Quick Project: Burlap Valance

So, we finally worked on our staircase. You know, the staircase that I pulled the carpeting off of back in September? Yeah, that staircase. And it is turning out AMAZING! I have to do some touch up work, and paint our railings, but then it'll be all ready for its own little blog post.

 

While painting I realized that I have a whole other house to take care of (oops). We also have friends coming to visit next weekend, so I've been doing some small projects in addition to the staircase. Today I was cleaning and realized that our kitchen window really needed a valance.

 

I'm in yoga pants, a tank top, and covered in a fine layer of cleaning supplies and dust so running to the store wasn't an option. Solution? Leftover burlap + my sewing machine + 15 minutes = ...

 

I think that turned out well! Okay, break time is over... back to getting our house all ready for guests.

 

Updates

I just noticed that it's been well over a month since my last post. To be quite honest, I feel like I've lacked motivation recently. I have my fleeting moments here and there, but once we got the yard done and finally had some free weekends to relax, I did just that... relaxed. I have lists of unfinished projects, a studio that is mid-reorganization, and a little more dust in our house than I generally prefer.

 

The one thing I have managed to do is get an Etsy store set up. I have a whopping 2 patterns available for digital download right now. That being said, I have about 30 that need to be converted from my pencil scribbles on graph paper. It honestly doesn't take long, but it gets a bit tedious. My shop is called Questionable Threads, and (for now) it is going to feature many of my cross stitch patterns. Eventually I'd like to also have full cross stitch kits, and the ability to take custom orders for finished pieces (for those who prefer to not stitch something themselves, but still want something awesome).

 

I have a whole bunch of DIY projects swimming around in my head, and some I even have all of the supplies for, but I really need to get my studio organized first. While on our usual weekend trip to Lowe's (yes, we'll go just to walk around and look at stuff), I found a 6-piece set of fabric closet organizers for $15. It had an over-door shoe holder, those hanging shelf thingies, and an under-bed box. AND it came in pink. I have a nicer set like this for our closet, but these cheapie ones seemed perfect for my studio, so they came home with us. J also got a set (in black) which now holds rifle magazines, gun cases, and other accessories in his man-closet.

 

I've had my studio set up for at least a year now, but I've been sewing and doing most other projects in our dining room. Why? I couldn't find the proper height (or priced) stool for the craft table we built, rendering it virtually unusable. Target came to the rescue on that one recently, and we finally found the perfect wooden stool for all of $20. So now that I can use my table, I can start crafting upstairs, and out of Jeremy's direct line of sight from the couch... which will finally stop the comments like, "Can't you use your sewing machine when I'm not watching tv?" and "When are you going to put this crap away?"

 

So, as you can see, it's been a rather uneventful month. No cool projects to report. I did manage to get into a car accident, so that's always exciting. I was stopped at a red light in a left turn lane (waiting for an ambulance to pass through the intersection) and the woman behind me thought it would be cool to just not use her brakes and plow into my car, while doing about 40mph, in order to stop. Don't text and drive, people! She had her baby in the car too, which pretty much sets her up for the Best Parent Ever Award.

 

The end result was a trip to the hospital for me, a few days of surprisingly bad pain from whiplash, and a car that is still in the body shop a month later. She hit me so hard that the back of my car crushed in far enough to squish the groceries I had just purchased at HEB. Did I mention that I drive a MINI and she was in an SUV? Yeah...

 

 

It doesn't look nearly as bad in pictures as it actually did in real life. Silly me got out of the car expecting to find a bumper that needed replacing and not much else. The whole back of my car is pretty much being rebuilt now. I really hope that the text she was reading/sending was worth slamming into me and risking everyone's lives. I'm just thankful that everyone at the intersection was stopped and saw what happened because she pushed me right out into the middle of it.

 

Okay, so now THAT is it for recent excitement. I'm heading upstairs to finish up my studio today, and it's now too hot for outdoor projects, so hopefully I'll have some blog-worthy things going on in the very near future!

 

Front yard? Check!

It's done! It's finally done...

 

 

After much debate, we have finally turned our front yard into an aesthetically pleasing masterpiece. Okay, so maybe it's not a masterpiece, but it doesn't look like an out-of-control mess anymore. We found out that the previous owner was a landscape designer, which explains why we have tons of flower beds and plants all over our property. We've spent the past few months in our front and back yards taking down trees, ripping out bushes, and getting rid of anything that annoyed us and/or was too high maintenance. Last weekend we added mulch to our front flower beds, which marked the end of our front yard work for this season (yay!). Sure, we still have some stuff to finish in the back yard, but we're soooo close to being done!

 

The front yard was a huge project. Things grow out of control down here if you don't constantly trim and maintain. Our front beds had all sorts of low-lying shrubbery that went wild since we purchased the house.

 

 

As you can see in this picture (above) from when we first moved in (2011), there was a lot of greenery just waiting to let loose and take over the beds. We're from NJ. We had no idea that things grew like crazy all year round.

 

 

Last year (above), we tried our best to rid our beds of what we thought we couldn't control. As it turned out, the remaining plants decided to go buckwild and then they grew out of control. It was a vicious cycle.

 

That brings us to this year...

 

 

BAM.

 

Let's take a minute and look at some more pics of our hard work:

 

 

 

 

I'm so proud of us. J and I aren't the type of couple to constantly fight with each other while working on a project, so we are efficient and get things accomplished fairly quickly. This project? It wasn't quick. We've dedicated the past couple of months to serious yard work. We'll be doing even more today in order to get our back yard finished. From a new patio and custom built garden boxes, to cutting down trees and ripping out shrubs, we've done it all this spring. My next landscaping post will be dedicated to our back yard, but for now, I'm just damn proud of what we've done so far.

 

And, just for a quick side-by-side comparison:

 

 

We're Crazy

Before you say, "Nahhh, you guys are fine!" let's take a look at this, shall we?

 

 

What is this, you ask? This is what I posted on Facebook and Twitter on April 11, 2011. Thanks to an iPhone app called Timehop, I can see my past social media history each day. The bigger question may be though, "Why does this post mean that y'all are crazy?" I'll explain...

 

I was at work that day, and J sent me a link. We had been looking at houses in NJ, and were having no luck at all. Everything we liked was way out of our price range, and everything else needed too many renovations. So, that day, J sent me a link to a house for sale in Texas and told me to just "look at it to humor him." Well, I looked at it for about a minute, picked my jaw up from the floor, and texted him back with something along the lines of, "When can we move?"

 

And that was it. April 11, 2011 was the day we decided to move to Texas. 3 months later we flew to Houston and bought a house. 1.5 months after that, we closed on the house and moved in. So, in just under 5 months we randomly decided to move across the country. We left our jobs, left everything and everyone we ever knew, and moved to a place that we had never even been to before. Yes, that's right, the first time we ever went to Houston was when we went to buy our house.

 

So, we're kinda crazy right? Okay, maybe "risky" is a better word. Regardless, I'm damn proud of us. So many people talk about moving here and there, but just stay where they are forever. We got an idea into our heads, seized the opportunity, and ran with it. Sure, we could've crashed and burned in a most epic manner, but we didn't. Maybe we got lucky, or maybe it was just fate. Regardless, it took us 5 months to completely change almost everything about our lives... and it was the best thing to ever happen to us.

 

If you take anything from this little lesson, its this: "Trust your gut and follow your dreams." Our entire relationship has been based on gut instinct. Everything from J deciding to date me (I'm still not sure what I did to make him stick around), to our cross-country move, its all just been a gut feeling as the driving force. If you're happy, you're not hurting anybody, and things feel right, you just go on ahead and follow your dreams. I know, it sounds like something you'd tell a child, but it holds true for all ages. You are never too old to change your life and follow a dream.

 

As a side note, here is what was going on one year ago today, on April 13, 2012:

 

 

It should be noted that we eloped 3 months later, and only told people via a photo on Facebook. Okay, so maybe "crazy" is an accurate word for us...