Up - Gray'd

The living room is now a subtle tone of gray and I have to say we are very pleased with the results.  We're still piecing it back together and I am still deciding if now is a good time for some re-arranging of things, but the general consensus is: its a win!

Now, can we please get back to obsessing over black walls?  In the past few days I have found several amazing images of black rooms and I think I have all but decided the dining room is next.  Yep, that's right dining room --- we're coming for you!

Those windows above are to. die.

This next kitchen very, very loosely reminds me of ours.  Except for the black paint and sort of everything else...

And then this next pic - which kind of looks like it would be a disaster, but also kind of looks like the best. game. night. ever.  

Hello Pictionary?! Yeah, I'm talking to you.

Nice Foo/Fu Dog lamps too btw.

We did actually do a smaller scale version of the chalkboard wall in our kitchen, which turned out pretty cool.  We had this random door to nowhere that screamed "SAVE ME!" and so the conversion began.  It was kind of a mess to get going, mainly due to the over-spray from the can of spray chalk board paint, but it dried quickly and was ready for chalkin' in no time.

You can kind of see it here.

Oh and while we're talking about things that happened months/years ago.... the Foo/Fu Dogs?  I picked up a random set of them at an antique mall last year because they reminded me of a pair of earrings my grandma Mimi used to have.  She had lots of crazy earrings, which might explain why I have lots of crazy earrings, but aside from that --- I thought they were cool and I liked their symbolism of them as it related to ancient Buddhist tradition.

You can sorta-kinda-barely see them in this pic:

Any way, the very next week I was sitting in the movie theater with my girlfriends for Sex In The City II, when I saw the same dogs in turquoise on Carrie Bradshaw's coffee table....

And as it turns out --- basically we're twins, which I sort of always knew, but now have confirmation of.

After searching for this image today (thanks HomeBunch) I also noticed the sort-of-gray color on the walls and realized how much I need a turquoise ottoman.

And while we're on the subject of that apartment, you may as well check out the entire tour of their super posh "home" that I found today here.


I read through it and couldn't believe the price on some of those items. Nuts. Anyway, lots of great images to inspire me today.  Just wanted to share.

Can of Worms

Requisite Gray is on the walls.  It looks fab. 
The fireplace, still covered in paper.

Today I saw this:

And I love it. 

To Paint Or Not To Paint

When we last left you we had just put a new paint color on our living room walls.  That project is still in progress, but we've already moved on to other ideas.  The funniest thing about all this paint madness is that yesterday marked our 1 month wedding anniversary.  Why is that funny you ask?  Well, while we were chillin' (sweating) on the beach in Curacao on our honeymoon, we talked about how we were taking a break from house projects for at least 3 months.  You know, take some time to relax after all our hard work planning our primarily DIY wedding and lots of home projecting for guests.  We do, after all, still have about 15 projects to update you on both wedding and house-related.  So, taking a few months to regroup seemed like a good plan.

Well, you see how long that lasted. :)

Back to the walls.  The plan is to cover the entire room in Sherwin-Williams "Requisite Gray" (which we will be color matching at HomeDepot for a more affordable option).  This color passed the daytime into nighttime test on all four walls unlike some previous contenders.  It still looked gray everywhere...not even a hint of purple.  Phew!   But then during testing we got the crazy idea to take our painting a little bit further....and we did this....

Cue dramatic music!  Bum! Bum! Bum!

And now for the buzzkill...

That's actually just paper from our Stendig Calendar that we taped to the fireplace as a way to test the concept.  It still really looks like this:

But we're torn.  Should we take the plunge?  The white definitely looks more modern, but we love a good brick accent.  The wall we knocked out in our kitchen for our beer tap is one of our favorite projects in the house:

But something about the fireplace brick just doesn't look as cool.  The good news is the white calendar paper is pretty convincing and so we feel like we already know exactly how it will look.  Plus, we took the liberty of asking our pretend friends John & Sherry Petersik of Young House Love what they think and Sherry says:

We're not ones to argue with two people who have made blogging about their decorating sense a full time job.  And clearly we are also not above a little shameless self-promotion over the fact that they answered our email (!!!), so basically - its all but a done deal.  But we're still open to opinions.

Do you have one?

The Porpoise and the Hair

The title of this post is awry.  Much like something in this photograph is awry.  Can you tell what it is?

Can't find it?  What if we take a closer look.....

AW----YEAH!!  That's right, your eyes do not deceive you!  That my friends, is a paint swatch, or as we like to call it:  A wild hair!  And its very presence might be a true representation of just how patient and level-headed we really are.

You might recall a day (okay maybe 45 days) when our living room looked a little like this:

And I, at the time, looked like this:

The agony of choosing a universal paint color was entirely too problematic for this girl.  You see originally, we had grand plans of each room having its own signature color.  We're not talking about a rainbow collection of living spaces, but a few tones that complimented each other and set each room apart.

We loved gray.

Gray was supposed to be the color of choice for the majority of our home, but we could never get it just right.  We tried at least 10 different shades and brands of gray, but in the end, it was a warm lavender in some rooms and cold silver in others.  With no furniture yet in the house and the old trim still shining through, we really couldn't tell what would compliment each room best and what the color would really look like once everything moved in.

The biggest problem?

We were short on time.  Had we had an eternity to think about it, I am sure we could've come up with a color we liked, but as you may recall, our goal was to have the entire house painted prior to moving in.  That left us a little over 15 days to come up with a winner.  Which might sound like ample time for normal folks.  But we ain't normal!  With those limitations, we went the safe route, a color we could live with and looked the same in every room:

Sherwin Williams - Kilim Beige.

Now before I go and hurt its feelings, let me just say that Kilim Beige is a delightful color...er....shade.  And in the world of beige-s, it is the great equalizer.  It's crisp.  It's clean.  It's beige.  We agreed it was the safest and decided to live with it until we had a better idea of what each space wanted. No rush judgments.  No crazy colors.  No regret.

So very level-headed and so very patient of us indeed.

And now?  We're back to gray.  A year and a half later we have lived with beige and enjoyed beige and even decided to keep beige in several areas, but at long last the living room is getting a facelift!   The swatching has begun and after a single color visited a tiny portion of our walls, we actually think we may have found a winner already!  It's either Behr - Dolphin (porpoise - get it?) or Requisite Gray.  Believe me - nobody is more shocked to have front runners than us. So in this tale of the Porpoise and the Hair, we are proving once and for all that when choosing paint colors, slow and steady still wins the race!

One of Those Days...

You're Invited

Back in March we started talking about a number of things we were in the process of doing.  Like the majority of our posts, we promised additional updates on a number of in-progress projects.  Well I am happy to report that we are back today with an update on something we promised: our invites.

You may recall that we were having a pretty choke-tastic time swallowing the truth of what wedding invites cost.  You might even recall that we decided this was a task we could DIY in an effort to save money.  We DIY'd our Save The Date Video (for a recap click here) and it turned out great!

We're cheap.  There I said it.  Did we save money?  For sure.  But notice I didn't say, however, that doing these on our own was a great way "to save time"....

You see, one half of this newly matrimonilized duo (made-up word alert!) has an incredibly hard time making decisions.

In truth, designing them was a several month process as I changed, re-changed, changed back and then changed again the design we finally went with.  There was even a moment in my invitation madness where the invites had printed, shipped and been placed before me when I suddenly got the urge to make one more edit.


That didn't go over too well. 


Who we are not:  graphic designers
What we do not have: a graphic designing program

I use Power Point and Paint.  Yes --- I know that is the most ridiculous thing you have ever heard and somewhere a million graphic designers are self imploding because of it.  But I use them.  Obsessively.

When it came time to finally upload my design to our choice printer --- VistaPrint for all of you taking notes --- let's just say, the files were not in the preferred format.  There were several limitations to their program, which added on a lot of time, so I opted to use one of their designs as a base and build upon it with my own design.  I went back and forth on this for weeks, but eventually I ended up with a product we could get behind.

For better or for worse, they were completed and VistaPrint was an economical option.  100 free postcards for new customers?  Um......  ok.  We became new customers a couple of times.   This allowed us to vary the sizes of our 5-piece invitation and create a layered look.  Each piece represented a different outing scheduled for the long weekend and a map.  Then, it was fastened together with a cool paperclip and bound by a black ribbon which would eventually become a sort of theme for our day.... 

New customers also got 250 free business cards -  so we opted to direct all of our guests to RSVP online by including a small (business) card with a link to our wedding website.  This was fantastic.  No extra postage for RSVP cards.  No extra envelopes.  I was adamant on having no inner and no extra envelopes.  And much to the shock and horror of all wedding etiquette enforcers: no one died because of it.  :)  Using Google Sites we set up a basic website with a spreadsheet option for dinner numbers and fun messages.

The other half of this duo LOVES spreadsheets.

Add in a keepsake snapshot from our engagement shoot and you get an idea of how excited we were to be done with this project. 

In the end, we managed to save some money for sure, but I am not certain the time I lost was worth it.  The end product turned out just fine, and accomplished it's mission, but the lesson I learned was that in the interest of time and ability, there are reasons to pay others to do your dirty work sometimes.  Either that or we should really invest in some real design software.

It's one or the other.  But..... I just can't decide.

Was It You?

Today we received two totally awesome wedding gifts by mail.  A cool pair of frames from Pottery Barn and the black flower planters we registered for at Target.  While we were thrilled to get them, we were totally disappointed to find that neither gift contained a card or gift message.  Someone sent them --- Was is you???

Just Married

Yep --- It's official!  After months of planning and projecting, some crazy ideas and last minute changes, The Big Day came and went in the blink of an eye!  It was 100% everything we dreamed and imagined it would be, it unfolded exactly as we planned and it really couldn't have been a more wonderful experience.

We opted for planning around the long holiday weekend of July fourth and in our opinion it was the perfect plan.   Family and friends started arriving in small batches on Thursday and continued through Sunday (our wedding day) and doing it this way really gave us the opportunity to maximize the amount of time we spent with guests and then allowed us to really take in the entire day and celebrate every minute of it.  Monday was the 4th, so several people stuck around to spend a little more time with us.

The fun began on Thursday night with some pampering for the ladies....

On Friday, most of the wedding party and our parents and several other family members were in town and we kicked the weekend off right with a wine tasting at Cellar Rat in downtown KC followed by dinner for 30 during First Fridays in the Crossroads Art District.

Then on Saturday is was time to cook!  We had a house full of chefs and assistants making the amazing Syrian dinner that was served Saturday evening for our rehearsal-less dinner party.

 It was a bit chaotic at times, but in a good way.  The evening kicked off with great eats and went well into the night with several people staying to hang out and visit - exactly what we were hoping would happen!

Of course, you never feel like you have enough time to truly visit with everyone you want to, but when it was all said and done, we both agreed, having the extra day to celebrate was well worth it!

We knew  from the very beginning our goal was to focus on making this day feel like us and to try our hardest not to be distracted from that along the way.  We wanted the vibe to be a fun, laid back and casual one and I think/hope we were able to achieve that.

There were so many incredible highlights to the weekend and so many moments that we wanted to bottle up and save forever.  We are anxious to get some of our professional pictures back and can't wait to share them.  We have really only seen one picture of the two of us together and it's currently our favorite image of the day!  It is a little blurry, so our fingers are crossed that the same one was captured a little clearer.  But - blurry or not you can clearly see the joy we were feeling as the main event was about to be begin.

One of our favorite moments happened at the very end of the night while we and our wedding party were breaking down the event space.  Everyone kept urging us to go home, but we both agreed, being there and seeing all of our work pay off and seeing all of our friends care enough about us to be there 'til the end was truly an amazing sight to behold.  We were feeling the love fo' sho and we didn't want the day to end.

We have a lot of details on projects to share because we essentially built, created or modified just about every aspect of the day, so we'll be getting into everything from the writing of the ceremony to several sneaky money-saving ideas we incorporated.  So you should definitely stay tuned.  We even have the highlights of several home improvement projects wrapped up just in time for our first 3rd floor guests- - so more to come!