Extrememe Makeover: Apartment Edition

{The Office}

Our office actually wasn't too bad until recently. There was a long shelf along this wall, to the left when you walk in. But it fell down earlier this summer.

And Ross had built himself a nice computer desk last fall, but I hijacked it with my statistics homework. The desk is on the right when you walk in, and there's a window at the back that looks onto the balcony.

If we ever hoped to have a clear dining room table, we were going to have to redo the office. Ross made an awesome desk with drawer last fall (this picture doesn't do it justice), but he volunteered to get rid of it and make one big desk for us to share. (I felt really bad because his first frame was so nice, but he did this all over the weekend while I was at work). And again, just like the living room we Ross flipped the office around.

New desk on the left. With a purple wall behind it! I did help pick the color, but Ross also did this while I was at work and tried to surprise me with it when I got home. I loved the desk, but it was so dark I totally didn't notice the color until hours later. Oops!

Guess whose side is who's? Haha!

I spy a cute bebe. And my inspiration board!

Chair on the right.

 
We really love this chair. It was our first piece of 'adult' furniture from a Nebraska Furniture Mart post-Thanksgiving sale last year. It was our Christmas present to each other. Now I wish we'd bought two of them, even though there's no room for a second one! We bought the pillows during Crate & Barrel's winter sale online and for months afterward, just walking by this 'big kid' chair made me smile. When it was by the wall bookshelf, it was the perfect place to curl up with a book and a hot drink. Now that it's by the window, I'll love sitting there in the sunshine this winter.

Finally, in lieu of the homemade bookshelf that fell apart, we finally hung up the Design Within Reach bookshelves I got for Ross for our first married Christmas in Texas. Ross has such a good eye for spacing them!

So that's our happy, sunny office. It's also warmer in the winter, which hopefully means I'll have an added incentive to do my homework!

Extreme Makeover: Apartment Edition

{The Living Room}

I don't pretend to I have an ounce of design sense in my body. I can tell you if I do like something or don't like something, but I'm not great at creating a cohesive 'look.' I think I exhausted all creative decorating juices when I re-designed my bedroom in high school. (Amazing buttery yellow walls with a beachy theme due to my obsession with the Florida Keys and blue and aqua walls with an ocean theme in the bathroom. Loved it.) Thankfully, Ross has more than enough design sense for the two of us! Although since living with him, I find myself complaining about things like the "poor design" of feeding pumps at work, so maybe he's rubbing off. Sometimes simple is better. And I know Ross will be happy to hear me say that!

This month we finally got around to de-Ikea-fying our living room. I do love Ikea, but Ross and I are both over the age of 25 and our apartment still looked like a student rental. (Granted, we are actually both students again. But graduate students with full-time jobs. And that's beside the point.) Plus, the red couch was fading to an ugly dull orange and sagging in the middle. And the seat pillows had developed holes in the front, so the zipper side was always exposed instead.

The opposite wall held the entertainment center, but I didn't get a picture of the placement before Ross moved it. Here's the big, black, credenza that held our TV.

First of all, we (and by 'we' I mean Ross) thought the layout would be better flipped. It was kind of weird having the couch right by the door so we moved it to the opposite wall by the patio door and put the TV stand on the wall by the front door.

We also wanted to get rid of the red and black theme we'd ended up with so we found a nice brown couch for a reasonable price at Crate & Barrel. We also fell in love with some geometric prints and the white pillow there. The pink flower pillow is from Target this month and the blue blanket is from Target... ummm... my freshman year of college.

Then Ross got crafty and made a 'coffee table' out of reconstructed wood. He was so excited to go to drive out to the woodlot and pick out some pieces.

I'm told it's mid-century modern to go with the couch.

The fun orange elephant is a piggy bank from Urban Outfitters this winter that I fell in love with. Ross has grown to love the whimsy as well!

Then Ross decided to build a credenza to put on the wall where the red couch used to be.

It still needs to be sanded and stained, but you get the idea.

The picture frames and flowers are from Hobby Lobby and the purple vase is from Crate & Barrel. Finally, here's the view when you walk in the door and look to the right, toward the patio.

The rocker is some fancy-schmancy molded chair that Ross loved. I'm so happy we seem to have found a decorating style that's classy enough for Ross (I swear he'd live in a white cube if he could) but colorful and fun enough for me. Such a happy space!

Harvest

Last weekend, I got to go to Nebraska and harvest grapes on my dad's vineyard. I'm so glad I was able to help out this year! And what a good reminder that "you reap what you sow." My dad has put a lot of work into this land in the last 10+ years and it was so wonderful witnessing that work come to fruition (literally)!

My Saturday started with a beautiful sunrise drive. I-29 has been flooded all summer but what the alternate route lacks in speed (it adds an hour to the trip), it makes up in beauty. What a scenic drive!

foggy sunrise in the valley

flood waters

small town charm

Before I knew it, I was at the vineyard by 9am and jumped right in picking grapes (and taking pictures)!

"I am the vine, you are the branches. All who dwell in me will bear great fruit." John 15:5

Oh hi, Dad!

fun with the sun

1-ton bins

1400 pounds of grapes

15 pounds of grapes makes 1 gallon of wine, which in turn makes 5 normal bottles of wine. Not a bad harvest for a small, organic vineyard! This weekend we harvested the Brianna grapes. Hopefully I can also go up there in October when they harvest the red grapes. Anyone else want to join?!

Gluten-Free Nutty Banana Bread

I hope it doesn't seem callous to share a recipe after my last post. But when I came home from that funeral on a rainy, cool Friday, I wanted to bake. Because in baking, unlike in real life, following an exact formula will lead you to the expected results.

 
Nutty Banana Bread (based off of this recipe)
makes 18 regular muffins or 1 large loaf

3 bananas
4 eggs
1/2 cup almond butter
1/3 cup maple syrup
1 Tbs. butter or coconut oil
1/2 tsp vanilla

1 cup quinoa flakes
1/4 cup coconut flour
1 tsp cinnamon
1/2 tsp pumkin pie spice
1/4 tsp salt
1.5 tsp baking soda
1 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp xantham gum (optional-- the coconut flour and eggs are pretty good binders here)

In a large bowl, mix wet ingredients until smooth. Add dry ingredients and mix well. Pour by rounded Tablespoons into muffin holders, or pour batter into greased bread pan.

Bake at 350 degrees. 18 to 21 minutes for muffins and 45 to 50 minutes for bread.

Amazingly "normal" taste and texture, no? I'm pretty sure this is my new go-to muffin base. I'm going to try it with zucchini and add walnuts next time!

The Lord Giveth

"Naked I came from my mother's womb, and naked I will depart. The Lord gives and the Lord takes away. Blessed be the Lord!"
 (Job 1:21)

I don't know why God has been calling so many little ones to him lately. NICU patients, co-worker's children, babies not yet born. Jesus says, "Let the little children come to me; do not stop them. For the kingdom of God belongs to such as these." (Mark 10:14)  But that's so hard to hear when a child going to Him means leaving the parents God gave him to. Parents who loved him and named him and held him, but weren't meant to keep him.

We may know intellectually that Jesus takes these children in his arms and they feel so much joy and love with their Father in heaven, but meanwhile their earthly parents still mourn. No parent should have to drive away from a child in a casket at a cemetery.

An angel in the book of life wrote down this baby's birth.
Then whispered as she closed the book "too beautiful for earth." 

Sunday Night in the Crossroads

Ross and I actually went out on a weekend evening! An afternoon storm blew in on Sunday. Sadly, it didn't leave as much rain as we needed, but it cooled things down.

The weather was perfect after the rainstorm, so we headed to the Crossroads districts and had a cheese plate and some wine on the patio at Tannin. On our way home, we stopped to look at the new performing arts center and I took a few pictures as the sun set. Ross's employer is the lighting desiner for this project and Ross has been working on it, so he was able to give me some trivia about the building. What a cool (and beautiful) project!

Ross asking me how much I thought this light cost. I never win that game.

This weekend started with a visit to some of my favorite bouncing babies and ended with this sunset. What a beautiful start to a busy week! Did your week start off well?

How to Make August Awesome

So July flew by. And not in a good way, either.

A lot of stuff went down that I wasn't expecting, I didn't get to Texas like I was hoping, and I barely touched my statistics homework (but can you blame me when it's a self-led class that I have until March to finish?!) This past week went by even faster, and I spent more time stressing about getting stuff done than actually getting stuff done.

Money, school, life, my somehow overloaded schedule: all of these things have been weighing on my mind and the first day of August left me feeling pretty down this morning. August and February are my least favorite months. But after reading the Fitnessista's post today regarding 10 Ways to Make August Awesome, I'm ready to turn my frown upside down. I'm totally borrowing her ideas and filling in my own blanks.

1. Have something to look forward to. School starts August 22! I have been so worried about it because I would rather sit in a classroom and listen to a lecture approximately 10 bajillion times more than I want to teach myself graduate level pathophysiology in front of the computer. But online degrees are less expensive, and you can't get closer than KU Med for the ease of going in to the offices if I need to talk about something. I am so ready to get started and just know how school is going to be. I have a great fear of the unknown and I'm definitely working myself up with anxious imaginings right now.

2. Create a goal for the month. Mine is to go to yoga 3x/week. Mostly in the form of 90-minute hot yoga sessions. Counterproductive during the dog days of summer? Maybe, but the stress-relief and heart-pumping workout benefits far outweigh that fact. Especially since running is a no-go this month as I start physical therapy for my IT band. And keeping a workout routine once school starts will help me with time-management and stress relief when I'm in the thick of things.

3. Plan a dinner party or fun event. This is harder for me, since we don't really have a house/yard to entertain in, but maybe we can plan something with some new friends once we start our couples small group on August 11.

4. Go through your summer clothes and decide what you didn't wear this year and need to get rid of. I'm a total sentimental packrat and I've been needing to do this for a while. With clothes, and with the two boxes that we still haven't unpacked from our move last October (clearly, I haven't missed anything hiding in there). I plan to do a major purge around here so there's less clutter to distract me from studying.

5. Go for a swim! I really loved my 5 swim pass at the local pool last month. Swimming laps is amazingly freeing and relaxing. But it was way too expensive so I need to get my butt to the apartment pool one morning while it's semi-cool. Even though it's way too tiny to do laps, I can still soak in the warmth and sun while it's still around.

6. Pick up a new cookbook to try this month. Done. Hello, Peas and Thank You-- The only cookbook that has ever made me laugh and that I enjoyed enough to read before bed the first night I got it last week. I'm also looking forward to utilizing my current copies of Local Flavors and Clean Start to utilize in-season produce. I'm hoping to just go to the grocery store twice this month and get everything else from the farmer's market!

7. Sign up for a fitness event with a friend. Just did a 5k with my cousin-friend Becky this weekend! But I'm also looking at a 5k for Ross and I to run later this fall. And maybe the Gobbler Grind half marathon again if my knee improves quickly? But don't hold me to that-- it's just a pipe dream right now. I would also LOVE to run the Disney Princess Half Marathon in February with Becky, but I can't event think about that until I get into the swing of school and know if I can afford to miss a weekend of the spring semester by traveling (or if we will be able to afford the cost of doing so).

8. Scope out some new jeans for fall. I'm the pickiest jeans person ever and I tend to buy one pair every two years. So this isn't high on my priority list. Instead, I'm going to roll with plan a vacation with your significant other. Ross and I are in desperate need and we haven't been on a true vacation for 2 years! Maybe a quick jaunt somewhere over fall break is in the cards.

9. Go out for girls night. Girls nights involving Harry Potter (seriously, worse dedicated fan right here) or visiting beloved NICU grads would be much appreciated. You know who you are.

10. Eat a pizookie. I eat cookies on a weekly basis, so I'm going to go with my current craving instead. Eat a local, ripe peach!

11. I'm going add an 11th one here, but I might start a 13-Week Dave Ramsey course soon. Not sure how we're going to handle money with 2 of us in school this year.



What are your August plans?! What's your favorite month? Mine are June and October for sure. And December, despite the weather, because it usually involves good family time around the holidays.