Random Wednesday

I love clean sheets on the bed!

Amazon Wishlist are the best for Birthday/Christmas shopping! So easy and convienient! I wish everyone used them! You can even add stuff from non-amazon websites as well, it's a great universal tool! My only problem is it's hard for me to add stuff to my list, I never want anything that I don't need to pick out myself (like I want a new purse but I need to see it in the store/try it on my shoulder to decide). I did add some gym equipment for our new home gym we've created. but what else?? #firstworldproblems

I only have two more working Fridays for the rest of the year! One is in 2 days and I'm on business travel so it doesn't even really count since I'm not in the office. Plus add in my vacation days I'm taking, I really only have 16 working days until Christmas Shutdown and then I'm off for 17 days straight (well I'm taking 2 vacation days to make that happen) One of the biggest perks of my company is our awesome time off!

We have this area/room in our house, it's supposed to be a formal living room when you first walk in the house  but we have nothing in it other than one curio/shelf cabinet and we refer to it as our christmas tree room since that's where we put the Christmas Tree. We don't want to make it a formal living room (such a waste) but can't figure out what else to do with it. We already have a huge playroom/game room loft upstairs, a gym, a study, and a theater room so what else could we possibly use this space for? Any ideas? And it would need to be something that is appeasing to the eyes since it's an open space and not a room with doors. It's probably the last room in the house we want to do some thing with, which means it's on next year's (even possibly the following year) list to complete but since I have NO IDEA I figured I'd better start thinking about it now and start soliciting help!

We're getting EM's 1st Birthday pictures done on Monday. I'm so excited for her smash cake session! We'll also be doing her christmas pictures and hopefully a family picture as well which brings me to my next dilemma, what to wear? I seriously need to go shopping but have zero time between now and Monday due to all the party prep and I have nothing remotely flattering to wear (still too heavy for my normal clothes and everything else is super wornout and not good enough for pics because I've been wearing it sooo often) and I'm dying for a sweater dress! Must find time!! Maybe I can squeeze a quick shopping trip in on Sunday while G is watching football! 

Ok so what is the best feature to use for Blogger (blogspot) comments? I signed up to use disqus and really like it but I believe it requires everyone to make a disqus profile in order to comment. Will that defer people from commenting? I kind of wish I used wordpress vs blogger - seems like their built in comment feature works well (doesn't require people to sign up for anything or have a google ID, yet I don't want the fully anonymous ability either) what is your preference as a blog reader/commenter?

Ponytails - Totally Posted Tuesday

Yey! Em's hair is finally long enough to put in a little pony! How cute is this: 

They did it a few weeks ago at daycare but I hadn't been able to duplicate it until today. 

Just downloaded the new Mac OS X 'Maverick' - anyone have any good hints about it? What is it going to offer me? I didn't get the last OS update (didn't see the need) and I was super excited to see this one was FREE! 

The painters are coming Thursday and we still haven't fully decided on paint colors (or bought the paint) These are the colors I'm currently leaning towards - but still need to see the color sample cards in person since who knows how my computer screen is really portraying them. 

Velvet Morning for the Gym, Mint Frappe for the accent wall in the playroom and Smoked Oyster for the rest of the playroom and halls/staircase 

Home Decor - A Totally Posted Tuesday Link up

Welcome to Totally Posted Tuesday, a weekly linkup with Glossy Blonde & Karly Kim!

We moved into our new house almost a year ago (closed 10/29, formally moved in on 11/2). Since we built the house, all the walls started stark white. (the builder only had the option to paint the entire house one color, so we chose to leave it white since we knew we wanted to paint most of the rooms different colors). Before we actually moved in, we had 4 rooms painted (we aren’t good at it and wanted it to look nice, so there is no DIY painting going on in this house) and to date those are the only 4 rooms that are actually “decorated”. Well our master is still a work in progress but the living room, study, and EM’s room are complete. We’re sick at staring at plain white walls and want to decorate some of the rooms to “complete” them and hang our TV’s on the walls but can’t really do that until we get them painted. We also decided that we want to do a little reconfiguring. We currently have two guest rooms, fully furnished and the treadmill in the middle of the game/play room (which is a big open loft like area when you come upstairs, not a separate room). We decided to sell the furniture of the downstairs guest room (which someone from Craigslist is picking up tomorrow!!) and move the treadmill into that room and make it into a "home gym" and have only one guest room (we always have two complete living room sets for guests to sleep on if we ever have THAT many guests spending the night!). This will allow the game/play room to actually be what it supposed to be and not have a giant treadmill in the middle of it. So now we’re trying to pick out colors… I HATE picking out paint colors. At our last house, I hated what we chose in some of the rooms and we painted it ourselves so I never wanted to try to fix it or pay anyone to come fix it so I just got used to it. So far the color choices we’ve made for the 4 previously mentioned rooms, I still love, so that’s good. We have a painter coming next Thursday, and so far we only have 1.5 colors kind of picked out. We’re having the home gym room, mud room, downstairs hall, and game/play room painted which feeds into the stair case/stairwell (what is it actually called?) and upstairs hallways. We used the below picture as inspiration for the home gym room color and I want some sort of mint green color for the one main wall in the game/play room knowing I want something more neutral coming off of it and into the hallways and stairs.Once I post a picture it'll make more sense, I promise. Ugh such a difficult decision as I know I’m not going to want to pay to get it repainted if I don’t like it. Any suggestions? 

home gym color inspiration

game/play room accent wall inspiration

So I took a picture of the current play room and uploaded it on behr.com and started playing around with some combinations on their Color Smart tool. It kind of gives you an idea of what it will look like, even seems to factor in how it'll look against the light glare. 

before

after

and one more shot with a lighter color:

before

after

I'm leaning towards the lighter color... I don't want something too much in your face when you first walk upstairs, but I also want something FUN but not too juvenile that I'll want to repaint when the kid(s) are like 7. So what are your thoughts? the wall with the windows will definitely be the wall I paint and the the walls with the doors and wall you can't see will be the lighter neutral color that feeds into the hall way.