Archives for August 2013

Let’s be real here…

August 9, 2013 By amusingmjblog 3 Comments

Or probably more appropriately titled… How to kill all your plants. In one easy step.

I have a lot of things in common with my mom and grandmother but one is how we deal with being upset. If we are having a bad day, we all make it better by going to buy flowers: cut flowers for vases or pots to plant outside, it doesn’t really matter. My husband knows that if I bought flowers it was a bad day.

When I was in the process of moving into my house I had a very close friend going through a really tough time and it hit me hard as well, so when my parents came down they helped me plant a few flowers in my yard and set up a couple of planters full of annuals to cheer me up. And each spring I plant new pots full of pretty annuals that are visible out of my kitchen sliding glass door on the side patio. The shelves the plants are all on came from my grandmother’s basement and are the perfect way to spruce up this plain concrete patio on the side of my house. (I plan on painting them some fun color when it gets cool enough in Texas to spray paint again).

So here is what they look like at the beginning of the summer (I think this picture is actually from last year, but they look pretty similar every year).

Some of the flowers I’ve had good luck with in this container garden in Texas are:

purple wave petunias (top two baskets)
Sweet Williams–usually come back every year on their own which is awesome
Vincas always do pretty well in the heat (white ones on the bottom)
Zinnias, which actually do much better in the ground, and are one of my favorite flowers to cut and bring in the house
Mandevilla– the pots on either side of the gate
Not shown but usually do well: Pentas and Impatiens

Ones that don’t fare so well:

Those two gerber daisy’s shown below? Never bloomed again, and wilt FAST from the Texas heat
Mom planted some sort of baby’s breath looking flower this year, didn’t even last through June
Snapdragons pretty while they bloomed, but didn’t do well in the containers

And then for the part which relates to the title: I am part of a small group that meets once a week, and this week one (of the many) topic{s} we talked about was the tendency we have to ‘put our best foot forward’ or to not show weakness. And I think blogs definitely play into that. I always love reading a blog post where someone explains that not everything is a well put together home, and in fact some of the happiest are anything but clean, perfect spaces all the time. (I know mine wasn’t growing up… thanks to 3 kids and ALL our friends)

So I never want to pretend that I have it all together or that my house is clean all the time (I can just hear my college roommates/parents laughing out loud at this statement). So here’s a post to show you just how wrong things can go in my world.

Last week was a crazy week in my world… I traveled for work and my youth director husband had his big camp (which I went to as an adult sponsor). So we were both gone for the better part of a week. Normally I have someone to come into the house to take care of Lexie and water my plants, but all my normal dog-sitters were also at camp… so we boarded her. But in the rush I completely forgot to get someone to come by and water the plants and that 4 days of 104+ Texas heat and no water=dead plants.

So here is the terrible after… what your plants SHOULDN’T look like. I’m still trying to rescue a few of them, but I think for the most part I’ll wait a bit and plant some fall flowers in their places. But on a brighter note, this guy below got the same water deprivation treatment… and decided to bloom in a gorgeous orange bloom. I bought this one as an already planted planter, so I have no idea what kind of plant this is, but I loved the surprise bloom!

So let’s pretend the pictures above are just really great ‘before’ pics for how awesome they are going to look in a month or two when I get new plants planted and convince my almost black thumb to turn a little greener.

Filed Under: Flowers, Keepin It Real, Patio

The Dining Room Drilled Down

August 7, 2013 By amusingmjblog Leave a Comment

I love our dining room. I love it mostly because we have already had many, many memorable nights of good friends and good food around that table. I actually nixed one of the houses I looked at because despite my realtor’s knowledge that they weren’t necessary and hardly used anymore, I knew I wanted the ability to host dinner parties. Since I didn’t have a stick of dining room furniture when I moved in, I went to my grandmother’s house and she had this large hutch she was willing to part with (it had been in the basement), as well as a dining table that had been in my grandfather’s office (the dining table actually collapses down without the leaves to make a pretty good sideboard). My grandmother bought the hutch from a neighbor when she and my grandfather returned to Kansas from WWII and paid someone to strip it down to its ‘au naturale’ state it is currently in. And can you see the holes in the sides? I’ve been told that was so you could put pies in there to cool and the holes would allow the heat to escape.

On top of it I have a collection of glassware… in addition to being a great place to store them, I love the feeling it gives off of an old general store.

The table is in pretty bad shape with lots of water rings and scratches and dings on the top, but it serves its purpose pretty well! I plan to refinish or paint it in the future, but for now it just means I can relax at dinner parties and not worry about someone’s water sweating onto the table or a stray wine drip ruining my perfectly good finish!

I come from a family in which seasonal decorating is an Olympic sport (you should see our houses at Christmas!!) but the only decorations I change much season to season are my dining room table layout. Right now it is summertime so I have out my beach-y stuff.

Funny side story: after a scuba diving trip with my family I decided to bring some shells I had collected home to use for just this purpose. My ever intelligent father said… you aren’t supposed to do that, they are part of nature; it’s not a good idea. I smartly retorted that I didn’t think customs cared about a few shells in the bottom of my bag. Come to find out… when I got home and dumped out my suitcase, I had brought a (now very dead) crab home in one of the shells. Lesson learned: customs didn’t care… but that crab did! I will now thoroughly investigate my shells before bringing them home.

Back to the dining room… the buffet on the left side of this picture was the first big gift my husband bought me. We had seen it at a store closing sale here in Dallas, marked down from $1500 to $500 dollars. At the time I debated whether or not to purchase, but decided I didn’t have the money to spend and passed it up. But I couldn’t stop thinking about it and told the husband I might go back the next weekend when I returned from a work trip and see if it was still there. While I was gone he went and bought it for me! (and he and a good friend hauled and installed it in the house…. and let me tell you, that thing is SOLID). It has three drawers across the top, but the rest are cabinets that just look like drawers. I’m not sure where I’d have stored all our wedding gifts if it weren’t for this buffet!!

I have two of those triplet window things in my house and curtains are so hard for those! In the Office I just hung two small curtain rods, but decided I wanted to try my hand at Roman shades. The curtains are THESE from IKEA. (Unfortunately that was before I was blogging… so I don’t have pictures of them in process… but if you google DIY roman shades there are tons of tutorials out there). The one thing I would have done differently would be to iron the curtains more carefully before attaching the strings for the roman shades… being a novice sewer I had no idea how important ironing was (hint: VERY IMPORTANT)!!

The rug is similar to this one from Pottery Barn. It works pretty well for the space. When it originally came from PB it had a bit of a musty odor to it, but after a couple of days being rolled out, that went away.

The two end chairs are from overstock found a while ago. The other four I got at an antique place in my grandmother’s hometown… for $25… TOTAL. I keep thinking I’ll paint them white, or do something fun to them, but I haven’t gotten around to that just yet! They have good bones, and are just the right size to fit between the legs of the table, so I’ll be keeping them for the foreseeable future.

Every fall in Kansas the farmers burn some of their fields (I think to return nutrients to the ground) But they typically do it at night and it is usually a controlled burn and can be BEAUTIFUL to see. For graduation from graduate school my older brother and sister-in-law gave me a gorgeous print from a photographer who catches that process. It hangs above my mantel in the living room, but they also gave me a book with all his pictures in it, autographed by him. I loved the pictures and thought they would look beautiful framed in a collection in the dining room (don’t worry I ordered a second book instead of cutting up the autographed one). I had a friend cut navy mats to fit the pictures and hung these six in a grid on the wall. I think they look AWESOME.

Philosophical moment: I love the idea of the controlled burn because sometimes I feel like that happens in our own lives… we need a little pain and hurt to be able to develop into all we can be. Okay, moment over… back to the dining room.

The artwork on the flipside is a framed copy of our wedding invitation (also a gift from my sister-in-law… she is a fantastic gift giver!), as well as some candles and a mirror.

And there you have it… all the details you never needed to know about the dining room!

-MJ

Filed Under: Decorating, Dining Room, House Tour

I may be from Texas, but I still don’t love burnt orange

August 5, 2013 By amusingmjblog 3 Comments

So if you read the House Tour Before post you’ll remember that when I moved into my house this is what my dining room looked like:

dining-room-before1 That’s my front door on the left… I have this weird side entry thing going on so the windows above are facing the front of the house, but the front door is to the side. Moving on… this wasn’t exactly the color scheme I had in mind for my new house, and since it was absolutely the first thing you saw, I wanted it changed PRONTO. (although we hadn’t even met at the time I painted this room… I married an Aggie, so even if it had stayed it would be long gone by now!). Just one more before pic so you can fully appreciate the intensity of the orange… and with a peach accent wall to boot!

So I did what any single girl on a budget in her first house did… I bribed a couple of friends with pizza and beer to come over and help me paint the orange away. When I explained to my friend what colors I had picked… he looked at me like I was crazy. Even crazier when we opened the paint can… and it was SO DARK. But I loved it, and hoped the white chair rail frames would look super crisp and tone down the dark background. Partway through the process… you can see we painted the chair rail with the same white as the top because they were a bit yellow-y compared to the ULTRA BRIGHT WHITE paint I picked. I now know that there are a bajillion (scientific number) shades of white out there… and ultra bright white might not be the best choice, but it looks perfectly fine…. and lesson learned. The room already looked a lot bigger with the top half painted white, now to add in the moody Navy color: Fast forward a bit and here is how the room looks now (a bit more styled!):