Wordless Wednesday

Design Help

Okay, folks. Let's be honest.

I stink at decorating.

Okay, maybe not stink at it, but I don't think I'm very good at it. I just don't have "the eye" to look at a piece of furniture/art/whatever and think, "OMG, that would look great in {nameyourspacehere}." I don't know if this comes from lack of creativity or lack of funds, but in any case I get very jealous when I find neat stuff on Pinterest (like this incredibly simple DIY hanging, or this super fun color combo) and pin it to my "For the Home" board. Or when my friend Sarah posts something incredible cool on her blog. (BTW... check out her Etsy store. This girl is AMAZING!!)

Anyway, we recently had company over the Memorial Day holiday, and I cleaned my house more clean than it's been in a long time. (We're not pigs or anything, just employed fulltime and involved in 3 ministries at church... Listen, I like my down time.) So, I thought I would give a house tour and talk about what I would like to do in each room. We rent, so we can't go too crazy, but our landlords don't mind if we paint and stuff. So, without further ado:

This is our guest room. It is also "the library." My husband has a sick addiction to

Christian music (at least it's not porn??). Every single one of those CDs is a Christian artist (rap, hip hop, R&B, pop, rock, metal, alternative). I really want to buy 2 of these from Best Buy and call it a day, but they are $100 a pop. Ouch. I always have an eye out for a cheap-ish CD shelving unit on Craigslist and at Goodwill/thrift stores, but I haven't had any luck. I really love the quilt on the bed. My mom gave it to me my junior (?) year in HS and it lived in its bag for like 6 years because I only had a twin and not a full. I actually have some art that I haven't put up yet that is in the same kind of color scheme and talks about the Fruit of the Spirit.

I'm just at a loss... this room has kind of become our "catchall" room -- hence the piles of stuff on the side table to the left of the bed. We don't have a lot of storage here. In our townhouse, I had a closet that ran the length of one room. It was wonderful to have that amount of storage. Now I have the closet off of here (not even gonna show you that... it's full to the brim), and a closet off of the deck, also full as it stores my bike and our luggage and some other boxes. I would love to be able to put our grill in there.

But I digress. If we get pregnant while we're still here, this will be the nursery, but it's huge. I want to also keep it somewhat functional as a guest room if that happens. I also think I want to just get rid of the full size bed altogether for now and maybe switch to a daybed or futon? Hmmm... I don't know. Any thoughts?

The next room is our room. I guess I'm happy with it -- for the most part. The bedding is the bedding we got the Christmas before we got married with a very generous gift card to Bed, Bath, and Beyond from my FIL and his GF. You can tell it's getting worn in, too. There's a hole in the fitted sheet (from IDK where... I think one of the boys poked a hole in there with one of their back claws) which also doesn't have a whole lot of elastic in there. The batting on the inside of the comforter is starting to bunch -- I keep rotating it so that it won't settle. I love the neutral tone of the bedding, though. I imagine it's easy to work with.

The bed frame is from K-Mart and was a gift from my MIL. I appreciate the nooks and crannies it has -- I store my glassed and the book I'm reading in there every night. It's incredibly important to me to have something by my head to put my glasses (and my phone -- it's my alarm) on each night since I'm blind as a bat without them (seriously... a -8.5 contact lens in each eye). I would love to one day have a "head board" that's actually a painting on the wall or something like this, but I would have to have a nightstand or something (or Lasik, LOL).

The bookshelf int he corner has some important momentos (our sand ceremony vases, a photo from our wedding, and our guestbook, as well as my diploma from Lindenwood) on it, plus all of our "non church" books (see the Harry Potter??) I would love to buy a house that has built in bookshelves, but since that's not in the cards at the moment, this is what we have.

Also, the picture frame above the bed? has one photo in it. Also a wedding gift. I just don't want our house to be all us, you know? Or our cats. Ha. I know it should be because it's our house, but I don't want it turning into a gallery of us... I need to print more photos, but that's so low on the list of "things to buy" that paycheck after paycheck goes by without me even thinking about it...

The two dressers we use belong to my best friend. We lived together at school for the last semester in a house she'd lived in for two years. So she had 2.5 years' worth of stuff by the time she moved out -- into her mother's house and eventually her fiance's house. Thus, no room for furniture. SHe needed a place to store furniture and we needed furniture, so it was kind of a win-win situation. Obviously I would love to replace these with our own stuff, but where to find good quality stuff for a good price that isn't a wreck? (Because, seriously, I can't take an old bookshelf and make it look AMAZING like Sarah can...)

Onward...

My kitchen is pretty much fine the way it is. I am planning on taking down that paper towel holder to the right of the sink, and I want to place some art on either side of the window. I've been tossing around the idea of buying some canvas and painting my own kind of abstract ones like John and Sherry at YoungHouseLove.Com did, but that would require me to have a creative bone in my body, and to have a color scheme in this room. When J and I were registering, we thought, "black and white kitchen with red!" would be really nice to have. Now I'm not so sure, LOL.

One thing I do want to do (and soon!) is paint that alcove behind my kitchen table. I bought a small sample of a really pale blue because I thought it would freshen the room up a bit, but when I got it on the wall, I decided it was too "baby boy nursery" and vetoed the idea. That table is also a longterm loaner, and I want to replace it with a round table. Possibly something taller. I think it'll help open the room up a little more. I would also love to hang something up on the wall above the alcove. Possibly a series of photos.

We have an open floor plan from the kitchen into the living room with vaulted ceilings (squeal!). By the time I got around to taking photos, J was lounging on the couch so I didn't want to take a photo. I will, though, I promise.

And, lastly, here is our bathroom. I actually love the color scheme in here so I'm not looking to change much. I need an idea of what to put on that top shelf of our over the toilet vanity. I also really want to take out the medicine cabinet to the left of the sink, and win a mirror decal from YoungHouseLove to put around the edge of our mirror.

Hope you enjoyed my home tour! If you have ANY ideas, leave me a comment!

PS: There's a reason I never post with photos... It took me at least an hour to get Blogger to load all my photos and put them where I wanted them. Argh.

Menu Planning

Do you menu plan? Two weeks ago was my first time and let me tell ya, I will be doing it again. First, I subscribed to E-Mealz a few weeks ago. We have the Aldi plan for 2. We don't eat everything off of there (I'm incredibly picky), and I don't buy everything at Aldi (I wouldn't touch their ground beef with a ten foot pole) so it costs a little more per week than what it says, but I have gotten some great ideas from there. I also am on Pinterest and am finding great ideas to cook on there.

I'm still trying to figure out my own system. I found this on Pinterest and I like her style. She didn't have an editable template (just a PDF file) so I made my own. In order to view it properly once it's downloaded, you have to have the Quicksand font installed.

It's nice because I know exaclty what we're having and I don't ever have the nights where we're like, "What's for dinner?" "Well, nothing's defrosted... Let's go get food from {fillintherestauranthere}. " Saved us a lot of money, especially since J accidentally got shorted on his check last time. So I'm in the process of planning the next two weeks so I can shop tomorrow and I have 3 empty spaces left.

What food do you like to cook?