Monday, December 19, 2016
The holidays are squarely upon us, and 'tis the season for gathering with friends and family. Whether you are hosting a family Christmas dinner, having a few neighbors over for a dinner party, or simply dressing up your table to be more festive, creating a beautiful centerpiece doesn't have to be time consuming or expensive.
Alex and I recently hosted a scotch tasting and dinner party at our house during Alexandria's Scottish Christmas Walk Weekend. The weekend celebrates Alexandria's Scottish heritage, as the city was named for Scotsman John Alexander, an original founder of the city and owner of much of its land. The weekend features a festive parade, a holiday tour of homes (here's a look back to when our home was on the tour lineup), a heather and greens sale, and many more yule tide and Scottish inspired festivities. Hands down, it's our favorite weekend of the year in Alexandria, and in our household, officially marks the start of the Christmas season.
Getting ready for the party seemed a bit overwhelming, because it not only meant preparing for a dinner event, but it also meant making sure our home was properly decked out for the holidays. We had a tree to buy and decorate...
...exterior window wreaths to hang...
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Thursday, December 15, 2016
What's black, and white & red all over? My newest holiday baking experiment, a moist chocolate cake with a sweet peppermint buttercream!
It feels like it's been ages since I wrote a baking post! While I haven't been diligent about documenting my various creations, I love surprising my friends and family with a homemade baked good (typically of their choosing) for their birthday.
For example, my parents' cake this past July we nicknamed the earthquake/flux capacitor cake. If the photo doesn't answer any questions you may have as to why we named it that, there was a massive crack/rift that occurred in the top layer. It was a complete and total #pinterestfail and absolutely not "blog worthy", but rest assured it was delicious and was all consumed in short order.
Alex's birthday in November brought about a labor intensive but crowd pleasing sea salt caramel cupcake. These little goodies consisted of a caramel cake, filled with gooey caramel, and topped with a swirl of sea salt caramel buttercream. Personally I found them a little too sweet, but the birthday boy gave them two thumbs up.
Which brings me to this holiday season's latest birthday treat. A good friend of ours has a December birthday, and when I asked her what kind of cake I could make her this year she was brave enough to leave it up to the baker. I poked around online for some inspiration, but no matter what I looked at I ultimately kept coming back to her favorite childhood cake, red velvet with candy cane frosting. I made this for her a few years back and wanted to put a new twist on it this time around.
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Who would have thought the 1990s hip hop party anthem "Jump Around" would eventually serve double duty as the theme of how I attack renovation projects? Everlast, DJ Lethal, and Danny Boy May never have intended for a 30 something DIY enthusiast to hang this catchy tune on her approach to home projects, but it happened, and it's all thanks to my mounting impatience and desire to just get something completed.
For anyone who is following our renovation journey spanning more than a decade, we thank you. Due to a limited availability of time, a desire to do things ourselves, and a tendency to prioritize "doing it right" over "doing it quickly," we move at a snail's pace when it comes to home improvement projects. What's worse is the simple fact that when we're starting to make progress on a large project, I'm frequently guilty of making us shift gears due to my impatience. Yes, yes, I'm fully admitting to being the catalyst for so many side projects taking over primary projects and massively derailing timelines. I often blame Alex for the slowdown, but it's at least partly on me. Let's call it "Wendy's Law." As a result, I'm sure when reading along it's hard to follow our progress, and can say that as someone living through the process, it can even be confusing for me.
The point of all of this is to tell you, in true "Wendy's Law" form, I've gone and thrown a wrench in our DIY plans.
While we're making a lot of progress on the massive renovation of the living room in our new house (yes, the one that's been ongoing for almost two years now)...
...as well as closing in on the finish line of our built in bench project...
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One of the most difficult aspects of renovating an old home is to ensure your alterations are not only functional and attractive, but are in keeping with the character of the house.
Anyone who has renovated a home of a certain age knows this all too well. The simple fact is that an old home’s character and identity comes from its many small details that were given the utmost of attention. If you complete a project in a old house that retains some of its original detail, and you and don’t take the time and effort to mimic these original details during the new project, your work often ends up sticking out like a sore thumb.
When we had ducted HVAC installed in our new home, we had to work hard to ensure the ducts would run inconspicuously throughout the house. While we were able to accomplish this in almost all cases, the one place where the air return duct had to make an unsightly appearance was beneath our lovely main staircase.
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Tuesday, November 22, 2016
We've been working on many projects over the past several weeks, but we've been rather quiet here on the blog.
Seems that we've been working on a lot but haven't been getting many of those items completed. Add a crazy work schedule, Halloween, now Thanksgiving, and an early October vacation into the mix and you've got yourself a recipe for blog slackerdom.
However, what we lack in blog posts I'm hoping we've made up for in progress that we'll be sharing over the coming weeks. Most notably we've been finally moving along the long delayed master bathroom cabinets project.
You remember those right? The two cabinets we've been building that will flank the master bathroom vanity?
We've been slowly making some really great project on these babies. This includes a good deal of working to build drawers to help close up four of the glaring holes on the front of the lower section and replacing it with functional storage.
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