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Empty House

I can’t believe that we’ve been in the new house a week already! It feels like we’ve been here longer than that. I guess because we spent a month and a half dreaming about it before we could actually move in. We’ve done a lot this week though. The previous owner left a ridiculous amount of nail holes, nails, and other hanging devices in every single wall. I took all those out, patched them up and repainted over those spots on the walls.  We got our new couch delivered! I planted the windowbox, we built shelves in two of the closets, we hung a curtain rod and the pink curtains from my old dorm room in my office, Drew took apart and fixed the dryer, the handyman came and fixed two outlets, patched up some of the walls, caulked around the tub and did some other minor repairs as well. My mom bought me a bed frame for the bed for my birthday, so the bed is no longer on the floor. We’ve gotten a good amount of our stuff unpacked and bought little various things for the house. I’ve also picked out nice and also inexpensive bookcases for the hallway and found the perfect desk that I’ve been wanting! (although they aren’t here yet) So needless to say, it has been a busy week! Drew has also been working all week and I’ve babysat and worked on several design projects that I have going at the moment. It does feel like maybe things are starting to settle down a bit.

However, let’s rewind a bit, shall we? Before all these things got done, we moved into an empty house. Would you like a tour of it before we moved anything in? I gave a tour of it, here, when the previous tenant still lived there and you can see the house will all her stuff in it, but since it will look totally different with our stuff in it, I think it is nice to start with a blank slate of pictures for comparison down the road.

Here we go:

Open the door and this is the view of the foyer. (For pictures of the outside, stairway, and our door, see the first house tour.)

This is the foyer looking back towards the door. I just love those windows and the hardwood floors!

The foyer has red French doors that open into the living room. See all the sunlight that fills the space? There weren’t any lights on when I took these pictures.

This is a view from the other side of the living room looking back into the foyer.

A view over to the side where the couch will be. (or actually, where it already is)


This view is from the same side, looking into the living room and on into the foyer from the hallway.

This is the hallway right off the side of the living room that runs all the way down the house. The kitchen is the first door on the right, the smaller bedroom/office is the second door and then at the end of the hallway is the laundry room. At the laundry room, the hallway turns to the right and straight into the bathroom with the second bedroom being on the left.

This is the view in the first door off the hallway–the kitchen. See, still lots of sunlight.

The kitchen is pretty big actually. There is room for our little round table and chairs under the window. The door open on the right is the pantry. However, Drew’s favorite thing about this room is the dishwasher.

This is the same wall with the pantry on it. The door closer to the front is a private stairway that goes outside. We are pretty much just using it for storage. You can see a view inside it in the old house tour, here.

The kitchen!

View into the smaller bedroom/office.

This is the far left corner of the room as you walk in. A nice little nook area.

The corner looking back towards the door.

Another look back towards the door, with the closet as well.

As you reach the end of the hallway, it turns into the laundry room.

Pretty basic laundry room. I’m just happy that we have one! This one is pretty big though. We also have our deep freezer in there now too.

The hallway then turns to the right and the bathroom is straight ahead and the bedroom is to the left.

Bathroom.

Pretty built-in.

Then you look into the bedroom.

From the other side of the bedroom looking back at the door, you can see Drew’s closet on the left and the linen closet on the right.

Another view of pretty much the same thing, but from the other side. You can see the bathroom door outside the bedroom door.

Goodness! That was probably more than you bargained for. But hey, now you know what we started with and can follow our progress as we decorate and make it ours! 🙂

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Closet Renovations

Another one of the great things about our new apartment is that it has plenty of storage space for us. There is a large pantry in the kitchen in addition to cabinet space, an extra stairway entrance that we can use completely for extra storage, a nice sized laundry room with shelves and a little storage alcove thing, a pretty built-in cabinet in the bathroom, a deep built-in medicine cabinet in the bathroom, two closets in the bedroom and another bigger closet in my office. However, two of the closets were a little quirky. Quirky in this case meaning not so practical.

This is the closet in my office. I’ve heard of double names in the South, but double closets? Apparently, the original closet (the very back one) wasn’t big enough, so someone decided to expand it. Instead of tearing down the half wall area between the two spaces to make a nice walk-in closet, they left it creating two awkward spaces.

Even more awkward was the positioning of the shelves and hanging rods. You couldn’t even get to the back one and the front one was at the perfect level to knock you right in your forehead if you tried to reach toward the back one.

Before unpacking all my clothes, I wanted to give this space a little more practicality. I decided that we should add shelves to the back part of the closet to put stacks of sweaters, jeans or t-shirts or pretty boxes for extra storage. I also wanted to raise the bar and shelf in the front closet so that I didn’t hit my head on it every time I tried to reach in for a pair of jeans.

I took all the measurements for the shelves so that we could go to get wood cut and buy some other supplies when Drew got home from work. A quick trip to Lowe’s and we had our wood and some screws.

We didn’t have any power tools either, so we also had to get a drill. On a side note, I don’t know what it is with Drew and older women, but he gets hit on all the time by them. Even when I’m with him. I asked this lady in the hardware store about a drill they had in the ad, but that wasn’t on the shelves. Drew walked up and she was in mid-sentence talking to him about the other drills that were on sale and she couldn’t even get a sentence out without having to stop and tell him that he had beautiful hair and eyes.

This project was pretty simple and only took about an hour or so to complete. We were sort-of lazy the whole time and really didn’t measure that much. I just had Drew hold the shelf up to about where I wanted it, we put the level on it until it was leveled, and I marked underneath it on the side walls for the supports. He made sure that the supports on both sides were level and we ended up pretty much right on every time.

Pretty soon we ended up with three shelves in the back closet. (we left the top one where it was already) Then we moved the front closet’s shelf and hanging rod up farther.

So much more practical! Now I have a walk-in closet! I have room to hang my clothes with storage on the shelf above them and then three more shelves in the back for more clothes and things!

It also makes the closet feel so much bigger!

It is easier to see the changes once there are clothes in it.

Even though the bar and shelf in the front are moved up higher, there is still plenty of room to store things on top of that shelf. It is nice to have tall ceilings!

Plus, because the clothes are up a lot higher, there is even more room on the sides to put in more shelving if I wanted to. This would be great to store other smaller things. Shoes, purses, scarves…

So much better!! But the fun doesn’t stop there! We still had another closet that needed our attention and this one was worse!

I forgot to take a picture of this closet before we put the first shelf in, but you get the idea. The top shelf in here was high enough that you wouldn’t hit your head on it and it also had a hanging bar as well. The problem was that this closet is less than a foot deep. That isn’t even enough room for a hanger!

See how small it is? I don’t know what this was ever used for, but it was completely impractical as it was. However, we really needed a linen closet to store all of our extra bedding, sheets, towels, rugs, tablecloths, pillows, etc… Since this closet is in the bedroom right outside of the bathroom, it fit the bill perfectly.

To keep this from being wasted space, we added three shelves and moved the top shelf that was already there down a little bit.

This one took a little longer, but just because the house is older and the walls were a little wonky and the wood length was a little tight in areas where the wall was bowed out. But in the end all the work was totally worth it. We wouldn’t have been able to unpack our boxes without this little linen closet. Look how full it already is! I’d have to say it was a pretty successful day and a pretty easy building project together. It is nice to see our little apartment already transforming into our little home. 🙂

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Planting

What was one of the first things I did in the new house? Clean all the floors? Unpack my clothes? Nope, neither of those. (well, I did them, just not before this) I planted flowers and herbs in the kitchen window box we discovered on move-in day. It was such a nice surprise! I love gardening and that was really the only drawback about this apartment–the lack of real outdoor space. But we didn’t really expect to get outdoor space in any apartment we were going to get. Not that a window box is actually outdoor space, but I was thrilled at actually being able to plant some flowers and herbs!

A little sad looking, don’t you think? One side of the box was also a little rickety so Drew put an extra nail or two in it to keep it together and then I got to planting. I guess it is nice that this particular window doesn’t have a screen in it and it is pretty easy to open it to plant things, water the plants, or snip bits of the herbs off to cook with.

The tree next to the other house sort of makes it hard to see my plants. But I planted two hot pink geraniums on either end with six little pink and white flowers spread throughout (I forgot their names–they are the ones that look similar to impatiens but like full sun) and three herb plants–a boxwood basil, oregano, and the other basil plant that we already had in our old house.

You can see them a little better in this one.

The basil plant that we already had is planted in the middle, although you can’t really see him very well. He sort-of didn’t get enough sun in the old house so he has rather wilty stems and they hang over the edge of the planter box.

We have our little kitchen table right under this window, so it is nice that you can see the pretty flowers when you are sitting at the table.

You can even see the flowers out the window from across the kitchen.

They must really be liking their new home. I only planted them on Monday and they’ve already gotten more blooms and the Oregano is about to take over the whole box. Pretty soon it is going to be halfway up the window! (although I didn’t take a good picture of it to show its progress–it must be the moisture rich soil I gave it) 😉

We are also thinking about making planter boxes for the front porch of the house. You can see part of it in the first picture, here. It would be nice to spruce up the curb appeal and also to add some pretty colorful flowers mixed in with a few veggie plants so that we could have some food out of the whole thing. The landlord said it was perfectly fine if we wanted to do it, but we have so many other things that we need to spend money on for the house (we don’t have hardly any furniture!) that I don’t know if we will get around to doing it just yet. Although if we want to plant veggies they should have already been planted. We’ll see how it goes.

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Birthday and Moving Weekend

Oh my goodness. This past weekend was one of the busiest/most hectic/exhausting weekends of my life. Friday was my 20th birthday!! It was the end to my 20 Before Twenty. My mom and uncle came into town from southern Illinois. We also moved out of our old apartment and into our new one! All on Friday alone. Saturday and Sunday were spent moving boxes around/unpacking/cleaning/running to the hardware store/having the landlord’s maintenance guy fix all the little things in the apartment and also spending every second possible running around New Orleans to the Garden District/French Quarter/cemeteries/streetcar/mall/restaurants/French Market and so on, to show my mom and uncle New Orleans in a nutshell. It was a pretty insane weekend. (Saturday was also my niece, Evie’s, birthday–she turned 6!) Most of our stuff is all still in boxes, the house still needs a lot of cleaning, and my entire body aches from all the moving and lifting and scrubbing and walking.

But we are in our new apartment! I really love it already! It seems so much bigger than when we looked at it. The foyer and living room at the front of the new house alone are about the same size as Drew’s entire old apartment. I am LOVING all the windows in here. Especially with this amazing weather we have been having here lately! (in the 70s with no humidity and a cool breeze!) We’ve had the windows open throughout the house and we haven’t had to have the air conditioning on since Friday! They also let in so much sunlight and views of the trees outside, so it feels so much more like home. (I was raised in the country, in a house with lots of windows and trees all around) I absolutely love when the indoors and outdoors are so connected. You can sit in the living room and feel almost as if you are outside. LOVE it! The kitchen also feels so much bigger than our old one and having a pantry and a dishwasher are amazing! So is having a full size fridge! I feel more like an adult now! Having a bigger bathroom and a separate bedroom are amazing too! It is funny how you notice all the little things after living in such a small space!

Overall, it is just so nice to have all our stuff in one place and to be working on making this house our home together. We know that we are going to be here at the very least for two years because that is how much school I have left. Although since Drew is already forming a good little niche in the area he works in, we will probably be here longer than that. It is nice to be able to make changes and feel better about making this place more ours since it is a little more permanent. I’m so happy to have a place that finally feels mine. It is such an amazing feeling! I never moved around as a kid. We always lived in our same house on the land that my family had lived in for generations. So the first time I ever really lived anywhere different was in my dorm rooms at school. I’m a pretty homey person and sorry, but a dorm room just doesn’t cut it. Those rooms never really felt like home. I had a good time and have lots of memories of them, but I always knew that pretty soon I would be leaving them. I’ve spent quite a good amount of time at Drew’s apartment too over the past two years, but it never felt like home really either. I didn’t have my stuff there and it just wasn’t mine. So it is so nice that finally I have a place that can be my first little home.

That isn’t to say that the last few days have been just peachy either. We couldn’t get Drew’s desk up the stairs to the second floor of the new apartment. It was too heavy and we were all exhausted by the time we got to it. So we had to give it away. We also had some issues with the dryer plug being a safety hazard with the cord right on top of the washer and when they tried to fix it they broke our dryer. Drew spent several hours yesterday and a few more today taking the thing apart, cleaning it, checking all the parts, re-wiring the cord they wired incorrectly, and putting all the dryer back together and I think it finally works now. I was taking a shower the first night we moved in and I looked up at the little window in the bathroom and the entire thing was covered in termites. They were crawling and flying everywhere. Up the shower walls, across the shower and on my soap and shampoo bottles. They were flying into the water and drowning and then floating around my feet in the dirty water in the bottom of the tub that takes forever to drain. That was one of the least pleasant experiences of my life, lets just leave it at that. The maintenance guy had to fix the drywall mudding and taping in my office room and his sanding got white dust all over almost everything in the entire house. He, of course, left it all for us to clean.

So anyway, that is what all I’ve been up to. I wanted to post about lots of things going on this weekend but just haven’t had time before now. Tomorrow I’ll try to get up a house tour of the empty house before we moved in and an update of a few little things we’ve already been working on. I also have the new couch to show you and pictures of the lovely window box we discovered in the kitchen window and have already planted full of flowers and herbs. I also need to post the outcome of my 20 Before Twenty. Stay tuned! 🙂

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Paintings by Janet Hill


It has been way too long since I’ve done an inspiration post! I am constantly being inspired by everything, so I’m not sure why I haven’t shared anything lately. (I’m currently LOVING Pinterest for inspiration! Check it out!) Anyway, I stumbled across this shop on Etsy today that has the loveliest little paintings. I should have narrowed them down to just a few to post, but they are so amazing and I couldn’t pick! (so be warned, this post has a lot of pictures)

They are all so pretty, I don’t know if I can pick a favorite! I definitely think I’ll have to pick one to go in our new house once we move in and I can see what wall space I have for art! I really like the first one of the kitchen, the third one of the blue dining room, and the seventh one of the office with the yellow desk. I also like the colors in the living room of the fourteenth one. The one with the three girls’ skirts/shoes/books one reminds me of me and my little sisters though. My grandma used to always buy us things with sets of threes. The one with the shoes is also really pretty. Goodness, I love them all! You should definitely check them out in Janet Hill Studio’s Etsy shop!

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Packing, Packing, Packing

What have I been up to lately? You guessed it. Trying to get all our stuff ready to move into the new house. I can’t believe it is actually getting down to being able to move for real! It feels like it has been FOREVER since we signed the lease! It has just been a little over a month, but it feels like a long time. Anyway, my mom and uncle will be in town tomorrow to help us get to moving, so we’ve got to get all this stuff in boxes. So far, we have most of it all pretty much ready:

My stuff has already been packed for a week or two now since I had to move out of my dorm room. This is the corner with all my stuff in it. (and a few of Drew’s things)

This is Drew’s corner half of the room. His stuff is still not all packed and he already has like three times as many boxes as I do! I swear the first like 5 boxes he packed were almost all full of electronic/computer parts/equipment, etc…

Oh goodness. The house is such a mess! All this packing madness also has me doing outrageous stunts like this one:

Drew, of course, pushed all his boxes of stuff to the back of this little storage area above the bathroom and couldn’t pull them out with the end of the broom handle. So guess what happened next? Yes, thats right. I was unwillingly hoisted up to the top of the 11+ ft. tall ceilings and into the dirty and crowded little storage area. All while wearing Drew’s clothes (that obviously didn’t fit) over mine because I didn’t have any old clothes that weren’t already packed in boxes and I had just done all my laundry when we were home. I wish I had a picture of me standing on Drew’s shoulders, with him standing in the chair to even be high enough to be able to climb in there. It is a lot higher up than it looks. And was even more treacherous trying to get down from there. Luckily, no one was harmed in the sake of packing. (yet, at least)

Mom and Chris, you better be prepared for this weekend. 😉

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Do It Yo’ Damn Self

Sorry, I don’t generally use foul language, but this has a point, I promise. 🙂

I (well, P.S. Designs) just finished a blog design for Drew’s landlord, Annie. I did all custom graphics for it!

Annie already blogs at Eat Drink NOLA where she tells wonderful tales of her adventures in New Orleans cuisine, but she wanted to expand her blogging repertoire to cover home DIY projects and tales of parenthood. That is where Do It Yo’ Damn Self (the blog) and P.S. Designs comes in.

Here is her custom header design:

I even made her matching custom social media icons:

I’m so excited with how the design turned out! Be sure to hop on over to Do It Yo’ Damn Self to check it out! She is even giving away Food & Wine cookbooks to two random winners from those who sign up today for her blog e-mailing list! Don’t miss out!

 

 

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Home for the Weekend

We just got back into New Orleans last night from a lovely/crazy/busy/whirlwind weekend at home in Southern Illinois. It was an easy drive there and back this time and although we were there for 4+ days, it still went by in like a millisecond. While I love New Orleans and New Orleans is my “home” for now, Southern Illinois will always be my “Home” and will always hold a special connection that no other place can. Maybe it is just that my family is there or our land has been passed through so many generations, the beauty of it, or the fact that it is where I grew up and I have so many memories there, but it always creeps deeper into my heart every time I set foot there.

Anyway, it was a jam-packed weekend with it being Mother’s Day weekend, my Granny’s 70th birthday party, the early celebration of mine and Evie’s birthdays, and Kelsey’s first high school prom. Lots of family time, cooking, eating, more eating, playing with the baby, teaching the baby to say new things, trying to catch the chickens, helping Evie catch tadpoles, packing up stuff that I wanted to take to our new apartment in New Orleans from home, catching up with the fam, even more eating, watching promenade, taking lots of pictures, and all sorts of fun things.

I didn’t take as many pictures as I should have, but it was nice to not have my face behind a camera all day and to just be able to relax and enjoy the time with my family. My uncle took more pictures, so maybe I’ll get some from him. Here are some of the shots I did end up with though:

There has been extreme flooding all around Southern Illinois, and on down the river southward. Here is me in front of a lake field.

This picture is really bright and Evie’s hair is blowing in her face, but cute nonetheless. 🙂

Womble Mountain = Home 🙂

The last time I was home (in January) all the trees were bare. I love the beauty of Spring. 🙂

Kelsey all dressed up. (But then again, when isn’t she all dressed up?) 🙂

Sisters 🙂 We didn’t manage to get one with Blake in it to be a sibling picture. That little rascal. 🙂

Evie jumped in though. Georgiana was asleep.

Tonya and I got to visit as we both watched promenade. Her little brother went as well. I can’t believe how fast we are all growing up! It seems like not that long ago that Tonya and I were at prom, not our younger siblings!

I just realized that I didn’t take a single picture of Georgiana all weekend. 🙁 I was so busy running around, visiting, taking pictures of prom happenings, and carrying G around and taking her out to pet “Hoppy” (Holly, our Golden Retriever) that I didn’t get any pictures of anything else! 🙁 Oh well, we had a good weekend, even if it is only remembered in our memories. 🙂

 

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In Retrospect, Final Painting

For our final in my painting class, we did a painting completely different than any others that we had done in the class thus far. This one wasn’t strictly from life, we could use photographs and it was up to us to morph multiple things/images into one final image. We were to pick two things, one 2D object and one 3D object, with one being reminiscent of our past and one being related to our lives now. This is what I ended up with:

So what does it represent about me? Well, the background is a fabric pattern. I liked this pattern- a quatrefoil pattern reminiscent of Gothic Architecture and I love art and art history. It is also very graphic and I love graphic design. It is also fabric, which I love and want to design my own collection of one day. Fabric represents a lot in my life. Learning to sew when I was young, my mom sewing all kinds of things, my love of the home and home decorating.  I’ve been looking for fabric for curtains for our new apartment and I was drawn to lots of pretty graphic patterns like this one. It just seemed fitting.

The watering can and flowers represents my childhood, home, growing up, my parents. I was always outside in our backyard as a kid, so obviously something related to nature would be perfect for relating to my past. My dad is an avid collector of various old/antique things and I guess my mom mentioned to him sometime how she liked watering cans and that began a period of him collecting all kinds of them for her. Most of them looked really similar to this one. I remember as a kid, filling them up with water from the hose and dragging them around the yard to water all the flower beds. The flowers inside this watering can are the same flowers that my mom would let us pick out at the feed store every summer in little cartons to plant in the yard and help her do the gardening.

Tying the two together in a cohesive way represents the meshing of my past with my present and how they are ever intertwined, but separate in a way as well. But then again, that is kind of obvious.

I’m so thankful for all that I learned in my painting class and I’m kind-of sad to see it end! Although I am happy that I’m done with school for the semester! I’m so ready for this summer!  I can’t believe that I’m halfway done with college though. It has gone by so fast!

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