Happy Monday !

After a two week (oops) hiatus from blogging, I'm back. Our first Christmas together was a wonderful one. We enjoyed spending time with each other. He surprised me with two gifts. Remember the old, non-working oven that used to be in my kitchen?

Here was Christmas gift #1 from hubby:

A new gas range convection oven :) I have enjoyed cooking with this already !

The next gift was a HUGE surprise. Here he is :

Blog friends, meet Ike :) He's a Chorkie (a Chihuahua and a Yorkie mix). He is two months old and is as wild as a new puppy can be. This is the biggest reason that I have not been blogging more frequently. I had no idea that Husband was going to get him for me and seeing him for the first time was precious.

Our company is gone as of yesterday morning (breathes sigh of relief) and now I am beginning to put my life and home back in order to begin the new year. Hope you all had a Happy New Year !

Powder Room & Other Pictures

Still recovering from last night ! Husband teaches a college Sunday School class at our church and so I invited all the girls over for a cookie decorating extravaganza ! The finished product :

This is only about a tenth of the finished product. They girls took most of the cookies that they decorated home ! It was fun and now I think my holiday baking is completed except for a red velvet cake, which will be baked tomorrow. I usually only bake the cakes at Christmas and so I really savor the taste (i.e. - consume the whole cake single-handedly), but this year, I'll have some people to share with !

Well, Grandpa and his wife will not be here until 8:00 tonight, so I have had another few days to get things ready. The powder room is by no means completed, but it's useable for now, which is, I suppose the point of a powder room.

Eventually, there will be some tan stripes on the wall (I ran out of time before the time that they were originally supposed to be here).

The guest bedroom is all ready for their stay ...

The sheets are washed and the bed is made (please excuse the ugly mint green color on the wall. It's on my to-do list as soon as the weather warms up in the spring !

The room is ready except for the price tags on the poinsettias and my wedding dress and bridesmaids dress hanging on the door :)

Our first Christmas is sure to be an exciting one! I hope and pray that all of you enjoy your Christmas with your loved ones and remember the reason we celebrate Christmas - our Savior's birth !

Merry Christmas from our family to yours !

Powder Room Update

I am still working on painting my powder room. This is it's current state:

I am trying to get it finished by Sunday. My husband's grandpa and his wife are coming to stay with us for Christmas. There's more than a little pressure, because this was his old house and this powder room is one of the rooms that he will use.

This is what the powder room used to look like:

Aaaaaaand another view :

Hopefully, I will get this finished by the time Grandpa gets here on Sunday !

Crafty-ish Saturday

Husband is at work today, so I decided to go and get my hair trimmed today and then came back to work on a few projects that I have been meaning to get to for awhile. The first is a small Christmas tree of Victorian-looking ornaments for the powder room. My aunt collected Victorian-looking ornaments for a long time and this year decided she didn't want them anymore, so I got them :) I found this tree at Goodwill for $0.99, but I wasn't particularly crazy about the blue theme and ornaments.

I found this little tin container at Goodwill also for $1.99. I took the Goodwill price tag off and the price tag underneath said $13! I don't know about any of you, but that's too much for this one-income household to pay for at little metal bin !

It was too deep for my little tree, so I filled it with some old paperbacks that we never read :

Next, I hot glued the tree stump to the paperback in the tin.

I filled the base with some leftover ornaments that I had from decorating various other parts of the house.

I tied  bow around the tin (everything looks better with a bow, in my opinion !).

And voila ! The finished tree :)

Not bad for a start. I think I'm going to start a collection of these types of ornaments. I really love the way that they look.

The second project of the day was covering a lamp shade of a lamp that has been in my kitchen ever since we moved in. It was a nice lamp that worked just fine, but it was plain Jane! Beige base, beige lampshade . . . You all know the story. So I bought some ribbon at Michael's awhile back that I thought would look really nice on this lampshade. It's blue and white, which are some of the colors of my kitchen. Here's the lamp at the beginning:

Here's the after !

Aaaaaaaaaaaand a close-up of the ribbon:

The finished product in my kitchen !

I am really happy with the way that turned out. Total cost of the project = $0.99. The ribbon on the spool was some remnant in the $0.99 at Michaels! I just love a good bargain :) I already had the hot glue that I used to glue the ribbon down. Hopefully husband likes it too ! Have a wonderful Saturday !

The Loot from Yesterday's Shopping Trip

The weather did hold off and I was able to go shopping yesterday with Caron. She is so sweet and her home is gorgeous ! She also has the scoop on the best cottage stores in the area, so we had quite the shopping trip.

One of the items that I got yesterday was this cute soap dispenser and jewelry tray.





This super cute Eiffel Tower soap dispenser and jewelry tray was found at Past and Present Shoppes for only $10! Find them on the Web at www.pastandpresentshoppes.com. The manager of the store is soooo sweet and knows about each vendor in her shop. All of the things that they sold were gorgeous and reasonably priced. I loved it ! I am contemplating whether or not to use the jewelry tray in the powder room with the soap dispenser or using it on my dresser. Any thoughts? This is the tray on my dresser :



I am currently redoing our power room from Grandma S.'s old 80's border to a Parisian boutique. I collect anything French or French-looking and thought that this would be a good place to display my collection.

The other cute thing that I found yesterday was at a place called Eclectibles. They do not have a website, but you can find them in Batavia, Illinois for all of those curious folks who enjoy all things handmade in this area. This was the cute sign that I bought for only $3:



My sentiments about snow are this - If we have to have it, we might as well get a snow day for it :)

Eclectibles also had these cute white bottlebrush wreaths for only $7.50 a piece that I keep obsessing about. I may have to go back and get them ...

For now, it's laundry and sniffing the yummy roast that I have in the CrockPot. Happy Winter :)

White Christmas ? Probably . . .

Hello blog friends ! If you're like me and live in Northern Illinois, you are getting pounded right now with snow. Yikes ! Our backyard looked beautiful today, even with the disgustingly cold temperatures . . .




Even my poor front door looked cold ;(



So instead of braving the bitter temperatures outside, I decided to do this instead . . .



Yep, that's right. Christmas cards ! The anxiety of deciding who to mail these things to (it's our first Christmas as a family) is almost as bad as deciding who to invite to your wedding ... Oh, well.

Hopefully the snow holds off. I'm supposed to go shopping and crafting with my friend, Caron, tomorrow. I really hope this nasty weather quits for a few days!

Our Home From Engagement to Marriage - Family Room

Our home is my husband's Grandpa and Grandma's old home. His Grandma died about 2 1/2 years ago and his Grandpa remarried and moved to Florida . . . so guess what we did ? We bought the house, of course ! We were very fortunate to be able to buy it - the timing and everything was perfect. The house, on the other hand, needs a bit of work. Beautiful bones, but some things in the house were a bit dated. Here are some pictures of the house taken a few days after our engagement :






This is now our family room. This is how it looked in January 2009. We have done quite a bit of cosmetic work to this room. It had not been painted since probably 1995.







This is the current state of the family room. It's floor plan opens into the kitchen, which is nice sometimes and sometimes not so nice. It's nice when we have our buddies over to watch a Bears game or a Blackhawks game or a Cubs game, but not so nice when we have dinner by ourselves and husband insists on keeping the game on so that he can watch and eat at the same time. :) Trivial stuff, I know.