Little Man Baby Shower

If you remember, 10 hours after finishing installing our new floors it was on to the next project, a baby shower for one of my best friends, Courtney. I was super excited to host the shower and begged her to do as soon as I called her out found out that she and her husband were expecting.

The theme for the shower was Little Man. Thank you Pinterest. I got inspiration from here, here, and here.

I got the invitations on Etsy from Katiedid Designs. I deleted personal information to keep away the internet creepers.

The rest of the printables, including the invitation insert below I got from Baby Buns Designs on Etsy Both of these ladies were great to work with! I printed the invitations at Walgreens and the rest of the printables at home.

The mom-to-be's one request was to have each guest bring a book for the little man. It is such a cute idea and I cannot believe that she did not get a single duplicate.

 
The food. The most important topic in my life. Did I mention I'm on a diet? Anyway...I decided to do "what is your craving" for the food. I'm sure I saw the idea somewhere, but now I can't find it.

The popcorn containers were from Party City.

The sandwiches were chicken salad and pulled pork sliders.

  

The breadsticks were from Fazoli's and were"mommy's craving."

Decorations.

For the games/activites we played the Price is Right with baby items, made wishes for the baby,  and made DIY Onesies.

To make the onesies, each person picked a onesie, a fabric scrap, and a pattern. I printed patterns off all sorts of places online and found about 40 different ones I think. After cutting the fabric out,  the next step is to use heat and bond paper to iron each shape onto the onesie.

They turned out even cuter than I would have imagined and even more importantly the mom-to-be loved them!

Now on a more sentimental note... (This is cheesy, don't say I didn't warn you)

These girls have been my best friends for around 10 years. Even though some of them left me moved away and we are physically fall apart, I feel just as close with all of these ladies as ever. Every time we get together, we pick up right where we left off like no time has passed. I feel so lucky to have these friendships and I appreciate how rare our "group" really is. How many people can say they even still talk to 3 of their friends from when they were 15, let alone still consider them best friends so many life changes and years later?

Now for one of my favorite pictures from the shower, even though it was technically after...

I cannot wait to meet Baby D! He is loved so much already.  We are all  eagerly anticipating his arrival in about 4 weeks!

Bamboo Floors Part 2

When we last visited the floor project we were somewhere about here.

I promise it got better from here and I'm happy to report that the house is back to normal finally. 

The click and lock went down relatively quickly. The cutting and cutting and more cutting was that time consuming part.

We had to end early (ugh!) again on day 2, so we ended about here.  Luckily, the next day we had some reinforcements come in and we were able to knock out the hallway, the entry way, and the kitchen.

One of my best friend's husband Matt and my brother in law Zack were super helpful!

This is my I'm over it face. My brother had just had his wisdom teeth out but he ran our errands and it looks like he also put some boards in.

This is the only way I saw Jacob for 5 days, except he would (thankfully for you) pull his pants up when I took a picture.

 My sister Ashley helped but is taking a break in the picture. Preggo on the right supervised.

If I don't mention that my dad also helped and mom "supervised" I will never hear the end of it so although they aren't in these pictures they were helpful and we appreciate it so much!

They all helped us knock out the majority of the floors on day 3. The light at the end of the tunnel was getting brighter. We only had the pantry, the hall by the garage and the bathroom left. Unfortunately, every single board in these areas had to be cut. During this part Jacob did the cutting, while I measured and put in the boards. It's a good thing we like each other is all I have to say. 


We finished the pantry pretty quickly on day 4.

 Then...we got stuck. We moved into the hallway between the garage and the bathroom in which there were three doors and the rest of the day looked like this.

 Jacob spent FOREVER in the door way. Seriously. I wanted to scream but lucky for him I wore my patient pants that day. All you need to know is that my idea was right and his was wrong.

This was Saturday before going back to work and even though we had only tiny spaces left to finish on day 4, we did not finish.

Day 5: The bathroom. We had to remove the toilet which require trips to Lowes and a visit from my father in law but we did it without breaking or ruining anything so I'm going to chalk it up as a win. The other bonus is that now we know how to change toilets ourselves.

And at about 4pm on the Sunday before returning to work after Christmas Break, the last piece went in. In the spirit of keeping it real, I measured the very last piece wrong and the picture below is not the last piece, but let's pretend.

 The boards were all down, but we couldn't call the floors done just yet. We had to paint and re-install the quarter rounds and wait for the carpet reducers to come in. We had to special order transition pieces for between the rooms that did not get new floors. Unfortunately, these took a couple of weeks to come in, but I'm happy to report that they are in now too. I was not near as excited about the transition pieces so I didn't taken any pictures of the installation, but basically one end slides of the hardwood and the other end we pulled and tucked the carpet under. We just used liquid nails to hold them in place. Sorry for the extremely blurry picture.

As for the quarter rounds, I used my trusty spray paint to give them a fresh coat of paint and then Jacob used a nail gun to reattach them. Some caulk and some paint touch ups and the floors were officially 100% done! 

An entire 10 hours before I was hosting a baby shower for one of my best friends at our house...

The Macklemore Thrift Shop Challenge

Jacob has to work the  Indy home show all day again today (boo) and I can do whatever I want (yay) without any whining opinions from anyone else.  So what do I do?  I accepted the Macklemore Thrift Shop Challenge over at Young House Love! I haven't been the thrift store regular I used to be, but apparently it was my lucky day because it was 50% off day at Goodwill. I took this as a sign from the thrift store gods, grabbed a diet coke, and off I went to pop some tags.

The challenge came from the lyrics in the song. Never heard the song? I posted the edited for radio version below and here's the unedited version.

THRIFT SHOP (PG Radio Edit Clean version) - MACKLEMORE & RYAN LEWIS FEAT. WANZ from Garrett Wesley Gibbons on Vimeo.

STEP 1: Go to a thrift shop with – just as the chorus of the song says – “$20 in your pocket” and take a picture. 

Like I said, I was by my lonesome so I couldn't take a picture with the money in front of the store, so I improvised. 

 


STEP 2: Spend your $20 any way you’d like and photograph your spoils. 

 I totally did not mean to, but all three items I bought were donated by Target. Bullseye strikes again!
 

 

I thought this little clock would be cute on one of the nightstands for only $2.49

The frame was $4.25. Brand new, in the box. No scratches. Score

 I'm looking at my receipt now and apparently I got the vase for $2.50? That does not add up, but it says $9.99 and then discount and then $2.50. Hmmm...

That brings me to a grand total of $9.90 with tax. Pretty cheap shopping trip if you ask me. It's too bad HomeGoods forced me inside their doors next.

STEP 3: Find one item (or more) referenced in the song and snap a pic 

"I'm digging, I'm digging, I'm searching right through that luggage
One man's trash, that's another man's come-up"

I'm pretty bummed that I didn't score a big coat or a fringed vest, but this suitcase is pretty cool too. Dare I admit I kind of like it in a weird way?

Mission Complete.

Prepping the Floors

We decided when we closed on the house in the spring that we were going to add hardwood flooring over our time off of work at Christmas. At that point we started saving and started some shopping. Of course thanks to my inability to make a decision, I did not decide which floors to buy until after Christmas with only a few days left of our time off.  However, I'm glad I waited and went to "just one more place" before deciding because that one last place was ultimately the one I had been looking for.

After lots of research and shopping we  decided on bamboo floors in the end for three reasons.  1. They are very durable and we have two very active dogs and will eventually have little Jacobs and Kims  2. We liked the way they look 3. They are environmentally friendly

We bought the floors at Home Depot. They are strand woven bamboo in a walnut finish with click n lock installation. I highly recommend the click and lock. It was super easy. Time consuming, but easy.

Once we loaded them up and took them home, we started the prep process the next day. We had heard that wood needed a minimum of 3 days before installing the floors once they are in the house, but this manufactor said that it was unnecessary with these floors. (So far, so good)

The first step was to rip up the carpeting in the dining room. Thankfully it came up very very easily and took about 10 minutes. We then removed all the tack strips and swept everything up before laying down the moisture barrier and underlayment. We decided not to rip up all the linoleum to save time and energy. We had also been told that it could be used as a moisture barrier if it is in good shape, which it was.

Emma bear loved the cold, concrete floors. She is still mad at us for putting in real floors.

The next step was removing all the quarter round. I forgot to take any pictures, but basically we used a spackle knife and a hammer to pry off each piece. We were actually able to save all of the quarter round and save some money. I marked them all on the back so we would remember where they went. We ended up giving them a fresh coat of paint before putting them back on.

To finish up getting ready to actually start laying the floors we had to cut off the bottoms of the door frames. We initially used the saw in this picture but it was really hard work and didn't do a great job, so we ended up borrowing J's dad power dremel multi max tool which was fantastic. I want one of my own ASAP. To know how much to cut off of the doors we used a scrap piece of floor and underlayment under the saw like the picture shows.

After the prep on the first day, we couldn't wait to see some flooring actually on the floor. This is how far we got laying floor the first day since we had plans in the evening.

 Andddd our family room looked like this...

What You Missed and What's to Come

Please excuse my 7 month little blogging break. My bad. I have no excuse, other than I started this blog for fun and to be honest I just didn't feel like it for a while.

There have been lots of changes over here so I'll do a quick update to get everyone up to speed. 

April 2012

We bought our very first house. Apparently it was a little known fact that we were actually renting the blue carpet house. I wrote a quick blog about the new house a while back but we have made tons of changes since then which are coming soon!

May 2012

I FINALLY graduated with my Masters degree in social work.

June 2012

We celebrated our second wedding anniversary. I guess we are not really newlyweds anymore...

July 2012

I started a new job as a therapist working with children.

My sister got married.

Hubby and I went to Punta Cana, Dominican Republic to celebrate our anniversary the month before.

September 2012

I turned 25.  How can that be?! Only two years until my scary age.

We added a new member to our family, Emma the 2 year old golden retriever mix.  She is as well behaved as she is cute! Proof that adult shelter dogs can be excellent dogs.

October 2012

Jacob became even older than he already is and started a new job. He is still in sales but left pharmaceuticals for building supplies and is loving the change.

November, December, and January

Blur of family, friends, projects, work and holiday festivities. I feel like I haven't sat down since October.

I have a laundry list of projects that are coming to the blog soon!

Watch out for:

• Installing bamboo floors
• Building an entertainment center out of hand me downs for the family room
• New upholstered bed in the master (and the details of buying a mattress on the internet)
• Filling my giant family room wall
• My sister's bridal shower
• " Little man" baby shower
• Guest room updates x 2
• Mounting a flat screen
• Painting bookshelves using a power sprayer
• Building in the refrigerator