Every 13 Year is Too Often

Proceed at your own risk!  There are some nasty creatures in this post.  

I’ve been bad about posting lately. But busy season is upon us, and the last thing I want to do after working on pictures all day is...working on pictures.  You haven’t missed much however, since we’ve been too busy to do much around the house.

This is pretty much what the spring looked like for us:

For those not in the St. Louis area, these are cicadas.  Specifically, they are the “13 Year Cicadas” that show up, in HUGE swarms exactly every 13 years, to fly into people’s hair and clothes, make a deafening noise all day long, and just be generally annoying.  Now, I don’t have any problem with bugs in general. I don’t even mind spiders that much.  I MIND these.  Nothing is more disgusting than one of these guys latching onto your hair and screaming in your ear.

They didn’t show up everywhere in St. Louis, apparently they stick close to the Meremec River valley (hello Kirkwood!).   Our backyard is full of them.  Below is a small example of what our entire back yard looked like:

Click on the picture to big-a-fy. 

These are all cicada shells.  They crawl up out of the ground (where they lay dormant for 13 years) and attach themselves EVERYWHERE.  And keep in mind, all of these shells turning into flying, screaming demons AT THE SAME TIME...making our yard downright unpleasant to be in.

I should have taken a picture of all of the holes in the ground they came out of, but oh well.  The cicadas lasted about a month and just now finally died away.  They were not fun during photo shoots, and they will NOT be missed.

Spring Forward

It's springtime!  We have been working to freshen up our landscaping...planting, weeding, spreading mulch, moving the drainage ditch, fun stuff like that.  

Now, here in Missouri, most of April looked something like this:

(This was taken at Ian's parents' house.)

...The return of the sun has been very much welcome in May.  For Easter, I decide to dye some eggs, since I haven't done that in YEARS.  I only did a few, since two people can only eat so many hard-boiled eggs.

I almost completely forgot that we had this bunny dish, which we got secondhand, along with our entire set of dishes.  But it works perfectly to hold Easter eggs!

Two Stars

So exciting!  We got our new custom artwork yesterday!  It is a multi-media painting, called “Two Stars”, by the lovely and talented Laura Meyer.  We traded our services, taking pictures for her new handcrafted invitations business, for a 30x40 piece of art made just for us!

(Please ignore the plant-stand that is standing in as a side table for the time being.)

It’s hard to tell in pictures, but the background is made up of book and magazine pages, and a vintage map as well.

It goes great in our living room, and it is so incredibly nice to see some art on that bare wall!  Now we just need a cute, bold pillow to go on the chair.  We were waiting to see what the artwork would look like, to pick out something that goes with it.

Thank you Laura, we love what you made for us!!

The Throne

As we get ready for busy season with our business, the projects have wound down a bit.  But we did buy this lovely chair from Crate and Barrel.  It sits in the space where the table and chairs used to be, in the living room.  It's really comfy, just ask Sam.  He has claimed it as "his chair", already.  At least he has been good about refraining from scratching the chair.  He only needed a couple little corrections on the first day, but he got it very quickly that this is NOT his scratching post.

We are in need of a side table (right now we are using a plant stand), and another table/shelf of some sort to go behind the chair...underneath where our custom piece of art will be!!  We're waiting to see what the piece will look like, to pick out a pillow to go on the chair.  For now, the throw blanket from the couch jazzes it up a little.

Up next:  Our new custom-made-for-us artwork!!!  We are so excited to finally have some more art on the wall!

The Books are Back

Part Two of the "Move the Refrigerator/Make the Closet Doorway a Bookcase" project....the completed bookcase!  Above is a reminder of what the closet looked like BEFORE.

And here, we present the finished bookcase, AFTER:

Ta da! 

 We are so excited to have this project finished!!  We have had all of our books and photo albums stored in the basement for a year.  It was so nice to take them out of boxes again and pick out what we wanted to display.  This bookcase doesn't fit all of our books, but it hold all of the important ones (and let's be honest, the pretty ones).

The most important shelf: Photo books and Harry Potter :)

My Blessing Basket finally has a home again too!

If you want to know more about The Blessing Basket Project, it is a great program, that you can read about here:
http://www.blessingbasket.org/

Women in countries like Ghana, Uganda and Bangladesh are paid much higher than fair trade wages for their basketry art.  They can then use these higher wages toward their own entrepreneurial endeavors...bringing their families out of poverty and becoming self-sufficient.  The Blessing Basket Project started in St. Louis, and their baskets are now sold online and in 35 states.  I bought mine early on, but some of the new work is even more intricate and beautiful!

What Paint Can Do

Get ready...it's time for the big before-and-after paint job in the kitchen!  Above is what the kitchen looked like BEFORE.  Dark and dingy....And here is what it looks like AFTER:

Let there be light!!!

And keep in mind, all we changed was the paint. 

Another angle:  BEFORE

AFTER:

And again:

Aaaand last one:

And you can see the color of the accent wall above as well.  We wanted something fun and bold to go behind the table.  Actually, this is the color I wanted for the wall above the basement steps, when we (someday!) knock out the wall between the kitchen and the stairs and just have a half wall.  If that makes no sense, don't worry.  The important thing is: no more yucky red paint that turns rags pink when you try to wash the walls (it was Valspar red paint, just to forewarn anyone wanting to paint anything red...stay clear of this stuff!  BAD.)

Here are some more pictures of the "new" kitchen:






So right now you're probably saying, "Whoa, that's a really blue wall you have there.  What exactly were you going for there?"  Well, it's fun...and bright.  I dunno, it's paint.  We thought, "what the heck, if it doesn't work, we can redo it."  The color will be broken up a bit when we put art on the wall.  We will  use simple white frames for the artwork we put up, which will dial down the "whoa" factor a lot.

Plus, yay!  The table isn't in the living room anymore!  The table is now where the refrigerator used to be.

We still have some changes to do in here (new light, new floor), but this is definitely makes a big difference!

Materials:

Wall Paint: Behr - Aged Beige (Paint and Primer in One)

Accent Wall Paint: Behr - Southern Blue (Ultra Saturated line)

Trim Paint: Benjamin Moore - White Dove

Fruit bowl and wall platter:  Target (I've had them since before we moved in together)

Putting the Fridge in it's Place

Here is the beginning of what I'll call the "Refrigerator Repositioning/New Bookcase" project, or "Why it's good to have an Ian around". Stuff like this would cost a ton if we had to hire someone. But that IS why we got this house. We knew it needed work, but we have the ability to make it awesome.

Part 1: Breaking through the wall of the closet in the living room from the kitchen side. This is the new opening for the refrigerator to go in. The closet doorway in the living room will be closed off and turned into a built-in bookcase.
Look at the master at work...and a hint of the new paint color for the kitchen (stay tuned for more in the next post).
This is what the finished space looked like after drywall, paint and electrical.

This is the finished product!

Right now we have vases on top of the refrigerator, but Ian left space to eventually put a cabinet in over the refrigerator. There was a lot of technical mumbo-jumbo that went into this project, but I won't bore you with that. The important thing is that this move leaves so much space where the refrigerator used to be (in the middle of the kitchen)! You will see what I'm talking about next time ;) Trust me, it's like a whole new kitchen.