Welcome to California!

Ok, most of you are already here, but you're not in my California. My California is located in West Sac, in a multi-colored house, up the stairs and to the right.

Welcome to California, the Golden State:

If you look closely, you see that orange thing is in fact, not a nipple (sorry to disappoint), but the silhouette of our state Capitol. It's just one piece of the California puzzle for that room. And that sucker was quite the scientific feat, courtesy of my mother's and my inartistic sides.

I had the idea of making a headboard the shape of the dome back when I was moving into my two bedroom apartment and wanted to have my guest room be a "California" themed room. It was only appropriate considering I lived right across the street from the Capitol. Unfortunately, I have NO artistic ability, and neither did my mom who was helping me out. So we went about it in the best way we knew how: with cocktails. OK, maybe not cocktails. But I'm sure that would have made sense too. We used equations instead.

First I bought the big sheet of plywood. Then I printed out a picture of the Capitol. From there we measured the distance between each vertex and point on the silhouette (we're talking centimeters on the paper) then divided and multiplied our way to the perfect ratio scale and converted it to a measurement we could use on the sheet of plywood. After we had all the main points, it was just a matter of connecting the dots with the right lines. Then Dad stepped in with the saw and cut it for us, and we finished it up with a layer of batting, an orange velvet curtain, some serious staples and Voila! We had a Capitol shaped headboard that can also easily be mistaken for the nipple of a bottle. To-may-to/To-mah-to.

The rest of the room is a work in progress. As I've mentioned before, I'm always on the lookout for all things California. I've got some "Welcome to..." posters to commemorate some of my previous hometowns (Fres-yes) and I'm working on getting them framed. I've already got one framed beauty in there...

It's California related because he plays for California's team, right? It also matches. That Lakers Gold is one of the new colors for that room. Now you know why California is called the Golden State. You learn something new every day. You're welcome.

Otherwise They'd Call it (House)Play

Gah. It's only 9:00AM on a Saturday morning and I've already been up for five hours. I thought weekends were for sleeping in? Apparently not when there's work to be done. Yes work. Housework, and lots of it.

I didn't purposely wake up that early this morning (no one in their right mind would), but just happened to wake from my dinner/cocktail/dessert coma. Usually I can go back to sleep within a couple of minutes, but my mind immediately started wandering to all of the things I had to do today, and I figured I could either shut it all out and try to go back to sleep, or just wake up and get it done. And so I set to work...

First project was my office that I said I was going to tackle last week. Uh yeah, didn't happen. So I got to it this morning and made an awesome discovery: my desk! I'm actually typing it at now, something I haven't been able to do since this whole thing started. I was also able to put things in their rightful place, including on my walls.

I don't know why I thought I just had to have that gigantor calendar, maybe it was to go with my gigantor calculator.

The calculator actually came in handy after I was done tidying up. For some reason I decided now was a good time to install my kitchen cabinet hardware. All by myself. Trying to do that with help is a freakin' joke, so by myself was hysterical! Right. High-larious. A mathematical nightmare(No, seriously. This really could all be just a bad, bad, dream. It was too early for me to really be doing this, I still had to be in my coma).

When I picked out the hardware at IKEA with my parents, they thought it was so helpful that IKEA also made a template with holes in it to just put up to your cabinets so you don't have to measure 300 times on each cabinet. I thought it was great too. Until I opened it this morning and realized the template was too small for my hardware. Damn Swedes! But I wasn't going to let them leave me handle-less in my kitchen, so I decided I would measure the cabinets 300 times.

I spent a good two hours trying to figure it out, first using cardboard as a dummy cabinet to test on, and then when that didn't work the first 100 times I decided I was ready to try it on the cabinets... genius! Clearly I don't have the patience or the brain for this. One drill hole in the cabinet later in the not-exactly-right-spot, I stopped.

This is what I was left with. I have a feeling this is exactly how things will stay until next weekend when my loving, caring, handy, thank-god-I-have-them, parents come to town to help me with some projects. And so I have to get my complaining out now. All throughout the morning I found myself repeating one of my dad's favorite sayings, "That's why they call it work, otherwise they'd call it play." I hate it when he's right.

You May Say That I'm a Dreamer...

I'm not much for deep thinking (there are lights to hang and hardware to install. I do not have time for that), but as I was hanging up some art recently I realized what I put on my walls said a lot about who I am. Or I guess it's more of who I hope to be.

Save for the animal heads- I'm really not sure what those say about me- the rest of what I've been hanging up lately makes me realize I'm a dreamer. Not a dreamer like I spend all day dreaming about flying (or surviving solely on nacho cheese) although that does happen. More of a dreamer in the sense that I'm an optimist at heart and I tend to always see and hope for things that are better than reality.

I'm drawn to these things in combination with pieces that make me smile when I look at them. Like my laughing Buddha in my office:

Everyone always asks why he's in there. Why not? He seriously makes me smile every time I see him. I want to be like him: permanently smiling and letting out a hearty belly laugh. I might wear a bra though. His boobs kind of scare me.

Then there's the pretty redhead on a wall in my living room:

Now this is truly wishful thinking. I like to look at this one and pretend it's a self-portrait (I did say it was wishful thinking) with her flowing red hair and perfect posture while carelessly riding her bike through a field of flowers.

Or my newest addition, a framed marriage certificate of my great-great grandparents from 1913(!):

This awesome piece is hung by my front door. I see it every time I come in and out, or up and down the stairs. A reminder of where I came from and something for me to strive for.

Halfway up the stairs is my favorite:

This painting combined with blue wall makes me want to dive right in to whatever. To fun, to relaxing, to the weekend, to a new house. Whatever I've got going on good in my life, this painting sums up that feeling.

I didn't make a conscious decision to buy all these pieces because they make me feel a certain way. I was initially drawn to them because they're visually interesting. Then after a while of looking at them they got me thinking and dreaming... And when you come and experience them for yourself, you'll realize I'm not the only one.

It's a Trap!

To clean or not to clean, that is the question. That seems to have been the question for the last two weeks now. The latter clearly being my preference, as evidenced by my office:

Everything is in the exact same place I put it the night the painters left and I set about putting things in their rightful place. Only not everything made it there. Sure, the big stuff is where it's supposed to be, but the small stuff is still calling my name. And I've been ignoring it.

I tell myself I'll do one thing a night during the week to get the job done. Monday night I thought I would put everything back in my kitchen cabinets. Tuesday night I was going to put everything back in my bathroom cabinets. Wednesday night the guest room was going to get organized. Thursday night I was going to scrape all of the carpet pad remnants off the floor. And Friday night I was going to organize the office. Clearly, the office job didn't happen, which means the other ones probably didn't happen either. Let me look around... Yeah, they definitely didn't happen.

During the week I find that by the time I come home from work, get ready for the gym, go to the gym, come back eat dinner, shower, and get ready for bed-- it's time for bed! Then when the weekend rolls around, the last thing I want to do is stay inside the house- what with all the food and alcohol to be consumed in my town! It's a vicious cycle really. And that cycle is where the problem lies. The longer I put things off in the beginning, the more likely I am to put it off indefinitely.

So this weekend I will desperately try to prove Admiral Akbar wrong. I'll be scraping, organizing, cleaning, touching up my way out of this trap.

Sweatin' the Small Stuff.

I thought this whole redecorating thing was supposed to be easy. OK, not easy- but easier than this!

When I first bought the house I had an idea of what I wanted to do: I knew I needed- needed- to paint the walls (does butter cream yellow strike you as my color?), paint my cabinets, replace the carpet and change out the lighting. But what I didn't have was the exact paint colors, the flooring, or any lights picked out. Those all just seemed like minor details. Right, minor.

For those of you who saw my house before the painters stormed in, you'd know how many samples I went through to find the right color. There were painted patches all over almost every wall in the house. Browns and blues downstairs, teals on the stairs, blues on the kitchen cabinets, browns on the guest bathroom cabinets, blues on the guest bathroom walls, yellows on the guest bedroom walls, and grays on the master bathroom walls and cabinets. I kept the lady at Home Depot busy with all my requests for samples (I talked to her so much about the house, I almost have the urge to invite her over to see the finished product when all is said and done). I sat with the colors on my walls for months, hemming and hawing over the best combo. Man, I hope I got it right because I can't take doing this again.

It's the same story for the flooring. I must have looked through at least 30 floor samples before finding something I liked. Carpet, tile, hardwood, laminate, engineered wood-- I looked at them all. But the problem with finding the right flooring material, was that I wanted it to compliment the colors of the walls and cabinets! If I couldn't decide on the walls, how was I supposed to decide on the floor? My head still hurts thinking about it.

After the main pieces of the walls, cabinets and floors came the finishing touches. The lighting in the house was just not doing it for me either. Dangling beads on shades on my dining room chandelier, simple recessed lighting in the kitchen, and trying-too-hard-to-be-modern-lighting in my bathrooms. None of these were my style. You'd think the smaller stuff would be easier to complete. Yet, picking out the lighting has proven to be the most difficult part of all of this. I've made the final call on the paint colors, the flooring, the decor... basically everything else but the lighting. And I think I might know why...

There are just too many choices. There are by far more lighting options than there are paint swatches in the world (it really seems like that). On top of that there are so many that I really, really, really like.

I stood at Lowe's recently looking at all these options for my bathroom. It was so stressful, like an interrogation: lights beating down on me, men in uniforms asking me if I wanted to pick one out of the line up, palms sweating, knowing that if I made the wrong decision my mistake would be staring me in the face every time I flipped the switch. But, a decision had to be made, so I pulled the trigger. I just hope I hit the target.

A Worldly Bathroom

I find it hard to type this as my little (OK, pudgy) fingers scream every time I pound the keys. I spent the better part of the day working on my downstairs bathroom. The little room off of the kitchen- Yes, there is a bathroom off of the kitchen (Rule #1, no #2!)- has been bare since the painters left. No lights, no mirror, no pretty towels. So I set about to the fixing that today, one tiny tack at a time.

I know I've professed my love of maps on here before, but I don't know if you believed me. If not, you'll see in the coming weeks just how much I meant it. Starting with today's update:

Yup. That's my (dirty) faucet with a nice assortment of worldly images behind it. Actually the whole bathroom wall is covered in the sort.

My mom and I got the idea to do this when were were visiting the East Coast and were treasure hunting with my professional-treasure-hunting-Auntie. We were in an antique store and found a stack of old National Geographic Maps. I got them on the cheap without knowing exactly what I wanted to do with them, other than they were going in my house somewhere.

My first thought was to put them above my counters as a type of back splash, but that didn't seem practical (fire anyone?), and I didn't think they were exciting enough to just display as art. That's where my genius mother (she gets it from me) came in and suggested using them as a wallpaper. From there we chose the bathroom as the location and thought the best way to do it was to casually hang them in up in no real pattern with silver tacks, like the old school ones used for bulletin boards.

The hanging process took a lot longer than I thought, and I probably should have put more thought into it, like I did with the pictures. But I didn't, and started hanging and carefully cutting around all the plumbing fixtures (and sometimes not so carefully). Four hours later, my little fingers felt like they do after putting together a large piece of furniture of IKEA that came with a million tiny little screws and dowels. Only it wasn't just the Swedish that made my fingers sore this time, it was the Russians, Greeks, Chinese, Tibetans, Kenyans, Vietnamese...

I Heart My Animal Head

Ever seen those bumper stickers professing the driver's love of man's best friend? The "I Love My Corgi" sticker. Only it doesn't say "Love" or "Corgi." It's usually a cartoonish heart followed by a picture of the head of a certain breed of dog. Every time I see one I can hear my dad's interpretation of it: I Heart My Dog Head.

Well, I Heart My Animal Head.

I don't know where my fascination of animal heads came from (I'm sure there's some deep, sick meaning behind it), but I do love them. Not real ones though. That's just gross. I like ones like this little antelope fellow here. I like them so much I bought two.

I had been looking for something like this for over a year now after going down to El Lay and seeing some giant steer heads painted pretty colors with the antlers dipped in gold or silver. I didn't have the $800+ to shell out on one so I set out looking for a more affordable version. I looked and looked and looked, and kept hunting around. Finally these dudes sauntered into my line of sight and I pulled the trigger and bought them. I wanted to display them as soon as I got home, but my walls weren't yet ready for their magnificence, so I set them aside waiting for my redecorating frenzy to begin. Then when the dust settled, like a proud marksman, I put those helpless suckers up for the world to see.

And So It Begins...

T-minus 36 hours and counting! Work is finally about to begin on my house and I CANNOT WAIT! I spent this evening talking with the painter/drywaller/framer/father/son team about what to do on the inside, and the tree guy about what is going to happen on the outside. First up, the tree:

It may not look like anything crazy here, but trust me, this sucker is dangerous. And annoying. But nice too.

One of the first things my neighbors told me when I moved into the property was that they could not believe the previous homeowner did not tell me about this tree. What did I need to know about it? I had already figured out that when the wind blows at night, the proximity of it to my window and the bustling of the leaves wakes me up. I know in the fall it gets naked and sheds all of my backyard. I also know that in the summer it gets full of leaves and provides GREAT shade for the Sac heat and GREAT privacy from nosy neighbors. But alas, there's more. Kind of like Fox News, it's got evil roots.

Crap! No seriously, crap can happen when roots get involved and its not pretty. The portions of tree can break through sewer lines and cause back ups of all the lovely things you flush down the toilet. My tree is parked right on top of the sewer line in my little neighborhood and if something happens to that line, and in turns causes poop to hit the fan (or bathroom floor) in someone else's house-- it's my responsibility.

No one told me about any of this before I moved in here. Would I have not bought the house? No, I love my little nest. BUT, I would have either negotiated a drop in the asking price or for the removal prior to my moving in. But, that didn't happen. Poop happens. So now I'm playing George Washington and cutting this sucker down. OK, I cannot tell a lie. Actually 225 George Washington's will be going to work on Wednesday morning.

I'm Good for the Economy

First of all, I'd like to start off by thanking Mr. Obama. Your idea of giving free money in the hopes that maybe- just maybe- someone will put back into this amazing economy we have right now while seemingly absurd (and socialist) to others... just made my day. No, it made my my life.

I (finally) got my tax return today. And in that tax return was a lovely first time home-buyers credit.



I'm not telling you this to brag about how rich I am right now, because trust me, I'm not. Every single penny of this credit is going to Home Depot, the flooring store, the lighting store, the local paint contractor and maybe a couple of design stores (CB2, here I come). No matter how much I would love to take a trip to Banana Republic or Nike right now, I'm using that $$$ to do exactly what is meant for. (Although, I would still be stimulating the economy even if I'm buying clothes, right?)

So today not only marks the first time I've ever seen 5 digits in my savings account (probably the last time too), but the true beginning of the joy and frustration that goes along with owning my first home, and making it mine and not the tract home (cute though!) it really is. In the coming weeks I'll show you step by step what I hope will really make this a place I never want to leave.

OK, I lied. I'm def going to want to leave when I start popping out more than child... but until then, this will be a place that really, really-- and I mean really-- reflects me.