I am the Most Awesome Mom of the Year.

Yes. It is true. I know it is still early in 2012, but I have declared myself the most awesome mom of the year.  I think you will agree with my awesomeness when you read what has garnered me so much, well, awesomeness. 

This all started back in December, 2011. The boys were on Christmas break and we decided to head over to Dallas to go the fancy mall. (I call it the fancy mall because they have one hallway that has all of the fancy, expensive stores; i.e. Versace, Oscar De La Renta, Gucci, etc. One of these days I want to actually walk into one of these stores, but I'm afraid I would look so completely out of place. Anyways, I have completely gone off on a tangent so back to what makes me the most awesome mom of the year.)

We went to the fancy mall because they had a special train display for Christmas that I had heard was really fun to see. Here is a picture of the boys in front of the train display. 

The train display was interesting, but not very big so we didn't spend a lot of time there. That of course means there was more time for shopping. This fancy mall has one of our favorite stores in it called the Paper Source. So we head to it and this is were my journey to the most awesome mom begins. 

Connor found this package of mustaches that he really, really wanted. There was one for each day of the week. Even though it was only a week before Christmas, Connor gave me his puppy dog look of "pleeeeaaaassse mom" and I bought them for him. 

This is what they look like:

These are not just any ol'fake mustaches, no they are Stylish Mustaches! (My particular favorite is Thursday's, The Weasel.) Connor was so happy to have these that he opened the package as soon we left the store and walked around the mall sporting the Monday Herostache.

So you are now thinking well this is a nice story Christie, but why does this make you the most awesome mom of the year? Because of this: 

On the way home from the fancy mall, Connor said he wanted to wear one of the mustaches for his spring school pictures. And here is where I get awesome! I told him if he can keep one of the mustaches nice and not used, he can wear it in the spring pictures. He doesn't believe me. So his older brother piped up and said "Connor when we get home write a contract and have her sign it and then she will have to let you." Those older brothers can be such instigators at times.


As soon as we get home, Connor quickly drafted the above contract and had me sign it right away. He hung the contract up on his magnetic board and picked Sunday's Hollywoodstache to keep special because we all know that is the most appropriate for a Spring Picture Day.


Well that contract and Hollywoodstache hung up in his room for a long 3 months. He was determined to call my bluff and see if I would really come through and become the awesome mom I was destined to be. And in the middle of March, Spring picture day finally arrived. Connor brought me the contract and Hollywoodstache with the picture order form and gave me that look of "is she really going to let me go through with this?" After looking at all of the information for a couple of minutes of uncomfortable silence, I said, "Let's go pick out a Hollywoodstache appropriate outfit!"


I emailed his teacher explaining that I had indeed agreed to this Hollywoodstache picture and I also included a note on the order form for the photographer as well. That morning Connor went off to school all ready to have his Hollywoodstache properly documented through the School Spring Picture Day. 


We finally received the pictures this week. And I must tell all of you moms out there that if there is any way you can get your own Most Awesome Mom award and have your kid wear a fake mustache in a school picture, please do. It is so worth it! He is so proud of this picture. 


So without further ado, I will now present you Connor in all of his Hollywoodstache Spring Picture Day Awesomeness: 

And here it is cropped in a little closer so you can fully appreciate the Hollywood mustache. 

Connor picked out his own clothes for the picture. He knew that he needed something dapper to go along with that stache. 


So that is my story of how I have wrapped up the Most Awesome Mom of 2012 already. I let my child wear a fake mustache for school pictures. 


(Full Disclosure: Spring pictures are not published in the yearbook and I did not allow him to wear the mustache for the class picture. These pictures are only for us and friends and family to enjoy. So no yearbooks were maligned with a kid wearing a mustache in his picture. Although I think that would be kind of awesome too.)


Thanks for visiting me and I hope you have enjoyed my tale of the Hollywoodstache, Spring Picture Day and Connor. :) 

Oops. I forgot to show the finished walls!

I realized that I never posted about my new walls being finished. We got this finished and then when right into the next project, so I got side-tracked a bit. 

I believe this is where I left off in my last post. The walls were going up and the finishing touches were being done so we could paint everything. The process ended up taking longer than what we originally thought, but we love, love how it turned out. 

TA DA......I am in love with our new walls. And the new paint. I ended up going through 8 different paint samples before I found the right color. It is Benjamin Moore Shaker Beige. 


Everything turned out just like I envisioned it would, which is good because Chris had some serious doubts about my vision. 

But he loves them too, which is really good because I didn't want to hear 'about the time Christie decided we needed walls and it turned out to be a complete disaster' for the rest of my life. 


It really is amazing because they look like they have been here all along. 


And I don't think I ever posted my canvas wall. 

I had this set of the beach pictures turned into canvas'. Thank goodness for Groupon. It took me a few months of getting coupons to buy all of these because canvas is expensive!  I got them from Canvas on Demand and they turned out really nice. Most of you will recognize these pictures from our Christmas cards last year. My sister-in-law Kathleen Frank took them for us last summer. 

Right after we got the walls finished, this was delivered. Actually two days after the walls were finished this ended up in my living room: our new wood floors! 


I will post about that whole process in a few days. One word pretty much sums it up though: Dust. 


Thanks for visiting me! 

We have walls!

We are moving fast with our home improvements. Ever since we bought this house, I wanted to change this:

The 2nd level is open to the family room and can get noisy. Sometimes it is hard for the boys to go to sleep because they can hear the television and sometimes it is hard to hear the television if they are upstairs playing. Or if anyone is talking downstairs it travels right upstairs so I really wanted to close up these openings. I had no idea how much it would cost or how difficult it would be. I decided to go ahead and get some estimates to see if this was a possibility for us or not. And thankfully it was very possible! 

Yesterday they started by ripping off the ledges...

and then framing and building walls! 

Here is the back and what it looked like upstairs. 

 

They added soundproofing insulation, and drywalled everything.  

We have walls! I am so excited and hoping this helps keeps the noise from traveling up to down and from down to up a little less. 


Today they are finishing them off with the mudding and texturing, and then we are having everything painted.  I hope everything will be done by the end of the weekend and I will post more pics. 


Thanks for visiting me!

Home Improvements Are Happening Again!

Now that the holidays are over and our trip to Disney World is done :(, we are back to finishing up the kitchen. 


This is what we were left to finish:

We finally hired someone to come out and pull those three center cabinets out so that we can actually put those barstools under the counter. 

We also wanted to do something with this eyesore of a utility sink in our laundry room. This room is right next to our kitchen. The man we hired had the great idea to take the cabinet he was removing from up there, and put it here with a new granite counter top. He said he had a scrap piece of granite that would match our existing granite. 

He showed up bright and early this last Monday and got to work. 

This is right after he removed the 2 piece cabinet that would go into the laundry room now. 

Here is a pic of that cabinet pulled out. See someone familiar in the corner there checking everything out? She was so spazzy on Monday. She would want to check out what he was doing and would peek around the corner at him, but would not dare come close. And every time he would go outside to get something she would bark at him coming back in. All day long and he didn't leave until almost 6. You would think she would have got used to him coming and going after about hour 4, but nope. 

Here is the new cabinet in the laundry room with the new sink top just put in. Yea! Huge Improvement!

And now the cabinet with the third one pulled out and the new cabinet ends installed to give it a finished look. 

And here is the final product! We love it! I now need to get in there and refinish these cabinets and then the kitchen will be done. 

This was the only bad thing. When the cabinets were removed we found out what we were afraid of: no tile under them. The woman we bought the house from left us one box of this tile in the garage. I think it is going to just be enough to fill this space. I hope! 

One of the cool things we had him add were these pull-out recycling bins in the cabinet. We had this ugly, old trash can out for recycling and now we can hide them! 

And here is the new laundry sink and cabinet. Huge, huge improvement. 

 And of course when you start doing home improvements something will break and need replacing. Our dryer broke right before we started this whole thing. We had someone out to repair it and it didn't work and the next repair was going to be more costly. 

So we decided instead of fixing this dryer for the third time, we would just finish off our new laundry room with these:

We wanted to get stainless, but they cost so much more that it was kind of silly to do that. These are huge! I washed our king size bedspread yesterday with no problem. And with two growing boys, I think these are going to be so worth it! 

So that is where we are with the home improvements. I'm just waiting on the tile guy to come and fix the floor before I get into refinishing the cabinets. We have some more big projects we are going to do over the next two months, so stay tuned! 

Thanks for visiting me!

Our Disney World Vacation

We recently went on our fourth trip to Disney World and it was fantastic. We thought this might be our last trip for awhile, but both boys enjoyed it so much that I'm sure we will be back sooner than we thought we would.


This time we pulled the boys out of school so we could go during Disney's off season. Even though there was a pile of homework to do when we got back, it was so worth it. The lines were pretty much non-existent and the weather was just about perfect. It was a little too cold for swimming and we had a little rain on our last day, but other than that it was wonderful for walking around all day at the parks. It was so nice not to fight crowds and really enjoy our time there. One night at Magic Kingdom the boys rode Buzz Lightyear 6 times in a row. There was no line at all. They got off the ride and got right back on it. Amazing! 


I decided to try and make a little video featuring some of the pictures I shot and the ones we purchased through Disney Photopass. I also added in some video here and there, but I have to get much better at the video taking with my camera. I couldn't get it to focus a lot of the time so I need to be reading the manual and figure that out. 


There is audio on the video, so make sure you have your sound on. 


Here is it! I hope you enjoy it! 





Disney World February 2012 from Christie Ellis on Vimeo.


Thanks for visiting me!

Project Life-2012

I decided to give the Project Life project another go this year. For those of you not familiar with it, it means I take a picture every single day so that I will have a complete look at our life in 2012. Some people do this weekly or monthly, but I'm going to attempt one every single day. I tried this back in 2009 and made it until August and then fizzled out. I hope to make it the entire year this time. 


I'm off to a good start. I have the first three weeks of pictures printed, documented and in my album.  

This is my title page. I got the blue page from Cathy Zielske's blog. She offered it as a free download. It was originally orange, but I changed it to blue so it would match my beach pictures more. She also had it in a straight 6x12 photo sleeve, which I thought I had in my stash, but mine was broken into three 4x6 slots. I just cut my page into three sections so it would work. I actually kind of like it this way. 

When you flip that 6x12 page over, you see the full title page plus three bonus pictures from our photo shoot this last summer. A lot of you probably saw some of these pictures on our Christmas cards. All of these were taken by my Sister-in-Law Kathleen Frank.  If you are in the Satellite Beach, FL area and need a photographer, you should definitely give her a call!

This is my first week's layout. The only thing I have to complete is the dates for the week on the blue card on the left. I'm not sure how I want to do the dates yet so I'm waiting to complete them. 

All of the cards and page protectors are from Becky Higgins Project Life Clementine Core kit. I really like the colors in this set. On this first week, I did the journaling in my handwriting, but I think I'm going to change this as the weeks go on. 

This is my second week. I decided to go easy on myself this week and just took shots from around our house. 

This is how I did my journaling for this week and next. I got the idea from Cathy Z's blog again. I really like typing up the whole week and including it on one card. This way I can get more pictures in for the week or I can add more filler cards to add a little more creativity. (And of course, after I print this, take a picture of it and load it onto the blog, do I realize that I misspelled turquoise on the last line! grrr! I will have to redo that one now.)

This is my week three. I love making the pictures big and then splitting them between two slots. I think it helps to keep the pages from getting too busy. 

I made the Enjoy Life from this page, plus the camera on the pink from the title page myself in PSE. I have also made a variety of cards like these to use throughout the year. One thing I found when I was going through the kit, is that there weren't very many horizontal filler cards included. So I just made some for me to use! 

That is my first three weeks complete. I really, really want to keep up this year. I set up a dedicated area in my scraproom and plan on keeping everything out and visible all year. I'm hoping that keeps me on track!


I won't be posting every week on here, but every now and then I will just to show what we have been up to. 


Thanks for visiting me!!!

Our Kitchen Reveal-95% Complete!

First off, I have to say that we love our new kitchen!! It took quite a while to redo these cabinets (over two months) and I'm not completely finished yet, but for the most part it is done. 


To refresh everyone's memory on what we started with, how about a few before pictures? 

I don't believe I have ever posted the above picture before, but this is the kitchen on the day we decided to make an offer on the house. We were taking another look before we decided for sure and I snapped a bunch of pictures to look at while we were deciding between this house and another one. 

This picture was snapped on my Iphone right after I got everything unpacked and put away in the new kitchen. 

Then this last picture was when we tried to brighten everything up by painting the walls green. I really wanted that color to work, but it just didn't. I think it brought out the yellow in the cabinets even more and just didn't look right with the granite. 

So next I decided to take on the huge project to redo all of these cabinets too. There were times when I was in the middle of this when I thought what in the world have I got myself into. It felt like all I did was cabinets for two months. I was so sick of cabinets. 

So. Sick. Of. Cabinets.

But then....I finished. We painted the kitchen a nice chocolate brown. And we got new light fixtures that Chris installed. And we decided that the white refrigerator just did not look right and on black friday took advantage of a killer deal on a new stainless refrigerator. And our old dishwasher would leak on the floor sometimes. Not every load that was washed, but after about every 10 or so there would be a puddle of water on the floor. And it was loud. So very loud. So we decided to replace that too with a black friday sale. 

And now we have this beautiful kitchen that we absolutely love!!!!!!!

Once again I used the Rustoleam Cabinet Transformation Kit. (I really think I should be a paid spokesperson for them at this point!) The outside cabinets were done with the Pure White and glaze. The island was done with the leftover Expresso kit I had from redoing the boy's bathrooms earlier this year. So far I have bought two of the white kits and one dark kit, and got two new bathrooms and a new kitchen out of them. Not including the new appliances, this kitchen remodel for the kits, new hardware, paint and new lighting ran us about $600. Not too bad!!!! And another bonus from redoing all of those cabinets is that I don't hate the kitchen floor anymore! I think it really works with the new cabinet colors. 

I still have one last part to finish, which is why this post is titled as 95% complete. 

I decided to wait to do this part after the holidays. We want to have those three center cabinets removed so that we can actually push the barstools under the counter. We will have to hire a handyman for that because we have no idea how cut those out and keep the granite from crashing down. 

So for the year 2011, I have refinished 46 cabinet doors (fronts and backs), 25 drawers and 2 medicine cabinets and completely redone 2 bathrooms and a kitchen. Not too shabby, if I do say so myself! 

Thanks for visiting me!