Happy Hallmark Holiday

I hope everyone had a happy made up holiday. As everyone knows we are not big fans of the holiday and since I blogged about this last year I will not go on a rant of my beliefs on this holiday. Instead I will talk about our great weekend of making strides on my New Year’s Resolution. The best thing we did was spend the day cleaning out our garage. We have lived in the house for two and a half years and our garage definitely showed it. It’s embarrassing to admit, but we started to turn our garage into a storage shed. If we didn’t know what to do with stuff we started piling it into the garage and since our garage is pretty deep it allowed for plenty of crap to store. I started to feel like we could be on that show Hoarder’s. Ok, maybe that is a bit dramatic because we could still fit our cars in the garage…barely! So, we spent the day together cleaning , throwing items out and making trips to Goodwill to donate other bigger and nicer items. For those of you that know me pretty well, you can imagine my excitement to do such laborious work. Yes, from the minute I woke up this morning I was plotting a way out of this. I kept telling myself to suck it up and just do this, but then again, that wouldn’t be my true self. I did more of assisting Andy in the cleaning, so basically, he did the majority of the work. I am not ashamed to admit that either. I even got in an hour long hike around the mountain and when I got back Andy had the garage looking fabulous. I am so proud of him that he had to put up with a lazy assistant and still got the garage looking super clean. He even assembled shelving to put stuff on. What a great guy!

Besides the cleaning we also finished one wall of decorations. As you remember from my New Year’s resolution I wanted to get decorations up, but just didn’t know what to do. I am so impressed with our decorating skills that I should go back and edit what I said back in the New Year’s post. Behind our couch we have debated a lot what to put there. Andy’s brother is an artist and has said for two and a half years that he would paint us something for the wall. Well, we couldn’t wait any longer and had to do something about that empty wall. We got these really neat pictures from Andy’s mom for Christmas and Andy and I didn’t know what to do with them until one day it just hit me to get shelves and go from there. It took HOURS to get the pictures and shelves up on the wall. It was also mathematically stressful because it included measuring the couch, the pictures, the space between the pictures, the shelves the indentation of all this from the edge of the couch, blah, blah, blah! It was also nice to see Andy work with tools in the house to get all this hung…kind of hot! Anyway, here are pictures of our fabulous decorating skills.

This is the back wall with the new lamp, decorations and our couch.


Here is a close up of the framed artwork Laura gave me for Christmas. Plus, check out that elephant. Andy and I thought that was pretty cool at the store and had to have it.


Here is a close up of Andy's framed image from his mom. Have you noticed the framed images spell out our last names? They are also images the photographer took around the Madison area? How cool is that?


Here is another picture of the layout of our creativity! Not too shabby, huh?