House Updates

Before I get into what's new with the house, I just have to say that last Saturday night Patrick and I attended the BEST "neighbours BBQ" EVER! We seriously paid for it on Sunday morning though - tehehe…which was brutal considering we needed to be downtown to show the condo to potential renter by 11:00am - ugh (our condo is rented! Did we mention we opted to rent our condo out while we wait for that *perfect offer?!?)! Who knew shooter lunges could be soooo much fun. What are shooter lunges you ask? Well, you'll just have to attend one of these BBQs to find out ;p I still can't believe I don't have any pics to document this BBQ…next time ;)
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Well, I mentioned a couple posts ago about us being so indecisive about what to hang in our dinning room/area…I was tired at looking at one large blank wall…albeit obstructed with a less than desirable light fixture…lol…so I the other day I randomly decided to go out front and take a few pictures of the flowers on our new planter:





We already had the frames from our last trip to IKEA, so I ordered 12x16 prints from costco.ca (only $2.99 each!) and placed them in. Patrick did an excellent job hanging the photos. I had my heart set on purchasing one of those Black and Decker stud finder/laser level. We went to Rona and Home Depot to price them out and they are around $80! Eep - not currently in the budget!

Anyhoo…here they are all nicely hung:





They aren't our "forever" art…we'll likely change it out once in a while, but for now it adds some much needed colour!

And here are some pics of our updated "landscaping" - we really just added some purple mums and a planter for some colour ;)





And finally a picture of our "joint effort" planter. Patrick and I worked so well together on this…lol…we are so proud! The heather (the low stuff) is already beginning to fill out. All the plants/flowers should last well into the fall - yay!



We have a few new developments in the work that I'll be posting about shortly:
1. Floating Shelves Are Hung
2. Coach Has Arrived
3. Ordered A Bed

Dinning Room Plans

I haven't posted much about our new home…but it is sloooowly taking shape…possibly in the slowest way ever ;) Not too much has happened mainly because we've been busy with the wedding and we JUST rented out our Kingston house and are STILL trying to sell our condo :( We did list with a new agent though and lowered the price a wee bit - so we are continuing to be hopeful :)

Anyhoo, back to our house. A few months ago we ordered a new sofa…it is a pretty modern/contemporary design, and it will be upholstered in a soft, almost powder blue leather…it should arrive sometime in September - yay!

In the meantime we purchased a new dinning room set using some of the monies we received as wedding gifts. It came with a table made out of hardwood (it has walnut and zebra wood veneers) as well as 6 chairs (that I less than love - but are pretty comfie). We then purchased the matching hutch to store all of our lovely wedding china in - yay! All from our lovely neighbourhood Costco - I *heart Costco!

Because we've been needing to basically decorate the house from scratch…mainly because we didn't have enough furniture to fill it - I really wanted to have a plan of attack. I signed up for polyvore.com which is a fabulous way to save images you've found on the web…and then can make mood boards/inspiration boards out of. However, I haven't figured out if I'm able to upload pics…so I made a board out of the saved images using Microsoft Paint - yes, I am so high tech!

Here is a picture of the beginnings of our future dinning room :)



We're currently searching for prints to fill the frames we purchased on our last trip to IKEA…I've seen some lovely photographs that would work from our talented cousin Lindsay (the ones we're thinking of are of flowers or other botanicals) - however, we are so indecisive! I'm also thinking that our dining room could use a HUGE hit of colour…so should we ever get the funds, it would be my dream to invest in a beautiful piece of colourful art for the wall behind the table - such as the two below:





Anyone know where we could find an affordable piece like these…preferably on stretched canvas?

In the bottom right picture of our dinning room, you can see our current dinning room light fixture - I less than love it, but we were given no other options :( I'm dreaming of a large drum light…still have no idea where to find one…anyone know?

And once we work away at furnishing the other rooms in the house, it is my hope to add some fabric panels to our patio door…we think it will soften it up a bit. Same with the "dream dinning chairs" pictured above…I've already found them at Scan Design…but those will have to wait.

So, what do you think? Any suggestions? Any tips?

TIA!

A Car Conversation

Last night as we were driving home from work we were discussing random things as we usually do. We didn't do a full grocercy shop this week…even though I had done all the meal planning (grrr!!!). Anyhoo, Patrick asks what's for dinner…I say "How about fish n' chips?" Pretty much all we have dinnerwise in the freezer ;) Patrick agrees fish n' chips would be good. The funny part happens next (at least funny to me!)

Patrick: So, what about dinner tomorrow night?

Ashley: I'm thinking grilled cheese and soup? (I've been hankering for a grilled cheese!) We'll need to pick up a loaf of bread though.

Patrick: We have bread…it's just flat bread (we have tortillas).

Ashlay: Nah, I'd really like it on regular bread

Patrick: Oooh - don't you think a flat bread grilled cheese would be good?

Ashley: Then it would be a quesadilla - oh my Lordie, you just invented the quesadilla?!?!?

LMAO…we then proceeded to have a good laugh at how silly he was…ahh…life is good :)

Professional Photographs Are Here!

Whoot! The pics have arrived, and Patrick and I are quite smitten with them ;) Our photogs Melissa and Lucas did a wonderful job capturing our special day. You can find a link to Melissa's website to the right of this blog ;)

AND if you are family and friends that are interested in seeing the pro-pic slideshow, facebook "candids" and honeymoon pics - you can find all of the links on our wedsite. If you don't know the link, and would like to know - please leave a comment ;) Otherwise, you can follow my wedding day "recap" on my other blog "Another Wedding Blog."

We have a pretty exciting weekend ahead of us - I'm going to meet my sister's sister - clear as mud? My sister, brother and I all have quite a blended family - maybe one day I'll post my understanding of it all, but in the meantime I'm excited to meet Angela (my sister's sister), her two kiddies and her hubs! I wonder if this makes me like an Aunt twice removed???

Have a great weekend!

The Book Meme

Thanks for the tag Laura ;) Although I have to say my list is pretty lame…I'm more of a VC Andrews, Jackie Collins kinda gal.

So, here goes:

1) Bold those you have read.
2) Put an asterisk next to those you started but didn't finish.
3) Italicize those you intend to read (or have started and intend to finish).
4) Red the books you LOVE
5) Reprint this list in your own blog.

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte *
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling (will probably never read it either! Blah)
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible (not front to back though ;)
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte *
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare*
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell*
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma - Jane Austen*
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli's Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell*
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones's Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens*
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte's Web - EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas*
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

Random Buy

Return address labels:

Too cute to pass up…I even ordered some Christmas themed ones ;)


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