Strike a Pose {+ winner}

We have this friend, Jaine, and she is an uber talented photographer.

She happens to be married to one of Mister's best friends so lucky for us she's taken a lot of photos of us over the years.

She took our engagement photos, Floyd's puppy photos and almost shot our wedding but she had a baby a week before so we decided that was a good enough excuse not to do it.

Floyd has been on the other end of her lens quite a few times over the years and every single time the photos make me so happy.

We recently stopped by her new studio with Floyd in tow and the lighting happened to be juuust right for the old Ham Bone. 

It's as if he's grown up in front of the camera or something.

And the winner of the Cards for Canines giveaway is....Brooke!

I cannot wait to see how sweet Melvin turns out! 

Rewarding Hard Work

This shop has been compensated by Collective Bias, Inc. and its advertiser. All opinions are mine alone. #TryALittleGoodness #CollectiveBias

We all know I love a good workout, a good run and a good walk around the walk with my best basset bud.  

I especially love my twice a week Bootcamp class that I attend.  

Not only is it always a killer workout, its two hours a week that I am able to spend time with my girlfriends.  We work out had but we also manage to work in a lot of girl talk and laughter.  The best of both worlds!

Our trainer does an excellent job of mixing up our workouts.  Whether its a circuit, a tabata or heavy lifting workout, it is always a challenge and always fun.  Unless it's Deck of Cards day and then I think about walking back out the door.  (Each suit has a work out attached to it and you perform it according to the card value.  Do you know how many sets/reps that is?!)

We've been working quite hard lately and I thought it was high time to treat my girls to a fabulously delicious treat bag for their hard work and efforts full of goodies.

However, I knew that with this special treat I didn't want to derail all of our efforts.  

As I was recently in Wal Mart thinking about what to put in their treat bags I came across goodnessknows® snack squares in the check out lane.  

I was especially drawn to the cranberry, almond, dark chocolate variety.  What doesn't sound amazing about that?  The apple almond & peanut, dark chocolate also jumped in my cart, I couldn't resist.  I am also excited to try the goodnessknows® Peach & Cherry, Almond, Dark Chocolate variety!

Healthy, quick, easy and not to mention delicious!  I love snacks that are not messy and easy to pop in your mouth...these goodnessknows® snack squares certainly fit the bill!

I knew these would be the perfect addition to their treat bags.

Through Bootcamp I've learned that well balanced meals and snacks are really the ticket to helping keep your fitness game on track.  

Continuing with the balance idea, I grabbed perfectly crisp, Fall gala apples and the ingredients for protein balls.  These things are staples in our house and fuel we use often for workouts.  

I always like to have a few cellophane snack bags on hands for putting together, easy yet cute treat bags.

I filled my girls bags first with an apple, protein balls and topping them off with goodnessknows® snack squares and easily tying them up with some twine.

Easy, delicious and cute!

I can't wait to surprise them with these next time we get together to get our work out on! 

How about you?  How do you fuel your workouts and treat yourself to a job well done?  What are you goodness to greatness tricks?

Lucky for you, heres a coupon to save on goodnessknows® snack squares for your next fitness treat fix!  I would pick up the cranberry, almond, dark chocolate flavor if I were you...

#tryalittlegoodnesssweepstakes

Floyds Mistaken Identity

I hate to admit it but until recently we had committed a cardinal sin.

It's the last week of October and we had not been to the pumpkin patch yet.

I know, I know I am breaking all of the blogger rules.

 I did pick up a teal fantasy pumpkin at Traders Joes weeks ago so that was tiding us over.

Along with our hoards of mums. 

Thankfully we corrected that this weekend!

Phew.

Every year of Floyd's life we have made it a mission to take Floyd to a patch.

He loves the smells, we love the photos ops and bassets just look adorable surrounded by orange.

Plus wrestling a basset hound while juggling pumpkins is always a good workout.

Floyd's floppy ears and happy demeanor always warrants a lot of laughs, points and general 'awws' from fellow pumpkin patch goers. 

He knows it too and puts on a little swagger.

Well this weekend as we were approaching the patch a little boy across the way yelled 

'that doggie looks like Charlie the Ranch Dog!' 

The highest of compliments for Floyd! 

Floyd was honored, I was honored and now I think Floyd and Charlie really need to meet.

After his semi famous encounter, we continued to drag Floyd around and make him pose with Fall things like the good parents we are.

And then Floyd helped me with something he thought I had on my face.

And that wraps up our yearly visit to the patch, better late than never.

Plus know maybe our pumpkins will last longer!

P.s. did you see the Cards for Canines giveaway?

Cards for Canines {Giveaway}

You know when you find an Etsy shop you are utterly obsessed with?

And then find out they are also a super sweet person?

And it gets better...they are local, love doggies and uber talented?

Well I have that person for you...

Cards for Canines.

I was introduced to Abby of Cards for Canines via Alexis when she had her make those adorable basset business cards for me.  I was immediately smitten.

I turned right about and had Abby make a print for my mom of her adorable dog, Sophie.

It turned out SO cute.

And there is more cuteness where that came from

Adorable, right?!

This one is probably my favorite though...

I mean, c'mon!!

On top of all this adorableness, I have a special treat for you today!

Abby has graciously offered to give away a custom illustration and card package to one reader!

So fun, right?!

All you have to do to enter is leave a comment telling me what adorable pooch you would have an illustration done of.

Bonus entries if you go follow Cards for Canines on Instagram and on Facebook - just let me know you did.

I wish you all the best of luck but if you are not the lucky winner (announced next Wednesday) I suggest you quickly put an order in with Abby for Christmas gifts.  I am already planning my next order to give to every single dog lover I know this holiday season.  Check out her Etsy shop here! 

Kitchen : The Before Process

Now that we've seen the final kitchen product and how we budgeted for it...let's go back to the beginning. 

How did this whole process begin?

This alllll started because we wanted new countertops.

However, I refused to put new countertops on our, not so great, cabinets.  I knew better than to do that.  

We had grazed the idea of Ikea cabinetry in passing and finally decided to give it a go once they came out with their gray Bodbyn line.  We saw it in person and were in love.

Ikea offers a design process that involves a designer coming to your house, measuring, drawing your plans and placing the cabinets in said plan...all for a fee.  Being as I have a design degree and have experience with kitchens, we bypassed this and saved a few dollars.  

Ikea also offers a design program on their website where you can place your measurements, walls, windows etc and plop in their cabinets.  I will say, this is not the easiest program to use.  So Ikea if you're listening, it's time to work on that program.   It's doable but it is a little trying.  

Thankfully the Ikea staff at the store was very helpful when we pulled up our plans there.  Like with all kitchen designs, ours took a few revisions and advice from their staff on which exact cabinets to use in places.  But overall, it was a terribly painful process.

Once we were all set we headed off to Ikea and bought cabinets!!!

Proof that we actually did it!

We were scared but elated for the new project!

(Like I said, we staggered our costs and bought our countertops on a separate trip.)

A few weeks later they delivered all of our cabinets.

In one million, small, narrow boxes.

There's our kitchen!

The next step was to get rid of the old kitchen.

I used a company that operates as a job training program that teaches their employees how to carefully remove and reinstall cabinetry/tops/sinks, etc.  They also have a store front where you can purchase these goods for reuse.  I loved this concept and the company and was more than happy to use them.  Plus they were in and out in no time flat.

They literally took everything.

No seriously, everything.

And then we lived like this for almost a week...
The demo happened on a Friday and install was supposed to start that Monday.
The Thursday before I received a call that our local install team that Ikea partnered with and whom we had been communicating with, had severed ties.  They quickly followed that up with the fact that they were flying a team in from Florida to install our kitchen asap.  Regardless, we were delayed a few days which led to a few more delays which I will get in to next time.

So that's the before...next time we will venture into the during and then the after.  And a whole separate post focused on how it is truly possible (with some help) to live without a kitchen sink for two months.

Any questions, just ask! 

Budgeting for a Kitchen Remodel

Earlier this week I revealed our kitchen renovation!
Thank you thank you everyone for your wonderful comments!
We are still oohing and ahhing over it ourselves and so happy to share it with everyone!

Like with most things in life, these great things come with a price.

And while our kitchen remodel would have been more enjoyable had it been free, we were able to save money here and there and still afford to eat.

Considering my career (interior design), I ventured into this project with quite a bit of background knowledge and insight (but there is always more to learn).

Luckily for you, I am here today to share a bit of that knowledge with you and a few money saving tricks we used!

1.  Make it matter

A kitchen renovation/remodel (or any renovation for that matter) is generally a big and worthwhile investment for your home.

It is important to evaluate if a renovation you are looking at is beneficial for your home. 

For example we could have gone with full custom, highly detailed cabinetry for our kitchen. 

But for one, we cannot afford that and two, neither can our house or neighborhood.  

Whenever we do leave our current house, we would have not gotten our money back.

2.  Keep it simple

One way to keep costs down during a renovation or remodel is to keep the plans simple.  Once you get into moving walls, electrical, plumbing, etc the costs automatically creep up, quickly.

The layout of our kitchen is is what it is.  We were not interested (nor had the option) of moving walls or changing the floor plan in the kitchen.  We kept the layout the same and only swapped out the type of cabinets in a few areas.  This saved us a tremendous amount of dollars.

3.  Plan 

As I mentioned on Wednesday, we started thinking about this project months before it actually happened.  Large home projects usually require large amounts of money.  Mister and I knew this was on the horizon at some point so we began saving early on to help the costs not be such a big hit.  While I am not a proponent of building up credit card debit, I am a believer in using those cards to get points and then automatically paying them off in order to get points/rewards for later on.

4.  Space it out
If you can space out your purchases, it makes biting the bullet a little easier.
We staggered buying our cabinets, tops, faucet/sink and tile over a few months.  We would make one big purchase, pay it off and move on to the next.  This helped the costs not seem like such a tornado through our finances.  We caught wind that the cabinets that we wanted were going up in price so we purchased those but then had to wait about 4 weeks for them to be installed.  While we wanted everything done asap, this helped us save money.

5.  DIY (and lean on your friends)
While Mister and I knew that installing the kitchen ourselves was not an option (not even one that needed entertaining) we knew there were some areas we could tackle.  We are semi handy and love DIY around the house.
 One area in particular was the backsplash.  While we could have paid someone to install it, we figured we could do it ourselves and save a few dollars.  And dollars we saved!
We purchased the tile online from Overstock and were able to save quite a bit.  We also found the majority of our tiling tools on sale at Lowes.  And the most helpful was that our neighbor lent us his wet saw #majorsavings
Think about what you can tackle on your own and go for it! I feel even more proud of our kitchen now knowing that our blood, sweat and yes, tears went into it.

Overall we enjoyed the kitchen renovation process and love sharing about it.  Let me know if you have any questions!

I am linking up with Kait today to talk all things budget...head on other there to see some more fabulous budgeting advice!

Kitchen : The Reveal

I have been dying to hit publish on this post. 

This one has been a long time coming...months in the works.

Sometime around last Spring Mister and I began tossing the idea around of renovating a few things in the kitchen.   It started with wanting to replace the countertops which lead to a new sink and faucet which led to new cabinets and so on and so on.

Well, we all know how those things go, one things leads to the other and here we are...

New kitchen!!

Mister and I are OVER the moon about it.  

Obsessed.

But to fully appreciate the after, let's take a quick look back at the before.

Ouch.

Let's go back to the pretty

So much better!

I am planning on a few full posts laying out all of the details.

How we lived without a sink and water in our kitchen for 2 months,

the selection process with a resource list, the good the bad and the ugly of the whole process and what is located in each of those new cabinets.

Along with any other questions you may have!

(Mister surprised me with the Charlie jar!! We have been on the hunt for weeks for it!)

But for now, here is the short on the details...

We purchased the cabinets from Ikea, had a sub contractor (provided through Ikea) install them, countertops are Ceaserstone and backsplash is from Overstock that we installed ourselves.

Don't mind me I will just be over here finally cooking up a storm and chuckling at Floyd's Charlie treat jar.

Mums the Word

I mentioned on Monday we picked up some mums over the weekend.

I cannot get enough of them.

I love the bright colors, the fullness and the punch of color they add to our yard.

Who knew mums came in such amazing colors?!

Now we just need some pumpkins to round out our fall decor!

But in the mean time...

The witch has landed! 

Of course my helper is never too far behind...

Weekend Wrap Up : Low Key

We traveled every single weekend of September (Boston, Marge, Taylor and home).  And while they were all fun trips and jaunts to see friends and loved ones, we were tired.  And homesick for our home.  And waking up in our own bed to a lazy weekend morning.

Mister and I had been looking forward to this past weekend immensely.  With just about 0 plans on our agenda we settled in for a low key weekend.

I am happy to say we were successful with that low key-ness.

Friday night we grilled delicious bison burgers and set up shop on the sofa to watch Wild.

We had listened to the book tape version a few years ago so it was nice to see the film version.

Saturday I was finally able to make it back to bootcamp (thank goodness) and get an excellent work out in.   The rest of the day was full of general housekeeping and all those pesky tasks that stay undone when you are never home.  

Later that evening we had a fabulous dinner out with the neighbors to 20 Brix.  We have been talking about going to 20 Brix for years and I am so glad we were able to make it.  The amazing steak I had made it very worth it.

(OBSESSED with those new shoes)

We ended the night snuggled on their couch with wine and brownies (for them, not me) and once again being thankful that we can easily walk home and right into bed.  

Sunday we started the day with church, picked up even more mums (we can't get enough!) and finally scored some new booties at DSW.  

All wins if you ask me!

Cheers to low key weekends and actually starting the week with all of our laundry done.  

#smallwins