Pretty Stairs

I'm sure anyone that reads this blog is well aware of my ability to come up with big huge projects for the house that will inevitably consume a lot of hours and a lot of cash. But hey, a girl can dream, right?! Lately, my mind has been running full force trying to figure out something to do with our staircase/hallway, since we've thrown around the idea of tackling that this winter when we're inside hiding from the bitter cold.

From what we've been told, whoever owned our little house before us was apparently trying to flip it. While that explains the all neutral walls and everything else covered in white paint color scheme we walked in to, it's also important to note that in a lot of ways... said flippers did a really crappy job. I suppose it's not exactly fair to assume that the previous owners even had anything to do with the oddity of the hallway, but I can't help but wonder (woo, Sex & the City shoutout!) why it is the way it is.

See my lovely little picture, which I've so beautifully labeled in photoshop with what I refer to as the "line of ruin" -


If you look closely, you can see that said "line of ruin" is a big squared chunk of the wall that juts out about a half of an inch from the rest of it. WHY?!?

Now you may be wondering why I really care about that little line of extra wall, and to that I show you this -


Beautiful, isn't it? This jaw-dropping staircase belongs to none other than Centsational Girl, who's blog full of DIY projects and at home makeovers has me drooling on an almost daily basis.

While I'm not sure I could EVER convince Dan to go for the wallpapered panels below the chair rail that Kate the Centsational Girl did, I was able to get almost a full nod of approval on the idea of a chair rail with blank panels underneath with complimentary paint colors for an overall gorgeous two-toned look. Then I noticed that darned line of ruin. And the fact that our staircase is nowhere near as breezy and open as Kate's. Long story short - we can't have a chair rail. And if we decided to try anyways, it would look really really ridiculous. FINE.

The line of ruin also knocks out any chance of serene strips a la Young House Love's extra bathroom (although I would go vertical over horizontal to play up the height) -


Back to the drawing board and still convinced I can do something besides paint one solid color, I turned to a google image search for "staircase makeovers" and now have two new ideas to run past Dan one of these days when I think he's feeling extra open minded :).

#1. DIY Stenciling. Easier (and cheaper) than wallpaper, tons of room for creativity, and somehow doesn't feel quite so permanent, which is always nice for someone as indecisive as myself.




#2. Funky stairs. With a "normal" neutral colored wall hosting a slew of framed black & white pictures. Again, not insanely permanent, and easy to switch up if I tire of it.



I'm fairly certain this could be done with regular old paper and some mono-adhesive spray, or wallpaper if I find something I love!

Happy Friday!

Thanks to the wonderful world of social networking, my Friday morning just started off bright with the news that I've won a $25 gift card to Red Lobster! I can almost TASTE the endless shrimp in my future already!!

Here's the long story of how it happened...

- Manda tells me I NEED to join Twitter, so I do.
- Someone named Foiled Cupcakes starts to follow me... so I follow them, too. I mean, come on, it's cupcakes.
- I see via Twitter that Foiled Cupcakes is looking for cupcake models, so Lauren and I sign up. Because, duh, it's cupcakes.
- We meet bunches of other social media fanatics at the cupcake shoot, and exchange Twitter names, because that's the cool thing to do.
- I start following Shona of Kamileon Events , who's just one of my new "Friends in the Blogosphere" from the cupcake extravaganza.
- Kamileon Events hosts a Twitter giveaway for a $25 Red Lobster gift card... and I win!

Now that I have sufficiently gotten your taste buds all worked up with thoughts of delicious food... head on over to Foiled Cupcakes and check out their latest blog entry featuring Lauren and nine of the other cupcake models. And be sure to check out Kamileon Events if you're in need of any event planning services!

Favorite Ingredients - Mixed

I've decided to make a conscious effort to post in my blog much more frequently... leading towards eventually posting every day. Since I neither have the time or the funds to do enough at the house to fill daily postings, I'm allowing myself the freedom to blog more randomly. I suppose a lot of it will end up being simple inspiration I gather from my daily blogroll browsing, but I do (of course) plan to continue posting 906-related goodness seeing as I have a minor love affair with my house and absolutely love sharing all of it with you here!

Today, I'm craving getting back to my love for cooking at home - experimenting with new recipes and trying to build up my abilities in the kitchen. While I have continued cooking lately, it's been much more sporadic and I haven't tried anything too far from our "normal" rotation. Also, having the grill made for tons of easy dinners through the summer (marinated chicken anyone?)... but with fall in Chicago quickly flying by and another brutal winter rearing it's ugly head, I'm hoping to get back to cozy at home dinners with a glass of wine!

This picture (snatched from a Style Me Pretty wedding) has been sitting on my desktop since yesterday just begging me to do something with it. While I love both images side by side and can picture little rubber-stamped drink stirrers like those on the right in my own wedding someday, it's the image on the left that has my mouth watering and instantly had the wheels in my head turning to figure out a quick and less fussy way to try this mixture of 2 of my favorite ingredients - shrimp and avacado - at home.


While perfect for a dinner party, these individual shrimp and chips are a little fancy for snacking at home. The plan? A chunky shrimp guacamole of sorts... I'm thinking diced avacado, cilantro, lemon juice, seasoned cooked shrimp coarsely chopped, and maybe some tomato, with blue corn chips like those shown to scoop it all up. Oh, yum.

Fall

It hit me this morning in a status meeting that October is right around the corner. Which means that it's almost time to start bugging Dan about holding up to the two promises I made him make to me for the coming season...

1. Go apple picking
2. Go to a pumpkin farm, buy pumpkins, carve pumpkins

Piece of cake, right? Eh. Seeing as he is a guy and all, he's not particularly excited about either adventure. So, I'm hoping that instead we can go here, and knock out both in one fun day trip!

House Tour - Kitchen

I posted waaay back in March about wanting to do a before and after house tour feature to showcase just how far we've come since we bought our little 9-oh-6. Clearly, I forgot about that until just now, because why wouldn't I think about that on a random Friday night? Either way, I took some bright and beautiful shots of the kitchen several months ago when I was trying to get it featured on This Young House... which never happened even though they sent me an email just RAVING about our kitchen makeover... but I digress. I love our kitchen and am insanely proud of the nearly-non-existent budget that we worked with, and although I've posted about it all in bits and pieces before, here's the down and dirty "holy crap what a huge transformation!" post about our teeny tiny cooking quarters!

To begin the "tour"... here's some before pictures. The layout of the room had me utterly confused and as you'll see... we drastically changed it.



So, we gutted it. Took down all of the old cabinets, found a scrapper who was thrilled to take the appliances, knocked out half of the long wall to have the plumbing and electrical redone, and tore up several layers of floor to uncover the hard wood below - which we then had refinished.




Our $42 countertop, appliances for just over $1,300 TOTAL, and all stock cabinets from HOBO left us with a brand spanking new kitchen for just a few grand. Seeing as we did it all for less than what some people spend on a new stove alone, I'd say this was one of the most budget-friendly makeovers I've ever seen. Without further ado, here's the amazing "afters"!




Oh, beautiful.

Stay tuned... the living room and dining room will have posts coming soon!

No, really, a cat died in my basement

Neighbor: Wow, you two have really been busting your tails over there at the house! What's next?

Me: Well, we need to do some work in the crawl space under the front porch. We were going to have it done professionally but it's insanely expensive so we're going to tackle it ourselves instead.

Neighbor: The crawl space?

Me: Yeah... well... we sorta had a cat, um, die down there... so we need to close it up so it doesn't happen again.

Neighbor: A cat?! Was it the big orange one?

Me: Uh... yes?!?

Neighbor: Man, that thing has been hanging around your house for years.

Me: Well, it died in my house too.


Go figure.

I suppose I feel a little better assuming that if it's been hanging around my house for ages it didn't belong to some poor kid who's now crying themselves to sleep at night missing their pet.

And since this story is everyone's favorite... here's the link back to the original post if you just HAVE to read it again.

Perfect View

Somehow, I managed to make this lovely 3-day weekend stretch to the point that I'm not even (completely) dreading going back to work tomorrow. While the weekend was supposed to start off even earlier with our last 1pm "Summer Friday" dismissal at work, I stuck around the quiet office for a couple hours color correcting and tweaking all of Amanda's American Idol meet & greet pictures. Surprisingly, I didn't much mind being at work later than necessary as my time playing around in Photoshop was a nice reminder of how much I enjoy working with the Adobe Suite.

Saturday night we headed out to Naperville with Erin and Kadence for "Last Fling". Kadence had a blast dancing with her Uncle Dan!


On Sunday, my mom and I headed out to Oakbrook and Yorktown... and I bought the Hanging Capiz Pendant from West Elm for the dining room!!


The current online price was $20 less than the "sale" price in store, so thanks to having done my browsing on the website ahead of time I was able to get the online price in store, plus not pay shipping! I absolutely cannot wait to install it, but that will require a "conversion kit" that they unfortunately did not have in stock, so we're going to see if it's something we can buy at Home Depot.

Sunday evening was the Labor Day Extravaganza celebration at the park down the block, so we invited my parents and Manda over for a BBQ and had plans to walk to the park for the fireworks. Turns out that drumsticks on the grill take longer than expected, so our food was just coming off the heat when we heard the first of the fireworks from the park. We decided to hurry and pack up our dinner picnic style, but as my parents went to the front of the house they realized that we have a PERFECT 99%-unobstructed view of the fireworks from right out in front of our house! So, we grabbed paper plates and ate our dinner on the porch with the fireworks overhead.


We'll definitely have to keep our perfect view in mind when the 4th of July rolls around again next year.

Our dinner was super simple thanks to the zest and juice of a lemon, some garlic, a pinch of salt and pepper, a bit of olive oil and a bunch of oregano, which makes for a DELICIOUS chicken marinade. (The original recipe is from one of my latest magazine subscriptions - Bon Apetit!)

Follow up

My dad reminded me that I never posted pictures from our City Chase adventure, so I'm here to recap the day!

Overall, the event was not exactly what we were expecting, but thanks to a little pep talk from Dan after I had a mini-meltdown an hour in to it, we ended up having a blast and it was a great day of teamwork and exploring the city together - which is what we set out for!

We started out with a warmup at Daley Plaza downtown with the other 700 or so teams. Here's Dan bright and early... and a woman who joined the crowd and put on a little show of her own. I'm fairly certain she hadn't even gone to bed the night before.



Following our warmup, the chase began. We were given a list of 10 objects and had to find 8 of them to earn our clue sheet for the day. After a quick trip to Walgreens for red lipstick, something expired, and something in a foreign language, we ran around looking for a ticket stub, a piece of US currency with our team number on it, something with the Chicago 2016 Olympics logo on it, and a couple of other random items from the list. Once we got our clue sheet, we camped out in Daley Plaza with other teams working out clues and planning our route.

The clue sheet had 40 different clues on it, and we had to complete 10 before getting to the finish line at Joe's on Weed Street at 4pm. Easy, right? Not so much! First, we headed to NBC Plaza for a photohunt obstacle, which was fun, completing our first clue in no time. From there, we jumped on the blue line to the UIC campus, but ended up spending more than an hour trying to find the stations, being told by other teams that there were insanely long lines (which ended in us deciding to not even go to the stations there at all), and getting frustrated (cue said mini-meltdown). So, Dan did what he knew he had to do - gave me a hug, got me some long overdue lunch, and sat me down to reroute our plan. With a newfound optimism and Dan's knowledge of random Chicago neighborhoods, we spent the next couple of hours on buses and trains knocking out clues and chatting with other City Chasers in the meantime.

Here's us completing the "trapeze" clue at Chopin Theatre:

Other stations we hit included softball and kickball in Cabrini Green, hurdles with Fleet Feet Sports, a zodiac challenge in Chinatown, and a running/dress up like a moron "race" sponsored by Southwest Airlines. Oh, and the 2nd post we went to in Chinatown... where we had to kiss a pig. Oink.

In the end, we completed 9 out of the 10 required clues, which surprisingly left us ahead of quite a few other teams we talked to that only finished 7 or 8. Turns out the winning team finished 10 challenges in just under 3 hours!!!

Now allow me to explain my statement above about the event not being exactly what we were expecting. For me, a $190 entry fee and constant reminders from the event staff about "pushing the limits" and "stepping out of your comfort zone" had me thinking we would be partaking in extreme challenges where Dan would have to coax me into completing them. Admittedly, I had been warned by a coworker that some stunts involved nudity, so we steered clear of the clues that spoke of being in the buff, and there was a pretty daring repelling stunt at Navy Pier that we missed out on, but I was still expecting more than what we actually faced. For instance, the trapeze clue - "He flies through the air with the greatest of ease, the daring young man on the flying trapeze!" had me gushing to Dan - "It's like a circus stunt! Let's go do that! I've always wanted to try something crazy like the trapeze"... only to end up at Chopin Theatre with a trapeze bar a mere 4 feet off the ground and the "challenge" to hang upside down for 5 whole seconds. Sigh.

Crazy and extreme or not, Dan and I had a great day at City Chase and it was fun goofing around together in neighborhoods we don't typically roam.


Next up on our adventure list, the 5k Rotary Run for the Wellness House in Brookfield to honor my dear friend Tony that passed away a couple of years ago from cancer. The run is coming up quickly in October, so I suppose it's about time we start training!

Happy Labor Day weekend!

Love is...

Today's comic made me think of all the hard work we've put into our yard, which is growing greener every day!