Kara's Korner

Painting the House Part 1 : Stucco Tutorial

noreply@blogger.com (Kara) — Tue, 15 Nov 2011 11:31:00 +0000

Last September, we started painting the exterior of the house. Yep, I said started...we never got past the first 25%. At the time, it made perfect sense. We were having pavers installed for the pool deck and wanted to go ahead and get the back painted before installation. Chris was in school, and I was in my first trimester of pregnancy.

For the past year, almost every day when we'd go for a walk or run, we'd laugh at how the back of our house was a different color than the rest of it. We were busy working on the nursery, and then the whole having a baby thing left us with very little free time to paint this big 'ol house.

And then I found this :

Do you see all the cracking on the side? And the rust coming through? It was worse on the other side of the trim, but I couldn't wait to take a picture, we just started poking to see how bad the damage really was.

Taken after we poked around some - it wasn't quite this bad to start off with!

It was bad.

And then Chris got out his side grinder and went to town.

Most sane people probably wouldn't have gotten that far, especially not with a 4 month old, but we're not sane sometimes. We've done a little bit of stucco patch work, and neither one of us have been happy with the outcome. This, obviously, needed more than just a patch job.

I gave Chris the green light to go ahead and see how bad the damage was, which meant he just keep breaking it apart until we got to good boards, by convincing him that we've needed to paint the house for some time now, so we'll just do the stucco work, and then repaint the entire house.

Logical, right?

Chris bought into it. A few weeks later he questioned why he ever let me talk him into painting the entire house because of a little stucco trim work, but that's another post for another day.

Back to the stucco...

We decided we were going to google and utube "how to stucco", and then go to the big orange box store and have the guys there help us with getting supplies. Then Kalia needed a nap, and to be fed, and a diaper change, and to be played with, and we realized that we might have bitten off a little more than we could chew.

So, we caved in and decided to get a few quotes. If the quotes were reasonable, we'd pay someone to do it. If they were absurd, we'd go back to plan 1, and just accept the fact that it was probably going to take us 10 times longer than normal to get it done.

First quote came in at $225. We had a few other places we were going to have them repair too, so we thought that was pretty reasonable. The second quote came in at $1500. Wha??? We asked a buzillion questions and they both were using the same exact methodology. Um, we'll take the $225 guy please.

We took pictures and asked lots of questions during the process, so that we'd know how to do stucco work if we ever needed to again.

Here's what the stucco guy was starting with.

And here's the how-to for any of you over-ambitious diy'ers out there!

First he cut back the rest of the old stucco work to make it nice and even.

Then he added the new trim boards (pressure treated wood) to fit.

Next, he took this piece of mesh and wire with paper backing :

And put it over top of the wood boards, securing it in with nails.

After that, he nailed in the protective vinyl edges. The vinyl edges are an upgrade from what was previously there. Most old houses used metal galvanized edging, which was why we had the rusting in the first place. Well, that combined with the fact that the previous owners had the sprinklers spraying on the house. We moved them out shortly after we moved in, but the damage was already done. Water plus metal is no good!

Just an fyi, all of this stuff can be found at your local home improvement store.

To keep the edges secured, he added staples along with the nails.

We had another area that was starting to show some wear, so we decided to go with a quick patch approach on fixing it. To do this, he needed to chip out some of the old stucco to give the new stucco something to stick to. It's basically roughing up the surface like you would for most paint projects, but instead of sanding, he used a metal scraper.

This is what it looked like after he was done chipping it off.

To bond old stucco with new stucco, some type of liquid bonding agent is needed. It kind of looks like Elmer's glue. He applied this using a sponge to all of the areas where the new stucco would go on top of the old stucco.

That's just the prep work!

Next up, the mixing. To create the sand finish to match the existing stucco work on the house, he mixed sand in with the stucco mix. He recommended not going too heavy on the sand to keep the final product strong. The mix was approximately 50/50. He mixed this dry in a large wheel barrow.

After dry mixing, he put the mix in buckets and added water. To mix the stucco, sand, and water he used a drill with a stirring tool to make a very smooth final mix.

The actual stucco work itself is a lot like working with grout.

Just put the stucco on your trowel and spread. He used a tray to hold the stucco, which seemed a lot easier than dipping the trowel into the bucket. I'll have to remember that for future projects!

Then smooth it over the surface,

until your area is completely covered.

Finish by taking your soft sponge and gently wiping until you have a smooth surface.

And that's it! It's definitely a lot of work, but at least we know it's do-able for the next go round. The stucco guy even took off $25 for stepping on a plant (it'll come back), and for us giving him water. What a guy!

Anyone out there willing to tackle stucco work on their own? Make sure to stay tuned for more house painting projects. It's quite a bit of work, but it's looking a-mazing!

Hope everyone's having a great week. Happy Tuesday!

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You Are Beautiful

noreply@blogger.com (Kara) — Mon, 10 Oct 2011 09:53:00 +0000

Hey guys!

At some point I'll be back to publishing more regularly than once every month or two, but for now, this is the best I can do. I started back at work six weeks ago, so things just keep getting more and more hectic. Don't assume that means we're not still house projecting, we most definitely are! We're just a little bit slower, and it takes quite some time to get it up here on the blog.

Onto the project ...

I've been mentioning that we're redoing the master bedroom. Part of that was the vanity / closet area, which we painted a little while back. The closet has the two big sliding doors that are mirrors, which I walk by every time I go to take a shower or get dressed. That didn't really used to bother me...

And then I had Kalia. I'll be completely honest here, I've never really struggled with body image or my weight or anything in that regards. I've always been really active, and my body, for the most part, has reflected that. The doctor released me to exercise when Kalia was 6 weeks old. I thought it'd take a month or two, but that I'd be back to my old shape in no time. Well, two and a half months have come and gone since being released, and I'm still not where I'd like to be. I do exercise every day, I do a minimum of a 2 mile walk with Kalia and Kodi, and a few days a week I do a 5k with Kalia in the jogging stroller, but I'm still not there yet. I continually have to tell myself that it took 10 months to put all that weight on, it's not just going to disappear in four long months.

I walk by that stupid mirror (its become stupid now) every.single.day and am constantly reminded of how my clothes don't fit yet, how my body seems to have a mind of its own, and how I'm not where I want to be with my weight loss. I'm not far off, I'm just still not there. I'm at the awkward stage of my old clothes fitting, but looking like someone glued them on me. I'm going to be 30 in 5 months, and I'm a Mom...pasted on pants isn't exactly the look I'm going for.

Well, enough is enough. No more pity parties, no more feeling bad about myself, and no more feeling sorry for myself. Motherhood is such a beautiful thing. The fact that we're willing to put our bodies through what we do to get this incredible little person here that we get to shape and mold and love more than we ever thought possible is a beautiful thing. The fact that we sacrifice our bodies for 10 months to carry this little person and then bring them into this world is a beautiful thing. That's what I need to focus on ... that's what I need to be reminded of. My new found extra poundage is well worth the extreme joy and love that my little girl brings to me every.single.day.

Sorry about the rant...I'll try to avoid being too Mommy hormonal and move on. There's a project in here too, I promise!

I bought two of these canvases on clearance from Jo-Ann's forever ago. They were 8$ total, and I knew I'd find a use for them at some point.

Chris thought I was crazy. Well, Chris always thinks I'm crazy, that's not really anything new. Those canvases have been sitting in a closet for quite some time. When I came to my "enough is enough" epiphany, I busted these bad boys out and got to painting.

I took step by step pictures of this, but they're lost somewhere in the 1925 pictures that are currently on my camera of mainly Kalia. I'm a little obsessed, I know. So, you get a few pictures of my cutie instead :

Amen to that!!! Hehe!

Really, I took those canvases and put a coat of white paint over top of them, then took my brush and dipped it in a little bit of the dark aqua paint that we painted the vanity area with and faded that down halfway through the first canvas, and then took the light aqua color that we painted the master bathroom and faded that down all the way through the bottom of the second canvas.

After that dried, I just took my paintbrush and painted on the words using the metallic white paint I had left over from doing the faux granite effect in Kalia's bathroom. It's not perfect, but that's kind of the point of the project. It's not really supposed to be. It's still beautiful because I made it, and it means something to me. For-warning though, it's semi impossible to photograph. There's no lighting in that area, and the flash bounces off of my metallic white, so just use your imagination to picture it a little bit more subtle :-).

With the flash on. Kodi thinks the addition of Kalia is exhausting!!

The rest of these are without the flash on, so the color is a bit more true.

I used the colors I did because of where I hung it. I like how it blends both the vanity area and the master bathroom colors together.

So, what do you guys think of it? I debated about doing it for awhile because I didn't want to come off as conceited, but it's my bathroom vanity area. I know why I painted it! If you have any questions on how I did this, please feel free to ask. I'll respond to them in the comments section.

Hope everyone is doing well. I've actually made quite a bit of progress in the Master Bedroom, redid the office, and am now planning away at making our awful formal living room Kalia's playroom. Oh yeah, and we're repainting the house. Life is never dull around these parts!! I hope to get the posts up soon. My goal is to really start back blogging more regularly after Christmas time. Kalia's starting to finally sleep through the night most nights, and I'm finding my balance in life, so I hope you guys will stick around to see what's next!

Happy Monday, hope you guys have a great week!

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Still Alive

noreply@blogger.com (Kara) — Sat, 20 Aug 2011 03:27:00 +0000

Hey guys!

It's been over a month without a peep from me, so I thought I'd let you guys know that I'm still here. We've actually got a few house projects that we're working on, but things go quite a bit slower these days with Kalia around.

I got quite a few emails and comments from you guys when I was pregnant about not knowing how I was doing everything and something or another about being a super woman. Well, I'm here to tell you I am most definitely not a super woman. I'm a new mommy, and I spend my days figuring out my baby. Initially, I felt the need to still get a lot of house projects done. I felt that I wasn't being 'me' without it. It kind of put me in a sad place, so we did the vanity to give me a little bit of sanity.

But somewhere along the way I realized something. I'm a go-getter, I'm a do-er...I don't rest that much, and my idea of relaxing is playing volleyball or running. I don't stop. I'm committed to doing things the best I can, I love to learn, and I love to be hands on with things. I love to be active, I love to create, I love to inspire, and I love to finish every day proud of what I've done. That's 'me'.

And these days, I get all of that, and so much more with this little girl :

She's 'me'. Her and her Daddy fill my days with so much joy and happiness...I can't even begin to describe it.

I had motherhood all wrong before she arrived. I thought I'd teach her the ways of the world, I'd teach her how to be a good person, how to do the basics initially, and how to succeed in life later on. What I didn't realize was how much she'd teach me. In 10 short weeks, she's taught me to see the world differently. She's taught me that I have a whole lot more patience than I ever thought I could...she's taught me to be empathetic to other Mommies...she's taught me that the best things in life lie in those little eyes and those little dimples. She's taught me how to love more openly and completely. She's taught me how to be a better me, and she's teaching me new things every day.

So please forgive the lack of diy posts. Right now, Kalia's not at the age where she can participate in diying too much (although it's hard not to write posts on every little thing that she does do...but I spare you guys and have a family blog just for that :-)), and until she gets there, my diying is limited to naptimes and after bedtime. House projects can wait until then...I've got more important things to learn and grow from in the meantime...

I hope all of you guys have enjoyed your summer and are doing well! Thanks for sticking around Kara's Korner, I really appreciate your support.

I'll end on one last one of my little cutie. Enjoy!

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Vanity Area Update

noreply@blogger.com (Kara) — Fri, 15 Jul 2011 22:09:00 +0000

Well, we finally got around to our first home improvement project since having Kalia. She doesn't really sleep as much as normal babies do, so getting things done, besides feeding her every hour or so, is quite challenging! Unfortunately, she came down with a cold last weekend. While she was sleeping her cold away (she's better now!), Chris and I took advantage of the down time and repainted our vanity area.

We had repainted our bathroom back in January (post here), which left our vanity / closet area looking pretty bad. The two colors clashed pretty badly, and we knew we wanted something a bit darker to make the area a little bit more cohesive, but went to work on the nursery instead.

Here's what the area looked like prior to our paint job on Sunday :

And here's what the area looks like now :

If you look carefully in the next few photos, you can see how this area ties in with our Master Bathroom paint color scheme.

The paint color is Mermaid Net by Behr. We took the Tide Pools paint swatch that we used to paint the bathroom and went two shades darker so that the colors would flow well from one room to the next.

We both were a little iffy at first about the dark color, but it feels warm and soothing all at the same time, and definitely makes the bathroom a cohesive area instead of being so disjointed.

This is just one of a multitude of projects I've got planned to get our Master Bathroom up to par. Every time I walk into Kalia's nursery, I'm jealous that she's got a nicer room than us!

So what do you guys think about our new vanity area? Do you like the dark color, and how it compliments the light color of the master bathroom, or is it too dark for you?

Stay tuned to see what else I've got up my sleeve. I'm ready for a nice, relaxing Master Bedroom instead of the hodge podge of a room we've got going on right now!

Hope everyone's doing well. Thanks so much for all of the sweet compliments about Kalia's nursery...I so appreciate every one of them!!!

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Nursery Room Tour

noreply@blogger.com (Kara) — Tue, 05 Jul 2011 10:17:00 +0000

I can't believe we started on the nursery room back in January, and just finished it up a few days prior to Kalia's due date (May 30th)! We've come so far and done so much in there though...it's a room we both truly love and can't wait to watch Kalia grow up in now that she's finally here.

In designing the nursery, I wanted to create something that would grow with Kalia. We put a lot of time, energy, and love into creating what exists right now, which I knew we would, so the thought of trying to change it up in a few years because it was too 'baby' wasn't something I was willing to do. The second huge consideration was that Chris and I had to love the room too. Not like it, but love it. Let's be honest here...while Kalia's in the nursery phase, the two people that are going to spend the most time enjoying or hating the nursery room design are Chris and I. Kalia will enjoy all of the patterns and shapes in the nursery, but the functionality and feel of the room is more for Chris and I right now than Kalia.

I came up with the general color scheme for Kalia's room when I came across this image on Benjamin Moore's website :

I loved everything about this color scheme, but decided because it was a baby's room, that I wanted the gray color to be a little bit lighter. This color scheme uses these colors :

lucerne
AF-530

storm
AF-700

paper mache
AF-25

Accent Colors
royal flush 2076-20

I used BM's Moonshine as my gray color for the walls, and used my existing white paint I had for the trim and pieces we built. When I picked up the paint from Benjamin Moore, I also grabbed their paint cards so that I could continually go back and compare the color blue and pink that I wanted for accent colors. I had the paint swatch card in my wallet and pulled it out and compared it for anything and everything that I bought to go into the nursery. It was such a great way to stay within my color palette

I scoured and scoured the internet, and went into baby shop after baby shop looking for ideas. The first go round, as much as I'm embarrassed to say it, I came home from Pottery Barn Kids crying. I'm not a pastel pink kind of gal, and store after store, that's all I could find. The internet was a much better source for me personally. The one item that I completely 'borrowed' the idea of was Kalia's bookshelves. All of the rest of the ideas I came up with pretty much on my own...I tried to design the nursery to be appropriate for a baby / toddler, but not scream "BABY!!!".

Lets go back to where we started with this room. This room was a mess when we moved into it, so we kept it as our junk room while we worked on fixing up other rooms in our home. Previously, I used it to do all of my building and painting projects.

We had to redo everything in this room to even get to a blank slate. We cleaned out the junk room (see here), primed the walls, removed the old carpet, painted the ceiling, and installed a new window (see here), painted the walls and closet, and installed a new ceiling fan (see here), painted the trim (see here), installed bamboo floors (see here and here), all to wind up with a clean slate room to start putting stuff in.

And here's where the nursery stands today (and all of the details on cost, where I purchased an item, and links to each initial post) :

This is the entry way to Kalia's Room. Both items on the hallway walls were gifts from Kalia's baby showers.

Next up, here's the crib wall. Details from this picture are below.

Curtains : Ikea (post here). Cost : Hava Curtain Rod : 39.99, white curtains, 19.99, pink curtains 24.99 on clearance.

Blinds : Home Depot (post here) Cost : $50.

Crib : (initial post here). From Bratt Decor. Cost: Crib and mattress (and a mobile not shown), bought off of someone for $400, white sheet from Target : gift, bedskirt from Pottery Barn Kids $53 (I wanted to make this, but ran out of time / energy!). Next to the crib is an old planter bench that I threw fabric on top of ($3), and am using as a stand for our diaper champ (gift), and we actually have since put Kalia's clothes hamper up there too.

Monogram : Made by me, post here. Cost : $5 for spray paint and pictures (already owned everything else).

Rug : (initial post here). From Land of Nod, Cost : $289

Chair : Pottery Barn Comfort Swivel Glider and Pottery Barn white twill with stone piping slipcover. Cost: free - gift for my birthday. (It's amazingly comfortable). Pillow : Marshall's $15.

Side table / ottoman - Calypso by Target. Cost : $50 (used completion discount plus 5% credit card discount).

Here's a close-up of the closet (details below) :

Closet System : Made by us (initial design post here, toy box post here, no sew bench cushion tutorial post here, entire closet system reveal post here, closet filled with clothes organization shown here). Cost : Wood : $50, adjustable hanging racks : Home Depot $20 , Mirror : Home Depot $30 , letters for name : Jo-Anns $10, hinges for toybox : Home Depot $17 (for all 4 hinges). Baskets : Lowes (already owned).

Next up, the bookshelves :

And from another angle (that's a little bit brighter) :

Here's what it looks like with the rest of the room (as much as was possible to capture) :

Bookshelves : Made by us (initial post here, follow up post here). Idea from Elizabeth Sullivan Designs (see here) seen initially at House of Turquoise (see here). Cost : $40 for wood. Already had paint and screws.

From there, we'll move onto the daybed wall :

Pillows on Daybed : Made by me (post here). Elephant pillow - made from a tea towel from Anthropologie. Cost : $18. All other pillows I had the materials for. I've had the big green pillows for quite some time now, but they're from Stein Mart.

Daybed : Made by me last year. (making the daybed post here, moving to the nursery post here). Cost: Already owned, free.

Alphabet Wall : (initial post here) Flashcards from Etsy (here). Frames : Dollar Store. Cost : Flashcards $64 (with shipping). Frames : $26.

If you keep turning, you'll see Kalia's dresser :

Another shot of the dresser with the crib :

Dresser : Made by us (build post here, finishing post here). Cost : Wood plus drawer glides: $150, already had everything else for building and painting, handles : Pottery Barn $6 (used discount code and $25 off $50 coupon), lamp : Kirkland $25, changing pad : Target $20, changing pad cover : Pottery Barn $19.

Gallery Wall above Dresser : Full post here, Consists of hand-me-down Mirror refinished (post here) and diy wall art (post here). Cost : Mirror, free, wall art : $10 (diy frames, fabric, and clothes pins).

And, of course, the best part of the nursery is this little girl right here :

She made all of the hard work worth while. I took that picture a week ago for her 3 week birthday. I love her so much!!

Whew...that post has been awhile in the making (and took awhile to type up). If you have any additional questions that I didn't cover, please check the initial posts out, and then if I still haven't answered them there, feel free to leave a comment and I'll try to get to answering it in a somewhat timely manner!

Hope you guys enjoyed the full nursery post! That room really has turned out to be our favorite in the house thus far. It took a lot of hard work, but it's something we both truly love and are proud of. What do you think of it? Anything you would've done differently?

Hope everyone's having a great week!

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Happy 4th of July!!!

noreply@blogger.com (Kara) — Mon, 04 Jul 2011 21:28:00 +0000

From the cutest girl in the entire world...

I might be a little biased :-).

How 'bout from our family to yours...

Kodi had a tennis ball in the pool that he was a little more interested in. He normally doesn't miss a good photo op!

Hope everyone's enjoying their day!

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Anniversary Gift

noreply@blogger.com (Kara) — Mon, 27 Jun 2011 10:13:00 +0000

Four days before Kalia's arrival, and 2 days before my scheduled induction, Chris and I celebrated our 5 year wedding anniversary. We don't really do typical gifts for our anniversaries...we plan a trip instead and call it our anniversary gift. Well, this year our anniversary gift was Kalia. And she was promptly late!

I wanted to give Chris something that told him all of the things I loved about him, so I got a deck of cards :

Took construction paper and typed up various things I loved about Chris, and decoupaged it to one side of the card (yes, for all 52 cards!) :

And then took the pictures that Erin had taken of Chris and I back in November, used glossy print paper and printed out the images to size of the cards, and then decoupaged those to the front of the card.

I put the cards in a tin box. I actually meant to decoupage the tin box too, but ran out of time / energy prior to heading to the hospital. Chris really appreciated the gift, and had a lot of fun reading through all of my serious and funny ways that I love him. He also loved that it incorporated pictures of us that he can go back and look at anytime.

For dinner that night, we headed to Melting Pot. The hostess / waitress / manager all couldn't believe I was out and about at 40 weeks and 4 days pregnant, but I told them I was trying to test my luck to go into labor on my own. It didn't work out too well, but not for lack of trying! Here's a few pictures of us from dinner that night. Man oh man, I was so pregnant in these photos!!

Hopefully I'll get around to posting the final nursery sometime soon! Sorry I haven't been responding to emails / comments just yet, but supposedly this sleep thing gets better :-), so I should be back at projecting with a cute helper, and responding to comments / emails soon!!

Hope everyone has a great week. Happy Monday!

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Coming Up for Air

noreply@blogger.com (Kara) — Fri, 24 Jun 2011 14:35:00 +0000

Hey guys!

I know it's been quite awhile since my last post...but little Miss Kalia is keeping me quite the zombie these days. I think I've been on the computer a handful of times since we've gotten home.

One of my big concerns prior to having Kalia was breastfeeding. I really really wanted to be successful at it, and was worried that I might not be. Well, Kalia is already taking after her Mommy and Daddy in that aspect and is quite the over-achiever. She feeds about every hour to hour and a half, which doesn't leave me much time to get any sort of restful sleep at all. Which means I'm a zombie all day / all night long.

One of my neighbors put it best...we're in survival mode right now. Chris feeds me and Kodi, and I feed Kalia. We've managed to go on our nightly walks almost every night the past week, which even though it takes away from sleep time, is helping me keep my sanity around these parts.

I actually do have some projects to post that I finished up prior to little miss Piggy getting here, but I just haven't been able to get on here for any significant amount of time. I can start pumping next week, so Chris is going to take over one of my night time feedings, and let me get more than 1 hour of sleep at a time. Woot! Hopefully I'll start to feel like the 'old me' energy wise again at some point.

Every day is a blessing, every day is rewarding, every day is a challenge, and every day I'm thankful.

Oh, and as a side note...breasts for breastfeeding are so poorly engineered. I can tell they were made by a man. There is absolutely no reason for both faucets to turn on when you latch onto one. What a bad design!

Anywho...

'Till then, hope these cute photos will tide you guys over!

1 week birthday walk...we were finally allowed outside! Kalia is so funny with her hands!

Just have to make a note that the camera is on a fence post on a self-timer for this photo. How Kodi knows where and when to smile is beyond me. He's part human I think!

Go Gators!! Kalia's Uncle Shawn and Aunt Christina really really love Kalia. They're Seminole fans, and this headband is from them. Now that's love!

Daddy moment...Kalia loves him so much already. See her hugging him?! Chris is amazing with her!

Awww...the swing and the bouncer were two of the best gifts ever!!

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Kalia's here!

noreply@blogger.com (Kara) — Thu, 09 Jun 2011 23:15:00 +0000

The absolute best project that I've ever done in my entire life made her grand entrance on Tuesday, June 7th, at 4:07 a.m.. It wasn't always an easy road, but one that I'd do again and again to get her here.

She came out weighing 8 lbs, 6 ounces, and 21 1/2 inches long.

We're all so happy she's here!

My two favorite people in the entire world :-).

I'm taking some much needed family time, so project postings will be on hold for a bit. This latest project has taken quite a bit out of me! There aren't words to express how great the reward is though...

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Laundry Room Redo

noreply@blogger.com (Kara) — Fri, 03 Jun 2011 10:36:00 +0000

I'm chucking this one up to psycho husband, not psycho wife this time. Normally I'm the go-getter and starter of projects around this house, but Chris takes all the credit for this one!

We've been looking for a new washer and dryer for quite a few months now. I told Chris when we were redoing the front doors that he had to put his search for the perfect washer and dryer that were perfectly priced on hold for now. I couldn't handle dealing with the door issues and trying to figure out what the hey washer / dryer I wanted, and where had the best price, at the same time.

Well, the door had been in for a good week before Chris decided to resume his washer / dryer hunt. And he found the perfect washer/dryer for sale for 25% off both. So last weekend, we tredged our tails up to Lowe's, had them price match a set from Best Buy, and came home with a delivery date of Thursday for the new set.

Our laundry room has been in a sad, sad state since we moved in. It's one of the rooms we've yet to touch. The fact that we came home from this with 2 days to spare before my official due date didn't bother Chris at all. Chris took out the old appliances before I could snap up a few before pictures, and it was late when I was taking this, but here's sort of where we started :

Here's a picture of our old dryer to give you an idea of what we were working with before. This thing was on its last leg!

Saturday morning, while I was finishing up Kalia's nursery monogram, Chris spent quite a bit of time cleaning out the old dryer vent. Wowzer...that thing was most definitely a fire hazard, and I'm so happy that he got it done before Kalia gets here!

We decided the only expense we were willing to incur for this laundry room redo was the actual washer and dryer (they're expensive enough, even on sale!), so for the rest of the laundry room, we used what we had laying around. Chris painted the walls leftover gray we had from Kalia's nursery (Moonshine by Benjamin Moore), and I painted the laundry room door Lucerene by Benjamin Moore. We took the laundry room door off to sand it down and paint it. I think we were daring Kalia to arrive. We have a thing with having doors off while I'm entirely too close to labor (see here). Chris painted most of the trim work...I helped some, but he gets to take the credit for most of the work. After all of that, we were left with this :

Which was such an improvement, but those stupid laminate cabinets were driving me nuts. We thought about pulling them off of the wall...but we're not sure what's behind them, and neither one of us was really willing to get into dry-wall work. So the cabinets stayed. I lived with them for a full day before deciding there was no way they could stay that color, so I got up early Monday morning and primed the cabinets. When Chris got up, I was sitting at the computer, and he wasn't very happy to see paint on my hands! He was a good sport about it though and helped me put on the two coats of white paint (Ultra Bright White by Behr), which isn't a perfect paint job, but it really makes the room look so much better!

These cabinets are temporary anyways, but I can at least live with them this way.

On Thursday, the Lowe's guys showed up with our new washer and dryer...

We actually had a laugh at Kodi's dog bowl. That's the first piece of furniture Chris and I built together, quite a few years ago. When we redid the kitchen at the old house, we had the granite guys take the leftover granite from our kitchen sink cut out, and make the top for this using our dog bowls for cut measurements. They hesitated initially, but we told them it was either that, or we'd go elsewhere. They obliged!

The trim in here finally matching the white doors looks so much better. Only 2 + years in the making of getting rid of all of that old awful off white trim!

I love the new color of the washer and dryer too! Maybe I'll actually do some of the laundry now! Chris would be oh so happy with me. The only "gender tasks" we have in our home is that Chris does Kodi's poop patrol in the backyard. He drew the short stick somewhere in here.

Ahhhh...SO much better!!! We've got a few things planned to finish over this laundry room...building pedestals, adding some wall decor, and as previously mentioned, removing those cabinets and adding some functional shelves up there, but this is such a huge improvement from where we started! And...I absolutely do not plan on doing any of that this weekend. At 41 weeks pregnant, my 'mojo' is most definitely running out!

Hope everyone had a great week and enjoys their weekend! Today is Chris and I's 5 year wedding anniversary. I'm so thankful, lucky, and blessed to be married to the absolute perfect soul mate for me. Chris is not only everything I could've possibly wanted in a husband, he's my very best friend in the entire world, and I can't imagine a single day without him! Happy Anniversary babe!! (I know, enough mushiness...sorry!) When we got married, everyone started asking us when we'd have kids. We told them all we planned on waiting till we had been married for 5 years or so before expanding our family. We didn't really intend to make it this close to our 5 year wedding anniversary, but that's what you get when you have two engineers in one marriage I guess!

Happy Friday!

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Welcome to My Birthing Month! Take Two!

noreply@blogger.com (Kara) — Wed, 01 Jun 2011 10:18:00 +0000

Oiy...in my first "welcome to my birthing month" post I said I wasn't even entertaining the idea of going later than May for my due date because I live in Florida and it's too hot.

Well, Kalia has other plans, so I'm just along for the ride. I've tried every sane old wives tale in the book, and she's just not ready to get here yet. Plain and simple. I actually went for a 4 mile walk on Sunday with Chris and Kodi, and as I was dragging my tired body up my driveway, one of the neighbors told me I should keep going so that I could walk Kalia out of me (to be fair, she had no idea that I was coming in from going that far). Yes, I'm sure if I managed to walk for an entire week, she'd show up eventually!

But...without a doubt, she'll be here this month. Very soon too...and that's all that matters! One of my nieces birthday is June 17th, and she said it would be so cool if Kalia and her could share a birthday. I told her that would not be cool at all! She'll be turning 8, and she agreed with me that she was just ready for Kalia to get here now too.

This past weekend, Chris and I finally headed to the plant nursery to fill our empty planters. We also ran to Lowe's, Marshall's, went out to lunch, ran to Wal-greens, and finally ended at Publix before heading home. It's funny how differently you look at places when you're 40 weeks pregnant. I notice where the bathrooms are first, and then second where a good place to lean against or something to sit on while we're deciding what to purchase.

Anywho, I thought I'd show you guys our pretty new plants today while I'm waiting for Kalia to get here.

We spent a few hours out here on Sunday and Monday, and I'm really loving the pop of color these plants add to the pool deck. We were supposed to get rain on Monday / Tuesday, so that's why our hammock is missing...but I took a nap in that for a little bit on Sunday too...before getting up and heading on our 4 mile walk. Sigh...restless exhaustion at it's finest!

Anyone else experience the 'over-anxious' neighbors or random people you run into at the stores telling you what to do to get your baby to come out any faster? I feel like I should make a maternity shirt that says "what NOT to say to a 40 week pregnant woman" and put a list of things on it for people to read and think about before saying something. I'm so anxious as it is already!! Oh well, everyone means well by it...I know, I know! 40 week pregnant hormones + patience just don't go so well together these days!

I still have another room we gave a face-lift to to show you guys too, so stay tuned for that one!

Hope everyone's having a great week so far...Happy Wednesday!

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Nursery Room - Monogram

noreply@blogger.com (Kara) — Mon, 30 May 2011 10:53:00 +0000

This is the last nursery project I plan on doing before Kalia gets here. I actually didn't really plan on having to get it done before she arrived, but since she's showing up fashionably late, the last and final project is complete. Sort of. I'm still working on sewing her quilt, but right now my sewing machine and I aren't on speaking terms, so that one most definitely will wait until after she gets here. Hopefully before her first birthday! (Kidding...sort of).

For above Kalia's crib, I wanted some of our maternity pictures displayed. I initially planned on just doing some sort of canvas or frames, but after doing the gallery wall above the dresser, I decided I needed something a little bit different for above the crib. I walked in and out of there about 1000 times, and finally came up with something that I thought I'd like...decoupaging our maternity pictures to a big huge K.

We have at of scrap wood left over from various build projects, so this project was pretty close to free. Actually, it cost $5 for the spray paint and pictures.

First up, I drew out my K on a leftover sheet of 3/4'' plywood. I couldn't decide if I wanted 5 x 7's or 4 x 6's, but after laying out both sizes, the 5 x 7 K was just too big. I do kind of wish I would've made this so the arms of the K were the same size as the body, but I still like the final outcome.

Chris came into the garage at some point during this, and agreed to make my cuts for me with the jig saw. I don't fit behind tools anymore, so I either have to bend over waaaay low to get things below my belly, or just pass the task of to Chris.

After Chris made the cuts while I held the board in place, we were left with a huge giant K.

I spray painted that black (while wearing my awesome mask), and then got up in the middle of the night to decoupage our maternity pictures to it. Sleep is getting harder and harder these days, so I moreso just nap a lot. My weekends consist of : nap, project, errands, eat, repeat. Anywho, I don't have pictures of the giant K just spray painted, but just imagine the image above black.

After the decoupage, here's what my K looked like :

I decided the ends needed a little bit ... more ... to it, so I cut out circles of fabric and added fabric type flowers. It added a feminine touch without being too girlie. These two fabrics are leftovers from her quilt too, so once I start speaking to my sewing machine again, this will tie in perfectly.

The centers are just pins that I snapped off and then bent into place. I glued them down using quick grip, and then attached the flower with quick grip to my K, but only where the pins were. That way I could still ruffle the 'petals' of my flower to have more of a 3D look.

Chris came in and thought the middle of the K needed flowers too, so I made a few smaller blue ones while I was at it.

We put the hangers in the back of it, and hung it above her crib. Here's the final product :

What do you think? Too big, too small, or just right? I debated about painting the K another color besides black, because I do love color in a nursery...but ultimately decided the pictures would look better against a black background. I also decided the black background went with her crib skirt and crib a little bit better, but I'm still on the fence about whether or not I'm going to add color back in.

Here's how it ties in with her crib :

When she gets big enough to pull things off the wall, we'll either have to put a screw through this, remove it, or pull the crib away from the wall so she doesn't pull it down on herself. For now, I'm just ready for her to be here already! Oh, and ignore the wrinkly sheet and bedskirt. The last thing I feel like doing is ironing these days!

And my favorite part...here's where we started with this wall :

And after a ton of work, here's what it looks like now :

Installed bamboo floors, painted walls and closet, new crib, custom built in closet system, custom built dresser

(To see my documented projects and paint colors I've used on this section, click on any of the links below the picture.)

So that's it...my last and final nursery project. Maybe Kalia was waiting for me to finish that up before deciding to show up. I'm done, she can come now!! I'll do a full nursery tour and recap everything sometime soon. Unless Kalia shows up...then I'll go MIA for a little while before sharing her with you guys, and then do a full nursery room tour! :-)

Believe it or not, we had a busy busy Friday and Saturday. I've got another room that we gave a mini face-lift to show you guys later on in the week, so stay tuned!

Hope everyone's enjoying their Memorial Day today! Happy Monday!

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I'm linking up to the parties in my sidebar...go check out what everyone else is creating!

Mini Living Room Project

noreply@blogger.com (Kara) — Fri, 27 May 2011 10:55:00 +0000

I know, you guys can't believe I'm so close to my due date and still doing projects. Me neither. I think breathing these days is a project in and of itself. But things that would normally get put on a 'list' drive me nuts right now, so if I can muster the energy to get something done, I do it. Even if it's small.

After we moved the cable, I noticed the shoe kick around the fireplace just looked...off. It's too light, doesn't blend in with the floors, and certainly doesn't go with the fireplace.

It didn't bother me as much when the obnoxious cable was running across the harth, but now that the cable is gone, the shoe kick bothered me.

When we redid the front door, we stained the shoe kick to match the floors, and I was completely amazed at how well our 'already had on hand from another project 5 years ago' stain blended in with the floors. I have plans to do do something else to that fireplace, so I decided that I wanted to stain the shoe kick to blend in with the floors instead of painting it to match the fireplace.

So, one night this week, when my big 'ol body couldn't get comfy, and my hubs loud snoring wouldn't allow me to fall back asleep, I got up and stained the shoe kick.

I think this needs one more coat (we did two on the front door shoe kick) to officially be done, but I might have to enlist the helpful hubs to do the second coat. Scooching around on my rear in the middle of the night to do this did not feel so awesome. To be completely honest though, as of me typing this post, he has no idea that I even got up to do this, or that it's done. I'd be in so much trouble if I got caught doing this in the middle of the night! I'm pretty hard to slow down, even when I'm exhausted.

It looks much better than it did before though. I'm happy it's not screaming out "hey, look at me, I don't match". Because that, my friends, was getting annoying.

Hope everyone enjoys their 3-day weekend. My tired body and tired brain are excited to have an extra day off of work. Why in the world I thought it'd be a good idea to work up until Kalia gets here is beyond me. For future reference for any of you guys, working up until your due date (and even possibly past...please Kalia come this weekend!), isn't recommended.

Keeping my fingers crossed hoping that Kalia comes by her due date, which is Monday. I know, I know...enjoy the carefree life with just Chris and I...it's just hard to enjoy when you can't breathe, sleep, or get up from low places on your own, let alone are a constant sweat ball from this amazing Florida heat. Come on Kalia!!! Yes, I think I said that I was ready for her to get here 3 or 4 times in this post. That's how ready I am though....

Happy Friday everyone!

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Chris the Cable Guy

noreply@blogger.com (Kara) — Wed, 25 May 2011 10:27:00 +0000

I really wanted to title this post "My Dad is a Big Butthead", but I decided it worked better as a subtitle.

Let me explain.

When we moved in 2 years ago, we went around and around on different configurations for our living room. Within a few months, we found a couch off of craigslist, bought some bucket chairs, and eventually had a layout that we were both happy with.

The one problem with our layout is that there is no cable behind the TV. That, in and of itself, is not normally that big of a deal to fix, however the wall that the TV is mounted on goes directly to the outside pool deck, and is solid concrete. We've had "move the cable" on every.single to-do list for the past year and a half or so, and it always gets neglected.

So how does any of that fit in with my Dad being a big butthead? Well, if you know him, you know he just is one regardless (my sisters will agree!), but that's besides the point. Back in December, I wrote a post to the weather about our frigid Florida winters, and included this picture of how we sleep during the winters (this was prior to us getting our new a/c and heat system installed a little while ago) :

Chris told me not to post this photo, and not because the lighting was horrible with it, but because the cable cord was showing. I told him all of my readers were too nice to comment on that. I was right...a few of you guys even commented on how much you loved our coffee table.

My Dad...not so much!

I forgot to take into account that he reads my blog too. He left the comment below :

Biggest.Butthead.Ever. The funny part about this too is that my Dad knew that I had pre-posted that and was out in Hawaii by the time that post was published.

Sigh...

Well, enough is enough!! My parents are staying here with Kodi when we have Kalia, so, once again, we put "move the cable" on our to-do list. This past weekend, we finally crossed it off. Chris said he didn't want my Dad coming over yet again with that stupid cable still running across the room.

Ugly Cable

As expected, this wasn't an easy project. Chris got up in the attic and pulled the cable up from the previous exterior wall and attempted to drop it down into this wall. Since the wall is solid concrete, that wasn't working.

We drilled a hole in the top of the ceiling to see if could find a hole to send the cable down that way, but all we did was create a hole for us to patch. Beyond the drywall is more concrete.

We decided our only option was to bring the cable in from the exterior wall again. Not exactly a seamless pretty project, but much better than the cable running across our fireplace.

Chris drilled behind where the TV is mounted :

The drill bit sticking out through the other side made us both laugh.

After that, Chris drilled from the outside to the inside to try to widen up the hole a bit ...

That's the cable sticking down from the pool deck area ceiling.

Yeah, things are starting to look worse at this point instead of better, huh?

This was the hole from the inside :

And this is the most ridiculous drill bit I've ever seen :

But hey, it got the job done!

After much finagling, we got the cable from the outside of this wall to the inside, and pushed back up as much of the cable as we could back into the attic. For the outside, I can't decide if we're going to get some sort of tubing, paint the cable to match the house, or mount something to this wall to cover it up. This is one of those 'domino projects'...check one project off the list, add a few more.

You can see in this next picture what you see of the cable from the majority of the pool deck.

For the inside, we still have to run the power line up to behind where the TV is mounted. Because there's already power on this wall, that, hopefully, shouldn't be as bad. Famous last words, right?

Woo Hoo!!! No more cable!!!

We were both entirely too tired on Sunday night to do anything more with this, so it's another "good enough for now" project that we're checking off the list.

Oh, and as a side note, I actually finished off the front door this past weekend too. I painted the trim, the wall around the trim, and Chris helped me grout the missing tile piece back into place. So that project went from a "good enough for now" one to a completely crossed off the list. Whew!

It's true that my Dad is a big butthead, but I'm really glad we've finally gotten this project crossed off the list. Chris too...it's been one of those things that's just been an eye-sore for entirely too long now.

Love you Dad!!!

Happy Wednesday everyone!

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House Numbers

noreply@blogger.com (Kara) — Mon, 23 May 2011 10:32:00 +0000

Well, I'm still here...and Kalia's still not. But it's most definitely not for lack of trying. I'm keeping myself as busy as my tired body can handle these days! Sigh...

Onto weekend projects...

We live in a community with a Homeowners Association (Chris was actually president last year...however funny that is!), and in our spring time mailing this year we received a friendly reminder that all of the houses needed to have the house numbers located on the actual house per the guidelines. Hmmm...we've neglected that for 2 years now...oops! The previous owner actually took the numbers with them. How odd would it be if they actually moved somewhere with the same exact house number?

Anywho, on one of our many trips to Home Depot within the past few weeks, we picked up a wooden plaque :

Image courtesy of Home Depot

and these big plastic numbers :

Image courtesy of Home Depot

I forgot to take pictures of the actual purchase, but these are exactly the same ones we bought. We actually wanted to test out the stain we had gotten for the front doord on something before committing and applying it to such an expensive purchase, and then hating it, so this plaque was perfect. I told Chris that we could just use scrap wood and make our own plaque, but once we realized the plaque was only $5 smackaroos, I let Chris talk me out of attempting to tackle yet another project. Although it would've been really easy, bending over to even use tools is a challenge with this big 'ol belly I'm rocking these days, so he won.

I applied two coats of stain on the plaque, and we decided we really liked the color, so we did the front doors with it. Last weekend we had a marathon spar urethane session going on. We applied a coat to the front door, this plaque, planter stands we got for the back pool deck area,

and our hammock (which I like to refer to as 'the boat' since it was hammock-less while we were applying the urethane coats on it)...and then repeated the cycle again...and again.

We thought about getting plants for these planters this weekend, but I got too tired. Those might wait until after Kalia gets here. If she ever gets here...I guess technically my due date is in one more week, but I feel like I've been pregnant for 10 years already!

Sorry...pregnant brain absent mindedness...back to the house numbers...

Chris test sanded the plaque before officially deciding it was my job to sand the front doors because he wasn't any good at it, but I think it's just the different qualities of wood. The sanding job scratched some of the stain off (we sanded with 220 grit sandpaper after applying two coats of stain and letting that dry overnight, but before adding the spar urethane), but it wasn't enough that I thought it was worth re-staining and then waiting to add the urethane to it. It just gives it character now!

This weekend I added the three coats of spar urethane to the back of this plaque, and we made yet another trip down to the big orange store to buy some stainless steel screws. After adding the plastic numbers on, here's what our house number sign looks like :

I think between the sign, the plastic numbers, and the screws, we spent about $12 on this. I really love that it ties in with our entry way with our new front door too.

I plan on spray painting all of the lights on the front of the house the oil rubbed bronze, and that statue in the front has been on my to-do makeover list for forever now. It's way heavy though, so it's something I'm waiting to tackle until I'm un-pregnant. We'll get around to doing those two things when we repaint the rest of the house.

I think both Chris and I were shocked at how big the numbers actually look against the house, but I think the plaque does a good job of making it something pretty instead of just having the numbers there. What do you guys think?!

Hope everyone had a great weekend! Ours was entirely too short. How is it that when you're this far along with pregnancy time seems to fly and stand still all at the same time?

Happy Monday!

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Shut The Front Door

noreply@blogger.com (Kara) — Fri, 20 May 2011 12:51:00 +0000

Just as a refresher, here's where the entry way started :

And here's where it was after my quick makeover of it a year and a half ago :

Which wasn't bad, it just wasn't great either. And it left us with zero privacy, which was no beuno.

The rest of the 'door story' isn't so quick, but I'll try to summarize so my post isn't a buzillion miles long! (Note...I fail miserably at this...if you just want to see pics, scroll on down!)

We saw Home Depot had a 15% off special order doors, which we knew we'd have to have because of our size, so we went into check it out...months ago. Like back in January. We found a door we liked that was marked down to $875 for the double doors, which was an amazingly great price, so we went to the door sales guy to place the order.

And the bill came up to something close to 2k. Umm...no, I want the $875 doors please. Apparently the door prices were mis-marked, but he did go through door company after door company, and threw in promo after promo to get us down to the $875 price. We had a 10% off coupon too, and he told us to go up to the service desk to pay for it, and we could use it there. Apparently they're not allowed to double dip, but if you go up to the service desk to pay, they don't know that there's been promotions applied already to the door, so you can generally get away with using another 10% off coupon.

Sa-weet...cha-ching! That left our door price down to right around $800 after all of the promos had been taken off and applied, and taxes added back in.

The door was supposed to be in a little over two months ago. It came late, and it came with all sorts of mistakes. The hardware wasn't the oil rubbed bronze, the door was flat instead of having an arch paneling, it wasn't double bore holed (holed for two entry way handles), and it opened on the wrong side (we switched the configuration to open on the right side instead of the left). All of which we didn't realize until we got home with this big huge heavy door and managed to get it in our garage.

I called HD and told them to come get our old door and order us a new one. For some reason, they were a whole lot more accommodating with me than Chris.

Fast forward two months, and our new door finally comes in. The guy swears that everything's checked out with it, so Chris goes by and picks it up and brings it home. After getting THAT one out of our truck, we realized it was missing a piece of weather stripping. I called and told them that they could bring me by a replacement piece that day because we weren't driving BACK to HD for just weather stripping. My pregnancy hormones must've been in full gear, because they gladly obliged.

Oh, and they took an extra $107 off the door. Sa-weet.

Well, now the big conundrum is how the heck we're going to install this massive door. There's no way I can hold it being 9 months pregnant, and there's no way Chris can do the door install by himself. So...Chris searched around, found a door installer, and had him all set up and ready to go for the week before last. Happy happy joy joy dance all around.

And then the guy emails, says it wasn't worth his time, and he wasn't interested in doing the job anymore. Yeah, he emailed that the night before he was supposed to get here. Great.

So, Chris called around some more, found a handy-man that charged $25 an hour, and got put on his list. The problem? His first available day was June 9th. My due date is May 30th. Oiy.

But I've taken the approach on whatever gets done before Kalia gets here, gets done. Whatever doesn't wasn't meant to be. June 9th it was.

The guy called this past week and said he had an opening and would we like to be squeezed in. Yes please!!! I was on strict request to hold Kalia in until the front door got installed.

Can you even imagine?! The thought of no front door whatsoever is WAY worse than the thought of a glass front door, but we really wanted that new door installed. And...we're not the type to be able to just sit around and WAIT for things, so...I stopped doing my labor dance and sat on my rear all day long trying to NOT encourage labor to get here.

Here's Chris beaming at lunch time...after they got the old frame out, and the new one in, and it was all plumb!

As you can see, installing new front doors is way more than just taking off the old ones from the hinges and installing new ones!

Do you see the one causality from ripping out the old door?

Apparently the old shoe kick thingy ma bobber (yes, that's my technical term) was screwed into the concrete under the tile, so when it came out, my piece of tile popped right off. Sigh...put it on the to-do list. We really weren't too concerned...we were just excited that our new front door was going in!

And after a loong day (6 hours with the handi-man, 3 extra hours with just Chris), our new front door, with our old hardware, was installed.

Look at how pretty those doors are!!

And here's a VERY happy Chris after the doors are in. Chris helped the handy-man to speed up the process, which saved us a ton of loot in the long run. They worked hard...all.day.long!

This past weekend, we worked on getting the doors finished. On Saturday, I sanded down both doors (Chris doesn't trust himself with a sander and anything expensive just yet), and then we each took a door and stained it. We waited the recommended 4 hours, and then applied another coat of stain on it.

On Sunday, we applied THREE coats of water based (low VOC for Kalia!) spar urethane, which is supposed to be good for interior and exterior wood finishes (most polyurethanes say interior use only), and sanded with 220 grit sandpaper in between each coat. Holy.forever.

We really were hoping that I didn't go into labor during all of this too. If I would've, there would've been boxes blocking the front door instead of hardware because we took all of the hardware back off to do the finishing work. We had a good chuckle on Sunday night, after the hardware was put back on, about our parents being at the hospital and asking for the keys to our house to go check on Kodi. We could just see us telling them "oh, no need...just move the boxes and walk right on in. Hopefully everything is still there!"

This week we fixed the broken tile from out front (it's still not 100% done, we need to re-grout it back in!), painted around the inside frame (the new frame is a little more narrow, so things aren't just a quick and easy replace...booo!), re-installed the trim on the inside, and added in the fill trim to account for the size difference. We still need to go back and add more caulk around the frames, paint the frames, and maybe give the walls one more coat, but this is good enough for now. I just wanted the framing at least on the doors in case Kalia decides to show up soon (please oh please!!!). After all that...here's the result of our hard work!!

We need to find a new runner to put in front of this door too, but for now, we're working with what we've got!

Onto the outside...

On our to-do list is repaint the rest of the house (we did just the back when we were re-doing the pool deck), but that is certainty not something I'm wanting to tackle this weekend, at 39 weeks pregnant!

And here's the full ~~Monty~~ entry-way.

So what do you guys think?! Do you think we're a little crazy to be doing stuff like this with two weeks left till my due date?! I keep saying I'm ready, but now I'm REALLY ready!! I'm so happy with the way these doors came out, and I'm SO THANKFUL for our privacy!!

I might or might not have stopped in front of the door and sang out "I'm in my skivvies, yeah, I'm in my skivvies!!!" while doing some retarded looking form of a dance that's only acceptable for my hubs to see at 38 weeks pregnant. I could be making that up though. You wouldn't know, even if you lived in my neighborhood, because you can't see in anymore!!! Hallelujah!!

Whew...what a long post!! Congratulations if you made it to the end...

Happy Friday everyone!! Can you guys do me a favor and please get your 'labor dance' on for me...this Florida heat is getting to be too much, and I'm a-ready for Kalia to get here.

Hope you guys have a great weekend!

Gevalia Coffee Bean Chat - Take 2 - TODAY!

noreply@blogger.com (Kara) — Thu, 19 May 2011 11:41:00 +0000

I'm re-posting this from last week. Due to technical difficulties, this didn't happen last week, but it's definitely on for 10 a.m. EST TODAY! Details below...

Hey guys!

I'm doing something for the very first time...I'm going to take my lunch break from work early tomorrow and host an hour long chat over on Gevalia Coffee's Bean Chat facebook page.

If you're interested in joining, just go to Gevalia's Facebook page (click here), and on the left hand column side, under their profile picture, click on Bean Chat. The chat starts at 10 a.m. EST, but I think the chat will be open starting at 930 a.m.. I will be talking about lots of different thrifty home improvement topics and sharing some of my projects on there.

Yes, if you know me in real life, it's relatively humerus that I'm doing this. I don't even have a facebook account. I made one for Kara's Korner just so I could login to do this. But hey, I'm always up for trying new things!

Oh, and as an added perk, they're giving away three bags of coffee to bean chat participants! So if you have any questions you'd like for me to answer (live), or just love coffee, head over there and check it out.

Hope everyone has a great Thursday!

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Nursery Room : Love is Blind

noreply@blogger.com (Kara) — Wed, 18 May 2011 11:11:00 +0000

I was hoping to have the final front door post to you guys today, but keeping up with work, my two mile daily walks, and everything else is getting a little rough these days with being 1 week and 5 days from my due date. Hopefully by Friday we'll have it completely done.

Just a reminder from last week, tomorrow I'm taking an early lunch break and hosting Gevalia Coffee's Bean Chat on facebook at 10 a.m. EST. They're giving away three bags of coffee during the chat, so if you want to pop over and chat with me about any of my latest projects, or just like coffee, come join me! I'll post another reminder again tomorrow.

Today though, another nursery post...

One of the finishing things left to do in Kalia's nursery was put up blinds. Unfortunately, the ones we wanted came either 1.5 inches too short, or about 20 inches too long. So, rather than have Kalia's window look like it was wearing pants on that were just a little too short, we went with the longer option. (Side note : My D. Mom used to make my sister and I wear 'tall socks' when we started to outgrow our pants. Maybe that's why I'm not a big fan of pants that are too short! Haha!)

We didn't really want the longer version to bunch up at the bottom though, so we did a little DIYing to make them fit to our window. Which is a standard window by the way...we bought and installed it from the big orange store...so that made the fact that there wasn't blinds to fit the actual window that much more annoying!

I really love the look / feel of textured bamboo blinds. I love that they bring outdoor elements in, and I also thought they would tie in nicely to the baskets that we already have in Kalia's daybed.

I really am going to fix the basket liners soon...really, I am.

To shorten our blinds, first we measured up how far we wanted the bottom of the blinds to hang.

Then Chris took the craft knife and cut along one of the thick bamboo slats. We looked at how the bottom of the blinds were initially put together, and then mimicked it. We wanted to make sure we had enough extra to not lose any of the smaller bamboo pieces, so we cut below where we actually wanted to cut (which was the dark brown big slat), so that we could glue up the excess string.

Like this. It doesn't matter that the glue isn't pretty, this part is getting folded over anyways!

And then we added more glue and folded our bottom piece over top of the brown piece to give a nice clean finished look. It mimics what was previously there perfectly!

FYI, the glue we use is quick grip. I'm too impatient to use much else...that stuff has a super strong hold and dries really quickly too!

Here she is hung in her new home.

I was actually really impressed by how dark they are when they're all the way down too. This picture is horrible because only the overhead light is on, but you can tell the difference that the blinds actually make!

And thankfully, you can see that we still have a little ledge left at the window...so there's not a bunch of excess blinds getting in the way! Woo Hoo!

Anyone else have to modify their 'standard' blinds to fit their standard sized windows or did we get a defective window / blind? What do you think of the bamboo blinds to finish off the window treatments in the nursery? I had initially really wanted to build a valance to go over top of all of this, and maybe one day we'll get back to it, but it was one of the few projects that Chris insisted get crossed off the list for the nursery. The other project was painting stripes on the ceiling! At this rate though, we need to start on nursery #2 before too long!! Oiy!

Hope everyone is having a great week. If you're available, pop over to the Gevalia Bean Chat tomorrow on Facebook from 10-11 a.m. EST to chat along with me. Happy Wednesday!

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Front Door Redo Part 1

noreply@blogger.com (Kara) — Mon, 16 May 2011 10:26:00 +0000

Well, no baby just yet!! Boooo!! All in due time though, right? I just wish my 'due time' was now!!

This week I'm going to show you our front entrance / door redo. With our last house, because it was so much smaller, we were able to just tackle one full project at a time, and not worry about having to go back later to make it the way we wanted it. We did it completely and correctly the very first time.

But this house is bigger. A lot bigger, so things take time to shop around for, and to complete. We can't do everything all at once, and until the past few months, Chris wasn't able to help much due to the whole work full time / school full time thing, so I did as much as I could on my own.

Unfortunately, I don't have a great before picture of our original front door. I redid this prior to my blog days, so taking before and after pictures used to escape my mind quite a bit! I sort of took a picture as I was redoing it, so can semi see the jest of where we started.

Here's the view from the inside...

Another inside view...In this one, note the pink tile in the entry way. Pretty huh?! Blah!

And here's an outside shot. You can see the pink tile on the step part of the door. Oh, and you can see that for some reason, the previous owners changed the left door to open instead of the right. That actually stayed like that for quite some time!

We priced out doors when we first moved in, and the cheapest we could find one in our size was close to $3000. I decided to just use gel stain to redo the door, and put off the whole buying a new front door extravaganza until a later date.

I also decided that re-tiling the entry way would solve at least 80% of what bothered me. The pink, slick tiles were not exactly our style. I started on the tiling job one Sunday morning while Chris was studying for an exam, and told him that I didn't want / need his help because I could do it all on my own.

In our old house, I laid all of the tile for our kitchen and guest bathroom redo, so I've gained quite a bit of experience and felt quite confident in my tile laying abilities. We actually have a pretty good system going when we're both redoing tile...I lay all of the tile, and Chris makes all of the cuts.

Well...I started at about 8 a.m. and laid as much tile as I could, and at 5 p.m. Chris decided he was done studying for the day because he felt so bad for me, and he came outside to help me finish up...which we did at 9 p.m.. Why I thought this would just be a one-day job solo is beyond me. Things are always better together, right?!

So after some new tile laying, removing the old hardware, installing new hardware, getting rid of those ugly gold kick plates, and gel-staining the old front door, our entry way looked like this :

This is the only horrible picture I managed to snap of the inside. Oops!

Which is how it stayed for the past year and a half. I didn't do the greatest job with applying my gel stain. It was the first time I'd ever used the stuff, and I put it on entirely too thick, and didn't do a second coat. Wrong wrong wrong way to apply gel stain! Live and learn though, right?

The main problem with these doors is the glass though. One, when you walk into the house, our bedroom goes off to the right, and the kitchen goes off to the left. I can't tell you how many times we've peaked out from our bedroom hallway to see if anyone was out front and then took off running to get something from the kitchen in our skivvies. Which, as you can imagine, has become quite the challenge to 'run' with my 9 month pregnant body I'm rocking! Two, the previous owners actually cracked the glass when they were moving their stuff out, so the front doors are actually a huge safety concern for when Kalia gets old enough to pull herself up and crawl around.

Plus, I like the idea of not having to answer the door if I don't want to. With the glass doors, you'd literally have to hide if you didn't want to answer the door, which we did occasionally do. And it's weird when your neighbor comes by to chat with you and tells you that she saw all of the wonderful gifts that you got from your baby shower in your living room. Yeah, she saw them through our glass. Slightly creepy. We do have great neighbors, but still...I don't want everyone to be able to see in my living room when they so please!

So getting new doors was the very last thing on our to-do list before Kalia got here. We've actually been in the process of doing this for MONTHS, but that post is for another day. Stay tuned to see what we wound up with!!

Hope everyone had a great weekend! Happy Monday!! Only TWO weeks left till my due date--woot woot!!

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Tray and Paper Towel Holder Makeover

noreply@blogger.com (Kara) — Fri, 13 May 2011 10:04:00 +0000

I think I can chum this next project up to nesting. I have other 'to-do' projects that are more important, but this one was quick, easy, and more of the instant gratification type.

We have a coffee zone area on our kitchen counter-tops. I don't know why, but it bothers me that everything just sits along the back of the counter-top. I wanted a coffee station, not just a coffee zone. So I grabbed an old serving tray that we rarely use, decided to give it a face-lift, and make my own coffee station.

I took the blue metallic paint that I used to do the faux granite counter-tops in Kalia's bathroom and painted the edge of the tray.

Then I found some orange scrap paper that I had laying around, decoupaged it to the tray in a pattern I liked, and voila.

A tray that's much more our style. Orange and Blue...oh yeah baby! Go Gator's!

I decided while I was redoing this that our paper towel holder needed a face-lift too.

I mean, really, who couldn't use a little more blue and orange in their lives / home, right?!

So I painted that little tile the same metallic blue.

And then I cut out a piece of orange scrapbook paper, gave it a monogrammed H for our last name, and voila!

Here they are in action :

Oh yes, loving my new coffee station!!

Our coffee mugs are up in those tall cabinets, so I officially have a coffee station now with a coordinating paper towel holder. It seriously took zero time to do...the longest step was letting it dry between coats (I used two coats of decoupage). Oh, and Chris finally hung our kitchen calendar that we got from Hawaii. You know, 4 months later. Hey...better late than never, right?!

Happy Friday everyone!! We have a big project that we hope to get done this weekend (yes, I know I said my projecting was done...don't worry, Chris has done all of the heavy stuff!), so stay tuned to see if we're still around to show you it on Monday. Personally, I hope we're not, and I hope Kalia's here instead!!

Have a great weekend!

Gevalia Coffee Bean Chat

noreply@blogger.com (Kara) — Wed, 11 May 2011 23:56:00 +0000

Hey guys!

I'm doing something for the very first time...I'm going to take my lunch break from work early tomorrow and host an hour long chat over on Gevalia Coffee's Bean Chat facebook page.

If you're interested in joining, just go to Gevalia's Facebook page (click here), and on the left hand column side, under their profile picture, click on Bean Chat. The chat starts at 10 a.m. EST, but I think the chat will be open starting at 930 a.m.. I will be talking about lots of different thrifty home improvement topics and sharing some of my projects on there.

Yes, if you know me in real life, it's relatively humerus that I'm doing this. I don't even have a facebook account. I made one for Kara's Korner just so I could login to do this. But hey, I'm always up for trying new things!

Oh, and as an added perk, they're giving away three bags of coffee to bean chat participants! So if you have any questions you'd like for me to answer (live), or just love coffee, head over there and check it out.

Hope everyone has a great Thursday!

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Dining Room Updates

noreply@blogger.com (Kara) — Wed, 11 May 2011 10:44:00 +0000

I don't think I've shown you guys our dining room. On my list of things to do is to add a page for our house tour with this blog, so hopefully you'll see our entire home at some point.

Here's what our formal dining room looked like with the previous owners stuff :

We hosted Thanksgiving at our home the very first year we moved in, so we painted the walls (pretty much the same color, but it brightened it up), painted the baseboards white, added furniture (dining room table, buffet, chairs), added a rug and curtains. (And by we, I mean mainly me...this was during Chris's first Fall semester, and he was in full fledged work full time, get his MSEE full time, and go to Gator Football games full time mode!) We moved in in April of 2009, and by November of 2009, this is what the dining room, with the table set, looked like :

This was prior to my blogging days, so please forgive the lack of full room shots. Here's what the room looked like with our very first Thanksgiving guests :

Notice the empty walls? Yeah...we ran out of steam / energy / money / care to do anything else in this room after that year. I had a ton of ideas for what I wanted in there, but other projects became more important.

Well, the weekend before last, while we were out closing out Kalia's registry items, we came across a mirror from Pier 1 for $20. A nice, mirror, cool shaped mirror...for $20. Yes, please, I'll take it! The reason it was $20 (instead of the initial $199)?! It was a vanity/dresser mirror that no longer had said dresser / vanity to go with it.

Easy solution. We just measured and attached our own hardware on the back.

Oh, and it had some scratches / dings on it, which were all fixable. Just a little stain later, and the mirror was good as new. My preggo brain forgot to take any good before shots of this...sorry!!

I told Chris I wanted to white wash or yellow wash it so the wood itself didn't just blend in...to give it more pop, but Chris put his foot down. He said we're hanging the mirror, and if after Kalia gets here, you want to tackle another project, fine...but this looks good enough the way it is.

It actually amazingly matches our dining room furniture really well. And those two picture frame ladders on either side we've had for forever. They've been in a closet since we moved here, just waiting to find the perfect spot.

Do you see those two little books on top of the buffet?

I got the red one for our first Thanksgiving and had everyone write down what they're thankful for that year. Not only is it a good way to reflect back on the year, and for us to look back at who celebrated what holidays with us, it's a great keepsake memorabilia that I know we'll keep for forever and read through. The very first entry in there is my Papaw, who passed away the day before we left for Hawaii. He wrote in our book " God has blessed me with so very much. The thing I'm most thankful for is a loving family. Pop Paw Hannan". I'd write more on how great of a man my Pop Paw was, but my pregnancy hormones are kicking in, and I need to move on or I'm not going to finish this post!

Whew...anyways, the brown book my Dad and T. Mom got me for Christmas, so once the red book gets filled, we'll move onto the cool brown one. Such a fun way to preserve family get togethers!

Here's a shot of the entire dining room, which is what we see when we walk in from the garage :

For those of you that are super observant, yes, there is a dining room chair missing. It's in the daybed room parked in front of my sewing machine, so that when I get motivated to sew, everything's all ready. I think the chair is collecting dust in there these days.

Notice that cool little box on the right of the picture? It's a R&Y Augousti desk box that I won in a giveaway from Elizabeth Sullivan's Blog. She's the interior designer whose idea I ~~stole~~ copied to make my nursery room bookshelves. It was such a cool, fun thing to win because it's definitely not anything I'd normally feel justified spending the $$ on, but to win a unique piece? Sign.me.up!

And yes, the expansive wall on the other side of the dining room is like the elephant in the room. It's huge and empty still, but hey, one wall at a time, right?! I actually know pretty much exactly what I want to do on the other side...you know, one day!

So what do you guys think of our dining room? I know a lot of people have given up on the idea of formal dining rooms to have more 'fun' rooms, but a formal dining room was important for us. We have so much family and love the idea of being able to host family dinners on our own! To give you perspective, this room sits caddy corner to my horrible Palm-Tree-room-that-will-someday-become-a-game-room.

Hope everyone's having a great week so far! Happy Wednesday!

Tree Movers Take 2

noreply@blogger.com (Kara) — Mon, 09 May 2011 11:11:00 +0000

Soo...raise your hand if you think it's a good idea for a 37 week preggo lady to move a big 'ol tree?!?!

Anyone?!

Only me? Really?

Yeah...I figured as much.

My brain doesn't follow my body so well, and as I'm wrapping up the end of my pregnancy and getting so tired of not being able to do things that I normally could do, my brain is going crazy. Seriously. I spent Thursday / Friday mainly in bed because I wasn't feeling well and was so exhausted, and then Saturday I up and decided we needed to move a big 'ol tree TODAY. That was enough of this laying around crapola.

Actually, we did a bunch of stuff around the house all day, and then floated in the pool for about an hour before I decided it was time to get to work. Restless exhaustion at its finest!

See this tree?

Now you don't!

That tree had driven us bonkers (that might be my new favorite word, sorry!) for quite awhile. It grows like crazy, which is great, but not so much when it grows on your roof and your neighbors roof. And your neighbor is the kindest sweetest funniest oldish woman that doesn't do much of her own yard work at all. I planted a Magnolia tree for her last summer because she asked if she could borrow my tiny little hand shovel to dig out a hole to plant it. Her plan was to dig a little bit at a time until she had enough dug out to put the Magnolia tree in the hole. Which sounded absurd to me, so I just did it for her. Point being, she ~~loves~~ loved that tree there (I mean, adamantly loved), but we did not love cutting it off of both of our roofs every few weeks.

We have visions for our back corner area of our fenced in yard being a sort of garden / tree / shade area. We started making it this way last March when we moved a few trees back here. We moved 2 Magnolia trees, 2 Maple trees, and whatever that big huge pink thing is back there that I love. Only one of the Maples and the pink thing survived. Both Magnolia's died. I secretly think Chris was back there peeing on them every day to make sure they died because he hates Magnolia trees (something to do with childhood trauma and having to clean up millions of leaves).

Anyways, after a little of this :

And some of this...

Hey...nothing like putting some of my newfound preggo weight to good use here!!

We got...giranimo!!!!

(We took a time out to remove the fence panel before actually heaving this bad boy over. So much easier to carry around the back yard than all the way around the front yard!)

We rinsed out all of the dirt to make it a bit lighter...

Woop! Happy Hubs! Tree is down!!

Next came the hard part...dragging the stupid thing to the back corner. We made it about 1/4th of the way there before taking a break.

I honestly thought the tree might stay here for the night. That thing was heavy, and poor Chris was heave-ho-ing most of the weight. I managed to be somewhat helpful up until this point, but once we took the break, my legs did not want to do squats anymore to pick this thing up. Because any of you that are pregnant or ever have been pregnant know that when you're this far along, you do not bend over, you do squats. If you bend over, there's a high possibility that you could topple over forwards and never recover.

But...we were determined, and in the end, this tree made it to the back. I might or might not have said "I wish you were Hulk Hogan" to my hubs at some point during this. He might or might not have responded back with something or another about not being able to take the physco out of wife regardless of how pregnant I am. Awww...the love we have for each other!! At least we make each other laugh a lot!

We dug a big huge hole, and after a few unsuccessful tries, managed to get the thing standing upright and covered in dirt.

I think the angle I took this at makes it look crooked. Or maybe it's crooked looking from the back...it doesn't look that way from the front!

That's a view of the tree from the back. You can see how massive it is from this point of view. I don't know why I thought it'd be no big deal to move it. Chris might have a point on the physco wife thing.

Oh, and the entire reason that we moved that tree was because of this one...

This is Kalia's Mango tree that we planted. It's supposed to get really big, so we needed another really big tree on the other side of it to balance it out. I think we're technically supposed to wait until Kalia gets here before planting a tree for her, but we're so close, and completely ready!

Here's how the back tree area looks with both of these in their new homes...

Kalia's mango tree has some catching up to do. Oh, and we moved that flower bush thing back there on Friday night too, but that wasn't as much of an effort. The big huge tree on the right took the cake. Now if only the grass would magically fill itself in...

Hope everyone had a great weekend and a great Mother's Day!! My boys cooked me breakfast, lunch, dinner, and dessert, and Kodi even floated in the pool with me. Kodi and I soaked up our last Mother's Day together with it just being him and I! (Yes, we really have a dog that will lay in a float and float around...it's the funniest thing ever. To see it click on the link above).

Happy Monday!

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Happy Mother's Day AND a Sunday Funny!!

noreply@blogger.com (Kara) — Sun, 08 May 2011 09:25:00 +0000

I just wanted to drop in really quick to say Happy Mother's Day to all you wonderful Momma's (including all of mine!!!) out there!

I'm posting my first ever video on here as a Sunday Funny, which I thought was perfect for Mother's Day. Only because it's me videoing my first born a year and a half ago. Furry sons count as first born's...he's given us lots and lots of practice!!

Before you view it, you should know that Kodi is a lot like his Momma. He's accident prone (I can't even tell you the number of bones I've broken, scars I have, or times I've had surgery for one random thing or another...at one point I had both my right hand and left leg in a cast...and no, I wasn't in a car accident. It just happens.).

Kodi's got the most sensitive pads of any dog ever. He runs on the grass, because if he runs on pavement or concrete, his pads tear open. My T. Mom got him 'shoes' a few years ago to try to see if those would help. I completely forgot that I recorded his first ever 'trial run' with these 'shoes' on.

It was my first time using the video camera, so please ignore the bad lighting and hopefully it doesn't make you too dizzy. It's too funny to not share! It's my first time uploading any video from this video camera too, and I have no idea how to edit it down to be a smaller clip size, so just close out of it when you've had enough Kodi. I'm not sure it's possible to get enough Kodi, but I 'spose you might not all feel the same way!

Hopefully I'll be a little bit nicer with Kalia...I'm pretty sure I'm not winning any Mother of the Year Awards with postings like these!!

Hope everyone's enjoying their day!! Oh, and one last thing...Sassy Sites is featuring me on their Sunday Spotlight today!! What a fun soon-to-be Mother Mother's Day surprise! Go over there and check it out!

Happy Sunday!

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Pool Deck Additions

noreply@blogger.com (Kara) — Wed, 04 May 2011 11:01:00 +0000

Our pool deck area is slowly, but surely becoming one of my favorite spots in our home. It might have something to do with the fact that I can't get cool enough no matter what I try with this ever-growing body, so the pool feels awesome... maybe combined with my new found love of floating around in the pool to take pressure off of this big 'ol body I'm rocking these days, or it just might be that our pool deck is awesome. It's probably a combo of the two.

We looked around for new pool deck furniture and decided that wasn't in the budget right now. Realistically, we can make half of what we want, and we can just be patient and wait until that time comes. There are a handful of things that we did go ahead and purchase for out there though that make it so much nicer.

I showed you the finished redone pool deck back in April. One of the things that's driven me bonkers about this outside area is the placement of the fan with relation to our table.

I guess only the person sitting on the end really needs to be cooled by the fan the way we had it setup previously. Easy solution though, right? Just move the table underneath the fan! Yes, it takes me awhile to figure things out sometimes...I'm a little slow.

It leaves a bit of an empty area between the big table and the chairs we have in front of our bedroom doors, but I have a vision for what I want to go there. I actually have something I'm going to work on to put as filler for now (assuming I don't go into labor prior to getting around to it! stay tuned!), but my end vision for that area is for Chris and I to build a little kids table and put it in there so Kalia + future kiddos + future little friends have their very own table to sit at. We go back and forth on whether or not to just build a couch for out here, but I think the table is more practical for us.

Oh, do you see my little pop of color that I added to our sitting area?

I just cut a few flowers from the trees in the back and put it in a vase. This deck desperately needs more color, but this was the only thing I could do for free for right now.

Allright, back to the big table area. If you look to your right from there, you'll see what used to be our outdoor kitchen area. It still needs a ton ton of work, but I've got a design in my head that I've got to draw out and then we'll get to fixing it up. In the meantime though, it got updated with a new deckbox.

Oh yeah, and we're using our sink plumbing as a towel rack. Hey...it works! We keep one towel out here all of the time to dry Kodi off with. He has his own towels, and that dog loves him some towel time.

The deckbox is great because it's sturdy enough to sit on, and it hides some of our ugly holes that previously existed here from ripping out our old outdoor kitchen area. Chris was so excited to get that deck box this past weekend because he had big plans on what he was going to fill it up with.

Hmmm...I don't know that I would call that full...but if the hubs is happy, I'm happy. Actually, you can't see the tubes of the pool cleaner in here because they're lined up against the inside, but that was Chris's objective. To get a big box to put Howie (the pool cleaner) in along with some other pool deck stuff. Big boxes to store junk...right up my ally!

My plans for this area include a sink, but do not include a grill, so this box is hiding our need to stucco up the wall, which is perfect. It might stay like that for awhile!

Continuing to the right from here is our grill and hose area.

For the longest time, we just had a hose that we threw against the wall here. Well, I threw it, and Chris would try to ravel it up nicely. We both absolutely love our 'hose pot'.

We got it from Restoration Hardware. It looks like a cool planter out there, ties in with the blues and grays we've got going on, and completely hides the hose unless you're right on top of it. On top of all of that, it's pretty easy to keep the hose organized and pretty looking in there...if it wasn't easy, I wouldn't use it. I'm all about the easy factor! And of course we love our grill cover...Go Gator's! There's actually a really pretty looking Weber grill underneath there too, but with the Florida afternoon rains and humidity, the only way to keep it looking pretty is to add a cover. No biggie...we love showing our Gator Pride!!

Continuing to the right from there, we come to our latest and greatest addition.

Our brand new hammock. I might be so enamored with this because of the whole pregnancy thing, but this bad boy is the most comfortable thing ever.

I call it our boat. We spent Sunday setting this bad boy up, and moving him around. Initially we thought we'd want it in front of our bedroom area where the two chairs are, and it fit there, but it seemed kind of cramped. By the time we got it all setup and in position, it was almost dark, so we ate dinner, and then went out here and looked at the stars for at least an hour before coming into bed. I think I want this thing to be my new bed. I can lay on my back without feeling like it's going to break.

Oh, and Chris's deck box did get a little fuller. When we're not using this, we just unclip the hammock and put that portion into the box. Which really leaves us looking like we have a boat out here.

I added the empty planters back out there even though they're...well, empty. We've got to either make or buy some of the elevated wheeled caster things to set these on so that when we water whatever plants are inside of them, we don't leave dirt just puddled up underneath the planters. We've also got to get some plants to go in here...all in due time though!

Oh, and because everything is in the details, another one of my favorite elements out here is this guy :

My Dad and T. Mom got him for me for my birthday a few years back, and he just makes me smile. He's the turtle equivalent of Kodi. He looks beyond happy that he's about to jump into the pool.

See? The smiles are similar! Kodi's just happy that it's pool weather again. If it's going to be 90+ degrees while I'm 9+ months pregnant, I'm beyond happy that we have this pool area. Picture that smile on my face. Or don't...that might be creepy...

So what do you think of our additions so far to the pool area? Anyone else getting outside and soaking up some rays? Is it Friday yet?! I'm ready to head back out here!

Hope everyone's having a great week so far!

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