Category — Decorating Goodies

It has been a happy happy day.

After all of the house drama we found a house that we love and had our offer accepted.  That means we are about 45 days away from having the house of our dreams!  I am so excited.  I just hope that the inspections and appraisal go without a hitch.

Here is a couple of things I have been eying for a long time that I would love for my new home!

 I am going to need some pretty pictures for my wall.  Maybe I could have a custom silhouette made by
sweetcarolinadesign, $22

I have always wanted this comfy looking velvet poof pillow from Urban Outfitters, $28

For entertaining, this Polly George cake stand, £100.00.  I have my eyes on the matching butte dish, teas pot and sugar bowl too.

Side table from West Elm, $129

These are just a few things I have come across in the last few months but I am sure there is a lot more to come.  Any places that you look for decor ideas?  I am going to need some.

Rubber Doily Coasters, Set of 4 - $19

I saw these over at Oh Joy and I loved them so much I had to share them!  Check out the other cute stuff at Gretel.

Something lovely to post today that Mr. Juicefairy found and passed along.

I have always had a fondness for family trees, probably because I rank family as the number one priority in my life.  The only family tree I have is on my father’s paternal side and it would be nice to have made into a pretty framed family tree, but I have never seen anything I would like to hang on the wall … until now.

Check out My Tree and Me.  Beautiful illustrations of family trees that you can have made for $95 ($70 if you order a print and fill in the information yourself).  I am thinking this is my first gift to myself when I get a new house.

Enjoying your Christmas wreaths and poinsettias so much that you are not ready to part with them?  I just saw that there is a product called Wilt Proof, that you can spray your plants with to keep them fresher longer.  This may be something I try out.

Somehow I forgot to mention on my blog that we were having our kitchen remodeled!  We have been wanting to have it done for the longest time and finally the stars aligned and we saved up enough money to make it happen!  After a month of construction (which was unbearable at times) we are finally done!

We got great deals on the labor and supplies so we ended up doing the whole kitchen for $5200!  After thinking about it I realized we got these deals by doing one little thing … talking about the fact that we wanted a new kitchen.  You can easily forget the power of word-of-mouth and just how far it can get you.

We had first mentioned that we would like to redo our kitchen to Mr. Juicefairy’s brother-in-law.  We thought maybe we could get some tips from him since he works for a home builder.  He surprised us by saying that he could order cabinets from the cabinet maker his company uses, at a wholesale price for us.  After sending a drawing of our kitchen to the cabinet maker they made up a blueprint with a suggested cabinet layout.  The bonus was that the price was more than 50% below retail! For $100 they shipped all of the cabinets direct to our house, assembled already.

Then we needed the labor.  Once again it started with a gripe to a friend about how high a quote came in for some bathroom work we needed done.  He reminded us that his brother-in-law, John, is a handyman/general contractor and passed along his number.  We ended up hiring him for the bathroom and decided to ask him about doing our kitchen as well.  He gave and gave us a “friend” discount and did great on the price for the whole kitchen said and done … no last minute additions.

While John working up the estimate he mentions that he is getting married early next year.  Our wheels start turning and mention that we are part time wedding photographers.  He ended up liking our work so half of his fee we did for a trade — labor on the kitchen for us shooting his wedding.

Everything was coming together really well but we still needed to find someone to install counter-tops.  Again, at work I mentioned to a co-worker while making idle chit chat that we were getting the ball rolling on a kitchen remodel.  He, of course, knows a guy.  After a few phone calls back and forth we decide we like his estimate and find out we can go straight to the granite supply and pick out a remnant, or and piece of granite leftover from a bigger job that was unused.  This would save us a lot of money.

All in all the kitchen ended up taking a bit longer than planned because we hired several companies instead on one contractor that specializes in kitchen remodel, but doing it this way was well worth the money.  I am so happy with the way it turned out and it has made cooking a lot more fun!