Kind of loving my outfit today. Also, please note the edge of a dumbbell in the background on the right side of this picture. I am constantly pumping iron. I am pumping iron right now. You don’t know. I totally could be.
{This belt was purchased from ModCloth and represents how much I heart life. This dress was purchased from H&M and represents how cheap I can be. Seriously, this dress cost me $5.}
It was an incredibly busy weekend in our house. I’m exhausted and my entire body, but especially my shoulders and forearms are insanely sore. We spent most of the day on both Saturday and Sunday lifting and moving heavy furniture and boxes. We sold two small couches that had overstayed their welcome in our house. One was taking up too much space in the guest room/study/holding place for all the stuff we don’t actively use, a room that will become my sister’s bedroom for two-plus months this summer while she does an internship in Baltimore! And the other was our main couch in the living room on which Dan and I would uncomfortably squeeze together each night to watch tv and whine about how badly we needed a larger couch. So out with the old, tiny couches and in with a new, much larger, super comfortable couch!
We also purchased a new bed frame that comes with a headboard and everything! I have been wanting to get a real bed for years now, and we finally have one. We don’t have a new mattress yet, but at least we can say goodbye to the crappy metal platform that has been our bed for the last 5 years. I am very excited to put the frame together and see how it transform our bedroom.
We also started putting together the new wardrobe we purchased to better store all the junk that is currently taking up space in our junk-storing room. Once we have that up and everything nicely organized inside, all we’ll need is a futon and my sister’s future squatter’s room will be good to go.
Dan’s parents are coming to visit next weekend for the first time in about a year and a half. We were joking that our place will basically be unrecognizable to them. Since they were last here, we have painted four rooms, changed out old crappy furniture with nice new furniture, and rearranged several rooms. To be honest, I can’t even remember what our house looked like or exactly how it was organized during their last visit. I’m excited for them to come and see all the big and little improvements we’ve made.
This May, we will have been in this house for three years and I am happy to say that it has slowly, but finally started to come together and really reflect our style and our needs. It is comfortable and brightly colored, and a place that I am happy and proud to call my home.
On Friday night, Dan and I went to his super fancy work event, where we had way too many free drinks and I cried during a speech from a former Ravens player who now has ALS (my grandmother died of ALS and I just could not manage to control my emotions). The night also saw me cracking up when Dan called someone Rollie Fingers because of the guy’s ridiculous mustache, until he pointed out that it actually was Rollie Fingers. So that’s cool.
I wore a black skirt and sweater with some red pumps that left my feet absolutely screaming by 3 in the morning.
Dan wore a bow tie that he got for his birthday. He learned how to tie it for the first time about 30 minutes before we had to be out the door. Not too shabby for a first try!
Dan’s cousin and her husband came up from DC to join us for the festivities.
We drank into the wee hours of the morning, enjoyed a late night breakfast at our favorite breakfast place, Blue Moon, and then woke up the next day to raging hangovers and mostly just stayed in bed watching movies and taking little naps.
I am a boring person.
I’ll actually have some better pictures of it soon because Dan and I are going to his special fancy work event tomorrow and I’ll be sure to bring the camera. But if you know me, basically just picture me how I always look, and that’s how I look now. Exciting stuff!
P.S. Hairstylists love me because my hair is so healthy because I never do anything interesting or fun that could ruin it.
P.P.S. Hairstylists hate me because I never ask for anything interesting or fun.
I love having exposed brick walls. They are so low maintenance. No painting. No worries about scratching them up when you move furniture. They are, all by themselves, an interesting visual element in a room. But they can also be a bit of a pain when it comes to hanging artwork because you have to be careful not to destroy the brick when you put in nails or screws. And if you don’t have one really big piece to fill up the center of the wall, artwork can end up looking a bit out of place and like too much of an afterthought. This was the problem we were having in our bedroom. The exposed brick is great and I love it there, but I also wanted something there to contrast with it, and we didn’t really have anything that looked right on that wall. All of our pieces felt too heavy for the brick, or too small and silly looking for the visual space. Enter Problem Solver Claire (in no way affiliated with your local news Problem Solvers)!
I took a bunch of prints that Dan had purchased long ago from the Detroit Institute of Art, as well as some pages from a calendar of Germany architecture and landscapes, and used them to add a bit of artwork to our brick wall.
Not wanting to put a bunch of holes in the wall, I decided to have them hang from the molding and just dangle in front of the wall.
Each piece is held up by a small binder clip that I attached to string that was then wrapped and tied around a push pin that I stuck into the underside of the molding.
I love how it turned out. The prints add a nice pop of color to the room and brighten up that wall quite a bit. Plus, if we ever get tired of looking at these particular images or decided we wanted to replace them with photographs or other pictures, we can easily remove these prints from the binder clips and snap in some new ones!
No, no, no. This is not a post announcing that Dan and I are having a baby. It’s a post announcing that we got a new side table! Isn’t that exciting? It may not be life changing news, but it has definitely made a big difference to one corner of our dining room.
A while back we bought a Groupon to Nouveau Contemporary Goods, a way too expensive and for the most part too funky for our taste furniture store in Belvedere Square. For $50 we got $200 worth of furniture. This weekend we cashed it in and got this terrific little side table and the lamp pictured here.
It is the perfect addition to our new dining room setup. Now I have the perfect spot to sit down with a good book and a mug of tea! And I can already picture my dad getting much use out of this little seating area when my parents come to visit in April–he spends most of the downtime during visits reading and dozing off while taking notes in the margins of his books.
Dan and I are extremely happy with our purchase. With this new addition, the dining room finally feels complete.
They are small and flat, riverbed stones
that can hardly believe the long journey,
the grand lapidary of wind and water,
has led them, finally,
to a snug fit in the soft delta
of the palm, to be rubbed and rubbed again
in the recesses of the pocket.
They are unlikely companions, one polished,
the product of some refinement,
tear-shaped and, it seems, a bit frail,
the other, an earnest little piece of a mountain,
cut and tumbled from the scree one day,
a rock nouveau, a rock’s rock.
There is justice in the world,
and the rocks are quite prepared
to ride it out in this bag of notions,
forever amongst car keys, chapstick,
an occasional ticket stub–
because if it weren’t here,
it would be as it is elsewhere:
the world grinding itself to dust.
I think this is just lovely.
Another terrible night of sleep last night, but at least I had this to get my morning started on the right track. It’s going to be 65 degrees today and I’m determined to soak up as much sun as possible!
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