Family Room and Light

Work cancelled today so I had a free day, which of course meant I started on tomorrow's to-do list today. Anyway, here are some pictures from last night. My wonderful husband helped me get the secretary desk in place. It was not as easy as just sliding it in though. We had to disassemble the bottom and then reassemble the desk inside the nook. However, now it's as snug as a bug as if it was built-in.

I'll probably put a large inspiration board on it or maybe a painting. We'll see. It definitely needs something though because the wall is quite high.

 And last night I was finally able to fit all the books on all the shelves.

 And finally moved over the red curtains.

And we got the burlap curtains for the living room!! It's less see through than it looks in the picture.
Here's that it looks like.

I also had this really old ugly magnet board/cork board. I was thinking of reframing it so I did all the work of taking out the frame:

 But then decided it was just too ugly and I don't really need a cork board, so I ended up buying this magnet board for the kitchen. It matches with the decor much more too.

I also spent hours putting up this pendant light. But I love it! And most importantly, I wired it correctly and it works!

Thanksgiving Weekend

We've been in San Diego during Thanksgiving weekend spending the holiday with his family who are from SD. This year Matt and I made a banana cream pie, a recipe we got from vintagevictuals.com. Here are some pictures of it from the website (not ours, although it did looks similar):

 It has a chocolate chip cookie crust.

 It turned out pretty well. And we definitely ate too much of it.

I also just bought our coffee table and the end table. The cart coffee table with wheels and the square wooden trunk side table that opens up for wine storage of which I posted pictures in the last post.

Below are some pictures of The Redbury, which is the hotel we stayed at for our wedding night. It's an amazing boutique hotel in Hollywood and all of their rooms are apartment style suites with a full kitchen, dining area, living room, and separate bedroom. I LOVED their decor. It's very 70's eclectic mixed with 40s chic and old 20s Hollywood glam, but somehow it all works seamlessly. I especially love their entrance area with the black and white tiled flooring. I want my entrance table to look like theirs. It's covered in stacked vintage bone boxes.

We took pictures with the entire wedding party between the ceremony and reception at this hotel. I cannot wait to see those pictures. The decor is so spectacular and I can only imagine how amazing our pictures will be with The Redbury for the scenery.

Living Room Furniture

I've been looking up furniture pieces for my living room and so far these are the ones I want:

I want two of these media storage units to go on either side of our TV easel in the living room. We need something to store all of our DVDs and Matt's games. I just love how industrial this looks. And it goes perfectly with our dining stools which are also in that room:

 This cart coffee table is amazing. I'm pretty much a sucker for anything that has steel wheels on them.

I also want this end table for that room. Once we get our sectional sofa, I want to put 2 chairs on one of the other open sides and have this in between the two chairs.

Here's another view of it open. Since the coffee table cart doesn't have any storage places, this end table would be perfect for storing all of our remote controls and misc. items that I don't want out.

Another Glamorous Weekend

I spent my Saturday morning scraping out the old caulk around my kitchen sink and putting in a new layer. However, I switched out my black iphone 4S for a white iphone 4S today, which means I no longer have the picture of the old caulking around my sink. Trust me, though, it was disgusting. This is what it looks like now though.

So that was Saturday. Then today Matt and I spend over 3.5 hours putting together this secretary desk. However, the top of the desk's trim is wider than the rest of the desk so it doesn't fit into the nook. I know, it happened again. It's off by half an inch. This time I'm just going to take it to Home Depot and have them shave off a quarter of an inch on both sides. Then I'll paint match the sides and it should be snug as a bug. This is what we have so far:

 The bottom drawer is a filing cabinet! So convenient!

This is the nook it will be in. Matt doesn't like this desk so I'm going to take it as my work station, and we'll get him a much bigger, nicer desk. Maybe a corner desk from Pottery Barn or something.

I also tried to put up the rest of Matt's books. The top shelf is all of his McSweeney's issues. There is also some logic to the arrangement of the other books, but I'm sure we'll have to reorganize them again at some point. I also put up the last typewriter so now every shelf has one.

 Only half of it fit, and the rest is still in the box:

And that's not including all of my books, most of which are precariously stacked in the bedroom:

I am keeping one entire shelf just for my Vogue. I have a few years worth of complete subscriptions and some random older ones from here and there. The oldest one I have is from 1998 with Hillary Clinton on the cover. And there's still so much room left for my subscription to grow :)

If this shelf looks like the same shelf as the picture above with Matt's books, it's because it is. I had all my Vogues in the far right corner shelf, but it looks so clean and crisp that I wanted to move it to a place of more prominence. Thus, I spent another half hour swapping out the his books for my magazines.

Eh.

Well I still haven't figured out what to do about the misfit of shelves. For now this will have to do:

Matt says he likes this set up. I don't know how I feel yet. The other option I think is to push all the bookshelves to the left and put up 3 high thin dvd shelves on the right. I found some that would fit with a few inches gap. I don't know how I feel about the asymmetry of the high low shelves though. It might look too bizarre.

 I also put up one large box of Matt's books as well as all the leftover books from our wedding. Our reception table centerpieces were staggered piles of vintage books on the table with candles in little hexagonal jars. The guests were supposed to take a book each, but clearly most of them did not. Good thing I like vintage books as decor pieces.

 We also have a collection of old typewriters. We have 4 so it'll be perfect to top the 4 bookshelves. I just need to put up the last one.

This was a wedding gift from my college friends who also took are engagement photos, including this picture. The pictures all turned out amazing and we absolutely love love this picture. I think we'll put this up maybe above the chair. I also plan to put up white empty frames above the bookshelves. Something like these, but maybe overlapping a little bit:

Haircut

Also, this was a few weeks ago, but I finally got the haircut I wanted! I had to wait over a year to get this haircut because I was growing out my hair for the wedding. Anyway, the first picture is what it looks like now (much longer on the right side), and the rest are various haircuts I've had in the past few years (in chronological order after the first picture):

2011

 2006

2007

2007

2008 

2009

2010-2011