Remember the guest room? There it is. Like my cute little Thomas Paul boy pillow?  He’s totally cute. Look, he’s wearing a jaunty scarf! Anyway, let’s get to the point here. See that nightstand? Nope? What’s that?  You only see a 10+ year old Ikea rolling office cabinet? Yup, that’s the problem. Ugh. Plus it’s too small for that lamp and a candle and the aforementioned guest copy of Us Weekly.  It’s got to go.

So, let’s play a game…

What do you think?  Mid-Century and wood or vermillion lacquer yet traditional?  Intervention? Do I need to step away from the West Elm?  Let me know in the comments!

This was going to be a post about what we ate while watching the Golden Globes this weekend, but since I missed that boat I think it’s more fittingly a post about what you should be eating during Puppy Bowl VIII!

via Animal Planet

The starting lineup was just announced and that’s Deliliah. You can watch her get sporty at Puppy Bowl VIII which airs on Animal Planet, February 5th at 3pm E/P. It’s no secret that we love a TV event around here, what better excuse for snacks? Our favorite snack with a fitting name for one of our absolute favorite TV events? Dog Food Dip! This recipe started with my dear friend, Meighan, who has made it for parties, barbecues, Justin Timberlake’s HBO concert special. Seriously. No party, TV event or red carpet has been the same without it since.  It will be her legacy and she’s kindly allowing me to share it.

I’m gonna warn you, it’s not photogenic. But once you’ve had it, I swear, there is no going back.

Vegetarian Dog Food Dip

Ingredients

• 1 8oz bar of cream cheese
• 1 can of vegetarian chili (I like Amy’s)
• 1 can of vegetarian refried beans (I like Bearitos)
• 12oz of shredded cheddar cheese

Directions

1. Spread the softened cream cheese on the bottom of an 8″ square baking dish.
2. In a bowl, mix the chili and beans together.  Layer the mixture on top of the cream cheese.
3. Top the dish with the shredded cheddar.
4. Bake at 350° until cheese is melted and bubbly then serve with a strong tortilla chip.

It really couldn’t be easier, or more delicious.  So have some while you’re rooting for the puppies and reveling in the beauty that is the Bissell Kitty Half-time Show. It’s especially good the next day, if it lasts that long!

When we first moved into the house the previous owners had left all the curtains so we wouldn’t be without window coverings. The thing is, those window coverings were so darn ugly that when we finally took them down and replaced them with clean roller shades I was so scarred by their flounciness (is that a word?) that I sort of swore off curtains altogether. It wasn’t until summer when that 7 AM beam of light would shoot through the crack between the shade and the wall directly onto my face that I started to think that curtains were the way to go. Luckily there are tons of really great curtain options out there and they don’t all involve ruffles and poufs and flowers. We started with our bedroom first.

I loved how they transformed the room so much I wanted to tackle the guest room next. I’d been eying West Elm’s Ikat Ogee Linen curtains and I thought they were nice, but would they go? Would the pattern be too big or not the right color? Here’s how the guest room looked when you last saw it.

And here it is now. They work! I kinda love them. The color tied nicely into the walls and the pattern is large, but it doesn’t look crazy in the small room. We hung them “high and wide” as you’ve probably heard on many a design blog. They also block out just enough light that I’m thinking of switching rooms.

Now that I’m on such a curtain kick maybe I’ll finally make the curtains I’ve been planning for the sunroom. It’s not like the fabric has been sitting in my basement for over a year.

So I mentioned previously that the kitchen project has been pretty long and drawn out.  Part of the reason is lack of time to get things done, the other part is just my general indecisiveness.  A couple of weeks ago I painted the kitchen a deep peacock blue, Martha Stewart’s Plumage.  It’s a vast improvement over the dingy yellow that was there before, but I just can’t decide on the color of the trim.  In the first round I painted it white and it looked like this:

Nice, but something was bothering me.  It looked a little more modern than I was going for and I felt like my eye was being overly drawn to the trim.  Maybe I watch too much Boardwalk Empire, but it’s a great reference for the time period in which our house was built.  I noticed on the show that most of the trim that isn’t dark wood is painted the same as, or a shade of the wall color.  Plus, I’ve always been a fan of Martha’s pink guest house where everything is painted the exact same shade of pink.  Here are a few other images that feature painted trim.

Lovely, no?  So I thought, what the heck,  I’ll try it.  I figured I’d start with one portion and not go all out, it’s a little messy but here’s a sample:

It’s kind of hard to tell because I didn’t properly finish it, but I’m not sure.  Part of me likes it and I think when the inside edges of the doorway are finished it will look nice.  The other part of me is really bothered by that skinny strip of blue to the right of the tile. Is it weird?  Should I go for it and paint the whole shebang?  I need opinions.  Sound off in the comments people, I need your help!

Oh, and just so you know, the floor is going, going GONE!  It’s gross and we’re planning some awesome black and white hex tile for it.  We just need to decide if we’re going to attempt the DIY on that.  Another thing you should ignore is the disgusting beige switch plates.  We’ll be fixing those too.

Maybe a better title for this post would be “Things I Neglected to Post in 2011.” Here they are, in the chronological order of a lazy blogger.

The biggest and most drawn out project of this year would most definitely be the kitchen. Almost a year later and still not finished, but we made some significant progress. In early spring we ripped out the old ugly tile backsplash and removed our laminate countertops to make way for soapstone and a crash course in tiling!

Our countertops went in just before Easter and I know this because I got a little crafty with this mold from the Polish Art Center and made a butter lamb!  Here he is, all cute, sitting on the new soapstone.

Then, in August, we got brave and ripped out the microwave shelf above the stove which was covered in what I imagine was the grease from a thousand pounds of bacon.  Here it is before with evidence of that old tile and countertop I mentioned.

And here it is after, ready for some tile and a shiny new range hood.

A week or two later my lovely sister-in-law came over to help us get started with tiling.  She taught us well, because we finally have a backsplash!

The holes you see were in preparation for our new range hood and while the range hood is up and working we still haven’t patched the ceiling. I’ll save that for a later reveal which, fingers crossed, will come sometime soon.

In October we took a break from work for some fun — at weddings, in New Orleans and on Halloween!  As an ode to the history of our house here is a 1920s family portrait from our annual Halloween party featuring my lovely, super-crafty and talented friends.

I crafted a magpie costume inspired by this post from Vixen Vintage.  And you know I love a chance to creep up the mantel.

After Halloween we were hit with a freak snowstorm that took out our poor lilac tree.  Guess we have to wait until spring to see if this one bounces back.

In November we finally hung the curtains that we ordered in June.  That’s us, just taking our sweet old time.  Good thing I love them because I’m guessing our return window had been long closed. (Please excuse the crappy phone photo.)

And in other bedroom improvement news, remember this ridiculous mess?

Totally embarassing.  Well, thanks to the fine furniture finding skills of Sit and Read in Brooklyn, we are now the proud owners of this little lovely.

The improvements don’t stop there!  Since we moved in and installed our felt tulip pendant we had been staring at this mess on the hallway ceiling.

Ick.  Since painting over it would involve the stairwell and some very high ceilings we took the easy way out.  For less than $20 we made what we think is a huge improvement.

Super easy, big payoff.

To round out the year we managed to pull off a pre-Christmas dinner for 11 in our still wallpapered dining room.  Not sure if my resolution to get rid of that stuff conflicts with my resolution to put less pressure on myself but if it’s still there in 2013 I may go insane.  On an up note, we got to repurpose the jars from our wedding and had an excuse to pull out the fancy dishes and flatware we save for special occasions.

So yes, we still have a lot of work to do.  We’re moving along at what seems like a snail’s pace but I hope to make more progress this year while still leaving some time to enjoy the things around me.  Until the next post I’ll leave you with a little peek at how painting is going in the kitchen.

OK now, back to work!

I had a request to show the full garden, so here are some shots pre-Irene.  Let’s hope she spares my unripe tomatoes, cucumbers and peppers.  That empty spot in the back?  That’s where the vine borers had lunch.  I also rescued our first jalapeno.  Didn’t want to chance that one blowing away.  How else would we make hurricane nachos?

It’s harvest time in our new little garden and boy are we excited about this beet.  Such a pretty beet.  There are some beans in the background there too, not to mention two delicious cucumbers in our bellies.  So, all in all the garden has been somewhat of a success.

I say somewhat because of the next image.  The poor little pumpkin that will never be.  Frowny face.

That, sadly, was the only pumpkin we rescued from the vine before this happened:

The dreaded squash vine borer!  Those little buggers eat your poor plant from the inside out, and they killed all five of my pumpkin vines.  What I’ve heard is that they’ve probably laid their eggs in my soil as well so they can hang out until next year when I try again.  Grrr.  Anyone have any tips on how to destroy those suckers?  I tried putting aluminum foil under the plants as they formed and when they got large I figured we were in the clear.  I guess not.  I’m not exactly sure if that tiny pumpkin will survive and ripen to orange but I guess we’ll see.  It’s still cute.  In the meantime I’ll just ponder what to do with a single beet.

Do you know what a good hiding place a basement is?  It pretty much immediately turned into the room where our mess could hide, where unloved things went to die, where doing laundry could turn into a scene from a Wes Craven film.  Many, many times I was sure a masked killer was hiding under that mess waiting for the washer to make some noise so no one upstairs could hear my screams.  It was seriously ugly.  So when our sweet new COO decided to give us off this past Friday to beat the heat at the nearest swimming hole I decided the only swimming I would be doing would be with the garbage and spiders down in the Bad Basement.  I’m almost ashamed to show this picture…

Trust me, it looks a lot brighter and colorful than it actually was.  But now it looks like this!

Ahhhhhh, breathe.  OK, it’s not exactly pretty.  What’s worse, a full vinyl floor or three-quarters of one?  At least now I’ll see Freddy as he comes sneaking up on me from the oil room.  Someday maybe it’ll look like this or (le sigh) this, but for now this will do.  And to prove I didn’t just move everything to the other side…

Disclaimer: I think this post may have been more exciting for me, but just think of all the roller skating I’ll be able to do!

So yay! We got our first garden radish, an Organic Sparkler from Park Seed.  But Boooo! It was our only garden radish.  Of the approximately 32 radishes we planted we got one.  One sad, lonely little radish.  What went wrong?  After some garden googling my guess is either our soil is too high in nitrogen or there was too much rain early on when we planted them.  We were hit with some seriously stormy weather in the spring.  But all this is pretty new to me so maybe it’s something else?  Any seasoned gardeners reading this that can help me with this problem?  My worry is all the other lovely leafy plants I’ve got going on out there are going to give me just that, leaves.  Will I get any fruit or veggies?

In any case, that radish was pretty and delicious on our tacos last night.

Woot woot, little dance, little dance!  Oh yes, I’ve finally got my garden.  Or as I like to call it, Vegetable Fort Knox.  That actually may be giving it too much credit, and if groundhogs can read blogs it may just taunt them enough to break in.  So let me take that back. But hey, so far so good on the vegetable front.  They’re growing and despite a few little bug nibbles here and there, they’re looking pretty darn good.  Let’s talk about how it all came to be before the big reveal, shall we?

First things first, we had to pick a spot.  On the south side of our house there’s a little nook next to our driveway that gets great sun and had enough space for a 8′ x 7′ raised bed.  We had tried a vegetable garden in the ground there last year and if it weren’t for the Great Critter Buffet of 2010 we may have gotten some good veggies.  So we cleared the ground and tried to level it out as best as we could.

We started with building 3 separate raised beds out of cedar with the help of The Pioneer Woman’s tutorial that we fit together in a U shape.  We built two that were 6′ x 2′ and one that was 7′ x 2′.  This would leave us 3′ in the middle to move around and tend to all the vegetables.  We set them in place and lined them all with hardware cloth on the bottom to make sure no tricky critters would be able to dig underneath.

After we got them level, lined and in place we had to set the 4×4 cedar posts at the corners so that we’d have something to attach the fence to.  This is where we turned to QuietMan’s tutorial on the doityourself forums.  We really should have listened to him about notching out the wood to bolt in the posts but we didn’t and it caused some issues.  Eventually we got them upright but not without serious sweat.  Another thing we should have anticipated was that the stakes we attached the sides of the beds to would interfere with the posts.  It would have been easier if we kept them away from the corners.  Hindsight right?

Ok, moving on.  How the heck do you fill 3 large raised beds with soil?  I’ll tell you what you don’t do.  You don’t order 3 cubic feet of organic soil and have it dumped halfway up your driveway at 10am on a rainy Sunday.  You don’t let the truck driver take out a tree on the way into the driveway.  And you don’t order 3 cubic feet when your garden only holds 1.  Stupid minimums. So, who needs some soil?

After a full day of shoveling and hauling the beds were filled. We also put some gravel in the middle to keep weeds down and make it look all purty though you won’t see it in the next picture just yet.  I should also mention that under the gravel we laid down some chicken wire. Again, to keep out any little tunnel diggers.

The last step of the project was to add the fence.  Cue the tears and the cursing.  This might have been the most frustrating portion of the whole thing.  No matter how we measured or how many times we measured the boards just never seemed to line up.  So we’ve got some gaps that we need to attend to. We also plan to close off the vertical gap between the posts and the fence with some thin strips of wood to make it look a bit cleaner.  But for now, everything is standing and our veggies have been safe.  Woohoo!  It only took us about 3 months, countless trips to Home Depot, sore hands, bruised backs and tears to complete but boy are we happy it’s (almost) done.  Eric’s parents were seriously saints lending hands and tools whenever needed.   We’re kinda proud. It was our first really big DIY project and it doesn’t look half bad.  Right?