Spring Cleaning

Spring is here!The past 2 days have been absolutely gorgeous. It was 80 degrees here today! A perfect time to start cleaning up the deck and getting ready for summer. I have to admit - really, the deck is my most favorite "room" of the house. I know I said the kitchen, but that's probably because the deck is only "open" for a few months of the year. The kitchen - well, is open all year. Last year we painted everything and it took a long time. This year was much easier. Basically, I just put a quick coat of paint on top of all of the furniture to clean it up.

My big project for this year is getting the bench and table I brought home from the family's summer house in Long Island. I recovered them from the old decrepit shed that none of us had ventured out to for _years_. Last year we cleaned it out and I brought home a lot of great goodies. I have a bench that my great grandfather built and a table that was built by - I don't know, someone in the family I'm sure. These are the 2 pieces that I did not do anything with last summer. They just sat out there all of August through the winter. Unfortunately, the bench rotted a little bit but thankfully it wasn't too bad and I think I got it under control using wood hardener from minwax. That stuff is great! It will help restore anything! Here are the pictures from the painting yesterday:I stained the top of the bench and painted the bottom. Now I just have to poly the top. The table - I just painted the bottom. I still have to fix the top up a bit and then figure out what I am going to do with it. I found some more rotted wood on it today so I put some hardener on it and have to fill the spot with wood filler.

Well - dinner just arrived. It's Taco Bell Friday! We have Taco Bell every single Friday. I love it! I've been having it every Friday since I was in elementary school (give or take a few fridays!). I always joke that I feel as though they should hire me to advertise for them! Till later...

Ricotta Gnocchi

I decided to try something new for dinner the other day. I came across a recipe for Ricotta Gnocchi a few months ago on allrecipes.com and it looked pretty interesting so I put it in my recipe box. Well, on Tuesday I decided to give it a go. It took longer than I thought it would but wow... it was SO good! I rolled out the Gnocchi myself...
and cut into pieces.
Here are the Gnocchi waiting for the water to boil on the stove.
This was the end result - yummy! I added 1/4 cup of sugar to the sauce to sweeten it a bit but I'm not sure if it really needed it. I also added zucchini and roasted red peppers because I love veggies in sauce! The red peppers really added some sweetness as well.Bryce also wanted me to take a picture of his meal so here is what he had to eat:
He doesn't like sauce so he had some plain Gnocchi, some watermelon cut using cookie cutters and some red grapes.

Color!

We moved to our new house about a year ago. I haven't been that great with decorating it just yet. I used to be a lot more colorful.... let me introduce you to our old townhouse...

This was the above my cabinets in the kitchen.

These are the french doors that went to the backyard from the other side of the kitchen. Below them is a closeup of the leaves around the door. We had 2 accent walls of the yellow in the kitchen with the rest of it being white. The curtains were curtains that I threw up there after we sold the house. I took my curtains and replaced them with the curtains from the house we bought :-).

This pictures is from Thanksgiving 2002 - it shows the other side of the kitchen. We have Thanksgiving at our house every year. It's my _favorite_ holiday! I LOVE cooking for it. We started out with about 13 people and now we have about 20.

Here is the inside of the door of the first floor powder room. I painted the door and the back wall of the bathroom was upholstered with fabric by my husband. It took a long time - but hey, no kids!

The next picture is the wall coming out of the powder room going towards the kitchen. We had stuff hanging there but I took these pictures all right before we closed on the house because I realized I didn't have any good pictures of what I had done.

This was Bryce's room - he had a racecar theme hence the racing stripe

This was the den. I painted the squares on the walls while I was on bedrest with Bryce. I started showing signs of preeclampsia at about 30 weeks and so they put me on light bedrest. I could sit up at times and I go downstairs for meals. So I just sat in my chair and sponged the squares on and wheeled myself around the room. That probably isn't what they meant by bedrest but after 2 weeks I was going crazy! I went from working 70 hour weeks to working 0!

Here our basement...

...and this is of us with Bryce when he was a baby in our living room. We had 1 wall with purple accent stripes and the rest were plain purple.

And lastly, here is our dining room. We never did get around to painting the dining room. I had always wanted to put up chair railing and paint below the railing because the dining room walls ran into other walls - but a good fix would have been chair railing in this situation. I loved the color of our foyer - it was a green. I had bought a green and it ended up being too green - I wanted it more sagey. So I mixed it with some cream from the den and made that color up. I have the color formula for it because when I worked at Home Depot (I was an HR Manager there) I went to the paint dept. and had them match it. That way you can get the formula if you ever want it mixed again.

Well - that pretty much completes the tour of my old townhouse. Our bedroom was continuously changing back then. I basically had a different quilt for every 6 months. The walls were white - I stenciled blue wording as a simple border (only above windows and doors) and I never had problems finding cheap quilts that had blue in them! That way I could change it out every few months and have a new look. After Bryce arrived though I got a little tired of doing that. It got to be too much so we bought what we have now - I only have pictures of it from the internet though... here is what we have:
Well - I'm off to watch Medium! Have a great night and hopefully I'll get those pictures from the weekend up tomorrow!

Busy, Busy!

It's been a busy couple of days! I haven't really done anything much - our 3 year old has just been BUSY! My hubby gave me the weekend "off" (he watched Bryce most of the weekend) and I still feel like I didn't do anything and that I was still busy! Although - I guess I was - I slept in, I watched a movie, I went shopping at Home Depot, I did some planting...

I didn't get in any blogging nor did I take any pictures. I think it's because my off days were pretty well... dull. Which was nice! Tomorrow it's back to busy Bryce although we will be heading up to my grandmother's for the day and my parents for dinner. Then it's back home to celebrate my hubby's birthday! He has to teach class till 7:30 so we won't see him until after that.

I'm really, really hoping that the weather in the morning is nice though because I would love to get Bryce outside to the park for an "early" morning play date - 10:00 is early for us!

Speaking of kids - I don't know how some of you all out there do it! Granted, I understand that as the kids get older it's easier to get stuff done and to keep nice things out in the house right now. All of my decorating is aimed around being child safe. Plus, we host a lot of play dates at my house so I try to keep it safe not only for my 3 year old but smaller kids as well. Yet, I am having the hardest time decorating the house and keeping it all in order! I also can't seem to decide on anything anymore! Before we had Bryce (in the townhouse) everything had color. I think it's because I realized that if I got tired of it I could change it pretty easily. Not so easy with little ones! So in the new house, everything is neutral so that I can add color in. But like I said in my earlier post - not so fun! It's bland. I need to get out and get some curtains or fabric to spice the rooms up but I just don't have the time! There is NO way my 3 year old is going to wait around for me to find fabric at G-Street fabrics! Ha. It's also too hard to buy fabric online w/o seeing the actual color. Plus, when Dave gets home the last thing I want to do is fight traffic to get down to "town" to go to the stores. I'm tired after a day of Bryce! It's very hard.

So for all of you mommies out there that decorate _and_ have kids - wow, I'm truly impressed. Ok, I better get to sleep or else Bryce will have to get his own breakfast in the morning! I'll try and write more tomorrow about our week and the teeny tiny projects I got done over the weekend.