Insta Tuesday

Like a lot of people I have become addicted to Instagram. Today I'm linking up with Jane over at Taingamala for the first ever Insta Tuesday to share some of the pics I've been snapping on Instagram :)

 

The two top photos are my cats, Evie (the black and white one) and Gizmo ( the orange and white one). The third one down is Mira, who is the newest addition to our family, we've only had her for a couple of months. She's an Australian Shepherd/ German Shepherd mix and she's my guard dog :) Sulley is the bottom pic and he's a Chihuahua/Terrier mix and he was our first rescue. I love taking pics of my furbabies, especially since my husband is gone so he can see how adorable they are.

 

 

The top is the picture I took of myself on my birthday, thank you Target for the cute dress! The other three are all from the JBLM Air Expo last weekend. I went with my friend and her daughter and we had a blast. I just love watching the jets fly around doing crazy stunts. It really is amazing to watch.

So there you have it! That's what I've been snapping pictures of!

Rededicating

It's never my intention to let this blog slip away, but some  how it ends up  happening. I really do want to rededicate myself to it this time. This deployment has been a little crazier than I thought it would, and has been really really hard at times and it's easy for me to just ignore things like this. 

But I do have a lot of projects on my to do list and this is a great place for me to share them. I will still update with some pics of the master bedroom, which in addition to being painted now has curtains. I could not be happier about his addition, it somehow makes the room feel a little more polished, and even though I'm far from finished, it feels like a step in the right direction. 

The living room is my main project right now. Painting will happen soon, I've got a color picked out, I just need to coordinate a time with my friend so that she can help out. There are a lot of pieces of furniture that I can't move by myself, so another person is essential. I'm also making some easy no sew curtains, I've got the bolt of fabric sitting right next to me, I just have to get a few more supplies. That will be a project I will be tackling this weekend. 

Another update I have planned for the living room is new pillows for the couch. I have one fabric, I'm going to cut up some curtain panels I have lying around and  my mission this weekend is to find a couple more fabrics to complete it. 

In the coming weeks I'm also hoping to acquire some new accessories to style the living room so it can feel more polished and put together, because right now it's pretty half assed. 

It's amazing how long it takes to put together a house. B and I have been living together for two years and married for a little over one and half our furniture is still hand me downs, and most of our rooms are very unfinished. It's a slow work in progress. It doesn't help that the military doesn't really pay all that well, I mean we make a living, but they should definitely be paying our guys more for the things they do. B's idea of a good time is definitely not furnishing and decorating our house. There's probably 100 other things he would rather spend money on, so I've really been trying to do this on a budget. It can be difficult sometimes, like when I see the absolute most perfect media console ever and I have been searching for well over a year for one, and it's $1,400. Not exactly in the budget. We will get there though. 

I hope to keep track of my progress and different projects I do on here, and I really really want to keep up with it. I think it will give me a good outlet as I truck through these next several months of deployment and I can actually see the progress I'm making in our home instead of focusing on the giant to-do list I still want to do. 

Sneak Peek!

I just finished painting my bedroom and I am super happy with it so far! I absolutely love having color on the walls! And even though my husband thinks I'm nuts because we live in post housing and obviously won't be here forever, I don't care. Just because you rent doesn't mean you can't spruce up your walls! I, for one, hate white walls, they're so boring and lack any kind of personality. Plus I love white furniture, which looks way too washed out with white walls behind it. So here's a sneak peek of the room, I took this photo last night after the first coat was done. I'll take some after photos after it's all dry and I find the motivation to move all the furniture back in place.

One month

Well I have officially made it over the one month hump in this deployment. It feels good, really good, to know that I have been able to handle everything on my own for one month. There's times where it sucks big time, but it helps a lot that I have a really awesome friend that I spend a lot of time with. We get together on Tuesdays at her house to do dinner and watch a couple of our shows, then she comes over to my place Saturdays. We usually end up doing a couple other things during the week, weather it's dinner or lunch, a walk, watching a show. Yesterday we took her 10 month old daughter to the zoo for the first time which was really fun! We finally have been having some nice weather here in the Pacific Northwest so we knew we had to take advantage of it. Today again it was gorgeous out, I'm guessing low 70's. I enjoyed a couple of hours out in the sun reading a book. So far I feel like I'm kicking this deployments butt and it feels good! Here's hoping the next few months fly by too!

Kitchen Sprucing

We're all settled into our new place and loving it! Unfortunately I had to say goodbye to the husband :( He's off to Afghanistan, luckily for us it will be a shorter deployment and hopefully time will go fast. I have a huge list of things I want to accomplish while he's gone which should keep me pretty busy. I've been doing a bit of decorating around the house, I'm going to start painting within the next couple of weeks and I'm very very excited to spruce up these walls!

I've got a couple of small projects that I did in the kitchen. The first was inspired by this from Pinterest.

pin

It was super simple to make, I just headed over to Goodwill and bought a candlestick for $2.99 and a plate for $0.69. I actually bought two plates because I wasn't sure if a big one or a smaller one would work better and I found two that I really liked. The big one ended up being the one that worked so I just stashed the smaller one in my decorating cabinet. I decided to spray paint the ugly gold candlestick a bright sunny yellow and I left the plate as is. 

I think it turned out pretty great! And of course we need a final pic of it in use. 

My second little project was for the window sill. I had spotted these cute little pots at the PX last week and a little cactus also caught my eye. So I went back and bought the blue pot and the cactus, and also picked up some cactus soil. It cost me about $15 total. Now I have a cute little cactus for my window :)

I have several more projects in the works, and I'll be back with a post of some before pics of our house. I can't wait until I get to the point where I can post after pics!

Painting!

Well I'm not yet, but soon. Only 2 weeks until we get into the new house and I went to Home Depot and Lowes today and loaded up on paint chips. I've sorted through them and made piles of the ones I want for which rooms. When we get the keys the first thing I'm going to do it hang up all the chips so we can see how they look in different lights. Hubby was not at all excited about painting and was actually against it since it's not like we own the house, but we just have to prime over it when we move out and I don't plan on moving again until they make us leave Ft. Lewis. But after I showed him some of the colors I picked out he was totally on board so I'm really excited! Hopefully he'll help me get started before he leaves, but I understand if he doesn't want so spend his last couple weeks here painting. I can't wait to update with some awesome pictures. Last night I made mood boards for the Master bedroom, the Living room and the Guest Bedroom, and so far I'm super happy with what I came up with!

Bountiful Baskets

I decided to try this fresh produce Co-op called Bountiful Baskets, where basically you pay either $15 for a regular basket or $25 for an organic basket of fresh fruits and vegetables. There's various picks ups throughout our area, and luckily one about 10 minutes away from me. I've heard fantastic things about it so I was really really excited to try it out. This morning I picked up my first basket, and here's what it contained.

Doesn't it look delicious? I got 12 oranges, 11 apples, 4 pears, 1 asian pair (which I have never had before, but am excited to try), 1 onion, 2 types of lettuce, broccoli, celery root (the weird root thing in the front right), a bundle of cilantro, strawberries, snow peas and 4 tomatoes. And I only paid $30 for all of this ( I got the organic basket, then there's a $3 first time basket fee and a $1.50  processing charge). There's no way I could have gotten all this organic produce at the store for $30.

You may be wondering about the quality of it, and so far I've found that it's pretty darn good. The strawberries aren't the best I've ever had, but I'm also taking into account that it's not strawberry season right now and any strawberries I eat never live up to the one's I get from Spooners Berry farm, which have the most phenomenal berries I've ever tasted. I also ate an orange and it was really good, very juicy and ripe.

I really love that this is encouraging me to eat more fruits and veggies, often times I find myself just buying the same things every time I go to the store. I kind of love not knowing what I'm going to get and then looking up new recipes to see what I can make. The celery root had me really stumped, I had to post a picture of it on facebook to find out what it is, but somebody suggested grating it along with some green apples and making a slaw which I think sounds absolutely delicious. I'm so excited to experiment!