Catching Up!

This is going to be a photo-heavy post...you've been warned. I realized the weekends have been flying by and random furniture pictures have been collecting on my iPhone, which can only mean that it's time to over-share!

First up is our trip to New York two weekends ago for my cousin's wedding.

Have I told you how much I hate Laguardia Airport? You would think with the high amount of taxes NYS accrues, they would be able to give it a makeover or something? Maybe I'm just spoiled by Hartsfield Jackson...

First stop was NYC to visit my mom at work and check out the terrace. How would you like to see this everyday?

Then it was back upstate. How cute are my parent's rabbits?

Check out my mom's roses - they are gorgeous:

Remember I talked about my mom's creativity here? Well, keep in mind that she can barely use the internet, so no Pinterest and no blogs...but how Pin-worthy is this?

  

Yes, its the wine press that I so badly wanted to steal, but how I can be mad when it looks so good in their garden?

On Friday we got to spend some really good quality time with my best friend Dawn and her kids Ryan and Hunter (my godson!)

Friday night we grabbed some dinner on the waterfront with Dawn and then stayed for some drinks and music. Get this? The band playing was a country band...you can't even make that up.

And what is a trip home without stopping at the ReStore? Even though the inventory was very thin, I found a few cool pieces. Check out this hutch - the lines are so modern and it was sixty five dollars!!

This one isn't exactly my style, but it was so pretty:

The following weekend, Brian and decided to go kayaking in Tennessee. Copperhill is just over the Georgia border and we found a super cheap kayak rental place.

The river is called Toccoa in GA and Ocoee when it runs through TN. We saw an otter, a dead river snake and a lot of rednecks. :)

On an unrelated note, the Euro Cup is currently going on...make sure you cheer for the right team!

Craigslist Find: Wicker Set

If I haven't already shared, our backyard is ground zero for mosquito breeding. I am very serious...it's BAD. To make things even more interesting, I seem to be allergic to Southern mosquitoes. All my life up north, I got the occasional bug bite with no major issues...then I move to Georgia and every time I get bitten, my skin swells, itches and then turns into this huge, bruise-y circle. It looks like something between leprosy and spousal abuse.

Needless to say, our back deck (when we had one) did not get the most use from me in the summer months and the whole time we had been ignoring our beautiful front porch:

I have a love for front porches, probably because I grew up with this (that was my bridal shower setup):

As kids, this was our 'base' during manhunt and the 'precinct' in Cops and Robbers (yes, I was the dispatcher). It was the place for parties, BBQ's and almost every summer family dinner. This made me realize that I wanted something like that in our house. Unfortunately, our front porch was currently inhabited by way too many spiders and several wasps nests. Lucky for us, we just inherited a power-washer from our in-laws! So after a good power-wash I started the hunt for some patio furniture.

Where did I start? Craigslist of course. Let me tell you, wicker is expensive. I really never expected it to have such a high resale value. So, when I stumbled on all this for $125, I did a double-take:

One phone call later and I was on the way to pick these babies up. I can't remember the final price, but I think we got down to $110. Brian and I just round it down to one hundred, since we describe it as 'the best one hundred dollars we ever spent'. Now, let me just warn everyone of one downfall of Craigslist. Doesn't every piece in the picture above look to be the same color? Well, in real life they were not.

The two chairs sort of match and the little side table doesn't match anything. The table has been rained on since living on our porch, so it's gotten stained. Hopefully we can take the power-washer to these guys soon. All in all, we are really happy with the set and we use it all the time!

Oh, the cushions are from HomeGoods and only $30 for the pair! That is a great price for cushions - you would be amazed at how expensive those things can get. Want to see the view from the other side?

Stayed tuned for another Craigslist Find - Tampa edition. My sister-in-laws scored an amazing patio table!

Master Bedroom Paint?

When you've taken such a long blogging sabbatical...do you just ignore it in your next post? Do you try and make an excuse?

Yes, I've been absent as of late. The house progress has shifted to non-blogworthy things like water main repair and gutter replacement. Trust me, no one wants photos of that. Oh, you do want photos?

Behold our new gutter! We added it onto the house because the drainage in that corner was a serious issue. The pipe will be buried once we get the retaining wall rebuilt...and then its time to attempt to plant something that won't die.

You want to see that retaining wall? Shield your eyes... 

This eyesore is the structure that is currently holding up half our front yard, the side of the deck and our beloved Dogwood tree. And no, our yard does not currently look like that - this picture was from the day we bought the house. We've ignored the wall as long as we could...because let's face it, who wants to spend a few thousand dollars on something so boring? Finally, we've saved up and decided to get it professionally 'done', which should happen in a few weeks.

Wasn't this post was supposed to be about paint...

Ages ago (October 2011, according to this post), I started to gather some ideas of what I wanted to do in our master bedroom. From the beginning, I had been in love with Benjamin Moore's Saybrook Sage. I even went out and bought one of those teeny little sample bottle (that they have stopped selling - gasp!). Sadly, once I got home and slapped a few strokes on the wall, the color just wasn't 'doing' it for me. Today I took reinforcements (my co-worker, Sarah) to the BM and mulled over several more options. So what happened? We both loved Saybrook Sage. Again. Obviously, the universe was trying to tell me something, so I decided to splurge $8.00 and buy the small tester pint. Stay tuned to see how two coats will look and in the meantime I'm trying to figure out how to get Brian to let me paint on a Monday night...