Christmas eve at Meme’s

I had a great time at Meme’s tonight. As always we enjoyed some great BBQ and Brunswick stew. We all sat around the table talking and had a good time.

I had the girls dressed up in their festive wear but Ki’s shirt was too big and it kept sliding down off of her shoulders and looked bad. Pooh was super cute in her little shirt though!! She even had both of her ears up for a few minutes!

Then she got tired and went and found a pillow to take a quick nap on before the food was served.

It looks like messing with the dogs must run in the family.

And this is a video from Pop’s house and I forgot to add it to that post and it’s a pain to edit so I’ll just throw it on this one. We were laughing SO hard at Jaden. I’m not sure if you can hear it but at one point Eric said “we could have saved a lot of money if we had just known to buy you a box for Christmas!”

Jaden and his box.

Christmas Eve at Pop’s House

We always go to Pop’s for lunch on Christmas eve and as always we had a great time.

 

Christmas Eve naps

Aunt Beth took more that she’s going to send me soon!

Bookshelf with drawers

One of my good friends asked me if I could build a bookshelf with drawers for her living room. She wanted somewhere to put photo albums and drawers for all their DVD’s. This is what I came up with.

I turned the spare room into my paint room so I wouldn’t have to work out in the garage when it’s so hot and cold. It really helped to have it inside but the cold still really slowed down the stain drying even with a heater and 2 fans moving air around.

I actually found the drawer pulls at Target! I really like them a lot and she did too. She was happy with it and it looks great in the living room. I wanted it to be darker but I had to get it delivered on the 16th since she had family coming in on the 17th and I needed to drive home. I told her if she wants it darker  after looking at it in the house a little while I could sand the poly off and put a couple more coats of stain on it but it just wasn’t possible to do that and have it dry in time to deliver. It was barely dry as it was!

I’ve been a slacker

Major slacker! I’m always busy when I’m home and this time was no different and then once I got back to TN I’ve been super busy and haven’t spent the time to write anything on here. So here is what’s going on! I’m happy to report that Ki is now using her steps all by herself to get in bed. She decided after we got back from GA that the steps really are pretty nice! I’m now done with volleyball this year. It’s  a little bittersweet because we had such a good time but we did find out about another gym that does open volleyball 2 days a week so we are going to try that out. We won 2 games this season, almost won a bunch more but oh well. 

I had a great birthday. Only thing that could have made it better is if I was at Disney with my boy like I was last year. Sigh, kind of hard to beat that one. The boy bought me a Kindle and I was so excited to get it! I’m amazed at how much it really looks like reading a paper book! I love it so far!

I went to dinner with some of my best friends here in town and Mari and I wore the same exact clothes. It’s like we share a brain!

All my girls. Michelle, Sharon, Mari, and me.

This weekend Mari and I went to an Ugly Sweater party but we know how hard sweaters are to find now since these parties are so popular we made our shirts. We had volleyball games at 7 & 8 that night so we were going to go afterward, well we ended up playing with another team for 2 games because they were short people then played our 2 games and we didn’t get done playing until 9:30 and we were SO tired by the time we got to the party we couldn’t even enjoy it. LOL we look exhausted in all the pictures. We bought the fabric at Hobby Lobby and had to get big t-shirts because we knew once we glued the fabric on the shirt wouldn’t stretch but we didn’t think about the fabric being so stiff so the shirts look really huge. haha they were ridiculous.

 

And last it snowed on my birthday. I repeat, it snowed. This does not bode well for the rest of this winter at all. Not at all.

I’m working on a new project for a friend. I’m building a bookshelf with drawers and have to get it done by Christmas so I’ll have pictures soon.

Pottery Barn Storage Bed

I’ll give it to Pottery Barn, they have some great looking furniture. Thankfully it’s pretty easy to reproduce. I built a storage bed for Nicholas’ room back in July but didn’t put anything out about it because I kind of have a thing about surprising him with a room make over every deployment. Last deployment I painted our bedroom and his bathroom without telling him and this time I did his room. It desperately needed it. He has gobs of Army crap and had put up a huge metal shelf in there to store it all. It looked pretty bad and made the room seem really small. I decided the storage bed would be the perfect solution to get rid of the metal shelf and so I started working.

I used Ana White’s plan for the full size storage bed with a few modifications. I wanted the bed to have a deeper storage area so instead of using 1x12’s like she had in her plan I had 2 sheets of MDF cut into 15 1/2 in strips (or what Ana calls a 1x16). I decided to use MDF because it’s cheaper and I knew that the guest bed wouldn’t be getting that much use and the MDF would hold up fine. If I were building that bed for a kid I would have used Plywood without question. I had the pieces cut at Lowes because it’s just easier to haul them around already cut down and I can’t handle a full sheet by myself at home to try and cut it down. I had everything cut on Sat, started working on Sun afternoon and had it in the bedroom by Thursday night. It was the quickest and easiest project I’ve ever built. It was nice having something so easy after finishing up those chairs! I didn’t really take pictures because I built it so fast and I forgot. It’s a lot easier to remember to take pictures when I have the boy out there with me.

I did use 1/4 in plywood to finish the back and you can see one of the pieces letting the paint dry at the bottom of the picture. I never took another picture with the back attached. I did make one mistake just because I didn’t take into account the extra inches I added to the width of pieces so the bed is 4 in longer than it should be so I have 2 pillows at the top of the bed to keep the rest of the pillows from falling into the crack. Oh well. I could make a head board to fix that problem but it’s just not that important to me right now. Maybe later.

I wish I had thought to take a before picture but it didn’t even cross my mind. I was able to fit everything from the huge shelf into the bed. I was actually really surprised how much this bed holds because I could still stuff a few more thing in there if I needed to. It makes the room looks so much bigger and I think it will help a lot when we get ready to sell the house next year.

Lots of catching up to do…

Us the day he went back. It’s the best picture we took the whole time he was home. We really need to get better about that.

A couple of months ago I came up with an idea for a nightstand with steps in it for Ki to use because she’s scared to jump on the bed. I told Nicholas about my idea and he thought it was crazy but figured why not! lol We had fun building it because we didn’t have any step by step plans and had to figure it out as we went along. That’s how I build most of my projects but it made him twitch a little bit. Poor guy.

Ki and I are still having a battle of will on using the steps. She doesn’t want to and I make her anyway. She would rather me still pick her up and put her on the bed, not doing that anymore. I will win.

When I got rid of the old night stands I just piled everything in the corner so that mess is cleaned up now.

So yep, that was the second week of R&R. Time in the garage and playing Wii, it was almost too exciting. Yay R&R! Tomorrow I’ll post some videos from my volleyball game to prove that I really do play and I’m not just telling people that as a joke. Oh and pictures of the bed that I built for the boy’s room and didn’t post because I wanted it to be a surprise. And he was really surprised because he walked back out as we were unloading the car and said “Um, did you build that bed because I was really confused when I walked into my room”. And just to be clear I don’t make him sleep in there that’s just where all his clothes and Army crap lives so he can get dressed in there and I can keep sleeping in peace. We learned a lot time ago what keeps our marriage happy. :)

Destin

Since it is so quiet down here we’ve been able to let the girls walk around off their  leashes and they are doing so good listening and coming back when we call them. We finally made it to the beach yesterday and when we got over there we were the only ones out there so we hopped back on the golf cart and came back to get the girls. We’ve never been able to take them out on the beach because we are normally down here when it’s crowded but we’ve always wanted to see how they would react to the sand and water. While we were gone to get the girls 2 couple brought some chairs and a few bags of food out on the beach so Ki decided to make good friends with them. They said they are dog people so they loved giving the girls some attention. They were so funny out on the beach. They were running all over the place. Nicholas tried to get Pooh to come down to the water with him but as soon as the water came at her she started backing up and when Ki saw that she turned tail and ran straight back to the people and stood by one of the guys like “whew, I’m safe up here!”. We were all cracking up.

Pooh when the water hit her. It’s blurry because I moved the camera while I was laughing but you see Ki turning to run in the corner. lol

Pooh following Nicholas to the water. Once she realized he was going to get in the water she stopped.

Our family. We had gone to the pool before heading to the beach so that’s why I have a towel around me. I didn’t get in the ocean!