Must...kill....Jamie........

And I would if I could muster up the energy to do so...but I can't.

Yeah, bootcamp kicks your butt.

We just finished day 1.

Ambre threw up 3 times. (Now, this isn't entirely abnormal for her, but it means we worked out hard.)

Oh yeah, and I can't exactly walk right now. And that was just this morning.

I can't wait to see how I feel tomorrow.

Or maybe I can.

But I can't wait to see how I look after a month of this!

It's booty time!

As in, it's not booty time...

As in, let's get rid of my booty time...

My good friend Jamie is this awesome personal trainer and he has a boot camp that he holds three times per week. I hear it is grueling and that I want to kill him afterwards.

Well, Ambre and I are going to try it.

We just took our before pictures (these will not be displayed until there are some far better after pictures. Sorry, folks!)

We start tomorrow - I'll let you know how it goes!

Here Comes Ambre!

Now that the room is painted, we needed to have a place for Ambre to sleep. We always knew that her room would be a guest room, but we haven't had any guests in the last 3 months, so we never needed to do anything with it. So it was a collect-random-things-that-don't-have-any-other-logical-place-to-go-just-yet room. This included a very large stack of mattresses (when we bought the house there were some fake mattresses left over from the model home days and we weren't sure if we should throw them away or not).


So the first problem was the bed. We didn't have a ton of money to spend on a bed, and we knew that she wasn't going to be staying forever, so we needed to come up with an economical option that still allowed the room to feel like home.


After several different ideas, I thought, "hey, why don't I just make one!"


Now, in the past, I've always had this idea with everything I've ever come across. But typically it didn't work out. My imagination far supercedes any talent that I have in creating things.


But now I have Anthony.


I'm typically the brains, and he is the brawn.


Actually, I'm the dreamer, and he just makes it all work out. He can tell me "yes, that will work" or "no, we'll probably have to do it like this."


So as I'm sitting in sacrament meeting, I drew up the plans to build a headboard for Ambre's new bed. And I didn't want it to be too easy, of course, so I made sure to have decorative gaps and some bamboo panels - since Ambre lived in Hawaii, I wanted to do an island theme in the room.


All of the materials cost about $50. We bought all the wood from Home Depot: a single finished 4x4 cut in half, a finished 4x1, a finished 2x1, some MDF backing, nails, and dark walnut stain. The bamboo panels were actually a table runner from Target cut into 3 pieces.


Then, all my Ikea furniture building experiences came into good use. Here's the finished product:

And a close-up:

Once we had the headboard in place, we put the finishing touches on the room, adding some new pictures and accessories, as well as my new favorite love - houseplants!

Welcome to Arizona, Ambre!

Another Painting Project

I love to paint!

Did I stress that enough yet?

So, I am very excited also for my darling sis-in-law Ambre to move to AZ! She'll be staying with us for the next few months at least while she gets a job, looks for a husband, etc! LOL! (Anyone know any really hot single guys?!)

And as excited as I am for her to come down, I was also thrilled at the prospect of painting another room in my house! Since it was a model home, all of the rooms were painted in some way. Most of them we were quite happy with, but not the guest room.

Here is the before picture:

Yeah, teal and brick red. I mean, who comes up with a color combination like that?! And this was after we had taken down the, um, dragonfly valence over the window and added the bamboo shade and red panels.

Well, I had another option to flex my design muscles and create this into a beautiful living space. I loved the striping, just not the colors, so I decided to only paint over the blue. I taped off right over the red lines and then used a sealant to make sure the tape didn't come off or have any bleed through.

Then we picked out two nice neutral shades of brown, just slightly apart in darkness. First, I painted the lighter color solid over the blue. Then I added a glaze to the darker color and sponged it over the entire thing. Unfortunately, the glaze lightened the darker color just enough that it was hardly noticeable over the other paint - although it did darken slightly when it dried. So, I got creative and sporadically sponged the darker color without the glaze on a few places.

Now the room looks much better:

My garden

My latest passion, even though I know nothing about it, is gardening. I just love the idea of being able to watch something grow. I'm just so excited about the idea.

So Anthony bought me a ton of plants! Both edible and ones that were just pretty.

It's a good thing we had the truck now, because even with it, this is what we had:

This morning I set up all the plants where I want them to go. I'll have more time to plant them all tomorrow. I'm really excited though!