Pumpkin time!

We got some HUGE pumpkins to carve when we were in Wisconsin a few weeks ago and finally got around to carving them tonight. This is actually only the 2nd pumpkin Chris has ever carved (can you believe that?!?), so he was really excited to spend his birthday evening immersed in pumpkin goo.


I really like to use the fun templates you can buy at the stores, but we didn't get that done this year. I free-handed mine (not a very complicated design!) and Chris and JR found "templates" online to base theirs on. So anyway, here are a few pics from tonight.


P.S. Happy Birthday to Chris!

Other pre-party projects

Just a couple other fun things we did before the party!

We bought some almost-new furniture from a couple moving to Florida. I think it's the newest and best-matching furniture we've ever had, haha! See pics in their clean rooms below :)

When we moved in, my mom brought us this captain's chair that was taking up space in her hallway. It's been sitting in our dining room but it had this hideous green tapestry cover (over the top of orange 'leather'!). One night, I couldn't sleep so I decided to go ahead and recover it. I just happened to have some fabric left from recovering the regular dining room chairs, and had just found my upholstery stapler when I was cleaning my craft room, so it was quite the easy project. I was pretty happy how it turned out :)


Our street is gorgeous in the fall, so I couldn't resist finding a few choice leafs and attempting to press them. I stacked them between a huge pile of magazines that I need to get rid of, and they dried/flattened beautifully! I wanted to display them somehow, so I decided to reuse some frames I already had. I painted the cardboard mat in the frame the same color as the wall and stuck the leaves in. I think they turned out nicely, and I can change the contents of the frames with the seasons. I'm thinking paper snowflakes or maybe pine sprigs for winter...

Last, but not least... I had some cute small pumpkins and lots of glitter and decided that they would go well together. I made the mistake of not making sure the craft room door was latched when I went downstairs for a while. I heard a thump upstairs and immediately thought "Oh no, the glitter is out and the cat got in the craft room!" She did spread the glitter around pretty well, but thankfully didn't get the entire jar dumped out. I just thought the little cat prints in the glitter were funny. There was also a trail of prints on the rug, but it didn't photograph well, lol :)

We're having a party-

QUICK, Clean the house!!! Turns out cleaning the ENTIRE house is not such a quick task!

Since we moved in last December, various people have asked us to have a gathering of some sort so they could see the inside of the house. We've talked about it, but never decided it was the right time until about the 1st of October. We both love Halloween, and it's fun to decorate for it, so we decided it was as good of a time as any to throw a party. The easy part: Sending out the invitations! The hard part: Cleaning and getting everything ready!

Though I'm sure there are many projects we could have completed before we had this little shindig, the only major thing we needed to do was paint the dining room. Paint color was a decision about 10 months in the making. Our dining room at our old house was red and we loved it. We got some red paint samples and painted big splotches on the wall, but it really didn't compliment the three different colors of woodwork in the dining room (four if you count the painted crown molding). I was bummed and stuck of what to do, so it got shoved to the back burner and we ignored the bright red shapes in the dining room for months.

One day at an open house, I had an unusual number of comments on the paint color of the living/dining room in the house. So many, actually, that I had to ask the owner what the color was. Applesauce Cake, she said. She actually picked it out for her parent's farm house that has lots of oak woodwork. Bingo!! Maybe Applesauce Cake would work in my oak-filled room! Turned out that we loved the color, so we got our standard gallon and a quart that it takes to paint these rooms.

When it came time to paint, I couldn't find my trim cup, so I just held on to the quart and went around the room. I opened up the gallon to do the rolling, put some on the wall and thought "That doesn't quite look right... It must just be because it's wet." It wasn't until I was done rolling the first coat and poured the remainder of the quart into the gallon that I discovered I was right. They were two totally different colors! (see picture) UGH! So the paint went back to Menards, turns out the formulas were right, somehow the machine got some extra red color in the gallon and threw it off. Two new cans of correctly-colored paint later, I changed the walls back to the right color. Even though it took an extra trip to the store, we're really happy with the color and got lots of compliments on it.

Not having anything else major to do to get ready for the party, we set our sights on cleaning. Well, I did... Chris kept telling me we had plenty of time to get everything done. (He did admit, after the fact, that he had no idea how long everything would take, hahaha!) One of our friends suggested we get some plastic tubs, go from room to room and throw everything that doesn't belong in to the tub and hide it until after the party. Though that sounded like a tempting idea, we didn't resort to the plastic tubs :) Luckily, Chris was able to take the day of the party off work and we did get everything done in time. Good thing too- there were so many people here, there wasn't room for our crap laying all over the place! ;)

So what have we learned?
1. If you're using more than one can of paint in a room, make sure they are the same color before you waste hours painting!
2. When you have a big house, it's a brilliant idea to have a cleaning schedule. It's much easier to clean one room a day than it is to clean an entire house at the last minute! Either that or get rich and hire Merry Maids...
3. Parties are fun, this is definitely a party house!

Porch Sale!

Because the garage is slightly hazardous (and not to mention full...), we had our first "Porch Sale" today at the Big Pink House. It's been a long time coming... we had intended to do it in the spring when sales are plentiful and weather is nice, but didn't get it done. This was probably one of the last nice weekends we will have this fall, so we decided it was now or never! It was quite a chilly start to the day, but finally warmed up after 11 or so.

Luckily, we didn't have to do too much hunting and sorting to get ready for the sale. I've been putting things to be sold in boxes in the basement for quite a while. I suppose if I were a little smarter, I would have been pricing things as I went also :) My mom also sent a bunch of boxes of "stuff" for us to dispose of for her- next time I'm going to make her stay and sort it with me!

Because of our lack of actual planning for this sale, we are fortunate to live on a busy street! We put a couple signs up and nearby intersections and one in the front yard and stayed quite busy most of the day. We ended up selling quite a bit and making some good $$- yay! We boxed up the leftovers and took them to Goodwill right away. It's nice to be rid of some of those things!

We also got to meet quite a few interesting people, some that even live nearby. A few knew past owners of the house, lots made comments about how much they admire the house, and a few even thought of buying it over the years.