Ikea again...

You may have noticed I wasn't here yesterday, and that's because I'm coming down with the sickness that has been attacking everyone I know. Haven't been out of bed yet today (it's 12:17 pm right now) and am currently hanging out in a pink tank top, underwear, and wool socks. Feeling good is all about looking good people. Anyway, I didn't want to leave you in a lurch, if you've been having trouble getting through your days without our house updates, as I'm sure most people in the world have been. It's a struggle, but if you just keep your mind on other things I'm sure you can cope. Otherwise feel free to email me and I'll give you a daily dose of me talking about our life. Excuse me if this post is ridiculous, I've been feeling kind of out of it.

If you follow me on instagram, you saw this update last night of my Glee on Netflix sickness cure, leggings help too. 

Anyway, back to business. 

We went to Ikea again - surprise! This time is was to get our bathroom furniture/accessories. Just to clear things up, we do not only shop at Ikea...it's just new to Winnipeg and happens to be crazy reasonable so we're jumping on that bandwagon right now. If you have the money, I'd recommend buying your vanity probably at a real kitchen/bath store (cough Norcraft cough), as it's better quality...but Ikea is just too cheap to pass up. 

You'll remember from our post last week, we had our bathroom design all planned with the Ikea cabinetry in place.

Our Ikea bathroom design, courtesy of Adobe Illustrator, and Philip Wiebe. 

We went to Ikea with my parents, and here's a rundown of what we bought:

1. The Godmorgon Vanity with Odvensik Countertop - the version with 2 square sinks, grey gloss
2. A Godmorgon Mirror
3. Lillangen Medicine Cabinet, horizontally hung with aluminum framed glass door
4. Grundtal glass shelf
5. Ensen faucets x 2
6. Lillangen high cabinet with aluminum framed glass door (in the picture above you see the fullen cabinet, when we got to the store it looked too cheap and didn't go with everything, so we decided to go with the lillangen to match the medicine cabinet).
7. Godmorgon acrylic drawer organizers...I couldn't resist. They're too amazing! Can't wait to get it all installed and show how organized the drawers are when I organize these babies. 

I want to say that's all we bought...but I feel like I could be forgetting something. 

8. I was...the Grundtal toilet roll holder.

9. & the Savern towel hanger.

While we were there, a lady also broke something glass everywhere...and walked away. For shame people, for shame. At least pay for what you broke, or find a sales associate and explain yourself. My mom immediately heard broken glass and assumed it'd be me - no, I was carrying a glass shelf around and it stayed in tact - Success!

If you feel like looking up each thing to see how much we spent - I think it came to around $1300 and something. I might have forgotten more things...but you'll see when it's all installed anyway! 

We also bought a bathtub and shower walls at Dynasty Bath, and we're working on ordering a beautiful new Kohler shower head and bath fixtures. Spoiler alert for Tuesday's "What are you looking forward to most in 2013?" - mine might have to be showering in a normal sized shower, and Philip's might be "my wife having room to shave properly in the shower again." 

Have a great weekend! Anyone else sick? Going to suck it up and help your husband gut the bathroom and shovel the blizzard out of the back lane? 

YHL Posers

At last I have the Young House Love book that I've been drooling over since it was released in November! I got it for Christmas...and this is ridiculous, but I for real almost cried.

Anyway...moving on from that.

Philip and I were reading it before bed each night and then we started post-it noting any projects we wanted to try. The hooks on page 145, idea #96 seemed manageable, and we were wanting to hang hooks behind our bedroom door for our robes anyway so we thought we'd try this project.

At first we were definitely at odds with our design concept. I had hoped for a cute patterned background (similar to what was shown in the book) and a solid letter, using white and green primarily. Our duvet is green so I thought bright green hooks or letters could be cute. Philip didn't like that idea at all, but I didn't like his ideas either, he wanted the canvas to stay mostly white. Eventually one of us suggested (I honestly don't remember who - I think it might have been a hybrid of me suggesting a stripe in the shape of an arrow and Philip taking the idea and running with it) painting silver arrow stripes downward (as the hooks will be hanging below) and then painting the letter green.

We started with using Frog Tape (best for crisp lines) to mark an arrow shape on our canvasses.

We painted between the tape with silver paint.

Love how the background looks, simple and pretty.

We painted the letters green with light green sides. They looked okay. In between you see the hooks we are going to recycle from downstairs, just need a little paint!

Halfway through painting the letter we also decided to lighten the green and paint the outsides of the letter the lighter shade. Cool right? Definitely cool, for a 16 year old girl or a college student's locker. Once it was finished, Philip pointed out how juvenile it looked, and now I can't stop seeing it that way either. I actually do still really like the arrows pointing down I think, I like the addition of the metallic, especially since our room turned out much more glam than our inspiration photo had suggested, the metallic would add to that vibe. So we'll see what we do now. We're either going to spray paint over the whole thing white and see how that looks - hoping it's nice like our white clock we bought on our honeymoon. Or, if we don't like that, at least we've got it back to square one and we can add color again if we want.

2013 Resolutions: Philip

Cass asked me to share my New Year's Resolutions with you. Last year, I stuck with my unpublished goals through until May. This year, I hope publishing them puts me over the top.

Now, everyone has goals about diet and exercise, relationships, and even faith spirituality. And those are good, so briefly: I want to exercise every day, max out at one sweet a week, keep a bimonthly date night with my wife, and get back in the habit of having daily time with my Bible (or YouVersion app, as the case may be). But those resolutions are boring to read; you've seen them a million times. What I want to do is focus on the New Year's Resolutions that are a little less common. Like...

1. Get two rejection notices.

Some of you may know that I'm a bit of a writer, with dreams of being an author/screenwriter/playwright (really, whatever storytelling medium will have me, poetry slams included). But so far I haven't gone and sent anything off. Why? Maybe I'm too nervous. Maybe I just don't know where to start. But this year I intend to start changing that. And aiming for two rejection notices is a bit of a hedge; as long as I send stuff a couple of works off to a publisher, I either make some strides forward in my writing career or I achieve my resolution!

2. Watch this year's Best Picture nominees before next year's ceremony.

That gives me a year to watch 9 movies? I can do that. Part of striving to be a great artist is understanding what makes art great. Being truthful and discovering your voice are great, but if you don't have a good understanding how to deliver, you're back to square one.

As an aside, maybe I'm just starting to hit the target demographic, but this year's batch seems pretty strong. ZeroDark Thirty, Silver Linings Playbook, Lincoln, Beasts of the Southern Wild, Argo; these are all movies I wanted to see as they've come out. I've missed them all so far, but there's no reason for that to continue.

Cass: I'm going to pretend I don't know Philip only wants to see this for Jennifer Lawrence. 

3. Get everything upstairs that's not related to the kitchen done.

Okay, so our bathroom reno has started to drag on longer than a Fiona Apple album title (h/t Hollywood Prospectus podcast). But we will get it done! And we will get the spare bedroom done! And the living room-ish! (It butts up against the kitchen, and our plans for it can only be fully realized when we can scratch together the coin to actually finish the kitchen.)

Having a beautiful living space is a top priority. Can't wait to share it with you as we make that happen.

4. Rediscover my At-Work Mojo

Last year I was kicking butt at the beginning of the year. But then some plans changed due to my company's integration with some of our sister companies. And then we lost one of the employees in our department and a lot of his work landed on my desk. And somewhere in that maelstrom, the je-ne-sais-quoi that had me at the top of my game at the beginning of the year faded.

It's time to refocus on what makes me great and what holds me back, so I can release my inner Kraken.

5. Run a marathon.

Ha. Haha. Hahahahahaha. I'm totally kidding. While I have the utmost respect for those who can, the reasons I don't want to run a marathon are legion (although if you quizzed me right now, the fact that many marathoners lose control of their, ummm, plumbing during the race would be reasons #1 through 18 on my list). But being able to jog 5K without dying would be nice. Maybe I'll work toward that.

So those are my resolutions. I hope to be back on the Friday Phil horse soon; as Cass mentioned, I'm directing a play that I adapted (writing pretty much all of it last week), but who knows, you may have me back sooner than later. (That is, if the blog will have me back!) This week, tell us what you're looking forward to most in 2013. 

Domestic Pride

When packing up my Christmas decorations, I had a "I'm as good at packing boxes as my mom is!" moment. It's similar to the feeling I get when Philip says, "Where are my sunglasses (that you've never touched)/screwdriver/extra deodorant?" and I know where it is somehow. I'm definitely growing up! Although not in every way, I'm still not the best cleaner.

Anyway, time to wrap up the Christmas posts, in talking about the packing up of Christmas decor around here. 

In preparation for take-down, Philip and I went to Superstore and purchased two Rubbermaid bins. I had hoped for red or green bins for easy identification, but they cost more and I figured I could just as easily make cute labels so I went for blue. Also we don't have as many decorations as we might some day - we only needed to buy two bins for now - and this makes it easier to buy more bins that match later on. I figure, if we want we can always buy green bins in the future if we see them on sale or something and use the blue bins for something else. You can never have too many Rubbermaid bins (that's what I tell myself anyways). 

So I got to work taking down decorations. I started with ornaments, putting them into some old ornament boxes that I had inherited, since the ornaments in them weren't as fragile and special to me, and then I put those ornaments just carefully in a box. Luckily there's nothing too heavy in my Christmas decor collection, so I feel like everything should be safe till next year (unless I get my hands on it - I definitely broke 2 ornaments in about 10 minutes while taking down my tree). I was pretty tempted to introduce the red solo cup/cardboard ornament holding contraption into my box, but I wasn't sure if all my ornaments would even fit in cups and then I'd have some odd men out, plus I just didn't get around to it - did anyone else do that? Would you recommend it? Anyone want to try it with me next year?

So genius. Okay, putting this picture into the post sold me on this idea for next year, definitely going to give it a go. (someone remind me next year?)

I put my recent 1 am purchase star in its original box, as well as the white Ikea trees. Some other things like homemade pine cones just got put in a big freezer sized ziploc. I also put my homemade-from-old-Christmas-cards gift tags in a ziplock and tucked them safely inside. Some other odds and ends got added too: Christmas lights, Philip's new pancake pan, some cookie tins, and our stocking hangers (except we don't have stockings at our house...so they just hang nothing). 

Once it was all packed in - and like I mentioned above - I did a better job packing these boxes than I ever have in my history (is anyone else a bad packer?) - you can see my history here if you don't believe me - I stowed it all in the basement in a place I thought was safe. Until we gutted our bathroom...it is now covered in bathroom plaster dust, but that's a story for another day.

All of our Christmas gear hanging out under the stairs. It says "do not stack" because I'm nervous about if another heavy box was put on top some ornaments might squish. 

When Philip got home we took down the tree after some struggle of figuring out if we could get it downstairs and keep it together so we wouldn't have to put lights on it again next year. We failed at that attempt, so the lights came off and down it went in three pieces.