What Have We Been Up To?

Wow, lately we've been slacking a bit on the blog updates. I'd like to say there was a good excuse for not posting in the last two weeks but, the truth of the matter is that we really haven't had much to talk about. We took a break from making changes to the house for a couple of weeks.

Two weekends ago, we celebrated St. Patrick's Day by going on a brew crawl in downtown Pleasanton which was a ton of fun! Because Pleasanton doesn't really have that many bars, 27 of the local businesses opened up their doors for the brew crawl and they each served a different type of beer along with a snack. We've been meaning to go to downtown Pleasanton to explore since it's so adorable so this was the perfect opportunity to see all of the cute little shops. We also went our ring bearer's 2nd birthday party, and wine tasting in Napa! It was a busy weekend but so much fun.

Last Saturday, we bought a table lamp for our nightstand from Cost Plus World Market. CJ and I like to read in bed at night before going to sleep and we always hated having to climb out of the warm bed to shut off the lights, so having a lamp in arm's reach is pretty amazing. Not to mention, it's extremely adorable. I'll post a picture of the lamp soon, just need to upload it from my camera. Next up for our bedroom - picking some photos to frame and hang above the bed. I think it would be nice to use some of our wedding photos.

Last Sunday, we worked on cleaning up the backyard, the front yard, and scrubbing down the entire house. We also FINALLY found an entertainment center to house the millions of cords and electronics that have been living on the floor for the past month. It's been driving me nuts to see all the clutter sitting on the floor so I can't wait for it to be delivered!! Our furniture guy told us that it will be delivered this week, woo hoo!

Our new entertainment center!

Once we have that delivered, we're going to pick out some curtains to hang up on either side of the fireplace. That will soften up the area and hide the outlets that are in random areas of the wall.

Bridal Bouquet Project

My beautiful bouquet

After our wedding, I did a bunch of research on what could be done to preserve my bridal bouquet. There are plenty of companies that do some sort of bouquet preservation technique to freeze dry it so it looks exactly the same as it did on the day of the wedding (for a shadow box or dome), or press the flowers and frame them. Unfortunately, I started doing this research a week or so after the wedding because it didn't even occur to me before the wedding. If you want to do one of those preservation techniques, you need to ship off your bouquet within a day or two of the wedding to ensure that it can be properly preserved. So, you should contact the company way before the wedding to see what needs to be done. Some companies need to ship something to you before the wedding to put the bouquet in so it doesn't get damaged in shipping.

I decided that I would just press all of the flowers and then try to do something with them when they were all flattened out. I pulled apart the bouquet flowers one by one and placed them in CJ's college textbooks (glad we could make use of them one more time!). Once they were all put in the textbooks, I weighted them down with a ton more books to make sure they were as squished as possible. Then, I just left them there for several months.

Last weekend, CJ and I were running a bunch of errands and decided to venture into HomeGoods for the first time. As were were wandering down one of the aisles, we spotted the perfect shadow box for my flower project and it was only $12.99! I was sooo excited to bring it home and get started on my bouquet project.

When we got home, I took out all the flowers from the textbooks and started to place them in the shadow box to see how I wanted them to look.

I also rewrapped the fabric from the bottom of my bouquet so it was nice and neat.

Once I got the flowers where I wanted them in the shadow box, I laid the fabric base on top of the stems of the flowers and started pinning the base into the cushioned shadow box backing. Luckily, I had some extra pearl pins from my bouquet and the shadow box came with about a dozen of them. I kept pinning the fabric until the base was as flat as it could be and then lifted it up to make sure nothing moved. I closed the front of the shadow box and, VOILA! I was done.

Super easy project and it looks so professional. I've already had two people tell me that it looks like I bought it from a store. :)

Master Bedroom

Last week was a busy week at work and at home so we took a little time off from blogging to rest. This weekend was quite productive and we're really proud of the progress we've made.

Here's a few things that we were able to check off our list:

1. Hang the curtains in the master bedroom
2. Wash, iron, and put on the guest room bedding
3. Make a shadow box of my bridal bouquet (saving this for another post)
4. Bought an adorable centerpiece for our kitchen table
5. Increased our internet speed (it's been extremely slow the past week so CJ spent many hours on the phone with Comcast trying to fix it)
6. Organized the garage
7. Parked our car in the garage for the first time!!
8. Unpacked a few more boxes

We're still looking for furniture for the formal living room. We haven't quite found something that we're madly in love with that's also a good price.

We're pretty excited about how the curtains look in the bedroom, it totally makes the wall look more interesting and we're happy to have all the curtain rod supplies off the floor and off our dresser.

Here's what the window looked like before (excuse the temporary blinds, we haven't chosen blinds for the house yet but these are still pretty nifty):

And here's what it looks like now, so much better!

We bought the curtains at IKEA for a great price (can't remember what that was right now) and we bought the curtain rod from Bed, Bath, & Beyond with one of our gift cards that we received from the wedding. It makes the room so much more inviting and cozy, we love it.

Here's a few more shots of our bedroom:

Our adorable "T" pillow and bedding from Pottery Barn

Shot of the window, bed, chest, and cozy rug for our feet

We have several more things to do for this room before we consider it done. 

1. Shorten the curtains a bit
2. We want to print some of our wedding photos for the walls and get some nice artwork as well. I take forever to decide what to hang up and where to hang it so who knows when that will happen. 
3. Get a lamp for the nightstand
4. Some type of decorations to put on the chest

That's all I can think of right now but I'm sure there will be more added to the list.

One of our engagement photos on the nightstnad