Happy New Year! What We've Been up to the Last Four Months

Happy belated New Year! The fall was busy for us with a lot of different projects all leading up to this:

We're selling our house! We're currently under contract so should be closing in the next month! Yippee! Our lives over the past 4 months have revolved around work (and LOTS of travel for me!) and projects to prepare the house for selling.

Our house overall was in pretty good shape, but there were definitely some projects that needed to be done, so here are some highlights of what we did!

--Updates to the kitchen: we ended up refreshing the cabinets with new hardware, cleaning and touching up the paint on the cabinets, and doing a deep clean of the grout (that was a fun Saturday!). 

Top is the new hardware and bottom is what we replaced.

Cabinets with new hardware!

Grout- before and after deep cleaning

--Refinished the fireplace in the master bedroom: the paint on the fireplace had gotten a bit dull and some of the knots in the wood were showing through the paint, so we wanted to refresh the fireplace to make it look that much more appealing in the master suite.

Before!

Prepped and ready to paint

The finished product with a drawing I bought from a street artist in Vienna.

--Organization: We packed up a lot of items to de-clutter the house, but there were some items we needed to keep handy that we used pretty frequently, so the solution was baskets to store items to look more organized. It's amazing how these spaces were transformed with just a couple decorative baskets from Target.

Coat closet - before

Coat closet - after

Laundry room - before

Laundry room - after

--Staging: I didn't take before pics, but we followed the advice of all the different websites that touted the importance of staging the house to sell it. We removed pretty much anything in the house that was personal including all pictures and knick-knacks and packed them up. We packed up a bunch of other stuff to generally de-clutter the house, especially the kitchen. The after results of all the packing up and staging the house!

The living room: our sectional previously was one large piece of furniture but we ended up completely rearranging the living room to make it flow better and to move the couch away from the fireplace.

 Kitchen: We packed away most of the items that were on the counters (i.e., our extensive wine collection since we don't drink wine that often...)  and put away all the wedding save the dates and invitations that were covering our fridge.

 

The dining room: we had been using the dining room as an office so we had to completely update that room to turn the room back into a dining room.

The house selling process should be wrapped up in the next few weeks so now our attention is turned to packing up and trying to find a new place!

Until next time,
CZP

Wedding Project Post #1 -- Stained Picture Frames

Two posts in less than a month-- WIN! Yes I realize that's not much to get excited about, but since it had been a year since my last post, it seems like a pretty big accomplishment.

Since I never got around to posting projects undertaken during wedding preparations, I thought I'd highlight some of the projects I did for the wedding. 

So I really wanted to put some personal touches on the wedding and one personalized item I wanted to include was pictures of all our parents and grandparents on their wedding days to be placed around the venue. 

I found a post on Pinterest how to easily stain plain wooden frames to give them a vintage look. The blog the post came from is here and it really was easy! All it took was some vinegar, coffee grounds and steel wool! I bought plain, unfinished frames from Joann's and for 6 spent about $70 on them. 

I mixed the vinegar and coffee grounds and let the steel wool sit overnight. Once the glass and backs were removed from the frames, I was ready to stain!

My work station

I forgot to take a picture of just the plain frames, but the first picture below shows a comparison between the unfinished and stained frames.

Some pictures during the process:

All the frames while they were drying...

Then I let them dry outside for a while....

And the finished products!!

I bought an extra frame so we had one to display an engagement photo!

This was a really easy and quick project and was a great way to bring in a vintage-looking element into the wedding. 

We're currently in the processing of trying to buy a new house so I can't wait to use some of these frames to display wedding photos whenever we're in our new home!!

Until next time,

CZP 

The Hiatus is Over! B's 40th Birthday!

So I know I've been MIA for nearly a year, but life got hectic with my two best friends' weddings last fall as well as my own wedding in March... But I'm back!!!

My wonderful hubby turned 40 a few weeks ago and I wanted to celebrate this milestone. Since he's not a big fan of being the center of attention, I knew a surprise party was out. Instead I wanted to keep it simple and have a low-key party that incorporated some of his favorite foods- BBQ and cupcakes. I found my inspiration from this blog.

I wanted to send out cutie invitations to capture the theme and I found them here.

 

I only did a few small craft projects for his birthday, including staining some wooden crates that would serve to hold the barbecue platters on the food table. I got these crates at Michael's for about $4 each and also found a spray paint stain for them- on clearance for only $2! Below are the before, during, and after pictures of the crates. They looked pretty good and they were super simple with the stain spray. 

Another project I created was a Happy Birthday banner. I liked the idea of using burlap in a couple different places in the decor so I found a huge roll of burlap to cut out the parts of the banner. B's favorite color is navy so I used navy scrapbook paper for the letters and navy ribbon to hold the banner together. So it would hold together, I made each word a mini banner. Below is the final product. 

I also decided to bring the burlap theme into the food labels and found the cutest squares of burlap at Michael's, then layered them with the navy scrapbook paper. Since I didn't have enough of the squares of burlap, I also made some larger ones without the burlap. Below are the food labels.

Since B saw me working on a lot of the projects, the only surprise was the photo collage. B's parents and brother were able to make it down for the party, and I know they all got a kick out of seeing all these photos. 

To make life easy, I had the BBQ catered from 'cue barbeque (cuebarbecue.com) and just had a bunch of side dishes to go with BBQ including a Mac and cheese bar, bacon-wrapped green beans, baked potato salad, baked beans, coleslaw, veggies and fruit.  

       

Some photos of the spread.

And of course, who can forget dessert. I got cupcakes from the same place we got them for our wedding- Jilly's Cupcakery (jillyscupcakery.com). B loves rice Krispy treats so I also had to make a few batches of those. The desserts were a big hit, as usual! 

B had a great time and it was so wonderful for our friends to come and share in his special night.

The food spread with B's banner 

Me and the birthday boy! 

My wonderful in-laws!

And some photos from the rest of the night!

Later in the night, we had to bust out some beer pong and flip cup!

All in all, it was a great night and we so appreciate everyone who came out to celebrate!!

Until next time (I promise it won't be another year!)
Cathy

Linens and Liquor Couple's Fiesta!

The past few weeks have been super busy preparing to host a couples shower for my friends Jodi and Matt who are getting married in October. Last weekend was the culmination of a LOT of planning and too many trips to Target, Wal-Mart, Party City, Hob Lob and Michael's.

My inspiration for the party started by finding this pin on Pinterest. I always make Paula Deen's chicken empanadas for parties so those were the starting point for the menu. I really wanted to create a fun party since Jodi and Matt are such goofballs (in a good way of course)! They are people that are always laughing and having fun so I wanted this party to reflect that. Jodi had two bridal showers planned so I also wanted to incorporate couples into one of the functions.

I found a lot of inspiration from Pinterest such as this photo garland as well as inspiration from this blog. Below are some highlight pictures from the evening.

The invitation!

Jodi and Matt's Photo Garland!

To make it a true fiesta, there had to be margaritas. There were three flavors that I made: traditional, blue lagoon and strawberry. Apparently I should have been taste-testing while making them since they were quite potent.

 Most of the recipes I used were Pinterest- found. I have included links to the recipes below the picture of the item.

The spread - Mexican Mac 'N' Cheese, Spinach con Queso dip, Mini Beef Taco Cups, Skinny Taco Dip, Chicken Empanadas and a veggie spread inspired by this.

http://www.willcookforfriends.com/2012/02/macaroni-con-queso-mexican-mac-and.html

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/10/27/mini-taco-cups_n_1052913.html

And the dessert spread!

 The vanilla fruit dip recipe can be found here and the cake batter rice krispie treats recipe can be found here. All the food got eaten up pretty quickly, so I guess everyone enjoyed everything!

Since it was a couples' shower, I wanted to keep the games to a minimum since I figured guys wouldn't be too willing to play the traditional shower games. One of the games that I found was for a Honey Do Fund. Each person had to wear a name tag with an item that could be used for checking off the honey do list. If anyone said a person's name instead of the name on their tag, they had to put a little something in the honey do jar. Turns out the moms were the worst at this game :) Unfortunately I forgot to take a picture of the name tags themselves, but you will be able to see them in the pictures of some of the party attendees.

The other game we played was a Battle of the Sexes. We split everyone into two groups of girls and two groups of guys. The teams had 4 minutes to answer as many questions as possible. I used questions from here and here to create the game.

One of the guys teams concentrating hard.

The other guys team

The winners of Battle of the Sexes trivia!

The other girls team.

Something that is often seen at showers is wedding advice. I wanted to incorporate the opportunity for guests to leave marriage advice for Jodi and Matt; however, when left a blank piece of paper to do so, I can never think of anything good to write.  I also wanted something more casual and fun to reflect the general mood of the entire party. I saw several instances, such as this, of people doing Mad Libs for shower and even at weddings, so I decided that would be perfect so I created a "Jodi and Matt Libs" (pun credit goes to Brett).

The Jodi and Matt Libs! I found the fabulous yellow and gray paper and green linen paper at Michael's to incorporate the wedding colors!

After food was eaten and games were played, it was time to kick back, relax and enjoy the margaritas and beer. 

You can also see some of the name tags I made in the following pictures. I got the name tags here- they are actually supposed to be food labels, but the fit on Avery 5160 mailing labels that I used later for the party favors. They were also some of the wedding colors (emerald green, yellow, and gray) so they were perfect to use for name tags!

The Bride and Groom to be in their matching sombreros! 

Myself, the bride to be and Katie, a co-worker of Jodi's (and my former co-worker)

My handsome fiance, Brett, 3 former co-workers, and Greg, Katie's man

The groom and some of his college friends

Some of the gentlemen of the late night crew.

After most of the guests had left, a group of us ended up playing Catch Phrase, enjoying some of the liquor that was given to the couple and sharing a lot of laughs. The bride-to-be also got curious as to the gifts she and Matt had received.

There was a lot of tissue paper!

Loving her veil!

Finally, as guests were leaving they could grab either a mini bottle of tequila or a Corona that were personalized for Jodi and Matt's fiesta. I found this awesome site where you can create your own beer labels. I basically took the label I created there and shrunk it down to fit on the mini tequilas. This was one of my favorite parts of the shower, creating these labels and the favors.

Close up on the bottles.

The other side of the tequila bottles with a picture of Jodi and Matt.

The favors- a bottle of beer or a mini bottle of tequila and a margarita glass!

All of the party favors!

The thank you sign for the favors.

All in all, it took a lot of work to plan this party, but it turned out great. I think all the guests had fun considering we didn't go to bed til  the wee hours of the morning.

Until next time,
Cathy