Happy Birthday....Me!

I had such a great birthday this year! It was just me and the boys, all day long. We went shopping for patio furniture (finally bought some), and started to lolly gag through Levin and La-Z-Boy thinking about family room furniture and a kitchen table.

We took a ton of pictures of Danny and I, and him acting like a maniac on the couch and climbing through the pantry shelves!


This whole new house thing requires a lot of start up costs! The family room furniture is not a requirement. Patio furniture is new for us. We've never had any before! We didn't have a patio in Lyndhurst, and now we have a great one :) A kitchen table will be needed. I'm thinking more towards Christmas (ie. whatever Gainshare we earn!). So much stuff. And it's just that. Stuff. But it's fun to shop for. At least the window shopping part is fun. I'm not good at the decision making piece. I flip-flop a lot...which is why we went to Litehouse furniture THREE times in less than two weeks. All three times, we we're thinking different sets. Today, we found THE set, and ordered it, and we're hoping it will be here before Easter, and crossing our fingers the weather is warm enough to utilize it! I've attached some pictures below. The chairs have cushions...but I can't find a picture of them :)

We Have Blinds!!!!

Have I mentioned how long it took us to figure out what we wanted to do for blinds in the house. I mean really, we are two very indecisive people. Nuts.

My requirements: cordless or a retractable cord (no child is going to hurt themselves with a cord on my watch!), and the top down/bottom up feature for the second floor and our bedroom. All of the second floor windows are super tall and almost go from the floort to the ceiling. Not quite, but it seems that way. So, the windows will NEVER be open from the bottom. I have an awful visual of a little person pushing right through a screen and tumbling down. I might be a *little* paranoid.

We weighed our options between wood, faux wood, and honeycomb. After much thought, a few showroom visits, and two professionals coming to our house THREE times, we picked the Hunter Douglas 3-cell, topdown/bottom up, retractable cord option in bisque. David installed Danny's tonight, and I almost melted. We have been using a blanket and table cloth on tension rods for two months!!!!

We also did the topdown/bottom up retractable cord in the library. I forget the "official" color, but it is grey.

My husband is the best! We ordered one set of blinds online for the master bathroom, and Dave installed them. The goal was to see how difficult it was for him to do himself versus having them professionally installed. He did them in a pinch, and perfectly! With more confidence under our belt, we ordered almost all of the rest online! Have I mentioned the $aving$ associated to this? Really, it's just silly not to consider this if given the choice.

We did order some from the professionals. These are for the master bedroom and the first floor powder room. Our bedroom is a Roman Vingette and the powder room is woods with tape. We were leary of trying to order and install these on our own :)

I've attached a few pictures for ideas. Only the woods are the actual wood color and tape :)

Roman Vingettes. Ours are brown.

These are the Woods with the tape.

Last are the honeycombs. We ordered all of them with the topdown/bottom up feature. I'm super excited about this!