Happy Halloween!

 Well I had a much scarier post planned, as alluded to in my last update a month ago, but I got a perfect picture of our Halloween decorations and the beautiful fall foliage outside so I'll leave you with this for now--stay tuned for my next post, which will also be spooky. And happy Halloween!

"Turn on Christmas"

We have jumped on the "smart" home bandwagon. Is it a bandwagon? I don't know. But we have some smart plugs and some connected speakers (which we will discuss in a future post), thanks to the power of buying stuff.

Why are we risking opening our home to hackers (as they say the "S" in IoT is for security)? Well, because 1. turning on the Christmas tree lights is REALLY REALLY hard and 2. we wanted to have synced music across the house.

Do you see the plug? It's there....

We are an Apple household, so that means we already own an Apple TV. It also can serve as a home automation hub - functionally that means that it serves as a intermediary that puts all of the smart widgets in one application.

What are the smart widgets? We have two Wemo Mini Smart plugs, one powering the Christmas tree and the other powering the dining room sideboard lights. It was a HUGE pain getting these smart plugs recognized by Apple's "Home" app. Apparently contemporary versions of these plugs have a "HomeKit" barcode which you can scan and connect with immediately. I guess our local Target sells these so infrequently that we ended up with a really old version that pre-dates HomeKit compatibility.

I had to install a "Wemo" app, connect to the smart plugs, install a firmware update, wait 12+ hours for someone or something to generate a HomeKit code, then (while my iPhone was on the exact same network as the smart plug) type the HomeKit code into the Apple "Home" app. I wasted a HUGE amount of time initially because I connected the smart plugs to our "guest" network, which is more secure since it doesn't have access to any devices on our home network. But that was a little too secure as the smart plugs couldn't see the Apple TV it needed to sync with. Oops.

Anyways, once I got that all sorted out we could see our two plugs on our Apple "Home" app. I set up a "scene" that automatically turns on "Christmas" (both smart plugs go from "off" to "on") whenever either of us returns home after sunset.

As the smart plugs also supported the Alexa Smart Home system, I also digitally hooked the plugs into our Alexa (fortunately being on one smart home system does not preclude being on another). So we can also activate/deactivate both plugs simultaneously by saying "Alexa, turn on Christmas" and "Alexa, turn off Christmas."

Practically this means that we have the tree and sideboard on MUCH more now, which makes for a much more festive home. (When you have to lean over a wobbly lamp and reach though a scratchy tree covered in precariously placed glass ornaments to turn something on - you don't do it much.)

Merry Everything!

Our decorations this year, by night (because it was night by the time we took the pictures and I'm sure I won't have time to do it tomorrow). Mostly the same as last year, but still worth photographing.  We inherited a few more outdoor ornaments. I think our house looks best at the moment in the daytime. We still haven't quite nailed the lighting, but the candy canes, window wreaths, and hanging ornaments look very festive during the light when they're most visible.

The whole scene, this year with more hanging ornaments (and less snow, sadly):

I so badly wanted to put lights on the tree that's on the right, the one that looks exactly like a Christmas tree. We strung up our white lights that we used to use along our gutters but apparently those don't want to light up anymore. Hopefully I can snag a new set on sale so I can light it up next year. Instead, we put up some candy cane ornaments, so I think it still gets the point across.

Now could it please just snow a little? Really that's the best decoration I can think of.

Happy Holidays!

A little late for many of the December holidays but still in time for New Year! We added to our outdoor decorations this year at the request of the pre-schooler, and Mother Nature contributed to making this a cozy wintery scene. Intentional or not, we ended up with a very candy cane-themed yard, thanks to some hand-me-downs (the hanging candy canes and the large ones nearest the house) and some new purchases (the walk way lights - these were by far the cutest inexpensive choice). Our icicles don't twinkle but they do have a white or a color lights setting. The whites, being cool LEDs, just do not seem festive enough (yes, I know they are "ice" but they still need a warm holiday glow). Plus they were so bright that they shone too brightly in our windows after we put the kids to sleep. So we went with rainbow lights - the first choice of said-pre-schooler anyway.

Because only the front two large candy canes actually still worked, we thought that looked weird also so we unplugged them and added them to the candy cane chain lining our flower beds against the house.

We probably should turn the lamppost bulb so that it doesn't stay lit, as I think it was so bright it distracted from the holiday decor. All the new lights definitely lowered the effect of the red and green laser lights - it's so bright around our house that they are barely visible (can you see them in the picture below shining on the house front?).

And an indoor picture - this year we didn't have a chance to get a shot until Christmas Eve, so here is the decor after Santa already paid us a visit. Good thing we remembered to unlock the child-safe fireplace lock so he could get in and leave us presents:

Happy Holidays!

New decorations this year - window wreaths to match the door wreaths (so thrilled that Pottery Barn got them back in stock!), and one of those red/green laser lights. Of course with a toddler who loves Christmas lights, we had to put out everything. The lights are mismatched and the application is sloppy but hey it's the twinkle that counts.

Indoors, we moved the tree to the fireplace wall (we rotate every once in a while, it seems) and went with silver ribbons instead of red. We got a new star when the old one decided not to turn on. Most exciting - with our family complete, we all got new stockings thus forever christening us as Mommy and Daddy.

Our village inherited an ice rink (we mostly keep it off because it plays music continuously when on) and our thrilled toddler helped me set the whole thing up and requested "more people" (little does she know that this village is just a small subset of the stuff I keep at my parents' house...). The cats aren't thrilled to lose their window seat but have found other places to sleep for the holiday season, fortunately.

From our family to yours, Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

A Plan and a Few Random Things

We caved in and called professional help from the Container Store for organizational advice. While we work back and forth with her on some ideas, we realized that our number one plan should be thinning out our own unneeded stuff and giving up that space to the kids. We have so many bookshelves and cabinets already that will work fairly well for hiding toys, but they are full of old binders, magazines, and other things. Between the added attic storage in our garage for things we don't want to throw out but rarely (if ever) need and a new sense of having to throw out things we will truly never need (is there really any reason to keep my notes from my high school AP Calculus class when it all looks like gibberish now? probably not) might give us at least some solution at no cost. Then at least we won't need quite so many additional shelves and drawers. So we will see how that goes.

In the meantime, we have made a few small adjustments to our home decor that I'm excited to share. After looking online for a Turkish lamp, I found this beauty at a local store and knew the price was not too high, so it came home with me immediately. I've wanted one for ages but just did not have a good place for it. Good thing we have a brand new room!

Here's some more eye candy of my lamp. It has a warm LED bulb in it so the glass stays cool to the touch and isn't using much energy. I just want to figure out a way to better hide the switch, which is down about one foot along the power cord. 

Isn't it gorgeous? At least now I have a nightlight for when I need to come downstairs with a screaming baby at 3am...(silver lining?):

We also changed up our hallway. It used to have pictures strung up with yarn to minimize holes in the wall (we don't have the white paint so we wouldn't be able to fill and touch up if necessary). Here's the before picture, from this post - which totally coincidentally was exactly 6 years ago from today.

Unlike what I said in my post about refreshing the pictures on a regular basis, they were the exact same last week as they were 6 years ago. So much for that.

We inherited a beautiful picture that a family member painted (two actually - one is waiting to be framed) and decided the hallway was a perfect place. I think it makes the place feel a little more grown up than the sort of "just out of college" look of the unframed pictures hanging on yarn, don't you?

And not a "decor" update exactly but this Thanksgiving we had a roaring fire in the fire place thanks to our old oak tree. It is aged and dry and we have lots of it for the winter. Gone but not forgotten:

Blind Saga Resolved

We resolved our blinds saga by throwing a lot of money at the problem. By the time we decided the blinds.com blinds weren't working out, we were already fully using the room for baby number 2 (surprise, we have a new human "addition" as well as a new room addition). The bright sunlight needed filtering periodically during the day when it shone into the crib, and the street light needed blocking when one of us brought her down to sleep there in the middle of the night so that at least one parent could catch some precious zzzzzs. Without any willingness to shop around ourselves, we brought in a local decorating store that had recently advertised that they did house calls for window dressing.

And so they came with binders. Lots of little samples that could be un-velcroed and held up to the window to see the way they filtered the sunlight (thank goodness it was sunny that day).

We picked a lovely gray that complemented the wall color in a cellular blind that can be raised and lowered from the top and bottom. We decided not to pay extra to have them installed for us, despite the frustration from installing the set from blinds.com. Fortunately, as we expected and hoped, these were much simpler. D had them both up within 20 minutes or so, with minimal hardware.

I love that we can raise and lower them from both ends, so we can get full sunlight but privacy (bottom half covered only) or as much light filtering as we need. They are magnetic at the top, making it easy even for someone short like me to snap the top edge into place.

We couldn't be happier, though I doubt I would go this route again, given the price. We definitely would have shopped around and done it on our own if the first order hadn't taken so long and we hadn't been in a rush for blinds in there. It is a sign of how much we love the room though - we couldn't wait to be able to use it around the clock.

Happy Halloween!

Well I was going to post about our window blinds but this seemed more appropriate. Happy Halloween!

(One quick addition on a home improvement sort of topic - we learned that a drywall saw is excellent at carving pumpkins!)

Breezeway 13: waiting and decorating

We hit a bit of a lull on the final "punch list" completion and so the new room has been lingering in a state of almost-doneness. So we have started to plan our decor. One setback - we got picky over some of the bubbles and imperfections on the floor during the polyurethane application, so they are coming back tomorrow to sand lightly and re-coat. This means another week before we can put down any furniture at all and 30 days until we can put down the rug, which just arrived after being backordered for a few weeks and taking up space in another room while the floors are in a suspended state of perpetual curing.

But at least I can tell you our plan.

Step one - cover the windows. After ordering several samples from blinds.com for roller shades (they make so many colors!) and looking at the choices in a variety of lights and at night, we settled on a lightly patterned one that did a decent job of filtering the light and put in an order. We're not planning to put up curtains or cover the french doors at all, so the room is going to be bright, making light filtering shades a better choice than any kind of room darkeners.

Next to the sofa. After having an empty room for about a week and having the toddler enjoy the empty space, we debated whether or not the one we'd chosen (but not yet purchased) would take up too much floor space. We laid out and agreed that it would take up a significant chunk but that there would still be enough room for play.

So once we figure out how to get it home (seriously, this thing is currently only in the store wrapped together as 3 boxes on a palate totaling 250 lbs), we plan to add a Frighten to our collection of funny-sounding Ikea products.

After avoiding it for years, we finally are going to buy upholstered Ikea stuff. It's cheap (and with destructive young children that seems like a good idea) and has room to spread out and has a cool pull-out sleeper. We don't intend to use this as a guest room (see note above on how bright it will be) but having the flexibility of pulling out the sofa to sprawl out on was irresistible. Plus honestly I have always wanted a chaise lounge. No idea why. 

Onwards to the rug - as you might have guessed from the paint color and the gray sofa,  we are sticking to the same color scheme as the living room - gray, teal, and red - to help us blend the two spaces. We fell in love with this rug from CB2 (it's slightly more on the green end of teal than the living room, but we think it will work) and simply couldn't decide for a while if we wanted the 5x8 or the 8x10. Now that the drywall and trim is up, we measured it out and decided on the smaller size (why get expensive beautiful wood floors only to cover them with a rug that would pretty much go wall to wall).

(Our room will not look nearly as nice as either Ikea's or CB2's photos, but whatever.)

We have an ambitious plan for possibly assembling built-in style cabinets underneath the windows and shelving beside them, sort of like we have in the living room surrounding the television, but in white. There are some complications there, notably that Ikea kitchen cabinets are no longer made in the same thin depth that they used to, so they will not fit behind the door to the garage. So we are exploring custom cabinets or doing some Ikea hacks to shrink them. More on that later though. First - get the floor finished and put in the basics.

Holiday Cheer

It feels like October but the holidays are upon us. This year the decorating is similar to previous ones, but we made a few tweaks.

Like last year (when, apparently, I forgot to take a picture) our tree is nestled between both sofas, tucking it a bit more out of the way so that the toddler can't do too much damage and it can't get knocked over by cat or child. We've now had the tree in all 3 available corners of the living room over the last few years - I like that we have some choice on where to put it.

We bought new lights this year, too, based on a review on The Wirecutter, our go-to place before we shop these days. and bought GE Colorite LED lights. I know they're energy efficient but no, they still don't look as nice as the old fashioned kind. Also we found it weird that there is so much purple in there, a color they don't usually include in colored lights. But as it's our toddler's favorite color, that's not necessarily a bad thing.

The fireplace looks mostly the same except this year we used live greenery we bought at a fundraiser, instead of the plastic one (ugh look at all those toys!)

Now I remember why we use artificial - needles everywhere!!

I went all Martha Stewart and made a felt tree for the toddler to decorate, though mostly she just wants to tear off the gingerbread man's eyes...

We skipped the outdoor lights this year - it seems I only have the energy for them alternating years (I did it last year. But we do have a new wreath and some more greenery.

After looking around our neighborhood, I decided I want to put wreaths in both upstairs windows. Of course my new front door wreath (that I bought last year on sale) does not seem to be for sale anymore, so I won't be able to create a matching set - or even anything complimentary, from at least a quick glance at all my usual stores. So I might need to start fresh next year. If I do, I'll have to remember to buy a thinner wreath - this one is so fat that we had to put it on our storm door since putting it on our front door pushed the storm door out a few inches.

Now we just need a little snow to add the real finishing touches on the making the house feel Christmasy.

I see you!

It's a minor change, but our relatively newly revamped basement has some new wall decor.

I can finally run on the treadmill and not be snuck up upon (that's not quite a grammatical English phrase, but you get the idea).

Target made these mercifully easy to hang by making the packaging include a template, to know where to put the screws.

Here's the longer view. We are still really enjoying our pantry redesign and the purple wall, though the room still needs serious work to not feel like a basement (or maybe we just have to live with it). It doesn't help that the little one never tires of unloading the lower shelves of the pantry and dragging groceries all around the room. Why yes, I would love to enjoy a can of chilis in adobo sauce on the futon, thank you. And a jar of herbs de provence while going for a run? Perfect! (Did I mention we stock some pretty random things?)

On the to-do list to make this place little more polished? Spray paint this wine rack white, which definitely will have to wait until at least fall, since I don't spend more than a few minutes outside doing manual labor during the hottest months of the year.

 Get a new grate for the fireplace:

We debated painting the inside white and putting something decorative inside, but the jury is still out on whether this fireplace is useable (home was sold with this fireplace "as is" - the inspector agreed that we shouldn't use it but our chimney guy said it was fine) and we don't want to make it definitely unusable without more information.

 And maybe, one day, do something about the eyesore on this side of the room.

But at least I don't have to look at it when I'm on the treadmill.

Oh, a cool random find at Target when we went looking for the mirrors:

Back when we were searching for a solution for a nightstand in the bedroom that was compatible for our under-bed drawers and our cat-tunnel headboard, these would have been nice to have. They're little shelves that clamp onto the very top of the bed frame.

Neat, right?