More of the man-cave...

I've already shown you the fireplace makeover, but how has the rest of the man-cave changed since we moved in?  Here are some shots of how the place looked on the day of our inspection, with the previous owner's decor:

This is what you see when you first come down the stairs:

This is the view if you are standing at the fireplace.  It's a VERY long room.  As you can see, the previous owners were using it as a place to watch TV, an office with desk and computer, and a kid's play and homework area, plus a piano!  And I can't blame them--that's a lot of space!

You might not be able to tell but the room has beautiful dentil molding.  In my opinion, because the wall color was so light, the molding wasn't really noticeable.  We wanted to go darker and wanted to make the room feel more cozy and masculine.  Also, we thought it would be neat to show our team spirit.  It was bold, but hey it's just paint, so we went ORANGE! 

I had already shown you the fireplace.  We also put up some bamboo shades.  In the corner (I call it a reading nook, although it's not really nook-esque.), There's a hand-me-down end table that is pretty badly damaged and needs a facelift.  I just cover it up with pottery barn magazines and a globe for now. The recliner is also a hand-me-down.

The couch, loveseat, and coffee table are furniture we brought from our old apartment.  The two end tables were cheapos off of craigslist but they were in such bad shape that no amount of sanding and paint can revive them.  But they are going to stay put for now because we have bigger fish to fry.  The two lamps are ikea, and the painting is from World Market.  It's a jazz scene and I gave it to my baby on our first Christmas together.

 Here's the man cave electronic setup because man caves are apparently all about technology.  Hubs has his beloved TV, surround sound, Xbox, and Wii.  I added the mirrors from IKEA.

Remember those wood paneling built-ins above?  I'll refresh your memory:

They had to go.  My FIL and hubs took out the fluorescent light and changed out the black outlet for a white one.  Hubs and I painted away.  Wood paneling is not that fun to paint either.  Better than brick though.  I also spray painted the brass handles with some ORB paint.  Right now, it's a bunch of random knick-knacks, but hopefully it will start looking more cohesive soon.

We bought the brown futon because we frequently have multiple out of town guests and wanted more than one bed for guests to sleep.  I hate the pillows, but I'm looking forward to making covers in some fun patterns!  As you can see, we kept the trusty piano.  We asked that it be included with the house.  I hope to paint it black, but hubs isn't so sure.  I know he'll love it though.  As you can see, he added his drums and guitar.  One of the main things we were looking for in a house was a place where hubs could play his drums and not bother the neighbors...that was not possible in an apartment.  You may be able to tell we have a music theme going on.  Most of the art is musical in nature, plus we have some musician figurines on the built ins. 

I'll show some more of the details of this room later, but I wanted to give you a peek. Continuing with my accountability list, here is what I'd eventually like to do this room.

Short term:
1.  Get new end tables that are more interesting (still must be practical according to hubby's rules).
2.  Make new pillows for futon and maybe even get/make a futon cover--I'm not that big of a fan of microfiber.
3. paint piano black.
4. makeover entry way table (not pictured) or buy something new.
5. makeover table in nook
6. recover chair
7.  Find something to put on the wall over the entry way table.

Long term:
Eventually, I'd like to get more neutral furniture and tone down the paint color (medium gray?) in the man cave.  I also definitely want to tear up the carpet, but I haven't figured out what kind of floors I want.....something masculine yet still kid-friendly.

Hope you enjoyed the tour of the man cave!  Usually, you can hear my hunk-o'-love playing piano or drums, or people playing rock band or rapping, or things exploding when hubs is on the xbox.

A little Christmas cheer

A tour of the house in all of its Christmas glory.  The fact that 90% of the gifts I'm giving this year are DIY projects meant that my time to focus on decorations was kept to a minimum.  I'm going to do my best next year to cut out the consumerism that detracts from the holidays and focus more on making memories. :)

Here is our tree.  As much as I'd like it to be beautiful and white and classic, this tree is a more accurate depiction of our family.  We are a bold colors, crazy ornaments, beautiful mess of a family.

 If you look closely, you might be able to spot some of our wacky but sentimental ornaments.  Hubs and I get one for each other every year.  My favorite is the Wonder Woman outfit near the top.  I'll have to share pics of some of my other faves sometime.

Since the living room is already turquoise and red, I try to stick with a simple red motif in there to avoid getting too clashy.

 This picture looks terrible because it was taken at night, but I love my table settings.  The jewel tone green chargers from World Market (post Christmas sale) are my fave.  It would be great if I could find something cute to sit on each of the plates---maybe just  a simple red ornament?--to take it up a notch.

This baker's rack came into my dining room when my mom moved in, and I'm excited about having an extra space to decorate!  Maybe next year I'll do more with it.

My favorite part!  I bought this frame from goodwill to put on my mantel, but it was too tall.  I like it here.  I drew string lights around the border for a more festive look.  Because of the red and green already going on, it's pretty easy to turn my kitchen into a Christmas exhibit.

 Close up of my new frame!  And notice the quote by my husband that says, "I'm not even sure pears really exist."  Yep, never know what is going to come out of that kid's mouth.

In the mancave, of course we have our Clemson tree.  We have begun accumulating quite a bit of ornaments, mostly thanks to my mom, who also let us borrow her stocking, and her scarf to use a tree skirt.

And finally, my mantel.  A bit underwhelming, but I was trying to go for a more natural, yet still festive approach.  I may still tweak it, even though Christmas is only a few days away.  Originally, I wanted several mirrors propped up behind everything and overlapping, but unfortunately, the thrift stores weren't cooperating and I didn't have time to dilly dally.

And a final closer view. I'm going to attempt to link this up with some other blogs:
The Nester: http://www.thenester.com/2011/12/2011-christmas-tour-of-homes-2.html
House of Hepworths:  http://www.houseofhepworths.com/2011/12/21/hookin-up-with-hoh-80/

We'll see how that goes--I've never done it before.  I'm supposed to add buttons but I haven't figured that out yet!  Blogging rookie!

 Merry Christmas, everyone, and to all a good night!

Giving Thanks

I know it's been a while, but believe me when I say that November has been a BUSY month.  First of all, my mom (Barb) moved in with us!  She has lived too far away for too long and, since we have the extra space, we decided to move her on in with us.  We hope to get her a place of her own one day, but this arrangement is working out great for now.  Her domain is the basement (don't worry, it's nice down there) and we live upstairs.  Of course, we do hang out, but I think it's good to have our space too.

Secondly, I participated in my very first craft fair.  I will share pictures later.  Let's just say I was very nervous, but things went well.

Third, we hosted Thanksgiving for the first time ever.  We had 8 people over for dinner (plus the three of us), and 6 of those folks spent the weekend with us.  Our overnight guests included my MIL, FIL, sis and bro in law, granny in law, and cousin in law.  I was very excited to have our friends Lynne and John join us for dinner (their families live in Michigan and what's Thanksgiving without an awkward family gathering?).  I thought I would be stressed to the max, but I kept my cool for the most part, mostly because this woman helped me cook and keep the house somewhat clean.

I wish I would have taken pictures of all the food, but alas, I'm still a novice at this blogging thing.  We had squash casserole, sour cream and onion mac and cheese, green bean casserole, mashed potatoes, dressing (I believe you call it stuffing up north), giblet gravy, rolls, sweet potato souffle, cranberry sauce, sauteed green beans, pumpkin cheesecake, gooey pumpkin butter cake, chocolate covered peanuts, and peanut butter pie. Our turkey looked kind of like this, except not quite so much bacon.  For my first turkey, I think I did pretty well.  It seemed to be a hit.

Here's a pic of the dining setup.  I pulled our dining room table and a folding table into our long living room so we could all eat at one long table.  As Claire from Modern Family said, "If it was good enough for The Last Supper, it's good enough for us."

Here's a pic of my place setting, complete with dollar store pinecones (12 for $1) as place card holders, pumpkins, leaves from the driveway, and a borrowed tablecloth from Lynne.  You can see remnants of casseroles and sour cream mac and cheese on my plate, which I savored with some sweet tea and red wine.

Here's a picture of my beautiful sis-in-law, Whitney, mid-mouthful.  Notice Davison's sweet granny at the head of the table.  While she was visiting, Whitney put Granny's clothes in the guest closet, which is the same closet my husband uses since I booted him out of the one in our master bedroom.  Granny's memory ain't what it used to be, particularly because memory loss is a side effect of her medications and on Day 2 she came out of her room wearing one of my husband's polo shirts.  She is so adorable.  She hides money when she leaves because she doesn't want anyone paying for her food.

Of course, no Davison household event is complete without a little Rock Band.

 Zeph, my bro-in-law, was tearing up the vocals, so I got a few close up shots so you could feel the emotion.

For most of the weekend, the boys worked on a house project that I can't wait to show you, but it's not quite finished.  I will give you a hint.

And I'll leave you with a picture of my fall mantel, because I realized today that I had not shared it since I completed it.

I'm so grateful to have such wonderful people to share my life and my home.

My baby's not a baby anymore....

My sweet, wild Brylee turned two last month.

In case you hadn't noticed, she is slightly obsessed with Toy Story.  I think it's great that she'd rather be Jessie than a Disney princess. She's adventurous, energetic, boisterous, and charismatic, just like Jessie, and I can't wait to see what she grows up to be.  I just wish she'd slow down a little on the growing part. :)

And last but not least, a picture of two of my three babies.  She loves my hubs more than me....it's okay, she'll grow out of that!

A Fireplace Reveal!

So we've been busy at the Davison household. Painting, painting, and yep, more painting.  Why does it always take one more coat (or two) than you thought it would?  So we started out with this fireplace in the mancave:

With the previous owner's decor

Right away, we knew wanted to paint the brick.  It was not a flattering color.  Sorry I didn't really take any good in between shots, but I did find this pic from our new year's party last year.  I apologize in advance to anyone who didn't wish to make an appearance on my blog, but it's the only shot I could find after we painted the brick (and the trim above the mantle).  

For those of you who have never painted brick, it is a beast, so you should avoid it at all costs.  The surface is just so uneven, so it involves a lot of poking, cramming, and shoving your paint brush.  And a lot of cussing.  :)  In fact, we hated it so much, we never even made it to the paint.  Yep, we simply primed the brick, felt like it looked close enough to white paint, and cut our losses.  We tell ourselves it's not that noticeable.  Also, you can still see most of the brass, but the wide brass band at the top, we had covered with black duct tape.  Yep, we are all about short cuts.

We went back and forth on what we wanted to do with the mantel.  It was a little ornate for our tastes, but replacing it with something more modern would have involved crowbars, getting glue off of brick, and worst of all, more brick painting!  So we left the mantel and changed the color.  At first I was leaning toward black, because it's supposed to be a man-cave and I thought the masculine colors and contrast would be nice.  But after looking at several black mantels vs. white mantels on Pinterest, white won me over.  

We did attempt to tackle that brass.  Brass is my nemesis.  We taped newspaper up to cover the glass and we taped newspaper on the brick.  Then we spray painted it with a flat black paint.  Note:  I do not recommend spray painting indoors unless you aren't particularly attached to your brain cells, but I did not want to buy more paint for such a small area.  We took extra high-tech precautions to keep from breathing in the fumes.  In other words, the fireplace is right next to a door, so we opened it up, aimed a fan to the outside, and held our breath while we sprayed.  Again, do not try this at home.  Unfortunately, we didn't do such a hot job taping the newspaper on the brick (laziness again) and the air pressure from the spray can was blowing the newspaper so I didn't cover the top of the brass as well as I would have liked for fear I'd get the brick.  Another issue I didn't think about since I always paint outdoors on a big piece of cardboard is gravity. Despite the fact that I was aiming at a wall, some of the paint particles were falling to the ground.  It seemed to be negligible, until we moved the painters tape, scotch tape, and other items off of the bottom bricks and there were bright white outlines of their silhouettes.  Doh!    You live and learn.

Next we tackled the mantel.  One coat Kilz Clean Start no VOC primer. (We took the roller and ran over our lower bricks to cover up our boo boo earlier with the outlines of the tape holders. Then we used some Behr Interior Satin Enamel Ultra Pure White we got a while back.  We have since started switching over to low/no VOC paints, but we already had this on hand. So we used the open the door turn on the fan method.  It took 3 coats of paint and probably could have used another!  Kill me now.  This mantel was almost as much of a pain as the brick.  Too much detail.  Too many curves.  Hubs was ready to kill me.  But we finished.  and we love it.  I wondered if the bright white of the mantel makes it obvious that we only primed the bricks.  Hubs says he thinks it makes the mantel "pop" more. I think he is a smart man and knows any other answer would involve more painting.  So without further ado....here is the final result:

We loooove it! And man, we have been building some fires.  We even did S'mores.  Yep we are kids.  

So here's a side by side (if blogger cooperates) before and after:

 Woohooooooooooooo! Happy lady!

Work in Progress

We have been in our home for roughly 18 months now.  I wanted to give myself a progress report to see where we've come, but also to document my to-do list and hold me accountable.  I'll be doing this room by room, starting with the room where we spend most of our time--the living room.  Here is what our living room looked like during the home inspection when the previous owners lived here.

I loved all the natural light.

My favorite part of the home was the floors!

And here is what it looks like after 18 months with the Davisons.  Actually, we have almost the exact same furniture setup:

View #1

My floors aren't sloped, just poor camera work.

To do:   Make/buy something to go on the blank wall beside the hall tree.  Maybe a starburst mirror?  Find a replacement for the too-small cheap target lamp on end table that came with us from our old apartment. Too much red/matchy-matchy.

View #2

To do:  The wall is too big for my small photo collage, so I'm thinking of making a big chunky frame to put around the whole arrangement. (I used matching frames so I can't just add to it unless I find more of them.) Replace old floor lamp in corner and find something more substantial to put on corner end table.

View #3

This wall behind the TV is so bland.  I'm thinking of taking the leftover paint from this room, adding a slight tint to it and painting a subtle stencil on this wall...perhaps using the same pattern in the curtains below.  Also, I think my corner vase needs more in it....it looks a little puny.  Although you can't tell in these pictures, all of our trim needs a touch up coat of paint.  After 18 months, I still don't know how I feel about the wood in the left of the picture.  A part of me likes the natural town it brings to the room, but a part of me feels like it looks unfinished.  It would be a pain to paint because it's textured.

View #4

Our couch is just a big red blob.  It needs PILLOWS too avoid being so harsh. Got some fabric from IKEA so I'm hoping my mom can help me make some soon. (Again, the lamp has got to go.)

Further down the to-do list:  More textures---maybe a rug, or a woven lampshade, or some textured curtains.  Then maybe double the curtain panels and extend the rods?  Maybe change out the plain jane light fixtures for something with a little more character?

And here are just a couple of detail shots, just for those who like the little details:

I got this set of frames (it came with a few others that I used for gifts) at Target on black Friday a few years ago for $13.  I traced the frames in this layout onto a big piece of cardboard, made a mark where the hangers were, held the cardboard up to the wall and nailed right through it.  Then I removed everything and replaced the nails.  A big sheet of paper would work better because you could just tear it away, but hey, we work with what we have.

 I got the the hall tree with baskets on Craigslist for $40 (because there is a crack in the wood, but you can't see it) and the pillow covers on etsy from thislittlehome.


So that is my to-do list for the living room.  When I think about the fact that I have 11 more rooms, plus a garage, hallway, and front and back yard, I get a little overwhelmed.  But I love making my house into a home, so it's okay if it takes us a while.  We aren't going anywhere.  :)

Asheville Part II - FOOD

Finally finished writing up the second part of our Asheville trip!

Day two of our Asheville whirlwind trip started out with a delicious breakfast at the B&B.  The main dish was some sort of Spanish quiche, and there was also a fresh fruit salsa and a berry parfait.  And I know it was bona fide (how am I just now finding out that bona fide is two words?) fresh because the innkeeper headed to the farmer's market as part of her weekly ritual as soon as breakfast was over.  I should have taken a picture of my plate but since you eat with strangers when you stay at a B&B, I thought they might think I was a weirdo. Gotta get over that!  After breakfast, we headed to Asheville River Arts District, which was awesome!  There are so many open studios there and you just walk in while the artist is working away.  One of our favorite artists that day was Jonas Gerard (google him) so we took home one of his prints on a 8x10 tile.  I'm sure it will make an appearance on this blog when we hang it although we aren't sure where its new home will be just yet.

River Arts District Studios 

After seeing lots of AMAZING art, it was time to get back to the real purpose of our trip--FOOD.  When we were looking for stuff to do in Asheville, we found the Asheville Food Tour, and it had gotten rave reviews.  For $35 apiece (we got a discount through our B&B), hubs and I got to visit Asheville restaurants, talk to the chefs, owners, or managers, and sample a bit of the goods.  I was kind of unsure about doing a tour--I don't like doing typical touristy things and it sounded like something old people do.  But it was our favorite part of the trip (well, tied with the drum circle).  I did not take pictures of the dishes(again, we were eating with strangers) so I apologize, but here are the places we visited.

We tried the Ecstasy Blossom Truffle (described on their website as dark chocolate with lemon zest, ginger, and saffron, topped with a candied violet) and then a sea salt caramel dipped in milk chocolate.  It was then that I realized I'm a simple girl and I don't need a candied violet atop my chocolate truffle.  The sea salt caramel was probably the best piece of chocolate I've ever put in my mouth.  We met with the owner, who was quite charming, and he told us how he was retiring and his daughter was taking over the business.  She has a  fine arts degree and he told us how she comes up with the formulas and designs for the chocolate.  The place has really grown in the last few years and now they ship all over the country.  We will definitely be revisiting.

At Green Sage, we tried a veggie wrap and some lentil soup.  Both very good.  My favorite part of this place, was its green philosophy.  Natural, local, organic ingredients.  Solar panels.  Compostable take out materials (to go boxes made from potatoes!).  Bicycle for deliveries. It had separate recycling bins for different materials and even a compost bin!  How many restaurants have compost bins?!

Next we went to Fiore's where we had some delicious gnocchi with white wine.  Yummmm.  Definitely will be revisiting.  I really liked the atmosphere as well:

  


For our next stop, we went to a barbecue joint--- 

There were over a dozen sauces to try and we sampled quite a bit.  We had bbq sandwiches and cole slaw.

Next we stopped at this cute little shop, called "Olive and Kickin'."  They gave us samples of olive oils (which you drink straight out of a little paper sample cup and it was so good.  I never thought I would enjoy drinking straight olive oil, but I'm a fan.

see my cute hubby back there?

Here is the balsamic vinegar buffet--flavors like pomegranite, espresso, and jalepeno.  I had no idea there were so many options.  You could mix and match and I could have stayed there for several hours.  Next time, I will be bringing some home.

Next we went to a fancy-shmancy restaurant called Restaurant Solace.  The head chef here buys produce from local farmers and sells to the public whatever he doesn't use in his kitchen.  It's his way of supporting local farmers.  I wasn't that impressed with the fancy chicken over a potato cake, but the Arnold Palmer we had with the sample was delicious.

Our second to last stop was The Soda Fountain, where we had some lime sherbet ice cream.  The Soda Fountain is located at Woolworth Walk, a venue full of local arts and crafts.

The Spice & Tea Exchange was our last stop and is another shop where I could have spent hours. No samples, but wall to wall spices to sniff.  Makes me want to cook more.  (If you look closely, you can see the jerkwad in the reflection that asked if Hubs was my spouse OR MY SON.  Talk about a blow to my ego!  Now, I know my husband does look extremely young even though we are only a year apart, so I know I shouldn't listen to this Kramer look-alike, but it stung nonetheless.  People, think before you speak.  That would never be a smart question to ask.  It ranks right up there with "Are you pregnant?" and "Why don't you have kids yet?")   


So, needless to say, we were stuffed and content by the end of the food tour.  It was great to try so many of Asheville's flavors and talk to the shop owners.  Asheville is a beautiful and interesting city and we can't wait to go back.