O Christmas Tree

In addition to the mini tree in our dining room, we also have a 9 foot tree in our living room!

Picture used in our Christmas card

Back when we first moved in, we noticed that the sellers left a 12 foot tree in the storage closet.  12 FEET??  I can only imagine what that would have looked like in that space, granted it is a vaulted ceiling so it would probably fit but we would be having to decorate with a really tall ladder or from the stairs (which probably isn't the safest).  Chris and I decided to just pick up a new tree at Michael's and opted for the 9 foot slim which turns out to fit perfectly in that little corner (once we moved the side table to the other side of fireplace).  We also picked up some lighted garland for the stairs from Bed Bath and Beyond.

I wanted to make a tree skirt, but with time flying by this holiday season I opted to just pick one up from Home Goods instead.

I love looking at the tree at night, and can't wait to build upon our current ornament collection, which is mostly filler ornaments bought during after Christmas sales at pier 1 and target.

My current favorite ornament - A handmade replica of our wedding cake

One of the traditions that I look forward to the most every holiday season is the annual Weddingbee ornament exchange!  I have been a participant for 4 seasons and hope to continue adding little elephants to our tree for years to come.

Top L: 2010 from Mrs. Thimble

Top R: 2011 from Mrs. Tulip

Bottom L: 2012 from Mrs. Seal

Bottom R: 2013 from Mrs. Candy Apple

In other holiday news I was able to find a sport for the holiday card display that I made last year.  It hangs on the closet door next to our gallery wall.  This way I can see it every time I walk from my office to the living room or kitchen.

And one last holiday bit of goodness around our home, preparing to host our first holiday family meal!

I'm trying not to stress as time is just slipping away but with cooking help from my mom, dad and Chris, I know we'll be able to make it through Christmas Eve dinner as well as Christmas brunch and dinner at our house.  I love the fact that we finally get to use the placemats, napkins, napkin rings and nice silverware from our 2011 wedding registry.   

My search for silver chargers at Bed Bath and Beyond returned a goose egg, so with little time left I picked up the gold and called it a day.  Once I started to set the table, I knew the gold just wasn't going to fly with everything else so thank you Amazon Prime for these silver beauties that arrived on Friday.

I doubt I'll be back online between now and Christmas, so I wish you all a very happy holiday!

The front of our 2013 holiday card

And one more bit of fun news...

It's a boy!!!  We can't wait to meet our son next year!!

My First Wreath

One of the things that I looked forward to after closing on our house was being able to make wreaths to decorate the front door.  I have Morgan over at The Handcrafted Life to thank for that, she has done some amazing seasonal wreaths for her house and I was excited to test my DIY skills again.

I started with a green wreath based and ribbon from Micheals, going around making loops and securing it with parts of the bendable branches.

I didn't really have a pattern in mind, just changing up the direction of the loops every now and then.

Once the loops were complete, I busted out the glue gun and got to work covering the L with some red, green and silver balls.

I wish the L stood out a little more (maybe I should have gone with another set of colors), but other than that I am pretty satisfied with our holiday wreath.

And one shot on the front door (we'll be painting that door at some point).  It's a little tilted because I decided to use some floral wire to attach the wreath to hanger to deter anyone from simply pulling it off and taking it with them (not that our neighborhood is unsafe in anyway but better to be safe than sorry).

Have you made any holiday decor items for your house?

Travel Tree

In my last post, I mentioned that the table top tree in the center of our holiday buffet has a story behind it that deserved a post of it's own.

Back when we lived in our apartment, I filled the fridge with magnets from our various travels.  You can make out the beginning of the magnet covered fridge in this shot taken when we first moved into our apartment.

With the stainless steel refrigerator in our house, the magnets were packed away in a drawer until I could figure out something to do with them. As the holidays rolled around, I thought it was be a great idea to decorate the table top tree (that was once used as the only tree in my first apartment) in a travel theme

In the process of going from magnet to ornament

A little hot glue and floral wire later and the travel tree was complete!  I love that this is on display on our buffet and always take a trip down memory lane when walking by it.  Remembering our trips to Napa, San Francisco, San Antonio, past cruises to Cozumel, the Bahamas, Costa Maya, Belize, and our trip to see my dad's birth country Trinidad and Tobago...

...our Christmas spent in Ohio, our honeymoon in Mexico, birthday trips to New Mexico, New Orleans and Fredericksburg, and a couple of trips to Vegas...

And my favorite the larger picture magnet from our trip to Disney World that acts as the star on top!

I am so glad that we figured out a way to still display these travel mementos, even if it's only one time a year.

Holiday Buffet

Now that we have celebrated Thanksgiving, I'm so excited to share some of the Christmas decor around our house!!

Not going to lie, we began decorating the house for Christmas before Thanksgiving, but I held off sharing on the blog until December.

The table top tree in the middle has a story behind it so I'll share that in another post.  All of the other decor items (with the exception of the Ikea lantern) were purchased at a great discount after the holidays last year.

The tree candles and ornaments in the lantern were picked up at Target.

Love the sparkle

On the right side of the tree is a sleigh basket from Pier 1 filled with mini ornaments from Target and another tree candle.

I love the change up of the seasonal buffet and will probably be a little sad when I have to pack it up after Christmas.

Do you decorate your house for the holidays?

Tales From Online Shopping

We've finally added some more pieces to our master bedroom, and it comes with a story.

Reading a clock on the floor from the bed got old pretty quickly, so we set out one Saturday to all of the local furniture stores in search of a couple of nightstands and a new dresser.  Unfortunately, 4 stores down and we were nowhere closer than when we started.  We decided to throw in the towel and turn back to the same place that we ordered our headboard - Wayfair.com.

I searched through the selection in our price range and ended up with 5 nightstand options that I showed Chris who made the final decision.

I love that the fabric that covers the drawers coordinates with the bed, and the darker wood adds a little something different than the lighter pieces we already had in the room.

We also picked up a couple of acrylic lamps at Target so Chris (who goes to sleep after me) wouldn't have to turn off the light at the door and walk to the bed in the dark anymore.

The nightstand purchase was an easy one with no issues, the stands came in one piece and the only thing we had to do was screw on the knobs on the front.  On the other hand, the dresser was another story.

We ordered the dresser in the same transaction as the nightstands, but knew in advance that it would require some assembly.  When it was delivered, the delivery man made a joke as he wheeled it up the drive commenting on the weight of the box.  That weekend, Chris dragged it into our bedroom and got to work pulling out the pieces to the puzzle. He called me in to our room with some bad news, there were scratches and dings to many of the pieces and one of the legs was broken in half.

I went straight to my laptop to look up the number for Wayfair's customer service and connected with a very nice guy who quickly put me at ease.  He told me that they wanted their customers to be completely satisfied and without hesitation put in another order for the same dresser at no cost.  He told me we could do whatever we wanted with the pieces to the first dresser as it would be a waste for them to get it back because they would not sell it to another customer.

I was ready to pack it up and send it to the dump, but my husband is ever the resourceful one and was sure that he could repair the broken leg with a dowel and some wood glue.  By the end of the day he had fixed the leg and assembled the dresser which is set up in the nursery (pictures to come once we actually decorate the nursery after finding out if baby is a girl or boy).

Three days later and the second dresser arrived with no issues.  This one was assembled in a shorter amount of time since Chris had already been through the process once.

Have you had any good customer experiences with online shopping?

Seasonal Buffet

Bring on the seasonal decor!!

I love decorating for the holidays, and as we saved up to purchase our house I used the time to hit up several after season sales and stock up on holiday decor.  The original plans were to decorate the fireplace mantel, but after we found our house and decided to mount the TV above the fireplace I had to find another place for my holiday decor.

Enter more online shopping and another purchase from Wayfair! (We previously purchased our headboard from WayFair) I found this buffet, that comes in black and cherry, and fell in love.  I debated for some time before actually pulling the trigger to purchase it and that was my mistake.  When I was ready to click buy at the end of August the black one was out of stock.  I wasn't a fan of the cherry, so I figured that I could hold out until the black one came back in stock.  I tried to find it on other sites like Amazon, but came up with the same problem - out of stock on the black.  I waited and waited, signed up for notification when it was back in stock and checked online periodically to see the estimation date get pushed back further and further (as of right now it's expected shipping is pushed till 11/8).

I waited a month and a half or so until my patience ran out.  I talked it over with Chris about buying the cherry version and if we didn't like it we could always go through the process of painting it black.  When it arrived we were both surprised to see how dark the cherry version actually is - Chris even asked me if I was sure I didn't ordered the black one when he was putting it together because it seemed so much lighter in the online picture.

With the buffet ready to go, I was excited to pull out the fall decor.  My favorite piece being the Ikea lantern filled with various sparkly pumpkins, acorns, leaves, pinecones and berries.

I put up the fall decor as soon as possible to get as much time in before I switch over to Christmas decor.   Knowing myself, the Christmas decor will be coming out next month as we prepare to host our first official holiday at our house (I know my mom is really looking forward to not having to cook for both Thanksgiving and Christmas this year!).

And just so you don't think that we are on top of everything, here is what the rest of our dining room looks like.

This is where all of our boxes were delivered from our storage shed and we are slowing knocking out the last few.  Once they're gone we'll be free to start looking for a new dining room table!

What are your favorite online shopping sites?

A Place To Lay Our Heads

Can I just tell you how happy I am that we can actually sleep in our master bedroom now??

First things first, we finally got around to painting our master bedroom.  We went with Behr Caribe and Ultra Pure White.  We originally were going to go with just the blue, but when we put it up on the wall I thought it would be a little too much to have the whole room in that color.

Chris went around and painted the baseboard in the matching white (it's still the original off white in the photo above) just in time for the arrival of our new bed frame!  I did a lot of online window shopping after falling in love with a headboard that I saw on This Casita.  I located it on Amazon, but ended up buying a version of it on Wayfair to get the foot rails as well.

Chris did all the heavy lifting, piecing together the frame while I worked on putting up our annual birthday pictures and the DIY map.

Once the bed frame was up, we took the plunge and purchased a king size Tempurpedic mattress.  I've never purchased a new mattress and Chris was rocking a futon before moving in with me. We have been eyeing one for some time, always gravitating to the same Cloud model every time we stopped into a Sleep Experts or Mattress Firm.  We used the rational that we need to invest in a good night's sleep, and this one has a 25 year warranty along with a 1 year love your mattress guarantee (which means we have 365 days to decide if we really like it, and if we don't we can send it back and get another mattress).  

The mattress was delivered the next day and I was quick to finally break open the bedding that we originally registered for our 2011 wedding, but ended up buying ourselves because it was discontinued between the time we set up our registry and our wedding date. This actually ended up working in our favor because when it was discontinued, all of the pieces were marked down AND I still got to use Bed Bath and Beyond coupons to reduce the price even more (just had to travel to 3 different stores in order to get everything)! 

I purchased pretty much every accent pillow that went with the set

As you can tell, the bed and the bench are the only pieces of furniture in our room.  We still need to find some nightstands and a dresser as well as some sort of seating by the windows for the reading nook.  But for now I'm just so excited to see where this room started and where it is today!

What do you like most about your bedroom?

Not So Bare Walls

We decided to take a break from unpacking boxes and start hanging some of our framed art and pictures.

I've always wanted to have a gallery wall and could not wait to put one up!  Before finding this house, the plan was to use the staircase but that idea when out the window with our L shaped stairs.  Instead we decided to use the space between the coat closet and the kitchen opening.

We played around with the placement thanks to the ever popular trace method and ended up adding some more once the original set of frames were up.

I love that the gallery wall can be seen from the entryway.

We also hung some DIY projects like the chalkboard menu for the kitchen and a shadow box of the paper goods we made for our wedding that now resides in my office.

Speaking of my office, I have to give a huge thanks to my husband for mounting the tv in my office and putting together my desk (which we picked up at Ikea when we purchased our couch).

We're still waiting for Chris' diploma to come in so it can hang on the same wall as mine.  I guess my college was out of the norm, because we actually received ours at our graduation ceremony.  Other people I have talked to (including my brother and Chris) received theirs in the mail 6-8 weeks after the ceremony.

With so much bare wall space still left in this house, I can't wait to unpack some of our other frames and get them hung.

Do you feel like hanging pictures or art makes a place feel more lived in?