This is Why We Make the Memories...And Why We Shouldn't Stop

You know I love my scrapbooks!

I had loaned a couple of them to one of Ryan's co-workers last week so she could see how digital album making looks in print. When I handed them over to her, life was normal - as we knew it to be normal, anyway. When she brought them back a few days later, everything about this world had changed.

I sat on the couch and flipped through the books before putting them back, and they made my heart so very happy. One of them was the album from our Friendtastic Fifth Anniversary vacation. While I have loved every single trip we have ever taken together, that one was extra special.

That was the trip in which we visited friends all along the way of our multi-state tour.

We went back to the place where we were married, sat on our beloved beach, and relived one of our most favorite days.

We took a lunch cruise one day and ate in a marina another day.

We watched sunsets from our perch in the sand.

We kayaked.

We toured new cities:

We learned about Duck Donuts (which we are still in love with)!

We visited Mayberry - and the Biltmore. (Both in a snowstorm.)

And then we drove home through beautiful snow-covered mountains.

I savored that whole vacation all over again as I looked through the books. I remembered the stories from beginning to end. The sweet generosity of our friends who let us stay with them. The guy at the coffee shop in Florida who snarled at me, "Do you even know what's in a caramel macchiato?" The wedding we watched on the beach - on our actual anniversary. The shark teeth we never found - on the beach known for shark teeth. The things we didn't get to see in Mayberry because we didn't have enough time. The way Asheville shut down entirely in a snowstorm - leaving us without dinner, because we didn't know we'd be out of restaurants.

I'm glad we made and preserved the memories so I can enjoy them now. In this season of not being able to hang out with friends, travel, visit new places, watch sunsets on a beach, or enjoy restaurants, I'm grateful for the chance to live in the memories. It's why we made them. They were meant to be savored in the moment - and in the time that follows, like now!

And just as I captured all the fun and beauty of a vacation, I'm capturing the strangeness that is our normal. I've snapped pictures of empty shelves at the store, signs of announcements, and more. Even though there is so much I would rather not remember about this time, I don't ever want to forget this time. I want to keep making memories, even if they're relocated to the confines of our house. We may be banned from county tours and other adventures, but rest assured, we will have adventures. We will make memories worth keeping.

So if you're looking to fill a few moments in this season of being sequestered, look back over the memories you've made. And don't fail to make new ones. These days matter too. Perhaps they're not grand or picturesque, but they absolutely matter!

Bathroom Overhaul - Pieces of Progress

Well, this is not how I planned to do today's post, but I think "this is not how I planned..." is the motto of life right now, isn't it?

I've been so excited to show you our bathroom overhaul, and my intention was to show you the before and after pictures first (so you could appreciate the full effect) but I am still missing a key decoration piece, so I can't show you just yet. I'm hopeful it will arrive yet this week, so I'll do that post the very MINUTE I can!

Hopefully it's okay to go ahead and show you some of the pieces of our progress as we went along.

First, the explanation behind the overhaul. When we bought this house almost exactly four years ago, everything about it was good, solid, cared for very well, and totally nondescript. It was a blank canvas of a house in all its builder grade glory. As you know, we have worked hard to add some character and personality to many of the rooms, but both our bathrooms have continued to be a bit on the plain side. (And we are not complaining. They work well and we are quite blessed to have two. Please don't misunderstand me!)

Eventually we hope to overhaul both of them, but changing up the master is going to be quite the undertaking. Overhauling the guest bathroom was going to be an easier task, so we decided to tackle it first, and then we'll have a delightful new bathroom to use when we eventually get around to updating the master.

Our guest bathroom is fairly big, as guest bathrooms go. It had a single sink vanity, quite a bit of floor space, a toilet (obviously), and a tub/shower combo.

Ryan did ALL the labor himself. (I did help with some things, but I don't want to lead you to believe in any way that I was essential as a worker.) He saved us so much money by doing the work, and I am SO THANKFUL for him and SO PROUD of him for all he knows how to do.

Demo day may have been his favorite!

 We took out everything but the tub. That got to stay.

It echoed so much without anything in there!

First up? Mudding and sanding. Ryan did all that in just a couple of days, and then we were ready to paint!

 I picked out our paint colors, and we ended up really loving them so much. We did one wall in Relaxed Navy (which is like a blue/green/gray color) and the rest of the walls and trim were Bistro White. (I felt that was appropriate for us.)

 We did the painting together, and it was fun!

One of the biggest changes in this overhaul was going from a single sink to a double. That meant we also needed more lighting than we had. We had purchased two lighting fixtures from IKEA, but we decided to return them and instead get one longer fixture. That saved Ryan a lot of wiring work. We found our plan B piece at Menards.

Once the painting was done, Ryan put in the floors. He found waterproof flooring at Sam's Club and we loved the color! We didn't realize how yellow looking the old linoleum piece was until we started putting down the gray flooring. He did a GREAT job with it!

I really wanted to do one fun thing on the far wall - to make it sort of a feature/accent wall. I proposed doing shiplap, and Ryan was on board (ha! See what I did there?) with it. We were able to get boards cut by one of our friend's dads - extremely affordably - and it took us a couple of days to get them painted. (Photo credit here to my friend Amber, who was visiting the night we painted. What kind of lousy hosts are we? Come on over! Watch us paint!)

And then Ryan cut them and we hung them. I tried the nail gun one time and it did NOT go well. (Funny! But not well.) OH how I loved the way it turned out, though!

Once the wall was done, vanity installation was next. This was the piece that inspired the wall and floor colors. Ryan found this online at IKEA and we were able to pick it up Valentine's Day weekend when we were in Indianapolis. We love it - and he said it was fairly easy to install, even with changing up the plumbing some. 

We hung up the mirrors we found on a REALLY good sale at Hobby Lobby. (We're going for rustic nautical as a decor theme, so we sort of had the porthole feeling going on here.)

Originally we planned to reinstall the old toilet, but in the middle of all this, Ryan installed some toilets for a friend and really liked how they worked (water saving features) so we ended up getting one to match. (It came from Sam's and was a great price!)

So there you have it! All this done in two weeks' worth of evenings/weekends. And now we have a really beautiful guest bathroom to share with our guests! So far, our small group has put its stamp of approval on it, and we hope whenever we have overnight guests again, they'll enjoy the extra sink space! 

As soon as I get the decorating finished, I'll show you the official before and after photos! 

How We...Reorganized Our Closet!

Remember when I said back in January that I wanted to clean out our closet? Though we are known to be neat and organized people, every house has a junk drawer...and "the closet." In our house, the dreaded closet was our master, and it had become the catch-all where we tossed things we didn't have time to deal with in the moment. From the looks of it, we just have had more than our fair share of moments. It was annoying. We tripped over things and couldn't find items we needed...so it was time.

We had grand plans. To be fair, we still have grand plans. One of these days, we'd love to get a closet system from IKEA (most affordable for us) and make that little nook appear custom-built. We even had a plan to go to IKEA last Saturday, if not to actually purchase, to at least make final plans.

But then...virus-ville. And panic. And people. It seemed like an unwise move to drop several hundred dollars on a closet system that only we would ever see when we weren't sure of the future of our jobs, our paychecks, or the cost of food.

Sometimes you just have to make grown-up decisions, even when they're not the fun decisions. And this one has been one of ours in the past week.

Despite our disappointment over a day of lost shopping, of Chick-fil-A for a meal, and for a beautiful, magazine-worthy closet, we decided to go forward with cleaning out, organizing, and using what we had right here in our home (and a minor dollar store trip) to make a clean, organized, pretty space. And we happen to love it, by the way. Even in all its mismatched imperfection.

Since I know some of you are experiencing unexpected vacations or work-from-home days right now, maybe it might not be a bad idea to tackle your closet, too! Here's what we did.

It's kind of embarrassing to show before pictures, but I will.

Stuff stacked everywhere on shelves, shoes overflowing our side-by-side shoe rack, dumbbells in the corner...for starters.

Couldn't access half the dresser because of hanging clothes. (The scarf hanger had actually already been redone by the time I took this picture. It used to be in a different spot in the closet, but I just stuck it here for the picture. It was a new hanger I'd gotten at IKEA a few weeks ago and it is WONDERFUL. My old scarf hanger had very tiny holes and didn't work well. This one is plenty big enough and I can actually get TO the scarves.)

And while I realize it doesn't look horrible, it was just blah in the back.

So here's what we did.

* We took EVERYTHING out of the closet. Oh what a disaster our bedroom was for most of that day! We sorted through every single piece of clothing, threw away things that were ripped, stained, or otherwise not worth keeping. We put aside everything we no longer needed/wanted/could wear so that we can (hypothetically someday) have a garage sale.

* We also cleared out the stuff in there, finding new homes for things that just didn't belong in this closet and making piles of things that could live in there again, but probably should be grouped together and easy to find.

* We thoroughly cleaned the closet itself while we had everything out. Vaccumed (WITH attachments), dusted, wiped down walls, and made it much better than it had been.

* We took out the lower shelf in the last photo there to create more usable space, as you'll see in a moment.

* We also took the door off its hinges, which actually made the closet seem so much bigger. (Our one splurge for the moment is to put a barn door on that opening so we don't have a door swinging into that little room or out into our bedroom.)

We decided to keep the dresser in the above photo (which was mine circa junior high) and decided to add into the closet the buffet we used to have as our coffee bar in the kitchen. We took it out of the kitchen several months ago and replaced it with a smaller and more space-effective piece that we love. We didn't want to get rid of the buffet, because it belonged to my grandmother, so we decided to repurpose it as a second dresser AND clothes-folding table!

The only other things we purchased for inside the closet were seven small storage tubs at the dollar store, and a full length mirror that we found on sale for $15.00. I've never owned a full length mirror, and while I'm also not one to often be eager to look in one, it will be nice for seeing my entire outfit at once BEFORE I get to work!

Ready to see the after look?

We took down all those hanging clothes that had been here, removed the shoes (those on the racks and those overflowing) and added the buffet. It's full of folded clothing now, and we organized all the storage above. My earring holder is there, as well as my oils stash, and then the pillow made from Ryan's mom's shirt. I have already been folding clothes in this space, and I LOVE IT!!

I moved all my hanging clothes to this space - and my remaining folding ones are on the shelves above. I put the hampers on top of the dresser to buy some floor space, and we reorganized all the folding in these dresser drawers.

Ryan attached our previously side-by-side shoe racks so they're one tall piece now, and yes, most of the shoes are mine. I'm such a girl. You can see our storage tubs above. (Some are still empty - we just bought some to grow in sow they'd match.) I added our wedding canvas that had not been on any wall for a while, and the sign above it was one I got for Christmas that says, "I remember the days when I prayed for the things I have now.)

And here's the new mirror!

We love it that we can find everything and it's all tidy now, even if it's not 100% pretty as a picture. A good use of our Saturday, for sure!

Anyone else cleaning closets these days?

Movie Inspired At-Home Date

Happy St. Patrick's Day! Don't forget your green! (If you're going anywhere, that is. Or if you live with pinching pranksters.)

When I sat down last year to craft some ideas for at-home dates, I had absolutely no idea that we'd be pushed TO stay home for so long here in 2020. I guess I was trendy ahead of my time! Ryan and I enjoyed one of our at-home dates this past weekend, even though we weren't on a full-fledged lockdown just yet.

This date was movie-inspired! I picked 50 First Dates, because I hoped it would inspire Indiana to develop some tropical temperatures. The morning after our date, we woke up to this, do I don't think it worked. (Just hazarding a guess.)

But let's not jump ahead to the snow!

When we got home from work on Friday, it was almost 70 degrees in our sunroom, so we spent a little while out there, soaking up the Hawaiian-esque rays.

Anyone catch Braeya's shameless bathing in that last picture? Sigh.

I looked up some Hawaiian scents on Pinterest and filled up the diffuser with a combo that promised to make the house smell like the islands. Since I've never been to Hawaii, I have no idea if the result was accurate, but we did enjoy our diffusing! (It's orange, grapefruit, and sandalwood, in case you can't see.)

Dinner cooked in the slow-cooker all day, so that added to the delightful aroma! I made Dashing Dish's Hawaiian Chicken Sliders, except we skipped the bread. And I made this Hawaiian Fruit Salad, which was also quite delicious. (I added bagged salad that we needed to use up.)

And then we hunkered down to watch the movie and drink some coffee!

* Fun fact: when I asked Ryan to check to see if we had free rental access to the movie, he said, "What? 54 States?" HA HA!!! Try 50 First Dates!

If you're not a fan of this date or Hawaiian themed food, you can adapt this to fit one of your favorite movies! Just draw from the setting or script to pick out your food. (We could have done waffles with this one, since that's what Lucy eats in the restaurant every day.)

By the way, if you need some more at-home date ideas, here are the ones we've done so far this year: an indoor picnic, the root beer taste test, a copycat recipe date, and the salsa-themed date! And this one, of course. And if you're a parent suddenly at home with all the kids and no idea of how to fill the days, all of these could easily be modified into family fun days!