It's All About The House Lately

It seems like a lot of my time lately has been taken up doing things that have to do with the house. Whether it's outside the house, inside the house, or going places to find stuff for the house. A few weeks ago when the weather was warmer, we did some work outside the house. We cleaned up around the yard. We got most of the bushes/plants trimmed up from the winter, mowed the lawn, pulled the patio furniture out, etc. We got a lot accomplished on a Sunday afternoon. However then the weather turned chilly again off and on, and I mowed the lawn again, but still have a few bushes in the back that need to be trimmed. Come on Mother Nature, work with me and stay warm so I can finish! We'd like to do some more landscaping around the deck this spring/summer so it would be nice if the warm weather would stick around instead of this back and forth stuff!

Now for inside the house. I've been wanting some new furniture for the house. Specifically a new chair, end tables & coffee table for the living room. I've also been wanting some kind of cabinet/buffet for the dining room. So a few weeks ago we went out shopping for furniture. Many stores later, we ended up finding a cabinet for the dining room at World Market. It's basically for the wine & booze, as well as some serving pieces and wine glasses. On our shopping adventure we also had stopped into Art Van because we were having problems with our couch and the leather cracking. It ended up that Art Van had to come pick up our couch to service it. Well to make a long story short, after some poor customer service with the delivery guys and the service department, I finally got a manager from the store to help me. They ended up swapping out our couch and giving us a whole new one. They also said they'd give us a discount on the matching chair so we ended up purchasing the chair for the living room. With that said, getting new furniture leads to rearranging the old furniture, cleaning, and in this case filling the new cabinet with stuff. I love the new furniture, and it's nice to have extra seating in the living room. I haven't found any tables yet, but I think that part is going to be put on the back burner for now.

Once we were done with that part of the house, we finally decided to get the basement family room painted. It's been a project that just kept getting pushed aside for the past four years. Neither one of us really wanted to paint the basement because it's a rather large room. Basically it was just a time consuming project that we agreed was worth hiring a painter for if we could get it done for a good price. So that's what we did, and during spring break I had a painter come and paint the whole basement. It was well worth the price to get it done in half a day versus it taking a few days between the two of us. It's such a relief to have it done. It's amazing what a coat of paint does to a room! What a difference it makes down there. It feels a little more "homey" downstairs. Once we get it completely done with accessories, furniture, getting rid of more toys, etc. it will really feel "homey" and not like a basement. I need to have a garage sale first though to get rid of some of the bigger items down there that are all crammed to one corner. We did make some more progress though over the weekend with a trip to IKEA. We got some new shelves & t.v. stand which makes a huge difference already. Now I just need to find the perfect storage bins for the shelves so I can reorganize all the kids crap, I mean toys. Haha!

So that's been a lot of my time lately in between dance, school stuff, etc. I'm also on another yearly spring cleaning bandwagon and am hoping to have this place in tip top shape by the end of April so I can figure out when in May I can have a garage sale! I want this stuff outta here! I'm sure you all want to see pictures of the basement and I will try to get them posted soon once I get the basement back together and furniture arranged. Hopefully by this weekend.