as we quickly approach our one year anniversary of home ownership (ah!!), we've found that lately, we've both been very frustrated and just feeling kind of blah about our house. not that we don't love our house, we do, but time and effort has been spent on other things and our house projects have been on standby for the past few months. just when we think we're ready to get back to the renovating, reese needs surgery, we go on vacation.... our next 7 weekends are already spoken for and full of fun activities. to add to all of this, our next planned renovation project is a big one - we're going to put down all new hardwood floors on the entire first floor of the house (minus the kitchen). we're excited to both work on this project and have it completed. the current floors are hard to keep clean because they really have no finish on them, they are splintering up all over the place (because they are so thin, the top groove portion of the tongue and groove can come up very easily, causing large splinters of wood), and they just look bad with some large stains and scratches. not to mention the fact that we still just have a piece of plywood at the bottom of our stairs where the hardwood is missing...

we've found, that over the last year, it's very easy to not fully live in the house because there is always some project, that we want to do, someday... for example - we might lean some pictures up against the wall where we want to hang them, but we don't hang them because the wall still needs to be painted. we haven't unpacked really any of our decor items because we know we'll just have to pack them back up again when we move furniture to do the floors. we haven't unpacked all of our clothes cause we might get closet organizers. when we're busy with working on the house, these things make sense and don't really bother us. but now that we're kind of on hold, all of those little things are really starting to bug me. a lot. i guess that for me, the house either needs to be a construction zone, or it needs to be a home. i'm fine with it going back and forth and switching as we work on projects, but i don't really like living in this inbetween state, esp. since it's been that way for months.

because of all of this, we decided that we're going to give our house a major cleaning and organizing, and start to put away, hang up, touch up, whatever little things need to be done. hopefully, by doing this, we can move past construction zone and just enjoy living in our house for a little while.

we started last night by hanging up the photographs we bought at an art fair months ago.

this one is across from the built-in hutch in our hallway.


i think we were drawn to this artist's work because his photographs reminded us of our house... for some strange reason... :-) by the way, that frame is from target and i am really happy with how the wood of the frame matches the woodwork in the hallway.


we had a hard time finding a frame for our second photograph (can you spot it?), i'm still not super happy with what we ended up with, but i think it looks ok all together. we finally got a matte for our keep calm print. now i just to find something else for the frame in the top right corner, and i might replace the 3 photographs in the middle frame. i like this arrangement though cause i can easily update or even add to the layout.


here's the new photograph - at first it almost looks like a spider web and then you realize that it's actually just a wall with an outlet.


i also gave up on my idea of having fresh herbs in the kitchen. they grew... but not very well. i don't think i gave them enough space in the little greenhouse, and with the cats, i don't think we have many other options for herbs inside. so instead i got a few new little house plants.


oh - our orchid lost its flowers a little while ago but still looks like it's doing ok (ignore the one dead leaf) - anyone know anything about orchids? will the flowers grow back? also, maybe i should add "clean the windows" to my to-do list...


and finally, a slightly blurry, but much better looking, reese. he seems to be getting better slowly, i've noticed that he's walking a little better now and just seems to be more happy overall. he's such a good dog :-)