And then! Through some combination of good fortune and the Obamacare Fairy (kidding), I was able to switch to new insurance that would cover our entire fertility treatment plan. The whole freaking thing, minus a few copays. It is awesome.

The only problem is that instead of mentally depositing the budgeted funds back into our savings account, I started to think about it as FREE MONEY. And Free Money is extremely dangerous.

Free Money forced me to buy the single most expensive furniture purchase in my life. Meet my four new Tolix chairs.

Free Money also made me buy a new purse, a bunch of new clothes, and way too many birthday gifts for the husband (which I never do because I am usually a grinch). I can’t decide if I should feel guilty, or grateful, or if I should just go ahead and make out with those chairs already.

The old door had about 14 layers of paint in various stages of peeling-off, a giant crack down the wood, and a knob that no one has owned a key to for at least a decade, which resulted in more than one awkward incident of getting locked out of my own house, once during a blog-friend party, which resulted in Jennifer and me trying to break into my house though the back door, but getting so scared halfway down the back alley that we ran back out to the street screaming like children.

So it’s an understatement to say that the new front door is a thing of glory. It’s energy efficient and lets in so much light, which my little rowhouse desperately needs since there are only windows in the front and back.

However, along with letting in light, it also let in peering eyeballs from the street. If you’re standing on the stoop, you can see all the way through the house to the back wall. Which means that my neighbors probably spent a lot of time staring at me throwing marvelous dinner parties staring at my television.

After approx. one bazillion hours of researching the best solution for the door, with a goal of maximizing light and privacy and beauty and minimizing cost and bulkiness, we decided to purchase Emma Jeffs window film from her USA retailer, 2jane.com.

Here are some before, during, and after pics of the installation. I’d love to hear what you think!

Here is what the film looks like on the roll. We had to measure and cut to size but it was really easy.

Here is my Handyman Husband, who is not really handy at all, but he is cute!

We decided to leave about 5 inches free at the top and the bottom, in part because I didn’t want to buy the gigantic size that was double the price, and in part because the cat likes to see what’s going on in the outside world. It would probably look more “finished” if we covered the whole thing, but it just made sense to do it this way.

Installation was surprisingly easy. You separate the film from the backing paper, spray everything with a mist of water, apply the film to the glass, and squeegee out the air bubbles. Seriously, that’s it. It should last a very long time, but would be easy for the next owner to remove, with no damage to the window.

The look from outside the door is subtle and frosted. Light and color shine though.

I searched high and low for window films (of all kinds, temporary, permanent, in-between) and these are by far the most modern and lovely ones on the market, especially in the USA. It seems like folks in the UK have more options, perhaps those Brits are on to something with the window film and we still need to catch up in the states? I am happy with the Pearl pattern we chose, but I also really liked the other patterns available.

At one point, we ran into a slight snafu because some moisture got trapped and was causing a cloudy bubble in the middle of the film. You can sort of see it in the photo above. We sent a question about how to fix it off to the Emma Jeffs website, and within 24 hours received personal replies from Emma herself (!) and Roxie, the owner of 2jane. Their advice helped us solve the problem (it just took one little pinprick and a little time) and I was floored by the stellar customer service. Although it wasn’t necessary, they even offered to replace it for free if we couldn’t solve the problem. I dare you to get that from Home Depot!

This was a fun little project, and now I can enjoy the light streaming into my house, as well as enough privacy to wear my pajamas past noon without fear of getting caught.

Disclaimer: We bought the window film ourselves. Nothing was given to me free, except Andrew’s three minutes of manual labor and his modeling skills.

1. I am minutes away from buying plane tickets to Colorado in two weeks to spend time snuggling my nephew and playing with these darlings. This makes me so happy.

2. The lovely K and I are unveiling a new (yet familiar to you old-timers) project tomorrow. So please do come back!

3. It only too me 3.25 years, but my guest bedroom has gone from this:

To this:

And that makes me pretty darn happy, too. Anything making you happy today?

We are spending the long weekend in Delaware with my in-laws, where we will eat lots of delicious food and be terrorized by our cat, who decided to come with us. Okay, so maybe we forced him to come against his will and now he is making us pay dearly, by doing things like climbing ladders in the middle of the night. I still have no idea how he got past my advanced pillow-barrier but I woke up this morning to a cat on the top rung, beginning his descent.

I hope Santa brings you everything you asked for, and he doesn’t, may I suggest you buy it for yourself during the post-holiday sales? I tried to keep things simple this year – just a few gifts, two cute burlap stockings, and one batch of bike-riding Christmas cards. As you can imagine, Andrew loved posing for this photo.

My sister-in-law (I wish I could just call her “my sister” but it gets confusing because then you might think I’m talking about my “real” sister, and anyway…) gave me this awesome monogrammed recipe box as a gift for being in her wedding. I love the colors, the monogram, the pattern, and the lucite box.

Finally last weekend I handwrote my go-to recipes on it, including an amazing homemade Caesar salad dressing from my friend Jess. This dressing is kicky with the garlic and about 4,683,294 times better than anything you can get in a bottle. Make it for yourself, or for your honey, or for a dinner party (preferably with homemade croutons)!

Two

I took an eight-session photography class this summer to get acquainted with my new camera. I’ve still got a whole lot to learn, but wanted to share my favorite photo I’ve taken so far. It’s from a hallway at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, one of my favorite go-to places when friends and family come to visit DC.

Three

Its a bird, it’s a bird, it’s another bird! Actually I think I count eight birds in my newly accessorized powder room. I’m awaiting the arrival of some funky monogrammed hand towels and then I promise to show you the whole thing. It’s my new fave spot in the house (which sounds kind of lame…but true!)

Remember this chair?

This $20 Craigslist bargain from two years ago has new fabric covering the cushions and a new home in our bedroom. I sewed the cushions myself with a little help from my DC-BFF. The pillow was clearance West Elm.

Here’s a close up the fabric. I can’t remember how much I paid for it, but it was in the ballpark of $10 at JoAnn Fabrics. So let’s call it <$50 for the entire mid-century modern chair ensemble. What do you think?

*****

Last weekend we went to Delaware for my mother-in-law’s birthday. Instead of spending a gazillion dollars on a bakery cake, I spent most of Saturday baking one, and photographing the adventure with my new camera. It was fun, messy, and more exhausting than cake baking probably should be.

But the cake was so good! My blog idol swears by Barefoot Contessa’s Beatty’s Chocolate Cake recipe so I had to make that. It calls for oil and not butter which I prefer because I think it makes for a lighter, more “box-like” fluffy cake. I knew I wanted vanilla frosting and searched some food blogs before settling on this buttercream one. Both recipes were perfect and I don’t think I’ll ever seek out alternatives (since I bake a cake only maybe once a year).

My MIL must have liked it, because she confessed to me that she woke up at 1:30am and came down to the kitchen for an encore slice as a midnight snack. And then my husband ate a piece for breakfast the next morning.

*****

While I’ve been a wee bit enthusiastic about domestic-ness lately, I must admit when I came home today to a house freshly cleaned by my monthly cleaning ladies I was soooo happy. My zeal obviously stops short of scrubbing toilets.

My parents were freaking ROCK STARS while they were here. In a span of about five days, they probably worked 65+ hours each. They got up early every morning, I fed them tea and coffee, and they worked until 10pm, 11pm, or midnight every night. We didn’t go out to one single dinner, or see one single sight. Unless Fragers or Home Depot or the tulips in my front yard count as “sights.”

They completed (with minimal help from Andrew and me): crown molding, a custom mantle and built-in bookshelf, a new front door, a totally spruced up entryway and 2nd bookshelf, and a new faucet. And my mom weeded the crap out of my front yard.

Here’s a view of the living room with the mantle and bookshelf and crown molding.

Here is the bookshelf in the back of the house. Crazy story – apparently behind this shelf is an entire little room/closet! First we found a hole in the wood, which was weird enough, but then we realize the whole shelf is removable, so we took it out and found another 2 feet of house! It even had a light back there. So weird.

The new mantle and bookshelf are gorgeous, but I think the most dramatic change is the entryway. We used to have an ugly wood door, and a REALLY ugly wooden structure thing that separated the entryway from the kitchen and did a very good job of hurting your eyes and not much else. Now it’s gone! And we also put in a full glass panel front door. Let there be light! (Don’t mind that damned blue tape, I’m still not done painting everything.)

We hardly did anything upstairs, but I did finally paint and hang my little birdies. Now I get to wake up and look at them first thing every morning, and my husband is reminded what a dork he married. Win-win, really.

There are lots more pics over on flickr, including the supersecret hidden room, the new faucet, and the be-curtained guest bedroom.

Thanks again to my awesome parents for all their free labor, and happy birthday to my dad! Love you guys.

My photo collages, let me show you them:

This is our second bedroom, formerly seen in a terribly sad state here. As you can see, the lovely Lubi Daybed from CB2 is here, the walls are greige, the heinous vertical blinds are gone, and….that’s about it. But it already looks massively better than before, if still a bit boring.

I still need:

1. Curtain panels – I can’t decide between a funky print or or plain white/billowy. I just want them to be cheap and chic.
2. A rug or Flor tiles – If I go with plain curtains I might get a funky rug (maybe zigzag?), or funky curtains with a plain rug? Again, cheap and chic is the goal here, which is why I’m scouring craigslist daily.
3. Lovely things for the walls – but this can wait until I have some kind of color scheme.
4. Refinished furniture - I want to do something to make a few side tables a little prettier. And a dresser might be nice for storing extra clothes. Again, I’m waiting to come across a good bargain on something secondhand.

And then there’s the living room. We found a gently used Crate and Barrel sofa on craigslist for less than half the price of a new one just like it. As soon as this snow melts we can get it delivered, which will hopefully be before April. Honestly, I’m not super jazzed about chocolate brown (I’m more of a gray/pewter gal) but I think the price, shape, and quality are worth it in this case.

Clockwise from top left:

1. Flor Botanicals carpet tiles – I really love these but would like to wait for Flor to have a sale before I purchase them.
2. Spring Mint (the top, lightest shade) is the current paint color. Photo courtesy of this site.
3. Inspiration on a built-in bookshelf. My parents are building me one next month!
4. The plates on my wall. Chronicled at length in my archives.
5. The C&B sofa we’re picking up this weekend.

It’s possible I am the slowest, most contemplative home decorator ever. When I watch reality shows where entire homes are redone in a matter of 48 hours, it’s almost hard to believe that is even possible. I have lived here for 2.5 years and still can’t decide on whether or not to get an area rug, let alone what color or size, and even once that’s decided it usually takes me 6+ months to commit to spending the money on whatever purchase I have finally come to grips with wanting. So I hope my snail’s-pace progress is entertaining at least, and maybe in another 2.5 years those damn curtains will be picked out, purchased, hung, photographed, and displayed for all eternity on the blog.

Anyway, all the while I’ve been hanging on to this CB2 gift card, I’ve also been lusting after the lubi daybed. I even included it on my 2007 wishlist for Santa. Santa didn’t bring it, and I (cried a little but ultimately) moved on.

At the same time, our guest bedroom, the one room in the house we’ve done absolutely nothing to fix up, really just turned to a pile of crap. It didn’t start off so bad, with perfectly plain queen bed and some mish-mash furniture. But then that bed got an extra box spring (discarded from the master bedroom) and became “triple bed” (an adventure for all who dare to sleep on it!) and everything in the room became a landing spot for junk, mostly sports equipment. For residents and guests alike, it was the least welcome room in the house.

Armed with the motivation that a new year brings, last weekend we spent a good day and a half cleaning out the room to the bare bones. I sold the bed and the extra box spring on craigslist, and… I’m guessing you can tell where this is heading… placed an order for the beloved lubi daybed!

Swoon. It will be delivered sometime next week.

I chose the rich chocolate color, not that I don’t like the orange but it just doesn’t go with anything else in the house. Now I need help finishing the room though: curtains, paint, a rug (perhaps Flor tiles). Before I was thinking about a very pale pinkish purple but I’m not loving that anymore. We could always stick with greige, the same color as the rest of the rooms on the 2nd floor. Or something else. I’m looking for curtains or a rug that will inspire me first.

So if you have any ideas or inspiration let me know. Even better if whatever you suggest is being given away for free on craigslist, because unless I have a gift card, that pretty much how I roll.

Janet: “Hello sir, are you Mr. Rasmussen of the tracking and polling company?”

Mr. Rasmussen: “No, I am the former Prime Minister of Denmark.”

Janet: “Well, I am quite embarrassed now. Nice to meet you.”

And then I ran away.

What kind of idiot do you have to be to mess up small talk THAT BADLY? My kind, I guess.

**********

Did I mention yet that Andrew and I bought a bed earlier this month, one night after we had been out drinking and decided it was a good idea to come home and spend $500 at crateandbarrel.com? The bed finally arrived on Friday and today we put it together. After years of being conditioned by horrible IKEA furniture construction, this was remarkably, unbelievably simple.

I finally love my bedroom. As with everything in the house, it’s not quite finished. We still need to hang a few wedding photos, and I need to sew a new cushion cover for the chair, but it’s oh-so-close and I want to show it to you now.

First, take a peek at what it looked like a year ago, when it was part green and part leftover blue.

And here’s how it looks today. What do you think?

On that note, it’s time to go try out the new bed…Night y’all

But I’ll still tell you about it, even though I can’t get that horrible news out of my head.

Remember back when I was gung-ho about getting the house in order and I took on a 21-Day House Makeover that lasted about a week? Well, this weekend I tried to pick up where I left off. It might take me 200 days to do my 21-Day Makeover (which, I KNOW, is totally missing the point) but I’m doing the best I can.

On Saturday, I finally gave up the idea that we were going to finish painting the house by ourselves and I hired help. Probably my best home-related decision yet — they did such a great job, and I didn’t have to climb a single ladder or clean a single paintbrush or touch a single piece of dreaded blue tape. From the bottom of our first floor stairs to the top of our third floor stairs we have a lovely coat of greige walls and shiny white trim.

While the painters were busy upstairs, I started on my plate hanging project, which I first blogged about in January. And oh, it was such a fun project for about 24 hours.

I started by cutting out paper the size of the plates and hanging them on the wall in a mock-up.

Then I glued these DISC plate hanger things on the back of each plate, following the directions with diligence and care…

Then I waited 24 hours for everything to dry, and started hanging them on the wall in place of the paper cutouts.

So far, so good, right? I got them all done but one, because the glue disc fell off when I picked it up.

WHICH SHOULD HAVE BEEN A SIGN.

But no, I perservered! Maybe it was just a fluke.

Look! Almost done! Nine out of ten!

And then a few hours later, I heard a crash. I knew what it was before I even stepped in the room.

Needless to say, I took the rest of the plates down. I really don’t know what to do next. I’ve already nailed nine holes in my wall and glued up all my plates (apparently with faulty glue). But my pattern doesn’t really work with just nine plates. And I really don’t want any more to fall and break! I’m definitely going to ask for a refund for my glue discs (I mean seriously, WTF?!) but beyond that I don’t know what to do next. Pottery Barn is no longer selling the plates so I can’t buy a replacement.

Ugh, what would you do?

Up next on the house: Hopefully the last of the IKEA furniture assembly, and hanging more things on the walls, but nothing that involves glue. Because I’m kinda mad about that right now.