Monthly Roundups
August Superlatives
It’s that time again! When we take a moment to look back on all that we’ve done in the past month at a glance (and gather all the links in one handy place for ya). And of course we tossed in some never-before-seen stuff, just because we’re over-sharers. This month felt especially busy for us, with everything from painting, organizing, building, rearranging, crafting, art-making, upholstering, light-fixture-ing, coding, ORBing (yes, it’s a category of its own), and breaking stuff. So let’s take a walk down memory lane, with yearbook-esque superlatives, because we’re strange birds.
Most Illuminating: Clipping 320 clothespins in place to create our laundry room’s clothespin chandelier for our first ever Pinterest Challenge. Oh and you can scroll down to the bottom of the post to see over 500 (wowza!) other Pinterest Challenge projects submitted by you guys. So much good stuff. Gah.
Most Spoiled: Potato-stamping a fun little pattern inside Clara’s closet turned reading nook. Oh to be one again…
Most Likely To Win Mariah Carey’s Approval: This free butterfly art that I made out of a flier that I picked up on our trip to Natural Bridge, VA.
Most Likely To Win Carrie Bradshaw’s Approval: Adding shoe storage to our laundry room, courtesy of some Ikea recycling bins. Although Ms. Bradshaw would need about a hundred of them for all of her Manolos.
So Fresh & So Clean, Clean: Finishing our laundry room makeover. Woo hoo – one room down!
Most Likely To Be Committed For A Pillow Addiction: Me, as evidenced by these new striped pillows that I scored for $9 each at HomeGoods. And if making free art out of paint chips counts as treatment, then I’m on the road to recovery.
Clumsiest: John, who seems determined to break things lately, including this light fixture cover that fell while swapping out the fixture in our hallway.
Most Hard-Working: Our new Effecktiv storage unit from Ikea, which has the fun job of housing all of our files, printer, and miscellaneous office goodies. Oh the excitement.
Most Debonair: Dressing up said Effektiv unit with some black glass handles from Hobby Lobby Schlobby Bobby.
ORB of the Month: Giving our mailbox the oil-rubbed bronze treatment, along with completing a few other outdoor maintenance projects (which helped our yard look not quiiite as neglected – it’s still pretty bad though).
ORB of the Month (Runner Up): Several door handles, including the hardware on our front door, got a nice little face-lift.
Most Cheerful: Giving our front door the yellow paint treatment. It’s like our house is smiling at us whenever we come home.
Most Likely To Stockpile Swedish Things: Us, after our first trip to Ikea since John’s parents moved out of the area. Suddenly a trip there seems much more precious.
Worst Dressed: A video tour of our not-so-clean house (as well as some random old photos of us).
Most Likely To Get Worms: Creating a compost bin in the backyard using leftover shipping pallets. We’ve got some pretty sweet dirt going on.
Most Likely To Rock: The rocking chair that I FINALLY painted and reupholstered (after it sat around unfinished for almost a year).
Most Pictures In A Single Post: A visual comparison of our new house vs. our old house, which involved so many photos that it took down the site down for a good hour (ca-rashhh). Lesson learned.
Best “Rome Wasn’t Built In A Day” Reminder: A look back at our first house, 8 months in, and how little we had accomplished in that time. Ah, memories.
Best Moves: Switching up Clara’s furniture arrangement to help solve a crib-in-front-of-vent situation.
Worst Moves: Rearranging the office furniture in preparation for its makeover, which turned out to be a not so good solution. At least now we’re on the right track.
The “Thrill Of The Hunt” Award: Searching high and low for the perfect cabinets to turn into a built-in office desk. With a dog and a baby in our shopping cart.
The “Ripley’s Petersik’s Believe It Or Not!” Award: Scoring six whole cabinets for six measly dollars at the Habitat for Humanity ReStore in Alexandria, VA (well, they were technically $6.30 with tax).
Most Destined For Greatness: Our office cabinets, which we sanded and primed to prep them for glossy white paint. So excited to get these babies done. We’ll share pics early next week if all goes well! And you can catch a sneak peek of me painting them over on Young House Life.
Most Likely To Be From New Jersey: Me, as demonstrated by my magnetic attraction to glittery pine-cones, which accompanied some simple leaf-y decorations that I made for my cousin Megan’s bridal shower. Oh yeah and I sorted M&Ms by color like a wackadoo.
Biggest Jerk: Hurricane Irene, who tore up our neighborhood. (Update: the tree was finally removed from our neighbor’s roof yesterday and they’re in good spirits but the house still needs a lot of repair. Thanks for keeping them in your thoughts)
Most Overdue: Redesigning our blog theme for the first time in over three years.
Here are a few not-it initial designs that we tried on and scrapped. So glad we went with the gray heart background and simplified the too-busy-header (too much change, too left-heavy with that pile of pics, and the ceramic frog felt less “iconic” than my beloved ceramic rhino):
Cutest Couple: Clara and her cousin John snuggled up post Hurricane Irene.
So there you have it. August at a glance. And yes, this was just as much fun as last months inaugural superlatives post. Dorks for life.
What have you guys been up to this month? Have you ever made a list of accomplishments to look back on? It’s so nice to take a break from adding things to our to-do list to look back on what we’ve already done. Just for a minute. True to form we were all over the place (nearly every room of our house got in on the fun). Let’s call it spreading the love (as opposed to lacking focus and bouncing off the walls), shall we?
Psst- You can check out July’s superlatives here.
July Superlatives
We’ve been getting requests for some sort of monthly roundup or recap when it comes to all of our undertakings (just so it’s easier to hunt posts down and see what we’ve recently conquered at a glance). And because we wanted to put our own weird little spin on it, while we were out to dinner alone (for the first time since Clara was born, mind you) we started chatting about how cheeky little nominations and titles for certain projects might be funny (or not, you decide)… and so the idea of monthly superlatives was born! As was the conviction that we have to get a life and stop talking about the blog while on our first date in 14 months.
Oh and since we’re on the subject of superlatives, you should know that John was voted “Friendliest Male” (three years in a row, actually – by his high school marching band) while I was awarded the title of “Best Friends” in the back of the yearbook (with Jenny Czajkowski, who helped me highlight my hair in her sink with mustache bleach). But enough about us. On with the July superlatives:
Most Cheerful: Painting The Laundry Room A (Pretty Darn Happy) Greeny Yellow Color
Most Improved: Adding Some Laundry Room Built-Ins (then painting them and filling them with stuff we already had)
Nicest Legs: ORBing Those Parsons Chair Legs
Most Likely NOT To Succeed (At Least The First Time Around): The Guest Room Light Switcheroo (And ReSwitcheroo)
Runner Up, Most Likely NOT To Succeed (At Least The First Time Around): Framing Our Anniversary Note Cards (And Then Reframing Them Without Borders)
Most Likely To Please The Queen: Tea Dying Some Pillow Covers (<–not only pleasing to the royals, but free).
Most Likely To Result In A Crack Joke: Filling The Patio Cracks With Polymeric Sand
Runner Up, Most Likely To Result In A Crack Joke: Caulking The Laundry Room Ceiling (Slash Kicking Off Some Other Laundry Projects)
Most Outdoorsy: Spray Painting The Patio Furniture (you guessed it, ORB).
Runner Up, Most Outdoorsy: Our Mini Porch Spruce Up
Class Nerd: Coding A Room Gallery
Most Boob-Centric: My Breastfeeding Post (who would’ve thought that little diary entry of sorts would get almost 1,000 comments?!)
Most Free Spirited: My Unironed Ribbon Chandelier (which shockingly still remains unironed, and I’m usually so anal…)
Most Controversial: Priming & Painting Our Laundry Cabinets, Switching Out The Hardware, and Hanging Our Ironing Board (which resulted in quite the directional debate).
Most Glamorous: Painting Clara’s Closet Pink & Playing Around With Champagne “Stencils” (update: I played around with some more homemade stamps/stencils and have completed around 20% of the closet – I’m hoping to finish this weekend and have a post for ya early next week).
Most Embarrassing: The Pinterest Challenge Video. By far.
Most Spontaneous: We didn’t really post about it because it happened sort of gradually, but around the beginning of July, Clara just decided to walk (after lots of funny one-legged crawling like this). And just like that she’s too cool for us. See it here if you can’t below.
Most Immature: The Whole Twig & Berries Thing (Spraying Painting Frames & Mats & Losing Our Duvet)
So there you have it. July at a glance. And yes, this was more fun than we probably should admit. Dorks for life.
Anyway, what have you guys been up to this month? Have you ever made a list of accomplishments to look back on? We’re so used to adding things to the to-do list that stopping to see what we already did is kind of nice. And it’s interesting to look back and pick out the super cheap stuff (tea dying our pillows, painting our laundry room, painting Clara’s closet, and making that ribbon chandelier were under $2 total) and the more major stuff (like creating custom built-ins and adding an inspiration gallery) along with all the other stuff in between. We were all over the place, huh? Just the way (uh-huh, uh-huh) we like it.
June Superlatives
Note: This is a retroactive post that I cobbled together in December of 2011 so I could make this page full of monthly recaps for the entire year (our first in our new house!). Yup, I’m just a bit type A. So here’s what we tackled throughout the month of June – high school yearbook style.
Most Improved: Finally painting our kitchen paneling
Most Annoying: Priming the paneling (which took more than a few tries)
Most Destructive: Removing a few cabinets & patching the floor (to make way for our impending paneling makeover)
Most Goal Oriented: Announced a new initiative to clear the kitchen table of miscellaneous clutter every night before bed (we’re still hit or miss on this).
Most Snow White-esque: Planting some fast-growing evergreens while making friends with a frog & a duck (to add some much-needed privacy to the side of our house)
Most Gifted: Commissioning (that sounds so fancy) a sketch of our first house for our hallway frame wall as John’s Father’s Day gift
Most Organized: Relocating and organizing the junk drawer
Most Likely To Get Dirt Under Our Nails: Weeding, landscape-fabric-ing, planting, mulching, & removing/relocating a few signs on our horrifically overgrown mailbox
Most Edible: Making a little container garden for our farmer’s market herbs (with a galvanized tin and a drill)
Most Desperate: Making eight curtain panels for our living room (by halving and hemming some no-longer-sold Ikea ones)
Biggest Heart Hearth: Painting our fireplace
Class Hothead: Removing an old wood stove (that Clara was unsafely enamored with)
Most Circus-esque: Sharing a really (really) weird elephant-related dream
Most Incoherent: Going thrifting in Georgia with Katie B (and getting waaay too hyper, as usual)
Most Colorful: Sewing curtains from imperfect discount fabric for the dining room
Class Nomad: Relocating a dresser and a mirror to the guest room
Most Superstitious: Making some “lucky seven” art (with painters tape and a scrap of wood)
Most Likely To (Not) Succeed (At Least The First Attempt): Dyeing some inexpensive slipcovers (a few times) for our dining room chairs
May Superlatives
Note: This is a retroactive post that I cobbled together in December of 2011 so I could make this page full of monthly recaps for the entire year (our first in our new house!). Yup, I’m just a bit type A. So here’s what we tackled throughout the month of May – high school yearbook style.
Most Improved: Organizing The Insanely Cluttered “Playroom” (more like “disaster area”).
Biggest Procrastinator: Painting The Dining Room (after living with swatches for five months)
Most Repetitive: Mounting Prints On Canvases (Not Once But Twice)
Most Outdoorsy: Sketched Up An Outdoor “Floor Plan” (not to scale though – oops – the house is way too big & our almost-acre lot is too small)
Most Domestic (Runner Up): Making A Festive Table Runner With Clara’s Weekly Fabrics
Miss Congeniality: Clara’s Photo Project (which we opted to continue on a monthly basis with a few tweaks)
Most Artistic: Painting Some Geometric Prism-ish Art (with a few test pots of paint and a clearance canvas)
Most Shy: Installing A Privacy Fence For The Freshly Finished Patio
Most Likely To Result In Goldfish Crackers Everywhere: Making A Pull Swing Piñata For Clara’s First Birthday Party
Most Shrinkage: Slipcovering Our Craigslist Dining Chairs (thanks to some lucky washing)
Biggest Party Girl: Throwing A Big Ol’ House Party For Clara’s First Birthday
Most Sentimental: Making A Video Of Clara’s First Year
Most Glamorous: Updating You Guys On Our Cloth Diapering Adventures
Most Type-A: Our Admittedly Insane Whole-House To-Do List
Best Feeling Ever: Completing The Cobblestone Patio That We Laid Ourselves (woot!)
Most Unexpected: Becoming Possessed And Sewing A Birthday Quilt For The Bean
Most Calculating: Digging Out And Laying The Foundation For Our New Patio
Most Annoying: Fixing A Pesky Broken Light
Most Sinister: Doing Some Pretty Involved (And Unexpected) Patio Demo (just look at that ominous blue glove)
Most Detail Oriented (Slash Neurotic): Painting Our Add-On Bed Finials To Match Our “Ikea White” Bed
Best Break Up: Completely Breaking The Patio Budget (& doing our best to embrace the imperfection of it all)
