Covet: Anthro Batik-pattern!

Although he personally voted against it, R left the cup decision up to me.  I decided not to buy them because the chance of using the dishes, bowl and cup together were slim to none.

But look at what else I found! Matching towels!

 

Love: Anthro Batik-patterned China!

R's going to kill me.  The last time I went downtown for a meeting, I came home with this:

I was at a meeting this morning, and well, I bought these:

 

To be fair, I had a bad week! And I tried to think practically and didn't pick up the matching cups.

I'm feeling a little remorseful for abandoning the cups now.  I mean, we don't really use cups, we use glasses...Should I really go back and get them?

What to do?

Covet: New Stuff at Paper Source

I have a love and hate relationship with Paper Source.  Just ask R.  I spent a lot of money and time at the damn store leading up to the wedding, but little to show for it.  I blame wedding burnout and their lame return policy.  Anyway, I got their new catalog in the mail today.  *Squeal*

Matrushka Measuring cups

Butterfly Vase

Teacake Cupcake Mold

Dry Erase Wallies

Fake Mustaches ( I want to have a mustache party!)

Cupcake Apron ( Makes an appearance in this movie) 

Babushkups Cups

Cupcakes!

My sister and I like cupcakes.  We've been on a cupcake mission for quite a while, but I didn't think to document it before, so we'll start here.

Here's a quick summary.

Kara's Cupcakes - (clockwise from top left) sweet vanilla passion fruit, java, chocolate velvet, raspberry dazzle

Baked - chocolate cupcake with oreo cream, Red Devil cake (they have a cupcake version of this too)

Miette - Gingerbread w/ cream cheese frosting and vanilla w/ vanilla buttercream

 

Cupkates - Red velvet,double vanilla, smores.

 

Cako - (Clockwise from top left) red velvet, chocolate decadence, coconut, vanilla chocolate, lemon raspberry, mocha.

More pics later!

The joys of remodeling, pt.3

WTF? Blogger won't let me upload pics directly from my camera now? This is going to take forever!


Not much of a progress report, but were's what we started with:

 Then we did this:

Now it looks like this:

Another 1413478924562385 days to go...

Covet: Liberty of London & Anthro sale!

The kitchen is still not done yet.  Boo.

Target's Liberty of London line came out the same time we were packing away our crap for remodeling. I've been holding off, but it's been so hard every time I go to the store.  I really wanted the cute prep bowls, but after about 3 stores, I gave up.  I tried to buy them online, but they were out of stock, so I signed up to get an email notification when they're in stock.  I checked the website today and the bowls are only available at stores! Grr...

Source

I want these too...

 Source

Even though all our crap is packed away in storage, I still couldn't help myself and picked up a few "Anthro"-inspired pieces from Marshalls.  I forgot to take pictures before I shipped them off to my mom's house.  And then I went to anthropologie.com and saw all these pretties on sale.

 

Source

I'm still holding out on buying more stuff because I'm not even sure I can incorporate all that I have already into our imaginary kitchen.

The joys of remodeling, pt.2

Turns out there's a lot more remodeling than we had hoped for. Actually, we're really "repairing" the damage from years of "stuff."  It seems the previous building owners have just painted or patched over the original walls, fixtures, and trim.

Before I make my FIL out to be a terrible person, I should point out that we do live at the apartment rent-free.  For the past 2 years, we have constantly tried to hire out these repairs, only to receive a liplash from FIL.  He doesn't want us to hire out something we can do ourselves.  I call bullshit.  For me, if it doesn't come with instructions, I don't want to touch it.  We don't really want risk any injuries for R, especially after 2 tours of worker's comp.  My FIL has a myriad of ideas, but he's just cheap and lazy (sorry for the crass description).  He kind of starts things and then stops.  It turns into a waiting game, because we never know if he'll come back like he says. 

But I digress.

After what seems like weeks of removing "stuff." This is how far we are in the kitchen remodeling process.

See that little electrical wire above the stove? My FIL put it there a while ago (It's one of his start-stop things).  It's for our future range hood he says.  We added new plank flooring from Ikea last week.  It'll never replace the original oak (?) like the rest of the apartment.  Apparently the previous owner ripped out the original wood floorboards and replaced it with linoleum.  Imagine old linoleum from the 50s with water and sun damage, that's what we had before.  It was really, really bad.

This is another one of my FIL's start-stop projects.  He did this more than 6 months ago and just left it. There used to be a wooden wall cabinet here with glass doors.  After trying (really hard!) to restore it, R and I decided there was just too many layers of paint and damage to restore.  We had to rip it out.

This is where the sink used to be.  With help from our friend G, we ripped out the sink.  That's an old window behind the pipes there.  It also can't be fixed, so we'll cover the bottom part of the window with the new backsplash.  I'm planning to cover the top part of the window with a curtain like a real window.

To date, we've spent about $500 on materials.  We're planning to dump another $500 on some more materials. Just for the kitchen.  Hopefully, I'll have some nicer pictures next post.