Home improvement projects

    Still the worst at blogging. We've been pretty busy with the holidays and everything,  but I thought I'd post some updates!

     First, we loved our Christmas (and New Year's) decorations. This was our first year actually decorating, so I had a lot of fun getting it all together. Brian did the lights outside, I made the wreath and found most of the ornaments. There are lots of penguins (I may have a problem). We also had a few religious elements (we may have ended up with three nativities), but I put them up after everything else and failed to take a picture before we took it all down... Next Christmas!!

  (Also, I tried like 8 million times to take a cute picture of Molly with our tree. This is what we got).

 

      Our next project was the window in the spare room. It's not very easy to see in this picture, but it looks directly into the neighbor's porch! The people before us had a curtain over it, but we never got around to that. We found some film stuff to put over it, and now Brian can roam around in his underwear without fear of traumatizing the neighbor children.

      It ended up with a few seams (it was kind of tricky to apply in straight lines) but we like it!

  

   Last project: the breakfast nook! Our kitchen is pretty tiny, and we pretty much never ate in there because our table didn't fit very well. Actually, it fits into the corner perfectly, but then there's hardly any room for chairs, and forget about inviting any people over for dinner!!

 

      While we were furniture shopping, I found this breakfast nook set, and thought "That would work so much better than the table we've got!!" I was so excited that I bought it right then and there. 

      I made some bad furniture decisions that weekend! We also brought a futon, which we assembled before we realized that it didn't fit where we had intended to put it. Luckily we found another place for it, and decided we should measure the corner before we tried to install the breakfast nook set. It was 1.5 inches too small. I was very disappointed, but happy that we found out BEFORE we unpacked and assembled everything. Moral of the story: measure your house and potential furniture before you spend hours assembling things...

    Since the set wouldn't fit, I decided to make one. I found the exact same table sold separately on amazon, and bought some storage benches to use for seats.

     I decided that I wanted it to look a little more like a booth, so I made this fancy seat back. I didn't document that process very well, but I used some quilt batting, fabric, a few large pieces of cardboard that we saved from the bench boxes, and LOTS of staples. I need to tighten the fabric up a little, but we like it so far! We'll see how it holds up. It's not the fanciest, but I can mount it on the wall with command strips (because we hate nails..), and it was way cheaper than an actual booth seat!

  

    One day I'll post more pictures of our whole house, but we're still working on a few things (also it's currently a disaster), so I'll save it for later. We really love it here though!! The neighborhood is awesome, and our neighbors are great. Maybe I'll post about that one day too, but no promises.