My Dream Home

Jamie over at Delightfully Coconuts has been posting about her dream home while she's over in Germany where her husband is stationed {I have so much respect for military families!}. I love seeing Jamie's ideas and thought, "Why the heck not?"...a common theme this week! I have been pinning ideas for my future home non-stop so many ideas have been swarming through my head. 

**Disclaimer: this Dream Home of mine is contingent upon winning the lottery.**

Here's a sketch of the outside of my Dream Home:

I wish I could find a model picture of the house, but this lets my imagination wander a bit. I see cream, gray, brown, and red. A lush lawn (for the hubster!) and LOTS of windows, which I love!

There are lots of things I love about the main floor!

• I adore the covered porch - it is darling! Gives some space to wind down on a cool summer night {ahh, summer...}.
• The study is right up at the front of the house instead of being tucked back away from the family, which ideally I would love for my craft space! 
• With the "formal dining room" having easy access to the kitchen, we're more likely to use it. Otherwise, I find those spaces annoying.
• The Great Room has built-ins, a fireplace, and is open to the rest of the house. A must with my family.
• I love the kitchen island and the corner walk-in pantry.
• Off the 3-car garage {a must}, there's a spacious mudroom with plenty of hanging space, a bathroom {I like that it's not smack in the middle of the house so people have some privacy}, and a desk. Ideally, the desk space would be for the business since it's near the garage, but that's just in my head and I'm being a little biased wanting the study for myself!
• Lots of windows!

Dislikes:

• There's no closet near the foyer. Shoes and coats would pile up when we had people over, unless we hauled them across the house or through the garage.
• I would like the garage to be bigger so my hubby could have a big enough space for a workshop.
• There's no deck. We need one.

The upper floor...how do I love thee? Let me count the ways:

• All four bedrooms are on one floor; that means easy access to the kids no matter what age they are. Yep, even when they're teens and want to hide away from Mom & Dad. Not a chance.
• It's a must for me to have the laundry room on the same level as the bedroom, and with easy access. This setup is perfect because not only is it located in a great spot, but it connects directly to the Master Suite Walk-In Closet!
• The Master Suite is vaulted, a good size, and has a beautiful attached bathroom with His/Her sinks, a linen closet, a jacuzzi, shower, and direct access to the closet.
• Bedroom #2 {B's room, in my dreams} has its own bathroom and a decent sized walk-in closet. Perfect for a girl, right?
• Bedroom #3 {E's room} and Bedroom #4 {my "someday baby's" room} have a Jack/Jill bathroom which is awesome; their own sinks separated from the tub and toilet. I'm also grateful there's a planned space for a linen closet in there!
• The desk space in the hall: I'd debate on this. If it remained there, it would be a good location to have the family computer and keep an eye on what the kids are surfing on the internet as they get older. Also a good place to incorporate a "go-to" homework station. However, it might be an eye sore right there in the middle of the hallway. I'm leaning towards liking it there though.

Dislikes:

• E and "someday baby's" rooms don't have walk-in closets. Are they a necessity? No. But they're nice to have.
• I would like more than one window on the corner bedrooms {Master, 2, and 4}. I love windows.
• The bedrooms aren't very large, but they aren't too small either. However, with having a closet and access to the bathroom, it would be nice to have a little more space in the bedroom itself.

The basement is a little hard to read. There's a space for a future bedroom - maybe an office or my craft room, or a workout space {bahaha who am I kidding?}! A good sized storage area, room for a bathroom, and a big rec room for my imaginary home theatre. My imagination is huge.

Just for fun, what do you like or dislike?

My Grown-Up Christmas List

Don't worry, I kept this post rated G! I've been scouring Pinterest, Target, and Etsy for gift ideas for friends for about a week now and thought the heck to it, I'll make a Christmas "Wish" List for myself. Just for fun {and as a reference for after the holidays!}.

A few of these items were on my "Wish List" for a gift drawing I did with my siblings, so some of these may be a part of my life in the near future!

This is something I fell in love with after reading about it on Jen from iHeart Organizing's post back in February {see it yourself here}. It's a stylish, sexy, practical CAMERA BAG from Jo Totes! Plus, it's TEAL, and I happen to have an enormous crush on teal accessories right now!

{Find your favorite design and color here.}

Stick Lamp - Green, found it at Target...and I actually want this for my cubicle at work! I am surrounded by toupe and it drives me crazy, so I've been trying to add bright colors. I have a vase that features brightly colored stripes {I'll have to take a picture once my cubicle is finished} so I'm pulling those colors into other aspects of my cube. {One of my next projects will be to spray paint some of my desk accessories, but that might need to wait until spring when I can get outside.}

Aaaaand of course a teal one for my home office/scrap room {dreaming...}! I love the pattern on this!

To showcase my beautiful family at work, I found this bright red frame {also at Target, see a pattern yet?} for my cubicle. 4x6, 5x7, I don't care. They also have it in green which I would love to get, too!

I love boots. I used to own quite a few pairs, but after I lost some weight last year they didn't fit in the legs correctly any longer. Sometimes when you win, you lose. BUT the silver lining to that all is I have a great excuse to buy new boots! I saw these Cali-3 boots on Pinterest and fell in love. I have always wanted a classy pair of gray {grey?} boots and these are perfect!

{Find them here.}

I'm not trying to be greedy, but sometimes when you see something as stinkin cute as this, it becomes an obsession. I. WANT. THIS. COAT. This is another Pinterest inspired wish list item found it at Aoisos. I'm a little hesitant to buy since they misspelled "elegant" in the name of the coat {"Elegnt"}, but that could be intentional. I don't know. All I do know is I would look amazing in that and I want it.

Last but certainly not least are these ADORABLE, must-have pillow cases from Janery. Jen at iHeart Organizing features Janery products quite a big on her blog and I fell in love with {duh} the teal for my home office and the yellow for at work. Why do I need a pillow in my office and at work? No, not for sleeping {I'm too busy blogging, obviously}. I tend to slouch. A lot. And it causes a lot of pain when I get knots in my lower back from it, so if I have a pillow behind me, I will sit forward in my chair and be forced to sit properly{that's my theory, and I'm sticking to it}.

There you have it, my Grown-Up Christmas List. Of course there are other items that I'm dreaming of, but opening a package with any of these items would make me feel all giddy and warm and tingly inside.

What's on your list this year?

Organizing Our Entertainment

We're pretty lucky to have lots of built-in storage in our living room and even down our hallway, but we haven't utilized the space very well. For one, we have hundreds of DVDs. How often do we watch any of these? Rarely. Mostly we watch one of our many TV show series or movies on Netflix. I'm debating whether or not we even need to keep them all... Secondly, it's become a catch-all for miscellaneous crap.

So what's the setup? Well, there is a built-in on either side of our fireplace in the living room. On the left is where we keep those useless DVDs. I purged them a few weeks ago with B and tossed quite a few that I have maybe watched once since purchasing, and we alphabetized the rest of them.

Above is the cupboard in all it's DVD-liciousness. 

See, all alphabetical...I even took a close up for you :)

To the side there's a small cupboard that is triangular and not very big. I don't know what someone thought would fit on these shelves, but I managed to arrange our TV series on them.

One of these days I'm going to find a better way to store them. But, since we're just renting right now and I don't know what our future home has in "storage" {hardy-har-har} for us quite yet, I'm going to hold off on that until we're ready to move. I have a few ideas bouncing around in my brain from different blogs and {of course} Pinterest so once the time comes I'll be able to make the upgrade pretty quickly.

On the left side we have our cable box, Wii, DVD player, and sound system hidden. All except the Wii were here when we moved in so I haven't messed with hiding the cables much. {It stinks renting - everything is temporary!} Above that storage cupboard, we had some miscellaneous crap. See below.

Told you. 

Well, I finally got tired of the mess and invested in a few baskets from Michaels as well as dug up a photo box that wasn't in use. After some slight rearranging with the shelves, I ended up with this:

This makes me so happy! {I did tidy up the cupboard below and put everything in its place, but didn't see the need to take a picture since the setup remained the same.}

On the lower shelf two baskets hold our Wii accessories and our remotes:

Go up a shelf and find our "fun" basket that never gets used...it holds our smaller games while the bigger ones sit on the right of it:

The next shelf up holds some of our fitness accessories:

Fitness Ball air pump, stretch bands, ankle weights, the jump rope, ad some of the manuals/guides that came with those items. My workout DVDs fit perfectly into that photo box I mentioned wasn't in use!

The part of this storage organization that made me most excited was finally having a place to store my scrapbooks! I work so hard on them but many of the shelves aren't deep enough for the 12x12 albums, so they basically sat in my office/craft room piled up and a hassle to pull out to look at. However, the depth of these side cupboards was perfect and once I moved the shelves around a bit I had space for them vertically too!

Rockin'!

Now one final look, before & after:

 

Total cost? Aside from the time alphabetizing the DVDs and elbow grease to move the shelves, the baskets came to a grand total of $8.56 {they were on sale plus I had coupons off my total purchase}! Can I get a "woot woot"?!

-KK

Elf on the Shelf - Day 2

Well, well, well, what do we have here? It's an elf...IN MY PRETZEL HUGS!

 

She even has crumbs on her face. Come on, if you're going to bust into our treats, at least wipe off the evidence...

B thought it was hilarious though!

Working on My Fitness...and Other Updates.

I got my butt out of bed this morning and worked out to Jillian Michaels: 6 Week Six-Pack and holy cow I swear I almost passed out. I better keep it up though! I thought I read somewhere that Jillian Michaels said to keep going unless you faint or die (you never know with the internet...) so let's hope it doesn't get to that point. I have this bad habit of NOT working out because it's just boring to me, and not because I'm a super fit rockstar or anything, I just strongly dislike the repetitive movements and lack of immediate results. I'm going to have to figure out what motivates me so I can keep going.

Dollhouse: what a pain. Part of the problem is I have to drive a half hour across town to work on it since we don't have the space here to hide it. The rest of the problem lies in the type of wood that was used to build it. While absolutely stunning without the marker and writing we added for decor as kids, the wood doesn't take to paint very well. You can see the wood grain even after six coats! I used craft paint, but I'm debating if I should buy wallpaper instead, or paint stripes in the rooms to distract the eyes from the texture of the walls. I only have 12 more days until Christmas, YIKES!

De-Monster Spray: works like a charm. B has had only one excuse in the last couple days (she can't fall asleep) but no fits or tantrums as before! (I feel like a genius, even though it wasn't an original idea of mine...next time I'd like to go all out as Happy Life Crafty Wife did here.)

Happy Tuesday!

-KK

Elf on the Shelf - Day 1

On Sunday Santa had a special package delivered to us: our very own Elf on the Shelf! I couldn't wait to begin the tradition with my family so B named her "Sally" (she even has a cute little skirt) and we read the story - twice.

Now, many people find their elf in mischievous situations, but we adopted Sally to curb mischievous behavior so Sally is going to be a really good elf this year. In fact, she reminded B not to touch her because of the mischievous gleam in B's eye when she was told she was forbidden to. Kids.

Here are a few pictures of Sally on the first morning; B looked for a little bit, calling her name, and finally saw her up on the mantle by the socks. Looks like Sally isn't playing hard to get the first week.

OH what's that, a note? If you can't read it, it says:

Breanna, 

Thank you for the perfect name,

I can't wait to play our special game!

Find me each morning when you wake up,

but please remember not to touch!

Sally the Elf xoxo

(Santa must have had the elves take classes, that is some pro poetry writing there!)

B was so excited she had found Sally free of her box and dressed in the skirt...she wouldn't stop talking about it all morning! Last night she whispered to Sally what she wanted for Christmas, something she forgot to tell Santa, so we will see what's under the tree on Christmas morning!

I wonder what Sally was up to last night...

De-Monster Spray

I am on a roll this weekend. B & E are getting along famously so I have this extra time to snap a picture or two and post. Yay! 

B has had a hard time going to bed lately, with excuses anywhere from monsters in her closet to her eyes won't stay closed.

Again inspired by Pinterest, I decided to create my own version of Monster Spray {dubbed "De-Monster Spray}.

Last year I held a Norwex "party" and bought the Odour Eliminator. Honestly, I haven't used it yet. I love many of their products but this is one I didn't get around to using because I never thought of scooping up a spray bottle when at the store. However, creating a "De-Monster Spray" was the PERFECT opportunity for me to start using it! 

I used 7 parts water per 1 part Norwex Odour Eliminator and B helped {I told her the Odour Eliminator was a special product that monsters didn't like...which is true if you compare monsters to "odour" - win!}. She knows that it isn't just water, so it's more believable. I can now chase away all of the "monsters" in the garbage can and any other places they might decide to pop up. :) 

Fabulous!

-KK