White slipcover + black dog =

Our white bedding doesn’t look this way, so I’m not sure why the sofa is so much worse.  And yes, the joys of having a slipcover is that you can wash it, but I can’t wash the thing every day!  Sheesh.  Maybe I should just shave the dog?

Long weekend working in the garden

On our long holiday weekend, we spent a lot of time out in the garden doing weed control, grass resurrection, and shrub removal.  Plus there was nice downtime at the end for a PBR or two.  (I’ll be doing a separate post on the removal of our huge forsythia bush with instructions for anyone else who may have the same situation.)

(Bought this copper container last year from Target.  It’s from their Smith & Hawken collection.  I’ve been waiting all winter to use it!)

(We went to our local Lowes garden center and bought some beautiful plants for the copper pot, that will hopefully be able to survive this heatwave.  Included are a Dracena, trailing Vincus, Indian Summer Coleus, Torenia, and Dusty Miller.)

(And for the first time ever, we’ve been watering each day to try and save our beautiful plants and grass.  They’re struggling at the moment.  Thankfully we have a very small yard or I don’t know that I’d want to water.)

It has been a relaxing weekend so far.  (You can see Nigel chilling out through the open window on the back of our sofa.  It’s definitely been lazy dog days of summer for our two bark-monsters.)  Thankfully the weekend isn’t over yet though… we have today off as well.  Woohoo!  Who doesn’t love a three day weekend?!

Porch Love, Summer of 2010

As it happens each summer, I’m obsessed with porch living.  Of course, it would be less difficult if I wasn’t living in [what appears to be] the world’s most humid climate in the Northeast U.S. at the moment.  (What gives North?!  I thought I moved here from the South to escape all that humidity and brutal weather?!)  Anyways…just as I was obsessed with sleeping porches last summer, that trend continues this summer as well.  Anyways, I did a story at the beginning of June for my day job about Porch Living, and this image was from that shoot.

I’m including it here b/c I thought it was nice enough to post, and people just don’t talk about living on the porch enough in my opinion.  (And also b/c I’m clearly still obsessed.)  Another item that’s perfect for summer relaxing & sleeping outside is a Mayan Hammock.  Nick and I saw a lot of these while we were in Mexico two weeks ago.  We even had the pleasure of sleeping on a couple one lazy afternoon.

So the moral of the story here is, sleeping outside is wonderful… as long as you’re not sweating profusely.  :-\

The Country Home kitchen makeover story finally hits newsstands!!

I realize I’ve been terrible about posting anything here lately.  So while I’m waiting [anxiously] for my wedding photos to arrive back, the Country Living makeover article finally hit newsstands!!  Our kitchen is a two-page spread on pages 68-69!  Very exciting!!

Wedding Bliss

So I took a LONG time off from this blog b/c I’ve been completely immersed in work and wedding planning.  Doing both sometimes felt like I had two and a half full time jobs.  But soon I’m going to begin posting more here…beginning with pics of my wedding and all the little details that went into it.  Here’s the first pic we got back.  It was a perfect day (with the slight exception of massive humidity).

New Bed!

We’re picking up our new bed this weekend, and I still haven’t figured out what color to paint the bedroom!  Nothing is making me happy.  I might have to admit that I don’t actually like/want color on my walls in the bedroom.  It’s a hard thing to admit b/c it sounds so good in theory…but every color is not right (even though they’re good colors on their own).   Gah!  Time (and my patience) is running out for this painting project.

We had some snow here

You may have heard…

Behind the scenes of the kitchen photo shoot!

So today was a lot of fun!  The stylists showed up at 9am on the dot, and the photographers were right behind.  I’d stayed up most of the two nights previous cleaning, tweaking, and editing [primarily the spices in] my kitchen so that it was putting it’s best foot forward.   For about a week, I’ve been nervous that once “outsiders” got inside our house they’d totally hate it.  Thankfully that was not the case, and we got down to business immediately!

Here’s the photographer working in the kitchen.  The Mac is all hooked up in the dining room.

Here’s a pic of the edits from my own kitchen that didn’t make the cut along with some props the stylist brought.

No explanation needed!  I had to keep out of the way while everyone did their magic.   In fact, everything and everyone was absolutely fabulous!  The only part of today that surprised me was when the photographers said, “Okay we’re ready for your photo.”

*Pause*

“What?!  No one said that I was getting my photo taken today too!”

Yikes!  I was kind of freaking out.  Thank god I’d managed to get up early to enough to manage makeup.  My hair was a wreck though, and I wasn’t wearing clothes that were what I’d want to represent myself in a national magazine…so I had to run upstairs and change quickly.  (No pressure or anything!)

Meanwhile, when I walked into my bedroom…what do you think I found?  Dog vomit on the rug.

But anyways…at the end of it all, we managed a photo that wasn’t completely embarrassing…and everything’s all done.  I can’t wait to see it when it comes out!