Adventures in Meditation

I've always been a crazy busy person. With a full time job doing events, a part time wedding coordination business, volunteer roles, keeping up a house and just keeping up family and friends, people ask me how in the world do I get everything done?

Well, I don't. I'm reading Sheryl Sandberg's Lean In where she talks about not doing everything - she focuses on what's important.

In the past few weeks, I've realized that I need to make myself more important during all this crazy scheduling. So I started getting up a little bit earlier each day to walk 40 minutes on the treadmill. It's only been a week and I missed the weekend, but I was back this morning and still focused on that goal.

When we got back from Disney, I heard about an app called Headspace. It's free for the first ten days and then a subscription but I have fallen in love with it, so I'm paying for it (something like the cost of two coffees a month). I'm not even getting paid to talk about this app but I do really think it's doing something good for me.

I'm focusing on the daily meditation thing for ten minutes each morning. It's apparently just the right amount of time for my hair to dry in the towel while I'm getting ready after my treadmill walking.

So by the time 8 am rolls around and I'm heading into the office, I've already walked for 40 minutes or so and taken ten minutes of quiet time for me, just to be still. It's been so amazing for me and my psyche.

Do you take time every day to just sit and be still?

Adventures in House Tours, part three

The first two parts of the tour of the first floor are here and here.

The second floor of our house is what they call a half story – it’s set into the attic and into the dormers of the house which you can see from the front. It’s a neat way to get more bedrooms upstairs and get all your space. I had no idea that these types of houses existed when we started looking but we are so glad we found it!

Walking up the stairs, there’s a landing at the top that leads to three bedrooms and a full bath. Hubs has his office to the right…

 

Straight ahead from the stairs is my craft room and office. It takes up a majority of the back of the house and looks out onto the backyard. With the built in shelving, it is perfect for my crafting supplies and wedding biz stuff.

The full bathroom upstairs is decorated with a celestial theme with a bit of Disney thrown in for good luck.

The final room upstairs is the guest bedroom, which still needs some decorating help. You can see from a few of these pictures the dormer that both the guest bedroom and Hubs’ office has at the front of the house. It’s just perfect for a place to sit and relax. It’s one of the best places in the house!

We absolutely love our new home! We have already replaced a bunch of things that aren’t quite to our liking and started updating things that need some work, like the patio doors and the landscaping. It’s crazy to think that we’re heading into the summer and about to celebrate one year in our home. Time flies when you’re a homeowner!

Adventures in House Tours, part two

When last I got my big girl camera out to take real pictures, we saw the living room, dining room, sitting room and kitchen, plus the front yard and back yard. That post is here.

On this lovely snow day, I decided to get some shots of the rest of the first floor. Around the corner from the sitting room, and directly behind the main staircase is another foyer. In it, there’s access to the basement, a coat closer and double linen closet that serves as half storage for entertaining things (crockpot, rice cooker, extra red solo cups, etc) and half linen closet for the master bedroom since there isn’t one in the bathroom.

Next to that linen closet is the guest bathroom, the only half bath in the house.

We managed to get most of the awful wallpaper off these walls, albeit in very close quarters with my father-in-law, over the Fourth of July, but we couldn’t finish the job. This is one of the rooms that the professional painter handled for us while we were on vacation to Seattle.

I highly recommend buying a house, starting a project and get halfway through, leaving for a fabulous vacation, having your mother-in-law let the painters in to your new house, and return to a freshly painted house. It’s pretty awesome.

 

Off that same foyer, there’s the master bedroom suite. It’s a bit strange to have it right off the kitchen and on the first floor, but growing up, my houses mostly had first floor master bedrooms so it’s kind of like I remember. Some people find it strange because most houses in our area have all the bedrooms upstairs. I have to say it’s amazing to be 15 paces from my bed to the Keurig in the kitchen. Nice.

This is another room we painted, and removed the floral border (by me, I mean the professionals). We still have the former owner’s window coverings in this room because we just haven’t gotten around to dealing with them yet. The awesome thing about this room was that floral pattern on the window treatment.

Imagine this with me… white walls, and that yellow-blue floral design on the windows, on the bed, on the border around the room. And then turn around and walk into the master bathroom. The border continued in there on top of white walls. There was a matching shower curtain and – matching toilet seat cover. We still have that one in the basement, if anyone is looking to buy one with a pink tulip on it!

 

We decided to make some changes in the master bathroom. The toilet seat cover and old shower curtain are gone, as is the border. We painted this room the same yellow as in the sitting room because we had an extra gallon from that project. I think it’s nice and bright!

The other positive about this bathroom is the double sink. We’ve had a chance to share a sink at a friend’s house or a hotel and goodness, how you get spoiled with your own sink in the morning! It’s lovely.

 

I like to say this closet is why we bought the house. It’s the same length as the bathroom it shares the left wall with and is rather wide – not quite enough room for us both to be in there choosing clothes, but do-able. We could even clear it out and put a small nursery in there if we wanted! It’s amazing and I can see my whole wardrobe in one glance. It needs some reorganizing already and I’m sure we’ll have to add some more shelving soon, but it’s wonderful to have all that space.

So that’s our first floor. It’s where we spend most of our time and we’re pretty much in love.

Adventures in New Decorations

With a new house comes all kinds of possibilities – where to put the couch, how to arrange the master bedroom, are we going to fit all our stuff in the tiny pantry. The usual!

Plus, when the holidays come around, how are we going to decorate the brand new place? When we first saw our house last Memorial Day weekend, I knew that I wanted to put lights on our holly bush outside plus candles in the dormer windows. It would be so perfect!

The inside of the house was more of a question. We had the big fireplace in the sitting room that would have the nativity on the mantle and the stockings hung below. We figured the tree would go in there too, because there was room. Turns out we had a ton of decorations and didn’t have to buy a lot for the new place, except for some ribbon to decorate the outside wreaths with.

That’s when Husband had a great idea – he took ribbon and some extra decorations from the wreaths and brought some color to our staircase!

We took the wide red ribbon from Costco and wrapped it around the handrail on each side of the stairs. We put a small piece of tape at the top of bottom to secure it, but the rest was wrapped around the balustrades.

The red and silver clusters are just stuck in the ribbon. We probably should have taped them down because holiday visitors under the age of 5 really loved playing with them!

I love going up and down the stairs, even if we don’t have a handrail to hold onto. It’s just so festive! Plus, we hung our holiday cards on the same ribbon going down the hallway to the right of the stairs so they are always in sight.

The first Christmas in our house was a good one!

Adventures in House Tours, part one

Welcome to our new home!

Since we closed on our first house back in July, we've been slowly getting the place in order. Unpacking boxes, moving furniture around, hanging pictures and slowly removing every single decorative flower in the house. The woman who owned the house before us had a thing for pink tulips and they manifest themselves everywhere - in the sidelights next to the pink front door, wallpaper and its borders in multiple rooms, window dressings, shower curtains and even toilet seat covers. It's quite impressive, actually. I have a whole collection of soft goods in the basement if you're interested!

I promised a house tour and I finally had part of the house clean enough to take pictures last weekend.

I can see lots of fun decorations on our front door in the coming seasons! However, that mauve pink on the door and the shutters will be going away next spring, I hope. Now, to choose a color!

When you walk in, the dining room is on the right hand side. The painting of Paris has been with us since our rental house a few years ago and we love it. It makes us want to go back every time we see it!

The dining room has a cut through into the kitchen. The wall with the painting on the right has the garage on the other side of it.

The dining room table and chairs, with the cabinet, came from my in-laws. That has been their dining room set for years and now its ours! Lots of memories with this furniture. The china in the hutch is also from my in-laws - so excited to have service for 12 now! I loved the Noritake pattern we chose for our wedding but we only have service for 5 in that one, and not nearly all the pieces. I hope that we can grow that pattern over the next few years because it would be great to have two! The blue china from our wedding would be amazing for Christmas, with blues and silver.

So when you walk in with the dining room on the right, this is the stairs to the second floor and the hallway to the back of the house, with the sitting room, powder bath and master suite.

If you turn left instead of right, that's our living room.

Complete with our family shrine - I am pretty sure that between the pictures displayed on the cabinet on the left and the table on the right, we might have everyone represented.

This is a good look from the corner of the living room across the whole front of the house. We love the double windows in both rooms and the great light it gets. We installed black out blinds in the living room so we can close 'em up and get it nice and dark for movies on the couch. It's the best.

One thing the old homeowner left behind (besides the window treatments and pink tulips everywhere) was this picture. It's an ink drawing of the house when it was about 10 years old. We absolutely love it! It's hanging in the main hallway and I think we'll leave it there until it's time for us to sell the place. Then, it will be there for the next owner. It's a really nice touch.

At the end of the main hallway, we have a small cabinet and more pictures. There's a castle cutout with the quote "To all who come to this happy place, WELCOME!" My in-laws presented me with this at our housewarming. I definitely cried.

Around the corner from the cabinet above, and in the back of the house is our yellow sitting room. I'm in love with our white fireplace that was like that when we moved in! We left the window treatments and decorated around them.

This is where our books live and the chairs from Weekends Only makes it a perfect nook for hanging out. It also opens into our kitchen which is exactly what we wanted.

Not quite as much counter space or cabinets as we would have hoped for but with those stainless steel appliances that were bought for the house before we put our offer in, how can I complain?!

The kitchen also has an eat-in kitchen. Love!

The door to the left is a double French door that leads out to the back patio.

We haven't done a lot to the outside, other than our small patio furniture and Hubs' new grill, but we will.

We've noticed that there are a ton of leaves that gather due to that big tree in the middle. It was so beautiful when the leaves turned but they fell so fast I couldn't get pictures. There's always next year!

There is plenty of space back here for expanding the patio or installing some kind of garden. We are really excited about the space!

The bedrooms and bathrooms are next!

Adventures in Warming a New Home

My new home is very, very, very warm. :)

We had our housewarming party yesterday and saw so many wonderful friends and co-workers happy smiling faces filling our new home. I feel very loved.

Everyone came bearing gifts - which I totally did not expect! We have a great supply of wines of all colors, little Disney knick-knacks to decorate our mantle and bookshelves, gift cards to the home improvement stores, and a very sweet set of things that might seem incongruous, but with the poem really made me cry.

Blessings for a New Home:

Bread - that this house may never know hunger.
Salt - that life may always have flavor.
Wine - that joy and prosperity may reign forever. 

There of course was bread and salt in the bag, and the biggest magnum of Riesling wine I'd ever seen! Along with those things, there were fall-themed kitchen towels and a pot holder. To add to it, she gave us a fluffy blanket to "warm" our new home. 

The blessing is from It's a Wonderful Life which I guess I should go watch now, huh? What an incredibly sweet present. I think I might end up making this my go-to housewarming gift.

P.S. I promise when my house is cleaned up after the party, I will take pictures and show you the new place!

Adventures in Unpacking

I had intended to do a long post today about the beautiful new home that we moved into earlier in the summer. However, there are boxes everywhere, the laundry is piling up, and wouldn’t you know it, this house is getting dirty just like the last one! I actually had to swifter the bathroom floor because of the weeks of me doing my hair on a tile floor. I shed a lot, apparently.

There are a few things I’m loving about the new place…

There is enough room in the kitchen to have a TON of boxes… and we were still ok to move around. Sort of. All of these boxes are gone, thank goodness!

I don’t quite love this part – the master bedroom closet came crashing down the day after we moved in. My dear husband went to the home improvement store (our home away from home now) and bought some additional support and was able to reinstall it. We need to do the same for my side of the closet.

 

Husband and I actually eat together at our kitchen table! There’s a dining room table as well, but this is in our breakfast nook in the kitchen. It’s the perfect place to keep the bananas, even though there aren’t any in this picture. The picture frame was from the townhouse and we used it to hang up our keys when we walked in. Not quite sure where it will end up in the new house, so for now, it’s actually leaning against the wall. Just like all the other artwork in the house. It’ll go up eventually.

My brand new gas stove. I love cooking with gas again! I always seemed to burn things on electric.

And of course, my favorite place – the coffee spot. It’s got a place of honor right on the counter, around the corner from our master bedroom. I’m in love.

 

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So we are getting settled, still unpacking boxes and trying to remember where we put a certain thing when we end up needing it. I was organized in the townhouse but it’s hard with so many more places that things can go. It’s a good problem to have, but I need to reinstate my organizing system in the new place!