Wow!  I can’t believe there is only a few days left of 2010!  This year has been an exciting one for me, as we finished our basement renovations, attended many weddings of family/friends, got a great promotion at work, and oh yea… I started this BLOG and ETSY SHOP this year too, minor detail really.    I had a lot of fun capturing all my life’s events with you all this year and hope to do so for many more years!  Your comments, emails, tweets, always put a SMILE on my face!!   So start off this recap, I just wanted to share some of my most memorable trips taken this year in month by month/picture form…

January

I began the year by helping prepare for my nephew, Evan’s, 1st Birthday Party, where I made Cake Pops for the first time! (Los Angeles, CA)

March

Our first of many weddings of the year was Robert and Roxanna’s Vegas Wedding Part 1 and Part 2 (Las Vegas, NV)

April

I attended my dear friend, Melissa and Chris’s baby shower (Canton, MI)

May

My brother-in-law and blog domain owner/designer got married! (Columbus, OH)

June

I attended my ex-roomies Navy and Peach wedding (San Francisco, CA)

Where I also happened to do my boudoir session with Bllew Photography too!

July

My brother, SIL and nephew flew out to visit us to surprise my husband for his 30th birthday!  It also happened to be my nephew’s very first trip to the states of Missouri AND Kansas!

Then we headed off to Pennsylvania for my friend’s beautiful wedding where I got to play bridesmaid (Doylestown, PA)

August

Melissa and Chris had a delicious Chinese wedding reception where I got to catch up with lots of college friends!! (Little Falls, NJ)

And later that month, we flew to Seattle for a sweet yellow and grey wedding! (Seattle, WA)

September

My brother got me and my sis-in-law last minute tickets to be in the audience (2nd row) of the Modern Family episode of Oprah! Did you see us on TV?? (Chicago, IL)

October

My husband’s cousin got married this month and it was a fun weekend spent with his family! (Stamford, CT)

And later that month, I met up with a bunch of bloggers and attended the wedding of the friend who introduced me and Marvin to each other!  And it was my first second shooting opportunity thanks to Anna Wu Photography! (Los Angeles, CA)

November

We spent our second Thanksgiving as a married couple in my husband’s hometown.  And we went to our first Michigan – OSU game ever (those are our alma maters), don’t ask me about the game please.    (Columbus, OH)

December

And finally, we ended the year with a cruise vacation in the Southern Caribbean (full picture recap to come next week):

There’s a recap of all the fun trips anyways… besides that, I did also make some trips out to the following locations for business purposes (some where I got to meet bloggers too!):

Cleveland, OH (multiple trips)
Orlando, FL (multiple trips)
Nashville, TN
Hamilton, MT
Ottawa, Canada

In between my busy travel schedule, my husband and I finished renovating our basement!!  As in… we began with wood paneling and water seeping through the walls in July 2009…

to foundation repairs, sump pump added, putting up drywall…

taping+mudding, sanding, priming, painting…

installing new light fixtures, new flooring+ carpet… and finally finished in August 2010!

Basically every weekend that was not spent traveling, was spent in our  basement, FUN!

And finally, some random statistics for year 2010:

Number of Times OSU has beat Michigan in Football since my husband and I have been together: 5
Number of Giveaways on Sandy a la Mode: 31
Number of Plane Rides: 46 (not including layovers)
Number of Blog Posts: 266 (including tomorrow’s post, the last one of the year)
Number of Blog Followers (via Google Friend Connect): 417
Number of Twitter Followers: 1069
Number of Tweets: 10,215+
Number of Comments: 10,350+
Number of Calories Consumed: 758,000 (estimate based on a 2000 calorie/day diet to maintain weight + weight gained LOL)

What is your best memory of 2010?

So since we have finished renovating our basement, we’ve now been spending the last couple of months organizing it!  So today I just wanted to share a little part of my “crafting side of the basement” with you today.  Yes, the other side of the basement is my husband’s “bachelor pad full of all of the electronics you can name side”, with a Wii, Xbox, huge TV, speakers, games, DVDs, etc.

Top: A homemade bunting banner which I wrote a tutorial for here.

Bottom Left: This pink organizer (painted by my Dad) was my nightstand before I moved in with my husband.  Now I’ve turned it into a ribbon, fabric scrap, cards, packaging, and pattern shelf.

Bottom Right: This ClosetMaid shoe organizer was purchased from Lowes.  It’s perfect for storing rolls and rolls of fabric.  On top of it is a thread organizer and a picture of me and my hubs!    And here’s a closer look at my fabrics…

There’s certainly room for even more fabrics, don’t ya think?!    I’ll share pictures of the rest of my “crafting side of the basement” once it’s a little bit more neat!  And I’ve finally started USING my fabrics to make some new passport covers w/ bows for my etsy shop, here’s a peek at the first three I’ve made, which I will be listing this week!

And we’re done. HELLO? Did you see that? We’re finally done with our basement renovation! And it only took a year! To see our progress from beginning to end, click here. Of course the last step of the process, laying down the carpet, did not come without a few bumps. We looked high and low at carpet styles, carpet colors, carpet pads, etc. We got prices from multiple stores and it took weeks until we finally landed on one, we had a 20% off coupon which helped too. The carpet we landed on was a light creamy plush carpet where the strands stick straight up. We were sent a samples of the carpet but were sent a different style, it was twisty, also known as frieze. We immediately called our sales guy and said, thanks for the sample but that’s not the carpet style we ordered, we ordered the plush one. He said he’d make sure the computer had the correct one and all was well. We decided to go with it and a few weeks later the carpet installers arrived at our house. The two guys went downstairs and did their thing. Once done, they called up for my husband to come down and look… and the first thing out of my husband’s mouth… “You installed the frieze carpet?” Profanity was strewn from the installer’s mouth. They messed up, they were supposed to verify with my husband before laying the carpet but they did not. But apparently the sales guy didn’t update the computer either… Mind you, I was on a business trip and my husband wrote to me and said “We have a problem. They installed the wrong carpet.” My mind was racing, my heart was beating fast, my husband sent a few pics and I wasn’t so sure about it. Pretty much we had two options: keep the carpet and get a discount or reinstall the whole thing and have to spend another day at home. My husband wanted to wait until I got home to make a decision, and the moment I stepped into the basement, I LOVED THE CARPET! I immediately dug my toes into the threads and laid down on the ground, big sigh of relief! Needless to say, we got a good chunk of money back so that sure was a bonus!

So without further ado, I present to you, our FINALLY finished basement!

As you walk down the stairwell, you’ll first notice the bamboo wallpaper.

And as you turn to the right, we have the wide open space with a beam in the middle and a cozy fireplace.

Say hello to frieze carpet, I just can’t get enough of digging my toes into it!

I just love the big open space without any furniture, maybe we’ll leave it like that for a bit longer. Marvin and I are such pack rats that I know once we start putting stuff back in the basement, it’s going to look cluttered. Although that means we can’t park one of our cars in the garage since it’s currently holding all the furniture… well parking outside is totally fine for summer/fall but I suppose we’ll have want to have that garage space back before it snows yea?

Not too long ago, Oprah announced on her show that “wallpaper is back”, and I’ll second that one.  It’s all over the blogosphere as a way to dress up your room or put on an accent wall.  Funny thing is, when we first bought our house 3 years ago and I saw all of the wallpaper in it, my first thought was GET RID OF IT!  And sure, there was some super old yellowed wallpaper with designs from the 1960s but there was one wallpaper that we decided to keep, and that was that was the bamboo wallpaper in the basement.  This wallpaper was on the staircase wall and a small area of a wall adjacent to it.  However with the foundation repair we had to tear down the wall adjacent to the staircase and up went plastic sheeting.  It pretty much took us a YEAR to figure out what to do with it… and guess what??  We decided to put the exact same bamboo wallpaper back up!   We already had painted walls, a brick wall, and a bamboo wall we wanted to keep consistency.  Thing is, we had to find one that matched the one on the staircase, and lucky for us, Lowe’s had an Asian Inspirations wallpaper book that we found it in.  But talk about expensive… it ended up being like $60 for a double roll… you could pretty much paint a whole house with that money, no joke!

And actually… putting up this textured wallpaper was probably the easiest 1.5 hour project ever (for our basement).  I think what helped was that it was a TEXTURED wallpaper, so we didn’t have to worry about seeing bumps as much as you would with a flat wallpaper.

1. So first, we put up the old wood paneling back on top of the plastic sheeting (because the plastic sheeting had these bumps on it so we wanted a smooth surface to work with).

2. Measure out the length and width of your wall and figure out how many sheets you will need across.  We decided to split ours up into three sections we measured the length of the first roll and cut!

3. Grab your paste (we just used a small container of border paste, which is the same as a bigger container of wallpaper paste but we only had a small area so we thought the border paste would be enough, and it was) and your start brushing it onto your wall.

4. Adhere your wallpaper and use a roller (or your hands) to push out the bubbles.  Boo on blurry pic!

5. Repeat steps 2-4 until you’re done!  The third piece was probably the hardest to measure because the width had to fit exactly within a defined area.  I had to cut it 4 times before getting it right but once it fit, it was MAGICAL!

6. TADAA!  The bamboo is up and holding in place! 

Do you have wallpaper up in your house?  If so, where?  If not, will you consider it now? 

So I’ve been a little negligent in writing posts for my Nest Designs category, shame on me.  My current CSN Store Giveaway that I have running basically reminded me that I needed to update you all on my basement!  Well, wouldn’t you know we’ve definitely made some progress on the basement in the past few months.  In case you missed it before, check out Series 1 and Series 2 to see how far we’ve come!  Basically, we’ve fixed the foundation so no agua seeps in, put up drywall, taped, mudded, sanded, primed, painted and changed some fixtures in the past… 10 months.  Yea, we’re kind of slow but we don’t have a deadline so we just do what we can without being overwhelmed!  And here’s what we’ve done in the past two months (with a lot of invaluable help from my Dad).

May 2010 – June 2010

Basement Bathroom

- Repainted the bathroom vanity and mirror from wood to a clean white (Thanks Dad!)

- Put in Traffic Master Allure vinyl plank tiles (joint effort by Marvin and Dad)

- Painted the bathroom walls Gray Ash (Behr paint) and installed the new light fixture

and here we have one side of the bathroom finished  (this last picture taken without flash, it’s hard to take a picture of the whole bathroom because the area is pretty small)

Main Basement Area

- We’re currently in the process of putting up the white baseboard trim (Marvin’s doing this one)    Once done, we’ll have to repaint it to cover up the nails

- And we’ve gotten multiple bids for carpet but just have to decide which one to go with.  This is the one thing we’re going to hire someone else to install!  Picking out a color has been quite the feat, we want a neutral color carpet but don’t want it to be too close to the wall color since that’s pretty neutral as well!  I think we’re going to go with a lighter, creamy, ivory type color.

And that’s it, after the carpet is put in we’ll be DONE in terms of renovations and on to decorating we’ll go!  We’ve really come a long way since wood paneling and stained yellow ceilings!

Are you here for the Sew Mama Sew! Giveaway?  Welcome!  You have until 11:59PM CST on Thursday, May 20, 2010 to enter and this is the fabric that is being given away!  So click on the sweet eggplant pennants fabric below and you’ll be redirected to the giveaway post (or you could right click and select Open Link in New Tab so you can enter the giveaway and also read this post)! 

Are you here to stay (I sure hope so!) and need an idea for what to sew with the fabric if you win??  Here’s what I would make if I won (since I’m still a beginner at sewing)!  A simple foldover pillow cover that takes merely 10 minutes to make!  Now who doesn’t love a quick and easy tutorial?  OK, grab your fabric and thread, turn your sewing machine on and let’s go!  Oh how I wish I could rig the giveaway so I could win! 

Sew Simple Foldover Pillow Cover Tutorial adapted from Apartment Therapy

Based on a 16″ x 16″ pillow, I like to make my covers into 17″ by 17″ squares because I don’t like them super snug.

1) First cut your fabric into a rectangle with these measurements:
L = (pillow size x 2) + 6″ = 38″
W = (pillow size) + 2″ = 18″

2) Hem around all edges of the rectangle about 1/2″.

3) Fold one short end toward the center of the rectangle with the “finished side” of the hem facing down.  The length of the foldover portion about be

X = (pillow size / 2) + 2″ = 10″

4) Fold the opposite side towards the middle by 10″ as well.  The middle portion should be 17″ and the foldover should overlap by 3″.  (Oh dear, I feel like I haven’t done math since 4th grade.  This took me quite some time to calculate out the measurement, so sad.)

5) Sew shut the two open sides of the square.

6) Turn the cover right side out through the center.

7) Iron and you’re done!  Oh and don’t forget to insert the pillow inside the cover of course!

Don’t you think the eggplant pennant fabric from Olive Manna that I am giving away would match well with the pillow I made?

I just realized that it’s been two months since my last basement update!  If you didn’t get a chance to read it before, long story short, we had water in our basement, fixed the foundation and now we are renovating it all on our own! Of course most the credit can be due to my wonderful handyman husband, I’m just his little helper. Series 1 documented our progress from July 2009 – January 2010 and here is what we’ve done in the past two months… slowly but surely we are getting things done!

February 2010

Ceiling painted white – wee!

March 2010 – April 2010

Walls finally have COLOR (Valspar – Churchill Hotel Maple)!

In terms of design and decor, we haven’t gotten really far at all… but we’re thinking maple, brown, turquoise, olive green for the color theme.

I bought these fabrics from Joann’s in the hopes of making pillow covers out of them.   I’m also thinking of pairing some solid olive and maple colored pillows with these as well.  I think the top left picture represents all of the colors I want for the basement the best.  Like I said before, I’m not the best at interior decorating so if anybody has any other suggestions of colors/patterns that would go well with these, please let me know!

Basement Bathroom

This is the current state…

…and this is what I WANT the after to look like – grey walls with yellow accents! I’ll probably end up painting our sink cabinet a mocha or black color because those go pretty well with grey too.

country living

What do we have left on our to-do list?

- Finish painting and put up trim
-Install new light fixtures
-(Re)Paint sink cabinet
-Install new flooring (we’re thinking carpet for main basement area and vinyl planks for the basement bathroom)
-And finally my favorite part… DESIGNING AND DECORATING!

When I am not at work, blogging, hanging out with friends, or running errands, there’s one other little big activity that occupies my husband’s and my time… renovating our basement.

Ironically, when we first bought the house, the basement started with an already-finished basement.  Sure, when we moved into the house, the basement had outdated wood paneling, dreary lighting, and icy (both in color and feel) blue sticky tile flooring.  But it was fine. It was low on our totem pole of things-that-we-need-to-do-something-about.  So what rocketed a basement renovation to the top of our To-Do list?

It started with a tiny puddle on the basement floor.  The puddle was so seemingly innocuous, as if it came from a careless bump of a hand carrying a too-full glass of water.  But, as Kansas City’s storm seasons brought rainstorms of increasing might, so followed more water into the basement, seeping in through cracks in the foundation walls.  Watching the sheets of rain falling outside my cube window brought such anxiety.  Did I put enough towels down on the floor this morning?  If I drive home now to check the basement, can I make it back for my next meeting? The rumble of thunder during summer slumbers used to be a soothing sound.  When you have water seeping into the basement, it becomes an ominous alarm clock.

After numerous nights of mopping and bailing water, we decided that our finished basement had to become unfinished, to make way for foundation repairs.  Once we were satisfied that the basement remained bone-dry even after the fiercest of rainstorms, we decided that we needed to refinish the basement.  And thus was born The Basement Project.  Our goal is to put a big, fat line through this To-Do by June 2010.  Come see how we’ve done so far….

Main Basement Area

**WARNING: MESSY BASEMENT ALERT. PLEASE EXCUSE.**

Before
(Note the wood paneling among the guitar shredding)

July 2009

-Tear out wood paneling
- Foundation repairs
- Re-stud walls
-Put in new electrical outlets, re-do existing

August 2009

-Put up drywall

September 2009

-Tape
-Mud

November 2009

-Sand. Mud. Sand.  Rinse, Repeat

January 2010

-Prime Walls (2 coats)

Basement Bathroom

Before

(The previous owner had this hilarious picture above the toilet…shame that she took it with her!)

August 2009 – December 2009

-Remove two layers of wallpaper
- Remove two layers of flooring

Whew!  We’ve actually come a long way in 7 months!  I never really realized that until I just put these pictures together.  Well I’m glad to say, in terms of work effort, we’re more than halfway there (at least I think it’s more than halfway, oh please let it be more than halfway)…

And here is the rest of “The Basement Project” to-do list:
-Paint Ceiling
-Paint Walls
-Install new light fixtures
-(Re)Paint sink cabinet
-Install new flooring
-And finally my favorite part… DESIGNING AND DECORATING!

I’ve never really been one to have an eye for interior decorating so this is where I’m going to have to call in reinforcements, i.e. YOU!  I’m most likely going to be posting some more on interior designs, furniture, color schemes, etc. (taken from the blogging world, websites, magazines, friends) that I hope to use in my basement or just inspiration that I love!  I think the first thing I need to decide on is a basic theme for the basement (Vintage?  Modern?).  *sigh* It’s so hard!  As for colors, I’ve decided that I want shades of yellow to be the color that ties together the main basement area and bathroom…and that’s pretty much as far as I’ve gotten.