Succulent should be a dirty word

Pinterest strikes again. This time in the vision of a succulent garden. I've been eyeing these adorable little glass spheres of unneedy greenery for over a year now... Never could find a reason to pull the trigger... But now in the bleak, bleakity bleakness of the Cincinnati winter I want some green in my life. And those fiddle leaf fern trees are just way the hell too expensive. Trendy trees are definitely something is never thought I'd be craving...

Mmmm figgy fern goodness

So yesterday I was running errands and headed to Home Depot. While waiting for my Cherry Cola paint selection for an accent wall I'm painting without permission in my apt, I wandered over to the plant section. The plant section in Ohio is approximately the size of a guest bathroom. Why? Because only garden assholes like me think they should be gardening when it's below zero outside. On that note I recently had a patch of grass delivered in more or less a pizza box for my puppy to poo in peace in. She wants nothing of it, and as such I now have a box o' turf on my porch, collecting snow...

Pre-porch... that would be a glass full of a random dog's yella snow.
Things get weird in Cincy.

I digress. I found some cute succulents. (What is a succubis? I know it's from some kiddy thing and I can't remember... But I want to say it every time I write succulent...) I then went to Michael's and found a mediocre glass bowl and some even more mediocre artsy fartsy pebbles and stones. I carried around a miniature dwarf in my basket for a hot minute until I remembered that I'm supposed to be hiding my Lord of the Rings affection from the public until my Frodo costume arrives for Comicon. Realizing the pebbles may not be enough, I bought some Spanish moss too. Which is absurd to have to pay for since I grew up with the stuff being a nuisance full of chiggers... Makes for great costume pubes though.

I got my goodies home and realized I'd made a whoopsie. Uh oh. They need dirt?! I've seen these things chilling in nothing but air! Clearly my green thumb and I are at a crossroads...

I know what you're thinking - they're going to let you procreate and care for a human at some point in the very distant future? But how human are babies, really? Much like a succulent they just need small amounts of food and daylight and someone to change their soil. See? I'm prepared.

After some prodding and digging and breaking of small plant arms, here's what I've got.

Pretty lame. I should've gotten a fish. And the gnome.

For added charm, I have been using a nettipot to water.  Straight from my nose to my little cacti friends.

DIY: Lantern Wall Display

While perusing Pottery Barn for some wedding registry ideas and came across this awesome wall hanging of lanterns.  

It was styled a little busy, but gorgeous just the same.  Too bad PB style costs my mortgage, that bad boy was almost $500 worth of lanterns and curtain rods!

I rounded up the lanterns at a Kohl's sale for $12-$20 each, the curtain rod at a Hancock furniture sale for $15 and hit up Lowe's for some really thick fisherman and spent a goofy Saturday morning trying to figure out what the hell to do with it.

I found a great guide online, that shows animated how-tos for each of the knots at AnimatedKnots.com.  Here are some we picked out... mostly due to frustration with the purty ones. Monkey Fist?  Right.  Just after I build my own yacht to tie it with.

This was a joke.  Now I know why people on Etsy charge like $20 for a mini one.
Fist fail!

Initial styling.  Ha!  The radio is for my pup, who likes to jam out to Bieber and a little One Direction, if she's feeling frisky, while we're at work.

Here they are all lit up.  Style just ain't my thing with this idea.  I need help, big time.  

I think I need to pull the lanterns up a bit?  

Disaster.  Suggestions, please.

Hosting: Stock the Bar Party

A couple of weeks ago I co-hosted a Stock the Bar for a couple getting married a few weeks after P and I are due down the aisle.  I've talked about how fun it is to have someone I can bridezilla my heart out to, that totally gets the ridiculousness of negotiating over linens and flowers and such, trying on dresses multiple times to get the right alterations, feeling up a hundred kinds of paper and design to find "the invite"...  It's been crazy but so nice to have a partner in crime!  


I couldn't have been more excited to play a part in throwing the happy couple a little shower to get them started on stocking their house and bar and kicking off the multitude of festivities coming their way!

My co-zilla has the cutest color combo picked out - yellow and gray, super chic and trendy yet classy.  

It was a lot of fun finding fun ways to incorporate their colors into the party, starting with the shower invite I DIY'd here.

My co-hosterita and I went through a bunch of ideas to find fun gifts and favors, which ended up including a traditional bar set, paper goods and these adorable Mr. and Mrs. glasses: 

For food we kept it really simple and toothpick/finger friendly:
Slow cooker meatballs
Pulled pork from the bride's fav spot: Fat Matt's
Spinach dip
Rotel-velveeta dip
Salted caramel cheesecakes (I made mini ones in a mini muffin pan!)

We toasted the future newlyweds with some really cute and fun S'mores Shooters:

Wish I'd had my blowtorch to light up those mini mallows!

DIY straw flags (in Word!)

Paper straws, dishwashable stadium cups and cocktail napkins featuring
the new couple's monogram (all from Etsy)

A chalkboard welcome!

Balloons floated around dangling the couple's engagement photos at eye level 

Signature mojito cocktail and water jugs
Why do lemons float and not limes?!

The spread!

The adorable happy couple opening their gifts!

DIY: Sliding Barn Door

The very first project we wanted to tackle when we got our home under contract came from a Pinterest post, shocker, of a gorgeous indoor barn door. We have a long boring hallway leading to our master with our laundry room halfway down. Perfect spot for some rustic chic! 

I researched my butt off of course and found some really cool modern hardware and farmhouse style doors. 'Spensive!  After drooling over and attempting to justify some fabulous options the fiancé had a revelation - reclaimed Georgia wood!  

While we didn't get the wood from here, P's family owns a farm in South Georgia originally built in the 1780s (not a typo) that gave us the inspiration to DIY with the reclaimed wood.  A new house has been built on the property, but the original home and barn still stand, one of the only in the area having survived the wrath of Sherman. A fact supposedly true only because the original great-great-great-ancestor that lived there was a "hell of a hostess" and actually had Sherman and his men stay on her property for a couple of weeks.  Her hospitality spared the family their home while the rest of Georgia burned to a crisp.  She buried all of her good china and silver, etc. when the troops came by, much of which was rediscovered during construction of the new home in the 1900s.  Pretty snazzy story!

Back to the DIY bit. We ended up purchasing the hardware from a guy on etsy for $200.  He also sells doors that look pretty cool or the whole package for around $600 or so.

P was itching for a man-project so he decided he would DIY the thing from scratch.  A lot of leveling, sanding, and staining and a whole bunch of new curse words he didn't learn from me later, we have this gorgeous door!  Some of the wood has carpenter bee holes, which I love.  And you can see the original round blade cuts from whatever crazy machine made the wood hundreds of years ago!

Staining the bad boy.  Check out the solid 15" slats of walnut!

Hadn't removed the real door yet!  Ha!

Looking down at the ground slider

Check out the cool old-school outlet!

DIY: "Stock the Bar" Shower Invites

A couple of my faves are getting hitched in 8 short months, which has been extra fun for me as I have a bride-in-crime to bounce ideas and vendors and such around with.  Makes my bridal diarrhea of the mouth to the innocent friends more tolerable!

Check out the cutesy l'il invites I made for the Stock the Bar I'm co-hosting next month!   I finally found a good use for the Washi tape that forchicsake.com got me obsessed with!

Gift Thy Neighbor

So we moved in to our new home 6 months ago and I still only know a couple of the neighbors!  Eek!  Between traveling all week to Birmingham, out of town almost every weekend for weddings, Clemson games, and otherwise and being DIY house project-attempters in every other waking minute I haven't exactly been the most open-door policy newcomer!  

To be fair, my neighborhood literally is 90% couples with little bambinos, all of which seem to have paired off into teams of roaming stroller gangs.  Besides taking Finnley for her walks, our only neighborhood social outings have consisted of a couple of sunset booze cruises in the golf cart - still working on our theme song.

It's a convertible.  No big deal.

So I made some gifts to spread some holiday cheer!  Seriously only 2 people out of 12 were home when Patrick, my brother and I wandered the streets handing out our hot cocoa mix, one of which had literally no idea who we were.  Ha!  Thought that counts - good thing I put our address on the label!

Hot Cocoa "Snowman Soup"

1 cup unsweetened hot cocoa mix
1/2 cup granulated sugar
1/4 teaspoon salt
1/3 cup mini chocolate chips (mini melt better!)
1/4 cup crushed peppermint candies
Lots of marshmallows!  More marshmallows!

Fashion some tags and write some instructions (I happened to have hot cocoa stamps and cutesy things in my grandma stash of scrapbookables!)

1.  Mix ingredients in a large bowl
2.  For each serving, stir 1/3 cup cocoa mix into 1 cup boiling water or warm milk

Yummy and adorable!



But then again, maybe this is why we have no neighborhood friends...

DIY: Matte Art

I have a neutral problem.

My entire living room is becoming one big neutral bomb of sand tones and beige-y glory.  Besides my big blue carpet that poos blue carpet fuzzies throughout the entire house that is...

Little Boo on the blue poo carpet
(Miss Piggy was an unrelated casualty)

A recent taupe and tan addition is a set of 9 panels I purchased from Beyond the Rack on a whim.  I knew it looked like a clock, but I didn't even bother with the description long enough to realize I was actually gettingggg a clock.  Neutral?  Will be lovely in my living room!  Purchase!  

It arrived looking about as glossy and cheap as can be expected for the $80 or so purchase price, so I doctored it up with some spray paint Frosting:

Valspar Frosting spray paint ($6)
Nail polish remover for frame edges caught in the cross fire ($2?)

Middle row has been un-sprayed - gross.

Finished product!
[Check out the wainscoting we did here]

DIY: Wainscoting

I had no idea what the hell a miter saw was, nor did I care... and then Pinterest happened. 

In the weeks leading up to the closing on the house I spent hours, and I mean the hours from 1-4am, regularly planning, Pinning and detailing things that were absolutely non-negotiable to install in our new abode.  

Between the seriously fabulous:

and the even more obviously necessary:

I begged for something slightly feasible and managed to pressure Big Boo into agreeing!  Farmhouse chic, yet full of the straight lines and clean aesthetic I'm crazy for.  And, best yet, I could spin it into increasing my fiance's wood-working tool collection.  Ahhhh, wainscoting.  Scotting, skohting, who cares, but it's lovely and a WAY bigger pain in the ass than it appears.  But it was worth it.  Just glad it was our first project, because my other half was still on board with the whole "nesting" phenomenon... in the beginning.


Here we go, pre-wainscot:

Big Boo and the chair rail:

In go the mini rail squares:

Add some funky sizing issues:

Then some Benjamin Moore "Sticks and Stones" above the chair rail, and some white super gloss below and WHAMMY, chicified!  Check her out:

   
Now we have a miter saw, a million tubes of excess caulk, and some awesome walls in the living room!