Around the House: Laundry Nook

Rather than a whole room for laundry, we've got a nook in the main hallway.  When we moved in, it had bi-fold doors, but it didn't take long for us to rip those suckers out.  I really hate bi-fold doors (we've only got one set left in the house, our master bedroom closet doors), but they were especially useless in the laundry nook:  our pretty new washer and dryer were too deep for the doors to close!

Five Feet High and Rising

As much as we love our house, I really don't know what I would do if we were the folks living along the Mississippi right now. On the one hand, we put a lot of blood, sweat, and tears into our home; but on the other, aren't the things in it just things? Then again, there's the inevitable fights with insurance that come after disasters like this one. Maybe it is just easier (though more blood, sweat, and tears) to build your own levy. Thankfully, the people living along the river and its tributaries have had enough warning to build these structures.

via Daily Mail Online

If you had enough warning, would you build a structure around your house to protect it from flood waters or other natural disasters?

Kitchen Itchin'

No, Mr. GI and I don't have some weird disease. Keep readin'.

As I said in this post, we worked really hard during a crazy time of year to paint all of our cabinets white. But I got this itch in the last few months to introduce some color in the kitchen, mostly because all of our appliances ended up being white (although we're dreaming of upgrading to stainless steel look when we can afford to) and now the whole kitchen looks a little like a bottle of Wite-Out. What I'm really hankering for is a different color on the bottom cabinets, like a nice olive-gray. And Dana over at House*Tweaking really didn't help things with her latest post about the kitchen in the Underdog. I know, I know... I said not one week ago that we had temporarily exhausted ourselves in the kitchen. Call me fickle.

Jenna Lyons' kitchen via House*Tweaking

Until I convince Mr. GI that we should move out of our kitchen cabinets again (only the bottom ones, though!!), I think I could settle for color via artwork. Like this precious conversion chart on Etsy that's beautiful and practical. Yummy.

Via SweetFineDay on Etsy

Around the House: The Kitchen

The kitchen is the space we’ve done the most on since we moved in, and it was also the space that had been updated the least before we bought the house.

Those cabinets. Whoa.

Even after settling in, it was still so dark.

Contain Yourself

I can't even tell you how excited I was for this little guy. We got a $25 gift card to the Container Store (cashed in on some bank rewards points), and I bought a few things we'd been needing around the house. Our random assortment of under-cabinet junk is now all orderly thanks to a $4 cabinet rack from the Container Store. How I love that place.... almost as much as an office supply store.

I didn't get any sort of promotion for this post- just singing the praises of having an organized cabinet!

Around the House: Living Room

Our living room has evolved quite a bit in the past few months. When we moved in, it looked like this:

You can see the dining room area in this pic [plus that hideous fan I'd like to violently rip out of the ceiling. Ugh. Those lampshades should be illegal].

After getting rid of our embarrassingly-awful college furniture, we made a Clampetts-come-to-town trek huge trip to IKEA in the old Nissan (R.I.P.) with the new home owner tax credit to get an all new living room. Much assembly later (thanks to two very good friends), we had two Karlstad love seats, a Poang chair, and other fun stuff.