Recipe: The perfect weekend morning

Who doesn't love the weekend? The best part: cooking breakfast with Tony! Breakfast is my favorite meal but sadly I refuse to get up early enough to eat more than yogurt or instant oatmeal during the week. I eat breakfast at my desk pretty much everyday so sitting down to enjoy a "real" breakfast is such a treat....a luxury, really.

The ritual: wake up without an alarm, spend extra time playing with the pup, play some good tunes in the background, and then...get busy cooking.

Sit down to breakfast and enjoy the morning sunlight...a recipe for the perfect weekend morning.

Begley loves the weekends too!

Happy weekend!
Rachel

Decorating Inspiration

This past month I've been busy collecting lots of decorating inspiration for our house. I am ridiculously excited to have a house to decorate, a blank canvas for all of my ideas. Living in apartments for the last 5 years has been very limiting when it comes to personal style. Below are my two favorite photos which were featured in an article on Apartment Therapy.

I envision our living room looking a lot like the photo above. Our couch and chair are the same beige as this one and we're painting the walls blue. We'll throw in some cool prints with the pillows and there you have it: our living room.

I LOVE this photo, I love every element here, I want to move right into this place! I would love to have this living room but we've already got that design covered. We are, however, using this same color scheme for our kitchen and dining room. Gray walls with white trim, golden yellow and brown as accent colors - Its going to be excellent, I'm stoked, enough said.

Friday, May 29, 2009

Our House

Here it is, the reason I've been completely MIA for nearly a month.....our house! We have been insanely busy running here and there, doing one thing or another for the house almost every single night this past month. We should be closing on the house next week, we should have closed on May 20th but I've come to learn that this stuff does not always go according to plan...actually, it never goes according to plan. We've had about 50 different plans at this point and none of them have worked out.

Anyway, I've still been busy collecting some good stuff so hopefully I'll have a few days to make some posts before the real craziness begins. This house has already been a lot of sweat and tears on our part and I'm sure the blood is soon to come with all the moving and painting.

I'll post more photos of the house in the future, after we get moved in. Hopefully some good before and afters!

Friday, May 29, 2009

DIY: Recipe Cards

It's no secret that I love collecting recipes so what better project than DIY recipe cards? I've thought about designing my own card (that matches our handmade invitations and other wedding stationary) and including a special family recipe to give as another favor at our wedding. I've also considered having a cake bar with several different old-fashioned layer cakes instead of a traditional wedding cake - I could share those cake recipes on cards and display them on the cake table for people to pick up as they get a piece of cake. I'm not sure if I'll use these ideas but I'm definitely going to design my own recipe cards to have on hand because well, why not? They're great, I love them and they would make great gifts!

You can find recipe card templates for the ones above at Etsy and Apartment Therapy. For a small price you can download the template and customize it to your own preference but with a little creativity, card stock and printer you can make your own 100% customized card so... why not?

Thursday, April 23, 2009

DIY: Coasters

This project is fantastic - I love DIY projects that are simple but still look like you would have paid a big price in the store. I ran across this DIY coaster project because someone made these as favors for their wedding. I'm not so much interested in that as I am in just making them for myself! I could also see making larger ones for use as kitchen trivets or using ones of all different sizes and patterns as a great wall art project. These would also make great custom gifts for any occasion - you could even make monogram coasters for someone.... yup, this is a keeper.

For complete directions click here.

Side note: After reading over the directions I became even more excited at the fact that you get to use Mod Podge. I used this stuff in high school for everything - collages on storage trunks, lamps, you name it and I Mod Podged it. Sadly though, I haven't had much use for it since then so the fact that this project uses Mod Podge gives it an additional star from me! Slightly dorky, yes... the end.

Unique Idea: Screen Door Pantry

Another genre of my collection that you'll be seeing a lot of is home ideas. Since we'll be looking for a house soon you can bet that I'll be looking for design inspiration. This is one idea that I absolutely love:

From Apartment Therapy

Its so unique, affordable and just all around awesome. Hopefully we'll have a pantry so that I can actually put this one to the test (hope you like it, Tony!) I also love the use of old jars as storage containers and the fact that they illuminated the inside. The only problem: you have to be organized since everything is on display...but, that's not a bad thing!