Bon Appetite!

We finally finished our table!!!

Did I mention we were redoing our kitchen table? Well, we were.

This is what it looks like!

Please ignore the bits of food Peri has thrown on the floor.

 I wanted to redo the tile on our old table top (we forgot to take a before picture of the whole table before we took it apart). It looked like this:

I really like having a tile table, because you can't do much to hurt the thing, and you don't have to worry about putting trivets down if you have hot food. I've been happy with this table for a few years, but it's kind of grody lookin', so I decided it was time for a change. Plus there were a couple of tiles with cracks in them, and the grout is the most beautiful shade of dingy gray you've ever seen (ick). We also weren't very in love with the color of the wood.

At first we were just going to chip out the tiles somehow and replace them. Then we wised up and realized that was a terrible idea. So we just took the table top off, kept the legs and Gary built a new table top.Basically, we adhered the tiles to a bit of plywood, and Gary made a picture frame that the plywood could sit in.

We got the tiles at home depot. They're just regular bathroom or kitchen tiles.

We found some with pretty designs on them! We really liked them but they were much more expensive than the plain ones, so we just bought a few. We like it better this way.

 

We went with Weathered Oak for the wood stain. It was strange though because the wood we used sucked in the stain in some places, and totally repelled it in others, which I think makes it unique and pretty. 

We were going to paint the legs a dark tan color, but decided a gray color would give it a bit more contrast and keep it from looking blah. We found a gray in the mis-tint aisle that we thought might look okay, and I really like how it turned out! It has sort of a brown undertone that goes perfectly with the wood finish. Plus it was discounted 50%, so the price was right too.

And of course my baby girl had to help show it off as well!

We really love our new table top! We'll get around to painting the chairs soon, so we'll have a matching set!

Menu Board

A while ago, I saw this on Pinterest: 

Once Upon a Chocolate Chip Cookie

And I decided then and there that I wanted one, and I wanted one now. I'd been trying to keep up with meal planning since I married Gary and became all domestic and such. The thing is, menu planning is really hard! I had to assemble all my recipes and figure out how much of everything I needed, and also remember what I still had on hand from last week's menu that needed to be used up. This usually involved extensive searches on the internet and lots of going back and forth between cupboard and fridge and recipe. And now with Peri around too, it's even harder to figure things out whilst she's clamoring around my knees begging for my attention. Though now that I've finally got her to take naps in her crib, instead of on my shoulder, I have some spare time for a couple hours a day! Yay! 

Anyways, I wanted my own menu board, and about a week or so ago, I finally made one! At first I wanted one just like the above, because it's so cute and orderly looking, but I didn't have a frame, (well I have lots of frames, but not one without glass that would work well), and no clothes pins and not a lot of cute paper to work with. But whilst I was cleaning out some junk in our house, I came across my old college girl white board that we don't use anymore, simply because we have many bigger and better white boards that we do use. I thought to myself, "Oh, that'll work!" And it has. 

It isn't nearly as cute as my inspiration, but that's okay, because it does its job just as well! The days of the week are in German, because that's how we do things here. I wanted to do Speisekarte instead of menu, but I didn't have that many letters. I'll change it someday. I'll also put some cute paper in the background someday too. The menu cards have magnets glued to one end on the back, and the ingredients for the dinners are written on the back, as well as any backing information (temp and time) that I need to remember. This makes getting shopping lists together so much easier! 

The top box is for meals we haven't eaten yet, and the bottom for things we have. Sometimes I just pull things out randomly, but since I have a bunch of leftover meat from last week, I went through and brought out meals that use the meats I have. Or I can just substitute meats and veggies for what I have on hand. Easy peasy! The boxes are held on by magnets too, so when the bottom one fills up, I can just switch them around, instead of moving handfuls of paper around. 

I would have liked to laminate them, since I take the meal card off the board and use it as a reference for things that I need while I'm cooking, but I didn't have any contact paper.

Incidentally, the days of the week aren't stuck on with magnets; I just used glue stick to put it right onto the board. It'll come off easily enough if I ever need it too.  

I also have a couple of fun things on my menu cards such as:

This way I don't always have to cook and we can keep adding recipes to our board.

And of course, I was sure to make plenty of extra cards for the try something new category, if we end up liking it a whole lot!

And that's my menu board! My niece Jeilyn was here last Thursday, and she thought it was just the coolest thing! She wanted to help me take off the cards we used and put new ones on, and asked me what we were having every day of the week. She also helped me to make the tacos! She asked me to make one for her house too. Maybe I just might!

First Post for the new Family Blog

I've been told by all my friends that I should have a blog, because apparently it's the thing to do. I didn't know what to blog about, but since I'm married now and have a girl on the way, I suppose my life might get a little more interesting. One can hope anyway. I have also been informed that it's a good way to keep the people who care updated on what's going on in life. I've been following a couple of my friends' blogs, and so far it's been enjoyable, so I'll go ahead and say they're right. So I've decided to post pictures and whatnot of the things we do with friends and family and around the home. I'm also looking forward to figuring out just exactly how to customize a blog space and make it really sweet.

Gary (my husband) and I have had quite a few things going on lately, so hopefully anyone who reads this will enjoy seeing what we're getting up to!

So let's get started!

Gary and I are expecting a baby girl at the end of July, so we're doing a few projects to get ready for her. The first one we did was a changing table for her. At goodwill, we found this kitchen cabinet/bar thing that was obviously attached to someone's wall at one point. We had already taken off the cabinet doors and hardware before I thought to take pictures for before/after purposes. 

 The inside was a pretty color at least.

But the top was orange linoleum. Ewwww. It was cute though, because a nice Asian lady at goodwill said it was a pretty color. I agreed with her to be polite.

What we really liked were these rounded shelves on the end. Gives the whole thing some character.

After a lot of cleaning, sanding, painting and other shenanigans, we got a pretty cool-looking (in my opinion) changing table:

 Currently it holds our DVDs and other assorted junk, but that won't be the case forever.

We took off all that nasty linoleum and replaced it with foam and fabric for a nice cushy place to change the baby. We're not totally done with it yet, because we wanted to stencil on some other decorations, but we'll be moving to a new place soon, so we decided to hold off on that until we are resettled.

That's about all for now. We have a really packed week ahead of us though, so expect some new adventures soon!