Home Improvements and other randomness

It's been a while since I've provided any sort of updates to this blog. I've been busy with work, life, miscellaneous things that I have nothing to show for, and clearly not busy with providing my loyal (+/- 3) readers with what we have been up to for the last month.One thing I have found is a place to make random collages... haha, so you get to be the first to look at my fairly terrible skills in putting together photos. (Whenever I type "skills" I find it hard to keep myself from writing skillz and singing All-4-One in my head). Although as you will soon see, I do NOT so much have these skillZ.

One fun project I had been super excited about trying was chalkboard paint. I had seen a couple of awesome examples of how to use it, and I had been wanting a place to try it for a long time. Luckily John is just as excited about "art" projects too, so on a cold March weekend we decided to test it out in our bedroom. We thought it would be best to try it in a room we hadn't painted yet, so in case we didn't like it, we weren't really wasting time already spent with fresh paint. So below is our before and after... plus a little m+j action to test it out!


Then, just for the fun sake of collages, I put one together of the Sheebs. :) We are hoping that she will be on the website for PAWS soon so that we can find her a really happy and loving home... I like the one on the bottom left because apparently it was taken by John when he came home one night.. I like to lay down, and try to leave enough room for Sheebs to share the couch... I'm happy to know that she totally uses it, and she does NOT eat our pillows while I'm snoozing. :)


Now to showcase some of the fun projects we've been doing around the house (aside from the chalkboard paint). In our spare room we have been trying to figure out what we can do to get some better use of space. We are going to be getting rid of the wardrobe that we have in there currently. (hopefully we can sell it on craigslist soon!) So, we made a trip to The Container Store a while back on a whim. We were wanting to get rid of John's broken dresser so we were getting some wire shelves to put in our closet for the few things that he keeps in there. It turns out they were having a pretty ridiculous sale on Elfa systems so we decided to get a few shelves to line one of our walls in order to get some space to put the immense number of random objects from our wardrobe. Then we decided we should absolutely put them up! I was so proud of us for actually installing them so soon after buying them. No procrastination there! They were totally worth it, and we do love them.. Although we need to get some serious organization on to make them look uncluttered and not so full. We also need to get some of the junk in our spare room cleared out so that it doesn't look so cluttered in general. Any suggestions? I thnk the #1 suggestion should be to eliminate how much we own... that would be true.

John using the laser-level for us to make sure our penciled holes are going to be level. We did a pretty good job. (Note: The green walls will be painted one of these days... I'm excited for that day)

Martinis do make the job go better... We waited to drink them until after our leveling.

Our final product on the wall!!!

Yes, the shelves are currently very bottom heavy, but we are working on pairing some of that down and reorganizing. It just shows how much they can hold.. It's amazing!

The expanded shelves for our pantry. I'm so excited to be able to put all of our small appliances in there!!

So those are some of the fun things that we've done lately. This weekend has been pretty laid back for us and it was awesome. John had a fun beer tasting at a friends house, I was lucky enough to hang out with the Sheebs for the evening and watch really high quality tv (NCIS, Fried Green Tomatoes, Criminal Minds). Then this morning I made these:

Crepes a la Frenchy!

While looking at this:

The view from our front window...

So that's about all that's going on over this way. Work is busy, life is pretty busy, and the summer is supposedly getting started. I'll believe it when it doesn't keep dipping to 30 degrees outside. On a random note, we were able to take advantage of one of the best parts of living by Wrigley Field yesterday - as John and I left brunch yesterday morning, we walked by a guy on the corner selling tickets for 1/2 price. We ended up walking into the game for a total of $30 in the 2nd inning and watching the Cubs get their first win of the season! It was a great time. :)