for my project. i finished it up, and moved it to it’s new home…

so look what i made!

i drew up plans, bought the wood and did it all myself! well, wil actually ended up cutting a lot of the boards, and he drove with me to home depot…i was planning on cutting them myself, but i think he just wanted an excuse to use his little hand power saw thingy. i was very appreciative because he made most all of the cuts in about 5 minutes!i really wanted a potting bench for a few reasons…1: the dogs like to eat my plants, so our herbs had to be up out of their reach, and 2: i was using this funky old wire shelf thing that i think was meant for sports equipment (it was in the garage when we moved) so it always looked junky and bothered me. now our herbs have a true home…hopefully they’ll flourish and grow big!

one more day left in my weekend now…hopefully we’ll make it to the bark park or do something with the dogs outside today when wil gets home. it’s hot and sunny and summery!

we added a new room to our house! well, it might be outdoors, and might not have walls, or a roof, but it is a new space for us for us to enjoy this spring and summer.

we attempted last weekend to lay the patio we’ve talked about for a couple months, and it was just not a good day for me and wil…hard, labor intensive shoveling with no light at the end of the tunnel is not good for a marriage. but, with a more positive outlook this weekend (also motivated by the fact that the left side was even more of a mudpit with so much recent rain), we picked up the project again …and knocked it out yesterday.

i think we were both surprised at how well everything worked, without any hitches at all. and to top the evening off, we went back to home depot to get wil the grill he’s always been dreaming about.

the dogs, while they couldn’t hang outside with us while we worked, loved every moment we’d let them out for the bathroom…they were dying at the prospect of getting to experience the new lawn, even when we only had a little sliver of it open to them. the grass was truly greener on the other side for them the last two months. they are overjoyed, to say the least. wil almost shed a tear when he saw them go to the bathroom on it the first time…i’d don’t think we’ll ever have a pristine lawn. : (
anyways- here’s lots of pictures (descriptions when you hover the mouse over the pic, fyi)! (notice the change of seasons in the first three pictures!)

the whole set with more pictures is here.

i got stuck in the garage today trying to leave for work. the door decided to crap out on me and not open. and then deep down in it’s metal core, it thought it would be even more enjoyable to watch me realize that the mechanism was twisted and that i wouldn’t be able to manually open it either.

today’s not been such a good day. i hate you, mr. garage.