Hi all,

Update your feeds/notifications/whatever you use to keep track with my reliably infrequent posts because I’ll now be blogging from this location.

Cheers!

I’ve made quite a few changes to our living room and dining room in the past months, and I thought I’d share some of them.

Let’s start in the dining room, shall we? I painted the walls Valspar’s Bay Sands, which is a grayish, greenish, tan that changes a lot depending on the light. I also used this color in the living room, and we really love it. We also wound up with a new (to us) dining table that we got from Craigslist. It has a leaf (that actually folds up and is stored in a secret compartment underneath the table top), so it can seat up to six people comfortably. I’m in the middle of repainting the top, so it will all be one color after I’m finished with it.

As for the living room, in addition to the new coat of paint, we also got a new (to us, another Craigslist steal) little chair for the corner and the striped pillow that’s sitting in it. We still love the white sofa and couldn’t believe our luck finding a like-new chair that is small enough to fit in that corner that comes from the exact same Ikea collection for – wait for it – $25.

As for where we go from here, we’re actually planning on investing in a hutch for the dining room, so we can free up some of our precious cabinet space and a sofa table for behind the couch, which we think will double as storage for shoes, keys, etc. and surface space for reading lamps and whatnot. Stay tuned, and in the meanwhile, here’s a sneak peak:

(Not shown to scale)

I’ve also done some painting and redecorating in both of our bathrooms, but I think I’ll wait until those spaces are looking a little more finished before I share them. The walls are still a little bare while we decide what kinds of art and other things we want to hang. Overall, I’m so pleased with how everything is coming together. It’s amazing what a little paint can do.

A few days ago, we celebrated our second anniversary with a long overdue trip to the North Carolina Museum of Art in Raleigh.

We had a little bit of trouble getting a good selfie on this outing . . .

The museum is set up in two buildings: one that houses that permanent collection and another where exhibitions are displayed. We kicked off our visit with the Birds of America exhibition, where the four enormous folios are can be viewed.

None of the other exhibitions really grabbed us like the Audubon display, and we only had about an hour and a half before the museum would close, so we moved on to the permanent collection.

We breezed through the collection, which included pretty much everything you’d expect . . . ancient Greek, Roman, Egyptian . . . European (including what seemed to be quite a lot of Northern European paintings) . . . early American . . . modern (which we skipped).

The next item on the agenda was food. We didn’t want to mess with Raleigh traffic, so we came back to Durham and stopped at Red Robin on our way home. It was tasty (as usual), and we picked up individual slices of cake (chocolate mousse for me, cookies and cream for Daniel) from Target before finally making our way back to the apartment.

All in all, a great day! 🙂

Yet another open-windowed discovery – a little tree frog underneath our patio table!

I love frogs, you guys. This one was loud!

It finally warmed up enough for us to turn on our air conditioner earlier this week, and lo and behold, it wasn’t conditioning properly. It seemed to be just circulating air without cooling it. I put in a maintenance request right away (we had several days with highs in the mid to upper 80s in the forecast!), but the repair people are apparently very busy these days and still haven’t gotten around to it (they’re usually very quick).

Thankfully, things have cooled off again, and we’re back down to the mid 70s, which is much nicer. Yesterday, I opened up all the windows and the sliding door onto the deck and enjoyed the breeze that wound through the apartment. Of course, like most parts of the south, we’re currently in the middle of a pollen explosion, and I noticed a fine layer of neon yellow powder coating our dining table, kitchen sink, and probably every other flat surface in the place after just one day. Oh well.

Mirabelle certainly enjoyed having the windows open!

(We recently discovered that plastic straws make awesome cat toys.)

Pardon the dark picture, but I wanted to give you a sense of what my view is like on mornings like this one when I work from bed. We got a good deal of rain last night, and everything is super green. Bird songs plus a gentle breeze make for a pretty nice office environment.

Last but not least, having the windows open has led to a few nature discoveries. First, as I was working at our dining table yesterday afternoon, I heard a woodpecker nearby, and looked up to see not one but two (different species, no less!) on the same tree just beyond our deck. Very cool. Mirabelle was so confused, though; I don’t think she knew birds could make noises like that. And in other bird news, I’d been watching a pair of Carolina wrens spending a lot of time on our deck over the past few days, and yesterday it became clear what they were up to. At one point, one flew near the Boston fern I have hanging in the corner of the deck, and I heard a bunch of baby birds start chirping like crazy. There’s a nest in the fern! I was worried that my watering the plant would dowse them, but I couldn’t resist peeking at the nest last evening, and it has a roof, so that’s no longer a worry. It’s actually a really cool little nest. I’ll try to get a picture once they’ve abandoned it.

The way things are going, I don’t think I would want to turn on the AC anyway!

I couldn’t pass these pretty flowers by without snapping a quick picture this afternoon:

And the forest behind our apartment is coming back to life in a beautiful way this week. I love the color of new leaves.

Mirabelle loves hanging out here when the door is open.

Hope everyone else is having an equally relaxing weekend!

We finally had a beautiful, warm spring day today! I kicked off the week right with some really pretty trees this morning . . .

. . . and enjoyed a bit of reading in the arboretum this afternoon. It was so nice!

I think we’re actually going to cool off for a few days (for what will hopefully be the last time!), but today should hold me over until the weekend when it will be spring again.

This afternoon, I impulsively bought a pair of ferns: one little dude for the mantle (I really need to find him a cuter pot) . . .

. . . and one larger dude for our deck!

I’ve been struggling to come up with something else to put on the bookcase we’ve been using as a TV stand. It was mostly filled, but there was still space on the right side of the upper shelf to add something.

A few days ago, it hit me.

I’d been encountering books covered in kraft paper for ages on the interwebs, and a small stack of them could be perfect in that little space on the bookcase. Plus, *bonus* it would clear up some room on our already-full bookcases upstairs.

So yesterday, I grabbed some wrapping paper from Target that looked like kraft paper (it actually has blackish/gray pinstripes, but I think the stripes are fun) and got to work. I thought it was going to be a time-intensive project, but the first online tutorial I looked at was super simple (just cut out a big piece of paper and fold it until it fits the book), and I flew through it.

 Four down, one to go

All finished! Love the stripes.

All in all, a super easy project that I’m really pleased with. I was going to write the titles and authors in white ink like in the first picture above, but I think I’ve decided against it. I would almost certainly mess up the writing, and I really like just the tiny stripes. Now I just need to figure out what to sit on top of them so I can have my bowl back.