Newest Family Member!

We've decided that Luke must be some sort of reincarnation of Saint Francis or something because he seems to find abandoned animals all the time.  In 2006, he found Snakey the redtailed Columbian Boa Constrictor in our apartment.  In 2009, he discovered Darla, the guinea pig outside of our apartment.  Flash forward to last week and we can now add another creature who has found his/her way into our ever-growing family.

Meet Trogdor...

 

Lucky for Trogdor, we already have Spinelli and anything a parakeet could ever need, so he definitely found his way into the right home.  Luke spotted him in our backyard, and after confirming that it was NOT Spinelli (I made a beeline to her cage when Luke said that there was a yellow parakeet in the yard to make sure that it wasn't her), we managed to lure him with seeds and a perch, and Trogdor and Spinelli have been bonding ever since.

This little budgie is also much cooler than Spinelli.  Spinelli has never been a very people-friendly bird, but Trogdor will let us take him out of the cage and he'll hang out on our shoulders and not immediately fly away like Spinelli will.

I wonder what we'll find next...

We heart Xcel!

Seriously, we love Xcel energy right now.  A few weeks ago, a nice young man stopped by our door to see if we were interested in partaking in having their Energy Squad come by our house to make our home a bit more energy efficient.  Normally, I am one to say "No thanks!" and shut the door in their faces before they can even finish trying to sell me anything, but I was feeling nice, so I let the guy tell me about it (it was also 90 degrees out with 80-something % humidity, so I felt a little bad for him).  Turns out, it was a good thing I didn't pretend to not be home, because it ended up being a great deal for us!

For $50, we were able to have the Home Energy Squad come in and have them install the following:

• Weatherstipping on our attic crawlspace door

• Programmable Thermostat

• Faucet aerators in both bathrooms and our kitchen

• A water-saving showerhead in the basement

• 8 decorative CFL lights in our kitchen/dining room

They also rated several appliances in our house, and let us know what the recommended rating was.  What I really liked about the whole thing was that they were no-pressure people.  They basically just said, "Here's what you got.  Here's what we recommend it be at.  Here's where you can find information to upgrade it if you like."

Since it was such a great deal, I want to give everyone else the opportunity to benefit from Xcel as we did.  If you want to schedule a visit with the Home Energy Squad, you can call them at:
(651) 328-6220

Guestroom!

Before Spring Break started, I knew that I wanted to accomplish some sort of home improvement project before going back to school.  Since the first part of the week was spent in Colorado, I really only had a couple of days to pick which project I wanted to get done in the next 48 hours.  Since we've been in our house, we have painted the basement, kitchen/dining room, basement bathroom, our main floor bathroom, and the unfinished storage room (soon-to-be office space that included painting the walls and the floor).  Originally each of the rooms were a standard beige color (we're pretty sure that the previous owner hired painters just before putting the house on the market, and painted every room the same), except for the basement, which was the yucky fake wood paneling.  Since I believe that the easiest way to make a big change for little moola in the shortest amount of time is to throw a new color on the wall, I decided to paint the guest bedroom. 

Here's a reminder of what the room looked like before:

On Saturday, Luke and I took a trip to Home Depot and Menards to pick up some much needed items for our projects (Luke's working on finishing the ceiling in the old storage room.  More on that when it's closer to being completed!).  Originally, I went in there thinking that I wanted to go with Behr's Shale Grey (kind of a brighter blueish grey), but after some deliberating in the paint chip aisle, I walked away with 2 gallons of Glidden's French Grey, which was a much bolder color that I had intended getting!  We couldn't remember if we had any rollers left or if we had any clean paint trays around, so we went home to tally up our supplies and planned to come back the next day for the rest of our necessities.

Sunday morning was spent at Menards, picking up a short handled brush, a wide paint tray, a new roller brush, painter's plastic and more Frog Tape.  As soon as we got to the house, I jumped right into getting the room prepped and taped, and I was painting by 2.  Getting both coats on took me until about 7:30 Sunday night, with only brief breaks for snacks and fresh air.  In the end, I was very pleased with the results!  As for the trim, Luke and I have decided to keep the oak trim the way it is, despite the fact that we know that the room would look even better with crisp white trim.  We just haven't figured out if it would be too weird to have just one room with white trim, while the rest of the main floor has oak.  Since this will be a kid's room eventually (provided that we're still in this house when we have kids), our opinion might change by then.

After shots (be warned, some of the shots do not show the true color of the paint.  For some reason, some of the pictures show the French Grey as brighter than it really is)

In progress

In progress

Immediately after the tape came off, but before the outlet plates were put back on.

To the left of the craft table is where the photo collage will go!

The bedding definitely doesn't match the walls as much as they seem to here...  A nice white bed frame will also help contrast and define the colors!

This picture captures the color the best.

Ugly light fixture that will also need to go...

View from the hallway.  Any ideas as to what we should put on that wall of the guestroom?

The next steps are to buy a new white bed frame (IKEA, here we come!), a queen sized mattress and to create a frame collage thing on the wall next to the closet.  The plan is to start off by printing some of my youngest sister's photography work and put in in white frames and then going from there.

As of right now, this is one of my favorite rooms in the house now to just sit and catch up on emails, read, etc.   I just can't get over how much I love the color!

Welcome Home, Leia!

Because we have a tendency to name nearly every item we buy and bring into our home (i.e., Sally the Step stool, Teeveetwo the new TV just to name a couple), it's only fitting that we have named our most recent large addition to the house.  Leia (short for Liatorp), found her way into our hearts while perusing the display rooms at IKEA on Monday afternoon...  

One quick look at her and we knew that the price and design were right, and that we needed her nestled in the Southeast corner of our dining room.  Luke and I have been in search of the perfect sideboard server/buffet for over a year now, and after several close calls, we just couldn't find the right one for the right price.  Sure, I fell in lust with multiple hutches and servers that were well out of our price range, but Luke was always good at keeping me from actually wanting to seriously pull the trigger on the purchase.  Did we think that we would be walking out of IKEA with a sideboard?  No, not a chance (I had looked so many times on their website, and somehow this one never came up in any of my searches, plus we were only going in there for another set of Hemnes drawers for our bedroom).  Are we glad we did?  Definitely (not including the 2 1/2 hours of quasi-stressful assembly- Damn you IKEA and your non-verbal instructions).  While we originally wished that she had a more natural wood colored top board on her, we figure that as our home decor tastes change she will do a good job withstanding that sort of change, and will be enjoyed by us for many years to come. 

Lastly (to make sure our other purchase made at the same time as Leia doesn't feel left out...), we also brought home Hemmy II.  He will hopefully be put together in the next couple of days so that I can get my clothes off of our bedroom floor. 

Overall, I must say that we had a very successful After-Christmas shopping day at IKEA.

Blizzard!

Today, we have been officially snowed in. Thank goodness both Luke and I have the day off (well, my parents gave me the day off since there was no way that I would be able to make it from Saint Paul to Minnetonka today). They're predicting that it could be almost as bad as the Halloween blizzard of 1991 in some parts of the state. I'm not 100% sure of how many inches we've gotten so far, but I know that our snow reaches the top of Luke's wellies!

Yes, I know that the shorts weren't the best decision on my part :-)

Coffee in the Garden

We've been on the hunt for the perfect bistro set to add to the brick area near our side door, and this this weekend, I finally found one for a reasonable price.  I had heard good things about Home Goods, so when I got the chance to check it out, I seriously wanted to bring almost everything home!  The store had several types of bistro sets (colors and styles), but I really liked the looks of the more weathered-white one the best.  This morning, L and I had breakfast in the garden on sitting at our new table set and really enjoyed it.  We plan on doing this as often as possible!

Before and After

One of my goals for this summer is to finish refinishing the hand-me-down patio furniture we received from L's parents.  Despite their age and history, the pieces are in pretty good shape so all I needed to do was lightly sand the original finish and then they were ready to be painted.

In order to get the look I was going for and even coverage, I decided to give spray paint a whirl for this project (though I highly underestimated how many cans of spray paint it would actually take to get these suckers done).  For my paint, I used the recommended primer for the first coat, and then the second coat was of Heirloom White.

Each chair required about 2 cans of primer and 2 cans of the color (and the total paint cost added up to be about $15/chair).  In the end, I am pretty happy with the results and am glad that I took on this project versus going out and buying new patio furniture.  Eventually we want to get new cushions for the set, but the leafy red ones work just fine for now!

Smashing, part deux

The drinkware we currently have...

I mentioned earlier that L's relationship with our dishware has not been a pleasant one since we've moved into the house.  At first, I just thought that he was somehow being clumsy, or not paying attention to how he washed the dishes.  Well, today I'm publicly apologizing to him because I have found out how fickle our drinking glasses really are.  While I was washing dishes this morning, I was scrubbing one of the glasses and it shattered in my hand.  And no, there wasn't any extreme temperature change, and I was being fairly delicate while washing- it just exploded on its own accord!  Needless to say, L and I will be taking a trip over to Macy's to pick up a new set of sturdier glasses with thicker walls to keep us from potentially being assaulted by our old drinkware.


 Any recommendations for drinking glasses?  Which of the following glasses would you pick?

 1.)

2.)

3.)

4.)

Now for something completely different

Well, not really.  I've blogged about our garden before, so this could end up sounding very similar to past posts, but I'm not in the mood to go back through them to check.

Also, the photos I am going to post aren't really from my garden.  It has begun to rain outside, so I'm relying on trusty ol' google image search to spruce up this post instead of going out and taking my own pictures.   (**Disclaimer: If you stumble across this blog and notice that I have used one of your photos and would like to be properly credited for it, please let me know in the comments section!**)

I might have mentioned this before, but L and I are pretty sure that the previous owners of our house invested a lot of time and money into their gardens.  This is a great thing for the L family because neither of us is very good at gardening, nor do we have the time and money to create such an elaborate element to enhance our house.  We moved in to the house mid-December and really had no idea what was going to pop up once spring hit, and now that we're in July, I can't believe that new flowers and plants are budding all.the.time.  I swear, every week, I walk through the garden and find something new.  On many occasions, L and I have referred to the garden as a fireworks show: Just when you think it's over, another one explodes.  When our tulips and lily of the valley faded away, we were sad to see them go, but we had no idea how much thought and energy went into this garden, and if it keeps up the way it has been going, we'll have blooms all summer long.

 This is a pretty good representative of our garden.  Totally.

The latest discovery at Casa L is the hollyhocks.  When it first started sprouting up, we thought that it was probably some sort of weed, but since L and I don't know what anything really is, we figured that we'd leave it alone.  Fast forward a couple weeks, and now the plant is as tall as I am, and I can see that we're going to have light pink and dark purple blooms!

I like that hollyhock kind of looks like peonies!  I was sad when our peonies died off, so I'm excited to have another feathery looking flower in our yard.

L's mom says that once our hollyhock has fully bloomed, she'll teach me how to make a hollyhock doll which would turn out somewhat like this:

Cute, eh?

Along with the hollyhock, our hydrangea plant is forming the prettiest white puffs of flowers (though the size of our hydrangea makes it difficult for one to get through the gate on that side of the house.  I like to call it our jungle.).  Soon enough they'll all look like the image below!

Gotta love the puffs!

The last update to our garden is what I actually planted.  I had never planted vegetables before, so I decided to give it a go with the intention to not actually follow the directions on the package, plant the seeds in the dirt, and water them (and if they died, I'd try again the next year and perhaps even follow the directions).  I am all about the topsy turvy tomato planter this year, and decided that it would be a good way for me to attempt to plant tomatoes with our limited space (and for some reason, tomatoes in a pot intimidate me).  There was already a hook set up, so I put in the seedlings (upside down, of course!), threw in some dirt, and watered them.  Apparently my approach is working so far because we now actually have some baby tomatoes starting to grow!  I've even gone so far as to give them some vegetable plant food, so hopefully that means we'll have a bushel of tomatoes in a month or so.  I'm thinking that next year, I'm going to pick up a couple more upside down planters and use them for bell peppers and squash/cucumbers.

What mine will hopefully look like once our tomatoes get bigger.

The other items I planted (this time actually in the ground) were green beans and cucumbers.  I am well aware of the fact that I have definitely planted them too close together, but I feel bad thinning them out, so we'll see how they continue to grow.  M inspired me with her Tee-pee trellis for her beans, so I picked up one of my own, and though the beans aren't old enough to be crawling up it yet, I have a feeling that it will have been a good investment.  L loves green beans (his mom grows them every year, so I'm excited to be able to walk out my side door and pick them out of the garden and use them for meals (or just as a snack)

Beans, beans, the magical fruit!  The more you eat, the more you toot!

 

The cucumbers also seem to be coming right along, so I'm hoping that we'll have a few of those as well to eat soon!  If we have an abundance of cucumbers, I want to try my hand at pickling a few of them, so if you have any good pickling tips or recipes, let me know!

Could really go for one of these right now with a little Italian dressing...mmmmm!

And who says you can't live in the cities and have your own little vegetable garden?