Weekend in Instagram

 This weekend was a mix of rain and beautiful sunshine.  It rained most of Friday, so Antoine and I decided to order a pizza from Dewey's, one of my favorite pizza places (lately we've been getting the Ryan's Inferno, which is never spicy [yay!] but always hits the spot everytime) for dinner.  After the delicious pizza we got into our pajamas and prepared ourselves for the last five episodes of the Walking Dead (which we had been saving up).  God, I love that show!  It's so flippin' good.

 While we were watching the Walking Dead I painted my nails with some crackle polish I had recently found on clearance at Sally's. It was my first attempt at crackle polish and I gotta say, I'm a fan.

 Saturday morning I woke up to find that my new pair of glasses had arrived.  I got them from coastal.com.  They have this promotion where your first pair of glasses are free (as long as your Rx isn't too crazy), so all you have to pay is $10 for shipping!

According to my weather app on my phone it said Saturday was supposed to be dreary...but it was gorgeous.  The purple tulips in our window flowerbox were loving the sunshine.

Since the weather was so lovely we decided to add a trip to Home Depot to our list of errands.  I picked up some herbs to plant (rosemary, basil and cilantro for now) and some new seeds to sew (including pickling cucumbers, broccoli rabe, brussel sprouts, and romaine).

 While we were at Home Depot, Antoine and I were gawking at these gorgeous forsythias.  We ended up leaving, going to the grocery store and then going back to pick up two of them.  Since we bought the house about two and a half years ago we've had these evergreen shrubs on either side of our porch.  When we bought the house they were fine, but over time they've slowly begun to die.  So we've had our eye out for something to replace them...and the forsythia seemed like a great choice.

 They're hardy and vibrant, yet have a delicate look to them up close.  And they really pop next to our blue house.  I'm in love.

 Here's the sad, dying shrubs that Antoine ripped out of the ground.

On Sunday we took it easy and didn't do much of anything, mainly because I wasn't feeling too hot.  But I did whip up a delicious smoothie for breakfast.  I got the idea for The Novice Chef's recent post on green(ish) smoothies.  I took her recipe and tweaked it a little, since I have a bag full of frozen blueberries in the freezer and I'm not a pineapple fan.  I went for non-fat greek yogurt, frozen blueberries, fresh strawberries, a fresh banana, and a couple handfuls of spinach.  I ended up having to add a little OJ to mine, since my blender sucks.  I gotta say, I was a bit skeptical about not being able to taste the spinach, but I figured Jessica wouldn't lie to me.  And she didn't.  With all that other tasty, fruitiness in there you really can't taste the spinach.  I even gave it to Antoine to try (and he had no idea what I had put into it since he was in the livingroom the whole time) and after he took a sip I told him there was spinach in it and he thought I was kidding.  And seriously, they're super addictive.  I actually had two of them yesterday and I'm craving another one already!

Call It Renovation

The last month has been a little hectic at work.  And the next couple months year is bound to be even more chaotic and stressful.  But all this stress makes way for some really big improvements to our department, and even my job.  Our department has been around in the library, in one form or another, for about 40 years now.  And in those forty years we've essentially occupied the "basement" of the library, a space originally meant for storage, not for people actually working in it.  And in those forty years the department has seen very little practically no cosmetic attention...until now.  See, a couple months ago the Public Library was awarded a grant to join forces with our existing lab and create a joint lab (that will conserve both the PL and UC collections) in our existing space.  As part of this, UC is funding a much needed and desired renovation and update of the department.  We'll be in the same space we are now, but some major changes are happening and will continue to happen in the next month. 

One example of the major major things going down (quite literally) in the department is that our main storage room is being converted into our Binding packing area (this involved tearing down a wall), so that we can make space for a second Conservation bench area, which we will desperately need after the Public Library folks move in permanently in January! 

 Demolition!  For a couple weeks everything has been covered in plastic and moved to the back of the department so that the wall could come down.  It took two weeks for the wall to come all the way down.

 

After the first week.  Apparently there were more layers to the wall than they were expecting.

And here's what we walked into yesterday morning...no more wall!

Now that the wall is down, the rest of the renovation can continue...tiling, painting, shelves moved out, new furniture, installation of the new bench area, new equipment, two sink installations, cleaning, more painting, picture hanging, etc.  The next month and a half are going to be INSANE, but I think it'll all be worth it...if my boss doesn't lose her mind in the process.  I'll keep you posted!

"Green Rugs Make Me CRAZY!!"

Living with a basset hound is a special thing.  Especially when that basset hound happens to still be in his puppy-phase.  From manic outburst to practically unconscious in a matter of minutes.  It's actually pretty hilarious most of the time.  Well, except when someone comes over and he decides to flip-the-shit-out and run around like he's on crack flavored candy.  Yeah, that's not so great.  But most of the time the spastic personality of a basset hound is an awesome thing.  You never know when a mood change is going to happen...except when it comes to carrots.  Carrots = extreme focus + palpable excitement.

Last Sunday, while Antoine and I were finally putting together our dining room we found out just exactly how said basset hound will react to a bright green rug.  Bright green rug + basset hound + fluffy cat = crazy shit-storm of manic awesomeness.  I don't know if it was the color that threw him into madness or that the rug was new and hadn't been there before, but as soon as we rolled out that rug Cheese started to go ape-shit.  He decided the rug was HIS and he wasn't going to share it's spectacular fantasticism with some stupid fluffy cat!  Here's how things played out...

 "This rug is MINE, you silly cat!"

 "You hear me?!"

 "I'M FLIPPIN' CRAZY!!"

 "BHLAGHAHAHAARGH!!"

"Oh yeah, cat, I almost forgot about you in my manic fury.  Beat it!"

 "BHLAGHAHAHAARGH!!"

 "Hey owner, you think this is funny!?"

"BHLAGHAHAHAARGH!!"

And after about five minutes a manic chaos, barking at the cat, rolling on the fun, running in circles...he passed out.  Oh the joys of having a basset hound!

Before and After: 50s Cabinet

One of the things that we had in our dining room prior to our little revamp was this crappy little sideboard thing my parents had given me years ago...

It's totally my mother's style.  Lighter, cherry colored (fake) wood with little leaf hardware and country touches.  Although it wasn't my thing, it worked well for holding all of Cheese and Gui's stuff and made a good spot for Gui's food (so it's off the floor and Cheese can't eat it).  But I didn't like it and was longing for something different, potentially something we could refinish and make a little crazy. 

After some searching we found this 1950s style cabinet with an enamel top on it.  The top was fairly scratched and the main part of it was this gross cream color, but we immediately saw it's potential.  After some stripping, painting, spray painting and a ton of hard work (mostly done by Antoine) we have a new cabinet that we are completely in love with. 

 If you can't tell in the pictures, the old color was cream and the new color is white (to match the existing white on the enamel top, our curtains and molding).

 Sidenote: most home improvement stores do not sell fuchsia or magenta spray paint.  But Plaza Art Materials does, along with a ton of other amazingly fun colors.  And it's reasonably priced!

I think Gui is liking his new table, although he doesn't quite get the concept of me trying to take a picture of him in front of his name on the wall. 

Before and After: Dining Room

The dining room has always been the place we put stuff.  Cheese's crate is in there, a random bookshelf from my college days, Gui's cat scratch post, and other odd and ends.  Not surprisingly, we very rarely ate/eat dinner in there (we are "dinner-in-front-of-the-tv" folks).  And it happened to be the only remaining room downstairs that hadn't been painted since we moved, and that means it was still that horrible beige-yellow color that the whole house was when we moved in.  I hate that color.  It freaks me out more than all white walls.  So, about four weeks ago Antoine and I finally decided to tackle the dining room.  For some time I had an idea in mind for it, so it was just a matter of buying supplies and getting our butts in gear.

Here's the before (please excuse the mess):

Our first idea when it came to the dining room was to paint one wall with chalkboard paint.  We thought it would not only be fun for us, but fun for any guests who came over to visit.

 Here is is in it's curing state.  Once you paint the wall, which takes several coats, you wait like 3 days and then cover the entire wall with chalk.  Then you wipe it off and your wall is ready to go!

 Woot!

 We've already had some fun with it.  Although, note to animal owners; if you draw something on the wall at their level they will lick it off!  Hopefully chalk isn't very harmful to pets?!  They seem fine...

Next up, we knew we wanted to do something with the light fixture.  It came with the house and while I don't dislike it, it was a bit sad looking. After searching at antique malls for a new fixture we realized that we didn't like many of them and the ones we did like we're out of our price range (aka more than $30 or $40).  So, we decided to spray paint the existing one, to liven it up a bit.  To be extra crazy, we went with a color shifting spray paint.

Before.  We decided to paint it without taking it down, so Antoine would not have to risk electrocution.

Unfortunately the color shifting paint is a little hard to photograph, so this is the best I got.  Sometimes it's purplish and other times it looks bluish-green, and I love it!

The painting of the walls and the light fixture took one weekend.  Then we spent another weekend working on refinishing a new cabinet we purchased for the room (more on that tomorrow).  And then we spent another attempting to hang pictures/art and shelves.  It wasn't until the fourth weekend (this past weekend) that we got everything in place.

Behold, the finished product:

 To go along with the one chalkboard wall we went ahead and painted the rest of the walls a bright, light blueish color called Polar Drift.  Let me just say, those paint and primer in one are awesome!  They are totally worth the extra $$.  Seriously, one coat of paint, that's all it took!

 It feels way bigger and brighter than before.  

 I love the curtains, they let in so much light and were a steal at Ikea.

 This little art project only cost like $10.  And it was so much fun to melt the crayons, I felt like a 6 year old.

 This was also inexpensive to create (read: free).  I took four old picture frames I had from college, spray painted them black (with some existing spray paint I had) and then put some small pieces of my marbled paper in them (and cut a couple mats at work using our handy dandy mat-cutter).

 I love, love, love our bright green rug we got from Ikea!  Since it was so cheap I was expecting it to pill badly, but so far...nothing!

I think one of the best ideas we had regarding the dining room were the wall shelves.  They are a huge improvement over that cheap old book shelf and they freed up so much floorspace for things like Cheese's food/water and crate.

I've got a couple more dining room related posts coming up in the future...including a basset hound's curious reaction to a new bright green rug.  Stay tuned.