A Change Here and a Change There

I consider the kitchen, the bedrooms and bathrooms pretty much done but the living room just bothers me.  I've tried rearranging furniture but I realized that I just didn't like the proportions of the items above the fireplace or the wine hutch on our 'Big Wall.'  I found an amazing bookshelf/wine rack at Crate & Barrel for a pretty reasonable price and found some mantel inspiration on Pinterest and spruced up the room a bit.  I still have some rearranging to do (we have so much damn wine!) but I'm liking what I see already.

Fireplace before.  The pic above just seemed to small for the space

Fireplace after.  Looks better, right?

Our old setup on the Big Wall (taken at Xmas obvi)



Replaced by this awesome piece!  Don't worry the other wine hutch is in the kitchen

So, we now have 4 separate wine hutches and a wine fridge and we have wine on bookshelves and at the bar area.  I need to start drinking more wine so I'll stop buying furniture to store it in!

Making Progress

The backyard is really coming along!  Here are some pics of the progress made this week, just a few more days and we're done!

Tuesday and Wednesday were spent prepping to pour

Concrete was poured Thursday

Concrete was stained the color Sandstone Friday

We have foliage!

Woo hoo!  Just a few mor days until completion!

Under Construction

We've spent the last 18 months updating and renovating the inside of our house and the outside has been all but ignored.  We have a beautiful covered patio in the back but we hardly sit out there because our view is dirt, weeds and a crumbling retaining wall. We love to entertain but when we do have people over the party rarely goes outside.  As I've mentioned before, the reason we bought a house rather than a condo was for the outdoor space and now that the inside of our house is done (well it will never really be done to this DIYer) we figure it was time to put some love into the backyard.  We met with several landscapers and settled on Angel from Promised Path Landscape who really had a vision of what our yard could be.  Construction started Wednesday of last week so here are some pictures progress so far.  We are most excited for the lounge area with the fire pit!  We should be ready for an evening of drinking Pinot Noir outside by the fire pit on October 15th (if there are no delays).  The front yard is still all sorts of ugly, but we plan on having Angel come back to do that sometime next year.

Before pic of the patio

Before pic of the yard

The Vision

After day 1

After day 1



End of day 3



Bye bye patio!

Wino Country

Last week we had the privilege of attending the wedding of our good friends Ryan and Rebecca.  Although the couple now lives in Minneapolis, the two opted to have the wedding in Ryan's hometown of Napa, CA.  I've known both Ryan and our mutual best friend Nate for 12 years now and have never been to visit their turf, even being the lover of wine that I am.  The wedding was on a Thursday evening so we decided to make a loooong weekend of it and flew up Wednesday morning and the wine tasting commenced immediately.  We ended up going to 18 different wineries in 4 days (our 5th and final day was wine free as we just couldn't bring ourselves to taste another drop) and had such a great time.  It was also a reunion of our entire San Diego crew so it was a lot of fun to all be together again.  I know these reunions will be few and far between now that we are all spread out.  Below are some pictures of our adventure, unfortunately I forgot to bring my camera to the main event (the nuptials).  You can view all the pictures of the trip by clicking here.

Our first stop on our first day

The Boeders in front of Luna

Darioush was built by a wealthy Persian.  It was over the top beautiful!

Tasting with the Colemans at Cuvaison.  Gorgeous views.

Family portrait at Raymond

Reserve tasting at Mondavi.  Do not drink the '96 Cab

Bubbly and cartwheels with Jenny at Domain Chandon

Rombauer Chardonnay is so good!  The view ain't bad either.

Pinterest

If only this existed when I was wedding planning!  Pinterest is the best thing ever.  It is a virtual pin board so whenever I'm blog surfing or internet window shopping if I find something I want to come back to later you just 'pin it' it to your selected board and it posts a pic of what you pinned and by clicking on the pic it takes you to the link for that item.  You can also see all the neat stuff other pinterest users are pinning and repin it to your board.  It's basically a bad ass one upper for your 'favorites' button.  You can take a look at everything I've pinned so far here and you can follow me by clicking on the Pinterest button on the far right of the screen.  Happy Pinning!