Wednesday, December 5, 2012
We'll be back a little later today with the second of our Twelve Days of Christmas Giveaway posts, so stay tuned. If you've not entered yesterday's First Day giveaway for a $50 gift certificate to Bishop Boutique, be sure to head on over and leave a comment.
In our last post about Wendy's great-grandfather's chair, we filled you in on the chair's history, as well as the journey it had taken from basement to basement until it reached our home in need of a little TLC.
The chair has transferred hands several times in the last 40-50 years, each owner having full intentions to refinish and repair the chair back to a functional piece of furniture. Who knows how long it had been in the state it was in, but to the recollection of Wendy's mother, it was even in the Wendy's great-grandfather's basement for quite a bit of time.
Wendy's Great-Grandfather and Great-Grandmother are in the back row, 3rd and 4th from the right, holding her great-aunt Marge.
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Tuesday, December 4, 2012
This Reader Reward is now closed. Congratulations to our winner, Lindsay, who plans to buy a Babar Shawl because she loves elephants.
On the first day of Christmas my true love gave to me, a Bishop Boutique certificate for a fabulous shoes and accessories shopping spree...
As part of our Twelve Days of Christmas giveaway, we're happy to bring to you a $50 gift certificate to Bishop Boutique. Located in the heart of Old Town, Bishop Boutique is a chic and intimate sanctuary for the fashion savvy. It offers a unique selection of shoes, handbags, accessories and seasonal flair to keep any woman looking stylish all year long - even in this cold weather! From the avant-garde to more classic styles, indulge in a shopping experience designed to look and feel like the closet of your dreams!
Can we also mention that Bishop Boutique is routinely one of Lulu's favorite stores? She always tries to pull her way into the store to visit with the store clerks and get a treat or two.
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Tuesday, December 4, 2012
This Christmas season we're thrilled to bring you the biggest giveaway we've ever hosted on our blog, and best of all, it highlights our wonderful town! There's nothing quite like Old Town Alexandria during the holidays. From the twinkling light-lined King Street to the bustling shops that occupy the area from the Potomac River to the metro, the feeling of the holidays permeates the air. One wonderful aspect of the area is the number of locally owned and operated small business boutique shopping options that Old Town has to offer. This holiday season we're partnering with the Old Town Boutique District
to bring you our "Twelve Days of Christmas" Reader Reward!
A partridge in a pear tree? Two turtle doves? Three french hens? Though these were possibly wonderful and festive gifts at some point in history, they're simply not a practical gesture today. Rather than try to scrounge up eight maids-a-milking or ten lords-a-leaping, this holiday season you'll have the opportunity to win up to twelve gift certificates to local Old Town shops.
Through the generosity of these small businesses in Old Town Alexandria, we'll be giving away a $50 gift certificate to each of the following stores over the course of twelve days. Here's the exciting lineup:
Beginning this afternoon we'll be opening up one Reader Reward each day with a dedicated blog post. You can enter to win that gift card by simply leaving a comment on the Reader Reward post, or by tweeting a message that we specify. Just check the individual contest pages as they're posted for details and eligibility, and please see our complete terms & conditions page for more details.
Don't worry, we won't be abandoning DIY blogging during this giveaway period. Resuming tomorrow, we'll still be doing daily posts on our many ongoing projects.
This holiday season, avoid the stress of mall traffic and support our wonderful local small business owners by choosing Old Town Alexandria as your shopping destination either online or in person. Make these Twelve Days of Christmas ones you won't soon forget!
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We can finally put our feet up! If you've been following along the last few weeks, you know we were feverishly preparing our home for the Scottish Christmas Walk Weekend Designer Tour of Homes here in Alexandria, Virginia. We scrubbed, sawed, painted, restored, and prepared for the big day in anticipation of hundreds of tour goers descending upon our home.
After leaving you with our checklist progress update on Friday, we ended up working at warp speed throughout the day on Friday and bright and early Saturday morning before the tour. We were able to check everything off of our list except for hanging the shutters in the front window. Not bad for the lengthy checklist we thrust onto ourselves. In order to focus on the task at hand we even carted Lulu off to an alternate location to protect her fragile and neurotic psyche from complete and total over stimulus. She knew what was up.
We also made a point to pause on Friday evening and drink our fair share of scotch (celebrating the weekend of course) at the Taste of Scotland event. As usual, it was a great event and we had a wonderful time.
But we're getting ahead of ourselves. Now that the weekend's festivities have wrapped up, we can take you on a virtual tour of our home as it looked this weekend for the tour, as well as give you a behind the scenes look at one of the busiest weeks of our lives.
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Friday, November 30, 2012
The. List. You know, the one I showed you two weeks ago when I confessed about my freak out over preparing to be on Alexandria's Designer Tour of Homes this Christmas? With just one day until the big event, we wanted to give you a glimpse inside the walls of our home, and how and if our frantic efforts are paying off.
Therefore, we'll circle back on the items we knew we needed to accomplish, how we're doing with the "nice to haves," and how our seasonal decorating/specific tour preparations are shaping up. We've also added a fair number of new items since last week. Ugh. So here it is, in all its glory:
1. Purchase chairs for the sun porch.
Woo to the hoo, this one is done. As we shared with you two weeks ago, we scored two great chairs for a rock bottom price from the Restoration Hardware Outlet.
2. Locate two additional frames for the sun porch, frame art in four frames, hang frames.
Our late night Target treks paid off. We secured the two additional frames we needed, and hung them on either side of the white hutch in the sun porch. As for the art for the frames, we have a little something special up our sleeves specifically for the Christmas season and home tour that will be put into place later today. We'll be sure to share photos of this art project soon.
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