New Addition to the Family

No, this is not a baby post. This is a post about a piece of furniture that makes me so happy it has become a part of our family. Yes, I love it that much.

Our kitchen has only one wall of cabinets. On the other wall is where I had this ugliness.

Please excuse the trash that sorely needed to be taken out.

I had been perusing Craigslist forever looking for a piece of furniture, preferably a buffet to fit this wall. Well all of the buffets I ran across were too wide for my odd length of a wall (46"). Then one fateful evening my Aunt and I dropped in on a little shop in Moberly called Endless Possibilities. It's basically a flea market in a store. They always have new and unique things. After borrowing a tape measure from the store owner I found this (can you believe it!) BUFFET!!!!

This buffet dropped down from heaven I tell ya! And the owners had it marked at $150... Womp womp. Remember that whole money is tight, paying for school, thing? Yeah, this buffet didn't fit into that budget. Luckily the owner happened to be at the store and he brought it down from $150 to $100 for me. The cheap-o in me still though it was a little high. So the scaredy cat Olivia went home without the buffet. All the while wondering if it would be there if I went back, could I find something better on CL, would I ever find something to fit that gosh dern wall?!??!??!?

Ok long story made a tad bit shorter I had my aunt go back and pay for it the next day. Also since my birthday is coming up, she and my grandma both put in $20 so this bad buffet rang in at $68 after taxes.

 

I cannot put into words how much this buffet adds to the kitchen. It has almost doubled my counter space, I now have a place to prepare things and use my mixer and it gave me a ton of additional storage! LOVE!

I'm not sure if I'll refinish it or not... still contemplating. This night-time picture really does not do it justice. Oh and that filled to the brim ledge above it either. The funniest part of this story... when Eric and I went to go pick it up I asked him what he thought and he said "Well it isn't what I was expecting." I replied with a what do you mean? He said he was expecting an actual buffet like at a restaurant. That got a few snorting laughs from me as I pictured a 24-hour buffet in our kitchen. Dream on buddy! Ah boys, gotta love 'em!

Cleaning Schedule Printable!

Hi Everyone!

I'm soooo giddy! It's Christmas Eve. Which means the big happy day is tomorrow and Eric and I are opening presents early so we can head to Grandma's in the morning. Anything concerning morning is early for us night owls so we figured we'd just open presents while were still wide awake. Plus when Eric gets home it will technically be Christmas. I never can think that way. Eric always says it's the next day when its after midnight, but if I haven't gone to sleep yet, it's still the same day. My days are just defined differently, that's all. Anyways on to business.

Some of you may remember that making a cleaing schedule is on my list of things to do over Christmas break. Here's a refresher for everyone:

• Make cleaning schedule.
• Paint kitchen cabinets.
• Find something to replace microwave cart.  More on that after Christmas!
• Read "Time of My Life"
• Finish Christmas shopping.
• Clean out LR closet.
• Finish BR closet (buy baskets to corral stuff on shelves and paint it)
• Paint trim in BR.
• Have a photo shoot with Mojo and Junior.
• Host a holiday party????

I have a hard time keeping my house as clean as I would like it, beause everything piles up and then I don't even want to begin to touch it. So this handy little schedule will keep me on track and cleaning my house manageable. Oh and I snuck in chores for the hubby which can always be changed as I think of more. :). Eric really doesn't do a lot around the house he's always helpful when I ask him to do something, but thats about it. Wait I'm lying, we take turns doing dishes, which definitely counts. I have come to peace about this laziness situation because I'm kind of a gotta-have-it-done-my-way gal. So when he does something wrong, I get all the more frustrated. Anywho here's what I came up with:

I had seen a lot of printable cleaning schedules, but none of them really fit how we clean the house and what days work best for us so I made one. I plan on putting this in a frame and sticking it on the fridge so that we can mark off as we go with a dry erase marker. Also since I am a nice person I created a few more color schemes and I am going to share them all at the end of this post, so you can customize and make the schedule your own.

For my red-loving friends:

And the sassy green one:

I have to give credit where it is due, so I did NOT come up with the banner I got it from this great site. When you are editing these, please don't take the "Created by Little House on the Left" thing out. I didn't make it permanent as I normally would have and also didn't make it a big part of the design, so just leave it please.
Here are the links for the schedules:

Turquoise Cleaning Schedule
Red Cleaning Schedule
Green Cleaning Schedule

They all look a little wonky in the viewer, but just click "File" then "Download Original" and it should open up a word document for ya. Enjoy!

Hope everyone has a safe and merry Christmas!!

Free Wrapping Paper

I haven't bought wrapping paper in. a. long. time. I pains me to watch all of that beautiful paper being thrown away after everyone rips into their presents. Well, that and I am a cheap-o pennyless college student :D. Usually I just throw newspaper on gifts along with a bow or reuse gift bags. This year I am getting the Wall Street Journal due to an award I got which means it's fa-reeee and it has some awesome full page ads and by golly they get pretty festive around Christmas-time. So I made the fronts of the gifts pretty and used newspaper to stuff bags with in leui of tissue paper. These gift aren't going to The White House or anything, so its ok if they're a little low key.

Here's what I came up with with a few little snippets of our Christmas tree:

The funny thing is that the watch one is actually a watch kind of gift.

And all lit up.

Kinda blurry, but you get the idea.

This was actually really easy. I just perused the newspaper, found my ads and cut them out. I wrapped the whole gift in newspaper and then taped the ad on the "front." Topped it off with ribbon and viola.

Or you could just do what Eric does...

Pretty, ugly, big or small its the thought behind the gift that matters most of all!

Are you guys ready for Christmas? I just have to get Eric a few more things and then I'll be ready.

Merry Christmas!!

Olivia

Killing Pumpkins

It is 8 days 'til Christmas and I still have pumpkins around outside...... Enter my genius idea to have a shooting date with the hubby and blow them to smithereens. It was fun and now our house looks a little bit more in tune with the date. No I didn't take pictures. I MUST remember to take my camera EVERYWHERE.

Someone else must be on the same level of my geniusness, because there were other rotting pumpkins at the shooting range. Nice to escape the painting madness around here for a bit :)

Happy Weekend Everyone,
Olivia

Slow Process

Hi everybody!! I made it through finals... somehow without a scratch and then it was high time to start in on my Christmas break to do list.

• Make cleaning schedule.
• Paint kitchen cabinets.
• Find something to replace microwave cart.
• Read "Time of My Life"
• Finish Christmas shopping.
• Clean out LR closet.
• Finish BR closet (buy baskets to corral stuff on shelves and paint it)
• Paint trim in BR.
• Have a photo shoot with Mojo and Junior.
• Host a holiday party????

This is just a quick tentative list I jotted down last week and my first day off from school (yesterday) my aunt and I dove into the biggest task of all since it was a rainy ucky day and we had already planned to anyways, painting the kitchen cabinets.I wanted to get this done before I start working full-time on Sunday. Boo. It is now day two and I am slowly chugging along at my own pace and trying not to have a nervous breakdown because my house it a wreck. Everything will get a final coat as soon as I get done writing this and then the cabinets will get a 3-4 day "cure time". Hooray for no more mismatched cabinets!!!

Here's a before picture to jog everyone's memory.

 And a sneak peek picture ;)

Yes that is a heart shaped paint glob on my arm. Had to take a picture. I'm a nerd, I know.