Over the past two weeks, Nick and I went on vacation! Unfortunately, it wasn’t a two-week-long vacation, but it did span over two weeks…if that makes sense…

It was so much fun! We went to Vancouver, Canada and Seattle, Washington. We went sight-seeing, visited some tourist traps, and we ate a TON! (There was soooooo much good food.) I thought Vancouver was a much prettier city than Seattle, but Seattle had way more to do.

In both cities, we stayed in the Chinatown/International Districts. We went to all sorts of great shops that they don’t have around us at home, and we ate so many things that we have never seen before. Amazingly, I did not come home any heavier than when I left! (Which is really surprising because I went a little overboard on the sugar…cake for breakfast? Yes please!) We came home with so much tea, that my bag got checked by the TSA. Maybe a coincidence? Or maybe they thought the tea was something else…

My favorites on the trip were Green Tea Kit-Kats, the best mocha ever from Street Bean Espresso, an azuki bean crepe from Unicone, Sushi Land, shopping at the Vancouver Daiso, and getting to spend so much time with my awesome husband, who did the majority of the planning.

It was so much fun, but it was nice to get home and sleep in our own bed. I can’t wait for our next vacation!

A few years ago, I sent my physical photographs out to be scanned to a disk. This weekend, I finally went through the arduous task of organizing them! It was time consuming, but fun to look back and see a bunch of photos that I don’t remember very well.

I thought I would share this photo with you because it’s the first photograph that I remember taking with a creative idea in mind, not just pointing and shooting. This is a picture of my brother in our tent on a camping trip we took. I had to lighten it a bit because it was really dark after being scanned, but, no, it’s not a good photograph.

In my childhood mind, I thought that with the shadows of the trees on the tent and my brother in front of them, the photo would come out with him looking like he was in the jungle. I obviously didn’t really understand photography much back then, because he didn’t look like he was in the jungle to my actual eye when I took the picture. But I was convinced that it would look really cool when it got developed. I was so disappointed when I got the photo back and a) my brother did not appear to be in the jungle, and b) the photo was so dark.

It’s fun to look back and see how much I’ve learned!

Are you tired of home remodeling pictures yet? Well, if you are, it’s a good thing for you that this is the last room that we are redoing this year. This is the main bathroom, and it used to have a pink pedestal sink, pink toilet, and flower wallpaper…on the ceiling as well as the walls! What a huge difference in this room! It’s so modern now. (Although, it was always fun to watch everyone’s reaction when we showed them this room!)

It’s so nice to have this done. We have been without a towel rack or toilet paper holder for over a month now, and the towels just don’t get as dry when they are bunched up on top of the toilet.

And since it was on super sale, we decided to try a bidet toilet seat! The concept has always made sense to me, but I wasn’t sure if I would like it. The part that grossed me out the most was that it has a heated seat. But actually, it’s nice, and I think it will be really nice in the winter! So in case you are on the fence about your own bidet toilet seat, I say “Go for it!” I’m happy that we got ours.

The original plan for this room was to just paint and replace the toilet and sink at a later date. But we decided that it made more sense to make the changes now, rather than choosing paint that goes with the pink porcelain, and then possibly redoing it in the future, if it didn’t look as good with our new sink and toilet. I’m glad that we did, because my original plan was to paint the room a dark gray. The room already looks smaller since the toilet and sink are so much larger than the previous ones. I think a dark gray would have made this look too dark and cramped. So good call Lavelys!

Here are the pictures that I promised of our new office. It’s my favorite room redo so far! On the wall above the door, the yellow bar goes across the top. On the opposite wall, it goes not quite halfway down the wall, and the walls that are perpendicular to that are at a slant to match up.

And check out that butcher block! So beautiful! (Can you believe it’s from IKEA?) I made the mistake of using a sponge brush, instead of a regular brush, to put on the varnish coat, so it’s a little globby in spots, but if it bothered me enough, I could always sand it down and redo it.

— Sidenote: What is a sponge brush any good for anyway? I’ve always hated them, but thought it would be nice to use so that I don’t have to clean up a varnishy brush multiple times. (I’m really bad at cleaning up anything with mineral spirits, which is one reason why I am hesitant to ever try oil painting.)–

I get so happy every time I come into this room, since it looks so nice! Sadly, I couldn’t find a good before picture, so you get to see just a picture of the border. And enlarged, it really doesn’t look so good! But it had a woodsy look to it. I also have a picture of the room while it was in-progress, with the painter’s tape masking off the sections. Nice improvement, I say!

Lately Nick and I have been busy fixing up our house to modernize it and make it our own. I already showed you our beautiful dining room. Now, we have moved on to the office.

Part of our office remodel included getting new desks. My current desk is really cute, but incredibly unstable. It’s always scary to have a drink on the desk. Just typing causes the it to wobble. It also is too small to accommodate my second monitor.

We love the butcher block look, so we went on a hunt to find some nice looking butcher block that was large enough, but not too large, and not incredibly expensive. It turns out that the butcher block at IKEA is exactly what we were looking for. I also got some cute legs there, and was so excited for my new desk. But sadly, the desk ended up being too wobbly for my tastes. So we returned the legs and went back to the drawing board.

Nick found a bunch of ideas online about building a desk using galvanized pipe. I was sold! How could piping not be incredibly sturdy? And it’s cute and lofty-looking. But this was an incredible fail for me. I did so much planning. I bought pipe and measured it and put a few pieces together to see how it fits and measured it to see how much of the length gets lost when you assemble it, and planned and priced…and failed.

When we bought the final pieces of pipe, I found out some important things that I did not know before. Pipe pieces are not all the exact same length. (I must have gotten lucky with the test pieces I bought.) Even if they are sold as ten inches, they might be a bit smaller or larger. And even though my test pipe all lost a half an inch when assembled, that does not mean that all of the pipe loses the same amount. My final product was not level, and needed too much work to get it to match exactly.

I also found out that I made my design way too complicated. I had too many connections and two rows of bars that had to screw in one direction on one side, and the opposite direction on the other side. I had found someone online who had a similar problem, and they told me to screw them in as far as you can on one side, and then unscrew them to attach the other side. This may have worked, but the quarter-inch size difference in the piping made one of the bars too loose.

I also had connections that needed to screw in to an exact placement. Which meant that the pipe was not screwed in as far as it could be, and it was wobbly and unstable…back to the drawing board!

We ended up giving up on the pipe desk and just bought stable desks that can go to sitting or standing. I’m much happier with the end result than what I think I would have been with the pipe desk, but the defeat was difficult to take. It looked so easy online…

I’ll post before and after pictures of the office next week. Stay tuned!