Organize Everything

If you ever need something for decorating/organizing your house and can't find exactly what you want, try organize.com, aka Organize Everything. I searched all over the Internet for a 24 inch wide, bookshelf-style pot rack in stainless steel (or nickel or chrome) and couldn't find it anywhere. I finally found something that worked on this site.

Also, we have some additional new organization tools in our home- a white board and dry erase markers. We are keeping a running list of all the outstanding decorating tasks on it. It's easy to walk up and pick a task to get crackin' on, and very easy to update, erase finished items (yay!), etc. We also have the grocery list posted there, and reminders to renew our license plates, etc. While much less low tech, this works a lot better than the wiki page we tried using a few years ago. The white board is right in our faces every time we walk down the hall ;)

Purple Reign Makes Roses Bloom!!!!

Rose Parade - the Lindbergh High School Spirit of St. Louis Marching Band

Rose Parade - My fave float, from Cal Poly Tech universities

Frog Nation!!!

We won!!!!!!!!!!!

TCU Won the Rose Bowl!!!!!!

Megan is a TCU Alumn, and when the football team earned the invitation to the Rose Bowl it was a dream come true. For those of you not familiar with TCU football, the team has been steadily improving its national ranking over the last decade or so under coach Gary Patterson, and the last three years in particular have been stellar. Sadly, the BCS system that favors the traditional football powerhouses has kept the Horned Frog team out of the big BCS bowl games, and out of the running for the national championship. The invitation to the Rose Bowl was a HUGE step, and the team WON, beating the U of Wisconsin Badgers (who were ranked number 5 behind TCU's number 3, so proving again how good the Horned Frogs really are on a national level).

Benson was a trooper and got up at 5 a.m. to leave the house by 5:30 a.m. - we had to hit the Rose Parade before the big game! We arrived in Pasadena at 6 a.m. to avoid the crazy traffic from the street closures, and after napping in the car a bit headed over for the parade. Thanks to my dad for snagging us bleacher seats in the second row so we didn't have to consider camping out on the street overnight! The parade was beautiful, with lots of amazing floats, great marching bands and very impressive equestrian entries, too.

After the parade we went back to the car for another nap (yes, we were that tired, it WAS New Year's Day) and after 45 minutes of rest we hoofed it over to the Rose Bowl!!! Our seats were third row from the top in the North end zone, and we can tell you from experience that there really is no bad seat in the Rose Bowl, because we had an excellent view. The TCU crowd kinda seemed like freshmen invited to the prom compared to the Badger fans who were well-seasoned in bowl game excitement. The Badgers were hardcore tailgating, taunting the TCU fans here and there, EVERY one of them was in red head to toe, etc. The TCU fans were, well, just bright-eyed and really happy to be there! Which seemed fitting, since just last year was our first real BCS game, in the Fiesta Bowl, and it was against another newcomer to the national stage, Boise State.

The game was a blast, and we've never hung on every play in a football game like that ever before. Everyone we talk to who watched it on TV thought it was a nail-biter at the end, but in the stadium it felt different. By the third quarter the Badger fans had deflated a lot. Even through that last rush where the Badgers scored, everyone was just watching the clock and it seemed like there was no way the Badgers could win it - even when they went for the 2-point conversion, it just felt like it was TCU's game.

Looking forward to watching lots of TCU football with friends and family next season!!!!!

Sofa Safari

As with several other things, never knew how many options for creating a sofa there are in the world! We chose a style called Slider (not like White Castle) from the Sofa Company. Now it's time for fabric choices. The company lets customers take large yard-long swaths of fabric home to check out how the colors look in their home lighting.

We've decided on micro velvet fabric- it's really soft and comfortable, and doesn't have that really contrasted two-tone look like micro-suede does when you run a hand on it cross-ways. We brought home 5 color swatches, and have it narrowed down to two of those (dark gray or coral - kind of like Jacob and Emily's wedding colors!), plus Benson wants to throw cream/white into the mix again. It's what we have on our current couches and it might look nice.

In this pic, Stormy is voting for my favorite by sitting in the chair it's on, so we now have an authentic test of how his hair does/does not show on it. (Hoping does not, since it's practically the same color as he is!) We are thinking of having an ottoman made of the coral one.

Paint the Town (or just the walls, please)

Picking a paint color is becoming a huge chore. It's my least favorite part of decorating so far. There are eight different samples on the walls; green is the settled on color, but now it's time to decide which green. It is shocking we are spending so much time and thought on this!

For the photo with 5 blocks above the fireplace (aka our Floo network connection with Chris & Gina) - we didn't like any of the colors because they all looked really tan or grey on the walls in daylight. We learned that lighting and light bulbs are really important, because they did all have a green cast to them at night under the very yellow (as we eventually figured out) lighting in the living room when we picked the colors. We bought Reveal bulbs to replace the current ones, and Benson used a suction cup on a pole to change them (will post about that later).

Soooo- we went very green and very blue for the next three paint colors. I think the picture here is in bad lighting, because they don't look nearly as vibrant here as they do on the wall. We are leaning toward the middle one - it comnes across sort of soft forest green in person. The one above it is a little too yellow/avacado in the daylight. The blue one looks too much like the sky, so having the whole room sky blue seems weird and too cold feeling.

Dining room console cabinet

battle scars, pre-restoration

final glory!

Both of us like used/antique furniture if it's a good style and quality, so we met Susan (the designer) at Wertz Bros. to look at some bars, chairs and cabinets. We didn't purchase any of the antique bars (Megan loved them, Benson hated them) but we DID find a beautiful dining room buffet cabinet.

Not that we knew/know anything about this, but apparently it is made by a mid-century designer named John Widdicomb. It needed some TLC because it was pretty scratched/banged up, so it was priced way lower than his items usually cost. We bought it and paid the Wertz Bros. furniture restorer to refinish the top, fix several nicks, re-hang the cabinet doors and add a magnetic closure to the front. It turned out gorgeous!

It looks kind of blue-ish in every photo for some reason, but it is really an espresso brown in person. The carved front cabinets are the best part. We've filled it with all our dining room linens, as well as the barware/glassware/ liquor. Come over and party any time! :)

Divine Dining

For the dining room table, we made a snap decision that we still feel good about. Susan (the interior designer) looked on Craiglist and found a gorgeous, dark chocolate wood table on sale for less than half the original cost. Benson got a call from her about it while Megan was busy with friends, so he took a look at the pics, decided he had to have it, and then called the owners. Turned out the table had been used to stage their home in NYC and didn't fit well in their new LA home, so it was hardly used-- nice bonus.

Benson talked Megan into driving the U-Haul truck from the sellers' place to our place (something about him leading using the Nav system in his car so she could follow....). So- within a span of seven hours or less, we found out about the table, rented the U-Haul, and had it in our home. Which was none too soon, because it came to live with us only eleven days before we hosted Thanksgiving Dinner. :)

Megan still thinks the shape looks a bit like a grasshopper in the DWR picture here, but we never look at it straight on like that, and the shape looks great in our dining space.

Magic Carpet Ride

Our designer told us the first step to decorating would be to pick a rug. How little we knew about the vast choices avaialable online for rug choices! We spent at least 4-5 days scouring sites, checking dimensions, weighing different color pallets, and second-guessing. Finally, we chose the one in the photo; it's a bit modern and funky, but the antique furniture we are using will offset it nicely, for a cool mix of colors, styles and shapes that will hopefully work harmoniously.