June 25, 2015

How to Keep an Orchid Alive

As I mentioned in a post the other week, we have owned an orchid for almost five months now and I'm proud to say that it's still alive. To me, this is quite the accomplishment seeing as I've never owned a plant before and orchids are quite fickle and not the easiest plants to take care of. They say you should own and take care of a plant before owning a pet or having a child, so I've taken my job as an orchid mom quite seriously. Okay, not too seriously, but I've tried hard to keep it alive. Although I'm by no means an orchid expert, I've had people ask on Instagram about how I keep it alive so I thought I would share those tips with all of you today.

June 15, 2015

Kitchen Reno Idea Board

The kitchen is really the heart of the home and right now mine is quite dated. Paul and I have been talking about a kitchen renovation since moving in last September, and we are finally getting to the point of making decisions on it. A while back I posted about the initial floor plan for our renovation, and this weekend we were able to visit some interior kitchen design places and really start narrowing our choices when it comes to the materials being used. There are things that I know that I want– gray subway tile with white grout, white cabinets, brushed nickel hardware, and adding an island. In my dream kitchen the island would be a warm dark wood and the rest of the cabinets white, but we are not gutting the entire kitchen and rather are rearranging the existing cabinets and are using an existing cabinet to help build the island in order to save money so we are going to end up painting both the cabinets and the island white. At first I was a little skeptical with all the white, but with new darker floors and gray subway tiles I think there will be enough warmth in an otherwise sterile white kitchen. This is such an important room so thus far it’s been a daunting process in deciding on all the aesthetics but after this weekend I’m starting to feel pretty confident.

June 9, 2015

Updates

Hi everyone, I hope you all had a wonderful weekend and start to the week! I thought today would be a good day to catch you up on things around here.  

Some of you may have noticed that projects have been going more slowly around here and the blog posts haven't been as frequent. Things at my day job have been really picking up lately, and all of my large projects that I've been working on for the last year are finally in the process of being implemented which means I'm in charge of overseeing a lot. Since I've been putting extra hours in at work, I no longer have as much extra time after work to work on some home projects. In addition, Paul and I both work from home so now that the weather is becoming warmer, once we both are done working we both want to leave our house since that's were we spend our entire day as is. The same goes for weekends as well. Since we are always in our home, weekends have been spent for the most part everywhere but inside our house. My parents were just recently in town and my in-laws have a cottage 30 minutes from us so we have also been enjoying quality time with our families as well. All this said, I can't promise that it's going to get a ton better at this time, just because we have many trips planned and we both really just want to be outside and enjoy this summer, but I do have a lot of things lined up. I also have several projects completed that I just need to find time to now blog about. I hope you will hang in there with me! 

 Now on to some things around our house!

1. Our Orchid child that we have had for about four months is still alive and looking rather healthy. I call it our "orchid child' because they say you should get a plant before you own a pet or have kids, and well this is my first house plant so i've been taking my orchid mom duty very seriously. Hah! I've had some people request a blog post on how I've taken care of it and kept it alive so I will be sharing that very soon!


June 2, 2015

Parade of Homes House Tour and Dream Builder

Happy Tuesday everyone! If you follow me on Instagram, then you might know that this past Saturday my parents were in town from OR and Paul and I went with them to some of the parade of homes in our area. I absolutely love parade of homes and grew up going to it, so it was so fun going with Paul for the first time.  Paul loves architecture and real estate and ever since we started dating he has always constantly looked at houses for fun. Me on the other hand, I grew up living in 9 different houses and grew up riding around looking at houses A LOT (even when we were on vacation) with my parents, so looking at homes has always been apart of my life. That said, since we both share a similar passion in houses it's definitely our goal to one day build a custom home that has all the bells and whistles and architectural details that our dreams are made of. This goal of ours is something that is definitely not in the near future, nor will most likely even be House #2 for us, but if life unfolds according to our plan (which we all know it doesn't usually work like that, but let's just be optimistic for the sake of it) it would be House #3! I'm 23, so I'm perfectly content waiting for years before accomplishing this goal of ours!

 At this point, I couldn't tell you all the details that would comprise of our House #3, but we do know who we want to build it and we had the chance to see one his homes this past weekend on the parade of homes. The builder is Dave Dunsendang Homes and is located in the Grand Rapids area in Michigan and I came across him over a year ago on Zillow and have been in love with his homes ever since. His detailed craftsmanship is beyond swoon worthy and exactly what my dreams are made of.  He was actually at the house that he built during the parade of homes and I had a chance to meet him, and you would of thought I had met a celebrity by how I was acting and how excited and complementing I was about his work.  Besides his craftsmanship, I also love the fact that he is a custom builder that builds the house based off exactly what you want, instead of going off a handful of pre-set floor plans that can only have minor adjustments made to the plan like most builders do. That said, enough about talking about the his work and get to the fun part, the pictures! This house tour was a house from last years parade of homes and was built on a old orchid, swoon!!