Dream Bed

I'm married and we still sleep in a double bed.

I used to think that this statement was not that odd, but the more I mention this fact to people, the more I get odd looks. You know, the kind of look you might give a two-headed person. The kind of look that combines shock and disgust. The kind of look that makes me think..."hey, maybe we should splurge for a new bed". Did I also mention that this bed (read: mattress) is over 10 years old? That it was mine in highschool, throughout college and now on into my adult years? Cause it is. Did I also mention that this bed has no headboard or footboard and that it is literally just a mattress, boxspring and bedframe? ....Yeah, I think it's probably about time for me to grow up. So that brings us to....

Dream Bed #1:

The Ella Bed from Z Gallerie

Queen: $1499.00

King: $1599.00

And...

Dream Bed #2:

The Farmhouse Bed from Potterybarn

Queen: $1449.00 - On Sale for: $1199.00

King: $1649.00 - On Sale for: $1399.00

So, we have elegant & comfy versus classic & structured. I loooovvvvee both of these looks and honestly, I'd take either ;) Which is your favorite? I think both of these beds exude the mood you want for your master bedroom...luxurious getaway. They both SCREAM master bedroom...they're very attention drawing beds that would be the focal point of any room. 

I listed both the queen and king prices because I'm not sure which size bed we'd get. Our current master bedroom could definitely handle a King sized bed (with room to spare), but I'm not sure what size bedroom we'll be working with down the road. Plus, when Mark and I travel and we sleep in king sized beds they seem SOOO big. almost too big! I sometimes even forget he's in the same bed as me! A queen bed seems more appropriately sized for us because neither of us are very large people...but down the road would we want a larger bed? Looking at the current rate that we buy beds (um...not very often or maybe more closely aligned to never!) in addition to the price tag on these, we're gonna have this bed for a WHILE! At this point it's only us and Rufus -- who insists upon sleeping with us every night -- but we're very shortly going to be adding one more to our family.......another baby kitty! :) Our little double sized bed is gonna get even more overcrowded, I imagine. 

So...how bout you guys weigh in for me...do you prefer a queen or a king and why?

And I'll leave you guys with this:

a *slightly* embarrassing old picture (circa 2007) of Rufus' sleeping habits. ....yeah, he's a snuggler alright. I couldn't imagine where he gets that from ;)

xo,
the indecisive wife

Slim Down....by Drinking Chocolate Milk?!

It's true. The Calcium, Vitamin D & Protein found in 1% Chocolate Milk can help you slim down! And notice I said 1% -- not Fat Free! Apparently your body needs *some* of the fat to help break down the Vitamin D. Check out the details here:

The Chocolate Milk Diet | Eat This, Not That

All you have to do is drink chocolate milk three times and day and eat nothing else for a week.

.....AHHHHHHHH, JUST KIDDING!!!!

It's actually not a "diet" at all. They just suggest drinking chocolate milk (along with your regular routine of diet and exercise) 3 times a day -- once in the morning, once before you workout, and once after you workout. If you don't workout that day then just drink a glass morning, afternoon and evening. Doesn't sound so bad right?!

My husband is gonna be thrilled. He LOVES chocolate milk!

Please Excuse Me While I Whine...

Consider that your warning....you may want to turn away now.

I have a lot of good things going for me in my life and some days (weekends/nights) I see that. I have a wonderful husband. Let me say that again.... A WONDERFUL husband. He understands when I'm stressed...he cooks breakfast on the weekends...he never pours himself a cup of coffee without pouring mine as well...he supports me...he does laundry (while sometimes drying my "lay flat to dry" clothing, but eh - mistakes sometimes happen!)....he loves (for the most part!) doing projects around the house with me...I say I want to build something and he designs it...and builds it....he tolerates my incessant need to "improve things"....he opens my car door when we go out to dinner...he writes me messages on the lunch he packed for me while he was packing his own....he holds my hand at the table at dinner....he goes to get me "fill in the blank" when I give him puppydog eyes....and on, and on, and on...

I also have a great "first" house and a sweet snuggly kitty cat. I have a nice car to drive and we have the ability to take yearly vacations. I have a job. My husband has a job...a "good" job. And we're happily married (the first year is the hardest?! hogwash!!).

So yeah, I know I have a lot of things to be thankful for, but all of that just gets buried in my everyday life. I want ME time...US time. Every week we look forward to the weekend...and then the next weekend and then the next holiday and then the next vacation....and before I know it years have passed by. I feel like I'm wasting my life. I sit at a desk everyday and work my ass off...stress out, harbor anxiety and what do I get for it? A fat ass paycheck? No. A sense of accomplishment? Not really. ...cause it's the same thing every month and it's not like I even get to see my hard work enacted. Appreciation? Hell No. I rarely ever, EVER get "Thank You's"-- instead I get complaints about how things could be better...little nit-picky things. I get emails unread, requests not met, questions unanswered and just a whole helluva lot of frustration.

I have this very aggravating habit to always do my best. I put a lot of pressure on myself to do a good job at whatever it is I'm doing. And to be quite honest, I'M getting sick and tired of trying. It always seems like the person that works the hardest and complains the least always gets the shit end of the stick. Shouldn't they be rewarded? Or at the very least appreciated? But, no...they get extra work and no extra pay.  I don't know, maybe that's just some crazy notion I have of work and of being a good employee. Or maybe I need a new career.

Why is it that we're expected to spend nearly 72% of our year working? that leaves us with only 28% of our own time doing what we actually WANT to do. That's insane!! I don't want to be forced to live my life by someone else's rules for the majority of my life (cause technically, we're SUPPOSE to be able to retire someday - right?!). I've gotta figure this out...maybe I need a new plan. Always playing by the rules and following the norm isn't always the right thing to do. I want to live at the beach...in warm weather and I want to make my OWN schedule and play by my OWN rules. I want to be able to wake up in the morning when I want to...and go workout, have breakfast on my screened-in porch and THEN go to work. If I want to go see a show and have a few drinks on a weeknight I want to be able to do that without worrying about having to wake up and go to work in the morning. I'm nearly 5 years in to this "routine" and I'm so over it.

DIY - closet shelves (aka, project # 5-ish)

It's officially Spring in Alabama but it's still 39 degrees outside. Okay, okay...to be honest we've had some really lovely Spring days so far....all 4 of them have been perfectly enjoyable. (wah-wah)

SO...until it gets warm and stays warm, the hubs and I are stuck working on indoor projects. A couple weeks ago we decided to tackle our custom closet shelves that we've been planning to build in order to take advantage of our large walk-in closet (yeah, that definitely tipped the scales in favor of our house for me!). Our closet previously consisted of a long wall of wire closet shelving where all of our clothes hang (oh yeah, there's definitely a future DIY closet system in our future), 2 short side walls - one with a window and the other with a small wire rack for hanging clothes and a laundry chute that previously did not have a door on it (it was just an open hole that went down to our laundry room...our kitty was quite intrigued by this) - and the front wall which had the doorway into the closet on it, but nothing else. We decided to build floor to ceiling shelves on each side of this doorway, which yielded us one 4 ft wide shelf and one 3 ft wide shelf.  Mark took all of our measurements then we divided it all up to determine our number of shelves. I wanted the majority of it to be spaces for shoes and the rest to be larger shelves suitable for sweaters and clothes storage (which will be housed in canvas bins). We also left some taller spaces at the bottom of the larger shelf for boots.

After doing a little research online, we determined that BC grade plywood in pine would do the job just fine for our shelves, so off to the neighborhood Lowe's we went. We selected 3 sheets of 15/32 4' x 8' pine plywood. Luckily, Mark had determined beforehand how many sheets we would need in order to get all of the cuts we needed and he also determined all of the measurements for those cuts so that we could have Lowe's make all of the cuts for us. That's right...Lowe's will cut your wood for FREE! We learned this little trick after doing the beadboard in our downstairs half bath makeover. We picked up a few more things like trim, brackets and wood screws and about $100 later we were on our way back home to start our work. 

All of the wood piled into the back our SUV.

The next few work days consisted of sanding and painting the wood. As a last step before we put it together we took the advice of the older gentleman at Lowe's that was cutting our wood...he told us that we should put a coat of polyurethane on it after we finished painting it. Well, after two coats of white paint we put a coat of poly on it...clear semi-gloss. 

Here's the larger 4 ft shelf after it was assembled and put into it's place in the closet

And here's the smaller 3 ft shelf in it's place in the closet. You can see that i was trying it out with some shoes ;) 

After the poly dried we noticed that the white paint now seemed to have a splotchy yellow-ish tint to it. The poly directions said we should sand and then put another coat of poly on it after sanding. Well, too bad we read those directions AFTER Mark had started putting the shelves together. Trial and Error, right?! So, Mark finished assembling the shelves and then we mounted them to the wall using L-brackets that I had painted white. Unfortunately the yellow tint was just as visible in our closet as it was before, so after painting the trim and nailing it to the shelves we proceeded to paint yet ANOTHER coat of white paint over the entire units. (the above pictures were taken before the trim was added and before the additional coat of white painted was applied. you can see the yellow-ish tint in it - no?)

Painting these shelves after they were attached to the wall was no easy feat, but Mark suggested putting a sheet of paper between the wall and the shelf and it made the painting MUCH easier! Smart boy!

Here's the smaller shelf after the last coat of white paint with the trim attached. You can kinda see in this picture how we angled the shelves that the shoes would be on. I wanted to do this so that you could get a better view of the shoes even as the shelves increased in height. In order to keep the shoes from falling off we just picked a larger piece of trim that would leave a "lip" on top for those shelves. 

Here's the finished picture of the larger shelf:

This shelf is mainly for shoes, but it does have 2 cubbies that will have canvas bins in them that will probably be for socks, tights, leggings and possibly one for belts. The lower portion is obviously for boots.

And here's a close up view of the slanted shoe shelves:

So....there ya have it! Project # 5-ish (or it could be #4, depending on whether you count us hiring someone to refinish our floors as a "project" or not, since we really didn't do much on that one). I can't wait till we can get out and start on our backyard makeover project...stay tuned for that one...I'm sure it's gonna be a doozy!

Bring on the Warmth!

This has been a COLD winter. Cold and long. So cold in fact that there was even some of this:

And this:

Beautiful Snowy Wonderland, right? Well guess what? These pictures were taken in....My Backyard!! In Birmingham, AL!!! Uh, yeah! Trust me, this normally does NOT happen. Not to say that Birmingham doesn't *ever* get snow, cause yeah, we do...sometimes. Sometimes we get a flurry or two! It's seriously rarely ever enough to coat the ground....much less completely bury it in about 2 1/2 inches! So what do you do when it snows in Birmingham? You take the day off work and play in it, of course! 

This was taken as I was pulling up to my house after getting off work about 1pm:

BIG flakes of snow were falling and covering our front yard very quickly! There was even enough snow to build a snowman:

We weren't really going for it, but i thought our snowman turned out kinda like a Tim Burton character. What do ya think??

Okay, so, it might not look like it here, but I hate the winter!! I mean, if it's gonna be cold then I'd like for it to snow. Wouldn't everyone?!? Unfortunately that's not typically the case here in Alabama. And man, this winter has been much worse than our usual winters....and it seems much longer too! ...Which makes me long for warm-weather even more than normal! I've always been a warm-weather person. I love summers....the heat really doesn't even bother me. I guess that can be attributed to my years spent in swim lessons, then swim team, then diving team and then lifeguarding. Did I mention that I love the water too? Cause I do. Yeah, I spent pretty much the entire part of my youth in or around the pool and although we did have an indoor pool in the small town I grew up in (yeah, that's right "an" indoor pool...singular. one. and that wasn't built until I was in about 8th grade), I still associate the pool with summertime. I love the warm weather, the sunshine, the summer sun dresses, the flip flops, the warm breezy summer nights...everything about summer and warm weather........And this winter is KILLING me!!! Okay, maybe not killing me literally, but killing my spirit! Seriously! Winters are depressing! They make me want to hibernate. I lack nearly all motivation. I keep waking up each day hoping that it's going to be warm. I mean seriously, at this point, I just wake up hoping for 50/60 degree weather! I just want to be outside!!

...which brings me to this.....

We booked a trip for our 1st marriage anniversary coming up in May!!!!!! AAHHH! I can't wait!! We'll be here...in this picture...in about 13 weeks! (geez, that seems too long!) It's the Valentin Imperial Maya in Playa del Secreto, Mexico (in the Riviera Maya right outside of Playa del Carmen) and we'll be spending 8 days and 7 wonderful, warm, ocean-side, all-inclusive nights here! (can you tell I'm excited??)

THIS is getting me through the winter....although I'm still praying each day that I wake up to 60/70 degree weather (I know,  I know, I said 50/60 would suffice...but 60/70 would be more like it!). 

stay warm,

The Indecisive Wife

xoxo