The end of year project(s)

I knew the days between Christmas and New Years would be the perfect time for us to accomplish a larger project - one that might require a little more than the two days of each weekend.

While we had a lot of options for this project, I decided to go with painting our bedroom. Yes, we did paint it once. And I hated the color. HATED it. It was my first experience picking out a grey and man oh man did I do a terrible job.

I even had another paint color picked out before I finished the bed skirt (and b/c I'm a visual person, I took a picture of the sample):

The new color is much warmer and is a subtle blue-green. I like it infinitely better than the terrible grey. Plus it actually goes well with the other colors in our house, rather than seeming like a cold random room.

The husband and I are quite the painting team. I always do the cutting in (or edging) and trim and he does the rolling. We can usually knock out some painting pretty quickly but with a room this size, extra large trim, and the need for three coats, this job took us a couple of days. It was totally worth it though!

In between coats, our second big job was the installation of all new blinds in the ENTIRE house. Yep friends, we bit the bullet and used some much appreciated graduation money (thanks mom, dad, and Honey) to buy 3 custom sized blinds and 17 additional blinds for our house. Whoa.

In addition to really odd paint colors, when we bought our home only two rooms (the master bedroom and guest bedroom) had blinds. The blinds in the master were so disgusting they were yellow. We've basically lived with crappy blinds or no blinds since we moved in.

While the sun shining in the room above looks nice and only a person standing directly in front of our garage can see in the windows, we thought it might be nice to finally put in blinds.

Baltimore trip

Our Christmas trip to Baltimore trip came on the heels of our visit to NC and a full week of work. It was a bit hectic preparing for the trip but so nice once we got there. We arrived Sunday afternoon and spent most of the time relaxing with family. It even snowed Christmas eve! Of course, while it was pretty, it wasn't exactly my cup of tea! :)

The husband built this little snow cooler for the beers.

We had a great time celebrating my MIL's birthday Christmas Eve. Oranges and grapefruits from our yard acted as a centerpiece for the table.

 

Our families are incredibly generous and we are so grateful for the gifts from them - several of which will be highlighted in upcoming posts! :)

The finale

You could probably call graduation the finale of my education. The weekend of graduation was full of celebrating the end of my educational career (ha) plus an early Christmas with my family. On our way to Winston we were fortunate to catch dinner with some of our NC friends in Raleigh - definitely a nice way to start the weekend.

Graduation took place on Thursday. We celebrated with a light lunch at Natty Green's afterward, followed by dinner at 4th Street Filling Station in Winston. It was all fantastic and I'm so lucky to have had the opportunity to celebrate throughout the day with family and friends.

The Saturday after graduation we had our family Christmas celebration.

Per tradition, we started out with a "Christmas Eve" dinner at Honey's where shenanigans occurred.

And then we celebrated "Christmas Day" with brunch at my parents' house.

As usual, my parents and family were extremely generous with gifts. For me, the showstopper of the bunch is the Roomba!!! (Yes, I am super excited about a vacuum) And it is awesome people - freakin awesome. I cannot express to you how much I'm loving that thing - it is handling our dog hair problem like a champ. The dogs' opinions are a little mixed. Gracie doesn't seem to even notice it exist. The one exception is when it wakens her from a nap at which point she relocates to another room. Shadow on the other hand is handling it like her usual self - she currently finds it somewhat alarming (and thus deserving of a few good barks) but once she gets used to it she'll be fine!

It was a packed few days but so worth it!

MIA

I can't believe it's been almost a month since I last wrote a post on this little blog. While I'm sure I've said at least a thousand times here that we've been busy, the end of December may just take the cake on busy-ness. But it was all good, fun, and celebratory (or at least most of it).

What all did we do in those last few weeks? Here's a rundown for y'all. :)

And the month of January (all 7 days of it) has followed in a similar fashion, albeit with no traveling. Throughout the next week or so I'll have updates on all of that stuff listed above and what we've tackled so far in this new year.

Oh, and before I forget,