Valentine's Day Dinner

I can't actually recall the last time Jason and I went to dinner for Valentine's Day. We usually just stay home and I make something. We had a bad experience at a restaurant many years ago that made us start doing this.

However, Moscow has a great little BBQ place called CD's Smoke Pit.  And they were going to do a Valentine's Day Dinner, so Jason and I decided to give it a try.

We love their food and I will tell you they did not disappoint . Here is the menu.

Candied Bacon-  it was like candy!

Lentil soup-nice and thick

The Pork Tenderloin Pinwheels. Oh My Goodness!!!! Delicious!

The smoked Pink Lady Apple- the smokiness of the apple and the sweetness of the ice cream and caramel was a perfect combination.

A friend joined us as well and that was a lot of fun. For our first Valentine's Dinner out in years it was a great success. CD's may just have to become tradition when it comes to celebrating Valentine's Day.

Bathroom Organization

So one of the challenges on the 14 week Organization Challenge is bathrooms. I tackled the master bathroom a day earlier than the actual start of the challenge week, but I was on a roll.

I watched a video by Alejandra Costello that inspired me to try taking everything off the bathroom counter.

Here is the before:

Pretty chaotic in my opinion and not the best thing to greet you first thing in the morning. Oh and the diet coke was for the project...it does not greet me first thing in the morning.

After some cleaning and organizing:

Now Jason's stuff is on his side of the counter. Too bad we only use one sink....which drives me CRAZY. I love the feeling of calm that comes over me when I walk in now. Just like Alejandro said you would feel. I should take pictures of my drawers, they are organized as well. It doesn't take me any longer to get ready in the morning than it did before, but the mental impact that happens with being cleaned and organized sure is amazing. 

This is obviously underneath the cabinet. I didn't take a before picture, but this is a drastic improvement. I added the door basket.

While working on the bathroom, I decided to tackle the shower.  I found a bathroom pumice stone at Bed Bath &Beyond. We have really hard water here, so the shower has never really been clean. I scrubbed one side of the shower with this pumice stone. Can you see where I haven't finished yet? The results are pretty surprising. It does take some elbow grease. I did the shower ceiling on President's day and that made a pretty big difference. I need to continue working on the shower and figure out how to seal it so it doesn't get that bad again.

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As mentioned above I decided to add pictures of my drawers. They are organized as well. And I put everything back as soon as I am done using it. Been doing this now for almost 2 weeks. It gets easier and easier and I love the feeling knowing the isn't cluttered.

Organizing Challenge-Bedroom

As I have mentioned I have been slowly working on an Organizing Challenge.  Here is the checklist if anyone is interested.

I haven't done  the challenge in order, but I am trying to do something at least every week. If it takes me longer that is okay too.

I worked on our bedroom a little while ago. And while we could use some furniture, and flooring and wall decor I am happy with it for now.  I am seriously considering taking the bed frame apart as the mattresses already sit on the floor because you would need a small ladder to crawl into bed if we had the frame fully set up the way it is intended. I am thinking about just doing a padded headboard, but we will see if I can talk Jason into the idea.

I didn't take a lot of before pictures, because I just forgot. In this one you can see my beside table (the right side).

 New bedding from Bed Bath & Beyond

 I love our little kinetic sculpture sleeping away on the bed. Surprisingly Jason doesn't seem to mind the pillows and I love the way they look.

 The 3 bags by the antique high chair were recently taken out as they were donation items. See what I mean by needing some furniture.

I use a chest as a bedside table at the moment. I was using just the top of it and thought let's try something different. The chest was empty, so I figured I would open it up and use the tray inside. I actually really like it. I got a little mail sorter to hold my phone and tablet while they charge.
The bottom of the chest has magazine folders holding some magazines that are sorted by name. My goal is to go through those magazines every few months and get rid of ones I no longer need or want. In this process I recycled probably 20 magazines. I was a little embarrassed by this to be honest.


Master Bedroom Inspiration

Below are just some ideas of things I am tossing around in my head for some wall decor in our room.

The  first 3 pictures below are using ceiling medallions on the wall. Ours would be painted white of course to contrast the walls.

LOVE these!

with our initials of course

all in white-maybe on one side of the window or the wall by the bathroom

Or some type of mirror. Most of these ideas are just for above the bed. I have some other ideas for the other walls around the room as well.

New Wall Decor

We have lived in our house for 5 years now. Wow 5 years! Where does time go?

We still have lots of projects that we want to accomplish, and that list seems to be getting longer and longer. Anyway I digress.

I joined a 14 week organizing challenge. And while I haven't been following the weekly challenges like everyone, I have been doing my own thing. The Facebook page helps keep me motivated to a small degree. But mainly I LOVE the feeling of getting rid of stuff, it is like a weight is taken off. Now if only it would really take the weight off, I have some I could lose.

I also decided I was going to start working on finally adding some life or personality into some of the rooms that have been neglected up until now.

So I turned to the all addicting website known as Pinterest for ideas. Yeah I love that site.  First I decided to tackle the laundry room.

The laundry room needs some help, and I have an idea board for stuff I would like to incorporate in there if possible. But until those projects become a glimmer of a reality I decided to add some artwork. This is only one wall, the other wall still needs sheetrock replaced.

Right above the light switch when you walk in

Laundry room wall decor

I still have some stuff I want to add. But doing it in bits and pieces.




I also added some wall decor to the hallway at the bottom of the stairs.

I have a metal flower piece that I think I am going to add to the wall in the first picture below. We will see how how it looks.

Add caption

Found at Bed Bath &Beyond.

This is the inspiration of what I want to do on the wall you see as you walk down the stairs. Now if only I was crafty enough to do it. May have to supply the canvas to someone and have them do it. This picture just makes me smile.

So small progress, but to me it makes a big difference in adding some personality to the house. 

Organizing Challenge

I decided to do this organizing challenge I found on Pinterest. It is the Bowl Full of Lemons 14 Week Organizing Challenge.

I did Week 1: Kitchen challenge, though I didn't clean out all the cabinets and wash them like she asks us to. I did go though our pantry and redid that.  Below are the AFTER pictures.

I also wanted to work on our tea cabinet which was a disaster in my opinion. There was tea behind tea, behind tea. Not to mention all the different strainers we have that don't stack well.
Here is the BEFORE:

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Here is the AFTER:

I found the best thing for all the boxes of tea!  It is the YouCopia Tea Stand.  You can see it on the bottom right. It helped a lot.

I still have another cabinet I want to go through. Hopefully I can do it this weekend, since it is a long weekend. it is our corner cabinet located right next to the tea cabinet. We will see how that goes.

Week 2: Laundry room.  I worked on the Laundry room last summer and have maintained it rather well. So I focused on the metal shelves that were in the laundry room. I hate having them in there, but they are there for the foreseeable future and I need to make them work for me. 

BEFORE:

AFTER:

Still have some stuff to work on, but it is better.  The top 3 shelves still really need some help.

 I really want to install base cabinets and some more upper cabinets. But I know Jason and I will differ on that. He will want to make them, and  I want them before I move out (which isn't going to be anytime soon).  

I have ideas on ways to decorate the room, and need to start doing little things down there.  

In this process I also found a great Facebook Page that is tied to this challenge. It is a great place to go for support, encouragement, decor and cleaning questions, along with other things.

Cats can be Difficult...well 2 of ours are at least

You would think that 3 months after getting a new animal, that everyone would at least tolerate each other right?  Abner and Cauchy are still extremely uptight around Casper, to the point where Cauchy runs whenever she hears him, and Abner still kind of slinks across the floor.

Jason and I were home for almost 2 weeks at Christmas due to the Universities being closed-that is a really nice perk.  So we left the basement door open 24/7 while my parents were here visiting. Then we decided to try switching the cats for a day. So the two grumps (Abner and Cauchy) got brought upstairs, while Casper got to stay downstairs.  

It took hours before Abner and Cauchy would even come up the stairs! They seem to think we seriously traumatized them by getting Casper.  Fast forward a couple of hours and we finally decide to open the basement door and let Casper out.  Never seen animals move that fast! Cauchy and Abner couldn't get away fast enough, though they didn't have a lot of places to go. We closed all the doors upstairs, as well as took the chairs away from the dining table so they couldn't hide under there. 

We had some very rough moments with Cauchy, and she got to spend some time in a pet carrier outside because she wouldn't calm down. She got so worked up in that there I had to wash it since it was fabric. So then she got put in the plastic crate we have, and stuck outside several more times. 

We mentioned when we headed back to work in January that we would just shut the door to the carrier and keep Cauchy separate, but upstairs. We haven't had to shut the door, because she kennels herself and normally only comes out if I am in the kitchen or if I feed her.  I know she moves around a little bit more than that, but it isn't much. 

Abner and Casper seem to be doing slightly better, I mean ever so slightly better. There is still hissing from Abner if Casper comes to close, but they can at least sleep on our bed together at night even if they are on opposite corners. 

I came home from work one night this week and I saw Casper and Cauchy touch noses. I mean they TOUCHED NOSES!!!!!!!  Not in an aggressive way either. Cauchy then promptly went running back to her crate as fast as her fat little legs could carry her. 

Not sure if Cauchy will ever come around to be honest. She was a feral cat to begin with and didn't have much social interaction with people until she walked into our condo one day.  

But at least everyone is now upstairs, that is progress-small- but progress. Hopefully as time goes on, they at least become more comfortable with the whirlwind that is called Casper. 

Casper

So we decided to get a new cat. I first came across Casper back in March when I was in Lewiston with a friend. We had to go to Petco for something and there he was. He looked exactly like Fergus and he tugged at my heart strings.

I did get the foster mom's contact information, but didn't do anything with it. I was feeling guilty of even thinking of getting another animal. Abner and Cauchy seemed to be really happy and content and I knew adding another would be hard. Jason and I talked about it occasionally, but made no action.

However we also know that Abner and Cauchy are older and it would be easier to add a cat to the mix now then when something happened to one of the others.

So we were down in Lewiston one day and just decided to stop by Petco and see if he was there for adoption. He wasn't. Part of me was relieved and part of me wasn't. Come to find out after talking with the foster parent, he had been pulled from adoption because he was having skin issues and had been on medication.  She told us that he would probably be available in two weeks after he had been off the medication for a period of time and they would see if the skin condition returned.

So a little while later, I emailed the foster mom just asking for an update. He had no occurrence of the skin condition, which they think was related to stress, and he was available for adoption. Jason and I decided we wanted to meet Casper.

We made the 30 minute drive from Moscow to Lewiston, the whole time I was fighting my emotions and guilt. Casper started off friendly and loving the attention, then he got defensive and started attacking and hissing. We asked if we could move him to a quieter part of the store (if it actually existed). He calmed down again and would be fine, then would freak out again. One of his freak out moments, he actually bit me pretty good. I got 2 puncture wounds on the top of my left hand and some pretty good scratch marks on the left palm. I left drops of blood on my way to the bathroom. After getting that all cleaned up, I went back to meet up with Jason and Casper. Now I was really conflicted, but watching Casper helped. I knew the attack was purely situational and not a reflection of his personality.

We decided to take the leap and adopt him.

My nerves driving home were intense. The guilt overwhelming. How would Abner and Cauchy take this?

We put Abner and Cauchy downstairs and let Casper roam upstairs to get use to the scent of the others. Sunday we attempted the first meet and greet....hummmm.... it didn't go badly. There was a lot of hissing and growling, but not much else.

We continued to try and let them meet downstairs a little at a time after work during the first week. One night Casper attacked Cauchy pretty good, then one day Casper attacked Abner 3 times, all really good attacks. Casper does have an advantage, he still has his front claws.

Casper got to spend the majority of the day and an entire night all by himself downstairs. We tried again over the weekend. Lots of hissing, some growling, some poop. Yes, I said poop. Casper seems to scare the poop out of Cauchy. So she got put downstairs by herself and we tried just dealing with Abner and Casper. Abner never really moved from under the dining room table, and when Casper would get near, there was of course growling and hissing. Needless to say, Abner was getting a pretty wet face by being sprayed with water every time. Every time Abner tried to moved (while mopping the floor he was crouching so low), Casper would come and check this out, thus making Abner run back under the dining table.

So the update right now is, that they still hate each other. I knew it was going to be hard, but I was hoping for some improvement by this point in time.

We will keep trying and eventually they will learn to at least tolerate each other (or so I hope). Keep your fingers crossed!

This is Casper very relaxed on Jason's lap, if only the others were this relaxed.