Wednesday, May 25, 2016

Our New Old House

We had so much fun making our CA house our own, but when it came time to sell it was obvious some of the more personal touches needed to be toned down a bit because mass appeal and all that boring stuff.

Before we look at all the fun pictures I just want to thank our realtor, Shanne Carvalho who supervised all the work on the house while we were on vacation.  We literally left for two weeks and when we came home, floors, paint, yardwork, staging, everything looked perfect!  It was like an HGTV reveal when we walked in that door! He did an amazing job.  Thank you, thank you, thank you, Shanne!

The outside of the house looked like this before we bought it:

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Then we transformed it to look like this:

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To prep the house for sale we had to say goodbye to our purple shutters and purple door.

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That one hurt a little, but it was really the only change we got a little teary over.

Here's the living room and dining room before we moved in.  Look at all the damage on those wood floors.  Eep!

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And when we lived there.

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And all staged for sale!

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Goodbye yellow, but look at those beautiful wood floors! We had them refinished because the truth is they needed it when we moved in and then they sustained 2.5 years of pit bulls.

Here's the kitchen before we moved in.

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No real changes in the kitchen to prep the house for sale, but here's a nice professional picture of it all staged.

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Here's Eddy's office when we bought the house.

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When I officed it all up for him:

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And staged as a bedroom!

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Our beloved dog bathroom pre dog wallpaper.

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And all staged for sale (which was basically what it looked like when we lived there.

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This was my office.

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Here it is all ready for quilting and such.

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And staged as a bedroom.

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Here's the library when we moved in (which ended up just being a wasted space where our dogs hung out.)

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But here it is beautifully staged for sale.

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The laundry room before.

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And after we lived there.

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And the only bedroom we ever used as a bedroom!

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Here it was in all its glory as our master bedroom.

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And all staged.

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The master bathroom.

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Oh gaw, it was terrible! This is what it looked like when we lived there.

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And all staged for sale.

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There was also an amazing transformation in our back yard where a crew removed all the damage our crazy dogs did over the years, but there were no pictures in the real estate listing. Sad face.

It's been a crazy ride, but we've said goodbye to our old place and we're excited about our new Portland home!

Friday, May 20, 2016

Road Trip: Monterey and Carmel

It was a bit of a whirlwind move from CA to Portland (things just happened so fast!) but we did find time to take a road trip with our Norman dog to say goodbye to some of our favorite California destinations and to explore some new things.

We began with a bit of the familiar: Carmel and Monterey.

First stop was the dog beach in Carmel, obviously!

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It's not a road trip until you take your dog to the beach.

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Then we just sort of bummed around Monterey looking at random stuff that we like.

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And by "random stuff we like" I apparently mean just tacky stuff we pass by.

But we did say one last goodbye to the colony of sea lions that lives in Monterey.

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Gonna miss these guys!

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Stay tuned for so much more CA road tripping!

Friday, April 15, 2016

I'm Too Lazy for Hexagons

I've always wanted a hexagon quilt, but I'm way to lazy to make one.  There's just no way I am going to be piece one by hand and it's not much easier to piece one by machine. So when mom bought me an unfinished quilt top for Christmas this year, I was super excited. That means someone else pieced this beauty by hand and did a really lovely job.

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I decided to quilt it with a pair of vintage sheets I collected. I had this whole elaborate way I wanted to experiment with free motion quilting techniques, but in the end, I felt simple was best.

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Rupert apparently doesn't care whether the quilt is finished or not.

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He snuggles one way or the other.

I was pretty freaking excited about this polka dot binding I made.

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I made it bias binding because inside corners are tricky.

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Here's the finished quilt!

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So many beautiful fabrics. Especially this one with the creepy baby with blue zombie lips.

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Look how pretty this quilt looks in my little quilt cubby in the livingroom.

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Room for one more...

Friday, April 8, 2016

We're Produce

My mom came to visit!

We went to the Golden Gate bridge. It was really windy.

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There was also this one sunny day.

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But seriously, there was only one. It was rainy the whole rest of the time.

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But we made the best of it with things like garlic ice cream in Gilroy (garlic capital of the world.)

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We also did weird stuff in stores.

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You know, because it was raining outside.

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Also, we were produce. This is my favorite photo from the trip.  Because produce.

Friday, April 1, 2016

Two Minutes and Thirty-Four Seconds

We went to the Tet Festival, a Vietnamese cultural festival in San Jose.

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There was this amazing (I mean *amazing*!) dragon dancing.

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But, truly, the most incredible thing that happened while we were there was that I somehow managed to convince Eddy that it would be a great idea to sign up for a banh mi eating contest.

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He was a little nervous.

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Because just look at the competition.

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I couldn't even fit the whole table into a single picture. Just a little bit nervous.

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The competitors had to put their hands behind their heads before the eating contest began.

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Then they had to shove a whole sandwich plus a whole bottle of water in their mouth as fast as they possibly could.

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It was not pretty to watch.

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Guess what. He won! Second place, but just by a hair.  I mean, almost first place!

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He got a sack full of prizes.

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He totally ate an entire banh mi and a bottle of water in 2 minutes and 34 seconds. It was one of the proudest moments of my life!

Afterwards I also ate a banh mi.

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But over the course of more like 10 minutes or so.