oops!

If it hasn't been obvious yet, it will be in a few minutes, I am totally inexperienced at DIY and home improvement in general. I discovered some new fun blogs this weekend and they got me in the mood to work on my house today. So I decided to tackle painting the trim in the downstairs bathroom. I bought the oil-based primer and white latex paint awhile ago but just hadn't started on it yet. Apparently this is the first time I've ever used oil-based primer before because I had NO IDEA that it was so much smellier than regular paint. I barely made any progress when I nearly passed out because of the fumes. I painted our bedroom at the beginning of January and while it did have some "paint" smell it wasn't unbearable. But this smell is definitely unbearable. So even though it's snowing outside I now have our front door open, the bathroom window cracked and the smell is still lingering after 45 minutes like this. oops! Lesson learned, I guess. :)

Score!

After a month of searching, Matt and I finally bought our new family room furniture! It's so exciting to have that done... now we're on to picking out a new paint color for the walls and finding (or maybe building???) an electric fireplace/mantel/tv stand combo. We ended up purchasing a couch, loveseat, chair/ottoman AND a coffeetable. We had almost finished checking out when we remembered the coffee table we had seen earlier and decided to throw that in too. More on the couch decision later but here's the coffee table we ordered.

Isn't it adorable! What's really fun is that it's actually two pieces smooshed together. We can separate them if we want and then we'll have so much room for activities (yes, Matt, that Stepbrothers reference was for you). It's kinda hard to tell in this pic but the color is actually dark brown not black. 

Sometimes I feel guilty about buying new furniture like this. So many people find used furniture super cheap and then can turn it into something a.maz.ing. I don't have those magical skills. I never seem to find the cute furniture (probably because I'm not going to the right stores because i don't know which ones those are) and then even if I did find cute stuff that needs some tlc, my painting and staining skills are severely lacking. So we forked over the cash and bought it new. 

But guess what.... I just saw this same exact coffee table on Amazon for $100 MORE than what we paid for it at Homemakers. How awesome is that!!! So even though I feel kinda bad about buying new, I'm totally stoked that we got a great deal! Hooray for new furniture and hooray for savings!   

Someday I want this hanging in my baby's nursery. I randomly stumbled across this photo today and have already fallen in love. Growing up I have many memories of singing this song with both my Grandpa Nash and my Great-Grandma Hogan. And of course with my mom. I know that I will sing this song to my own babies someday. So when I get pregnant (sometime waaaay in the future) this will be the first piece I search for when turning our office into a nursery. 

3rd week of work completed!

I love deadlines. It totally engergizes me when I have a short timeline to get something done. Is that weird? When there's a project that HAS to get done RIGHT NOW, I love it. I've always been like this. I think it's why I'm such an amazing procrastinator. Give me two weeks to write a paper and I'll still start it 2 days before it's due because I'm much more productive with my time when I know I have to be. If I actually started it in advance it would take me so many hours longer and the quality of the product wouldn't have been any better than only having a little while to do it.

This week at work we had a "drop everything else that you're doing and help us finish this project" couple of days. It was awesome. We had to finish the bonus/raise salary worksheet to present to our company's parent company for approval. It was fun to work on this type of project and I felt especially valuable because of my mad excel skills! :) Plus those days flew by too. I hope that my boss will continue to pull me into projects like this that are outside my training and development bubble. I think I was able to prove myself as being valuable in these kinds of situations too.

Now if only there was a realistic way to put some enforceable deadlines on our house projects and I'd have sooo much more accomplished!

Fun with Friends...lots of them!

It's weird how different life is now that I'm no longer in school. I know there's the thought that college is a giant party occasionally interupted with class... and there probably was some time like that for me when I was at Iowa. But being back in school the last year and half has been far from that. While I still was able to spend time with friends while in school, my mind was always on school. There was always a case to be reading or a paper to write and I missed having Sundays just to relax. Now that I'm free from school, I've felt more free to have fun. No guilt about homework.

So here's a quick recap of all my post-ISU fun this last month!

NYE
Due to icy weather, our NYE in Huxley ended up smaller than expected. However, it was still a fun night in! The night was filled with lots of catching up with good friends, way too much delicious food, the discovery of a mini-keg, a board game that can outlast monopoly and a good old fashioned sleepover! It was a great way to start off 2011! Pics curtesy of Liz...

Polly Day
I capped off my final week of unemployed freedom with a raodtrip with Jenny up to Winona, MN for Polly's birthday. We celebrated the 27th annual Polly Day starting with the Wheel of Meat. Apparently the Wheel of Meat is not an uncommon thing in small towns, but I had never heard of such a thing. For every drink that we purchased between 4 and 7, we recieved a raffle ticket. And then at 7:15 they drew tickets for random cuts of meat. (It used to be an actual wheel that you got to spin for a chance at bringing home some meat but the lottery rules changed or something and now it's just a raffle.) The birthday girl got lucky and ended up with 3 wins. Unfortunately the rest of us were not so lucky and the result of our raffle tickets was just a nice buzz. We spent the rest of the night at one of her favorite establishments. It was so fun to help Polly celebrate and to catch up with both her and Jenny!

Back to Work
I started my new job on Monday after Polly's bday! I was excited and nervous. I worked there this summer for an internship but a couple things were different ... my position is a brand new position, I don't have any formal education regarding Training & Development, and my manager from this summer left in the fall and I hadn't met the new manager yet. But all these things also make work interesting and exciting which is good too. My position is HR Training Generalist and my focus will be to identify skill gaps, coordinate with technical experts in the engineering group to develop training modules and then create a "roadmap" for employees to follow in order to advance their skills (and be more productive for the company). There's a lot to do with lots of unknowns but I know I'll learn a lot in the process.

High School Craziness
To celebrate being back to work, I was thrilled to hit up HH with Katie on Friday and we continued the party on Saturday night. I brought Jackie along and we met up with Katie & Kelly and their husbands. It was a crazy night but sooo much fun! I love how there's those people that even though you don't get to see very often, it's just like the time never has passed. Katie's my oldest friend - we met in preschool and continued to attend the same school all the way through college at Iowa. While Kelly didn't go to our elementary school I still met her during that time thanks to RE at Sacred Heart. It's always a blast when I get to hang out with them! Unfortunately I did have to pay for all that fun the next day though. oops! However, with no guilt about needing to do homework it was great to have a lazy sunday.  

Overnight Guests
And now we're caught up to the last few days. Renee & Matt came to visit for the weekend. They left their baby at home and were ready to let loose! By the time I got home from work on Friday they had already finished off a few drinks and the craziness just continued. Thanks to my long recovery the previous weekend, I was more than happy to be the DD on Friday. And boy was it hilarious being the sober one. We introduced them to the famous Flying Tomato pizza at Wig & Pen and then went over to Renee's brother's house. We made the long trek to West Glen but it was worth it. Lindsey and her bf were able to meet us out there, which was great! Saturday included recovery time as well as shopping time and then we went out to dinner at Ruby Tuesdays. I hadn't ever been there before and the nice atmosphere and food made it a great choice. We spent the evening a slightly more chill than Friday night :) and ended up back at our place. Brandon & Erin came over too.

 

Packers vs Bears
We're not really NFL fans but how could we not watch the playoff game tonight... especially because we got the opportunity to hang out with even more friends! Mary & Adam invited us over to their place and Baby Callen was really the center of attention! I think Liz/Page, Emily/Rob and Matt & I all did a great job of sharing though :) It was a great way to wrap up a fun weekend!

 

Sofa Shopping

I've been bookmarking sofas on my computer for weeks now. And I've been hitting up all the furniture stores around here to check for comfiness and the feel of the fabric. I even dragged Matt, my parents and my sister on various trips to the furniture stores. But despite all this work, we still haven't found the perfect sofa. I know, I know... there is no such thing as the perfect sofa. But it still would be nice to find something that both Matt and I agree upon.

We have made some progress though. At the beginning of this search my "likes" were all over the place. I could imagine all sorts of styles in our house. But even though my "likes" were many, they didn't match up with any of Matt's "likes". I didn't realize how different our expectations were for our new furniture. However, after lots of searching my style preference seems to have emerged and it's lining up more with Matt's preference.

Here are some of my favorites right now...

As you can see there's both regular sofas as well as a sofa/chaise combo. I've always thought a true sectional couch would be awesome but right now we think it may not work for our room. However, a sofa/chaise combo may be a great compromise. And as far as color - we're thinking in the brown family. But someone is a little particular about the feel of the fabric so that's more of a priority than the actual color. :) Hopefully we're able to decide on something soon because all this looking but not buying is exhausting. And we can't pick out a new paint for the walls until we decide on the furniture (lesson learned when painting our bedroom walls before picking out fabric for our window coverings).

My baby sister

My baby sister is studying abroad in Spain this semester. It's so weird to think of her as all grown up and living in a foreign country. While she's not that much younger than me (7yrs), I still remeber her being a little kid. And just when I got one sister back in the US, the other one leaves. It sounds like she's off to a great start and hopefully she'll keep blogging about her adventures! Here's a link to her page:

Stories from Spain: ¡Finalmente en España!