Showing posts with label house. Show all posts
Showing posts with label house. Show all posts

Thursday, December 29, 2011

A Christmas of Firsts

This year was a special year for us.  It was Corgan's first Christmas, our first Christmas in our first house, and the first joint Piedfort/Bankey Christmas.  It was a mad house, but we had such a great and wonderful time.  Everyone showed up early for Christmas breakfast (Dad made biscuits and gravy!), and we sipped on mimosas.  I made my tarragon scrambled eggs, and apparently Philip (Stuart's brother) had to ask if they had gone bad.  He'd never seen green flecks in scrambled eggs before! Poor Philip.

My brother Chase and I makin' bacon!
Everyone brought their gifts over to our place to open, so of course we had way too many packages everywhere!  There were nine adults and the first granddaughter, and that makes for a lot of gifts.


Here's a picture that needs no explanation:

Check out the shirts!

The best time of the day was watching Corgan!  She had a crazy bad cold, so she wasn't in the greatest mood, but she was precious none the less.  She was actually more excited for the toys than the boxes and paper, which I hear is not normal.  She got a stocking stuffer of Grover from Sesame Street that sings Jingle Bells when you push his belly.  She couldn't get it to sing herself, so every time he stopped she would get all mad and do her fake cry.  It was adorable!

Corgan, her Grover, and Grandma
And lastly, just for fun, here is a peak into the crazy life that is the Piedfort/Bankey clan:


Wednesday, December 28, 2011

Painting Fun

When we bought our new house, we had completely fallen in love with the layout, size, and yard, but we hated the colors.  One front room was mint green, the dining room powder blue, the kitchen pale yellow, and the living room was all white with one dark blue accent wall.  Did I mention it's an open floor plan and there were floral stencils everywhere?  Upstairs we had one bedroom with neon orange walls and neon yellow trim (I am not kidding), another room with periwinkle blue/purple with bubble gum pink (again, not kidding), and then our loft was the piece-de-resistance: orange with green and yellow daisy and sun stencils!  We spent the first few months painting the two bedrooms and the entire downstairs, a solid two days tackling the loft (which is Corgan's playroom and I'll share that with you in a separate post), and most recently Stuart and I tackled the stairwell and upstairs hallway.


You can see a 'before shot' of our boring hallway.  The yellow on the right is the accent wall in the loft, and the tan color is what we chose to paint it, and, yes, the beer is a necessity to any painting project.

 We had to get a paint roller extender in order to paint our stairwell...

...and we put it to good use!  This would be Stuart listening to 'Disco Stick' by Lady Gaga.  I love this man!

 Here is the final product.  You can see that we kept the white trim, and painted every surface in tan.  The change is amazing.  There is nothing like a fresh coat of paint.

The stairway was not fun to do, seeing as we had to reach over the edge from above to paint under the trim.  It was awesome seeing Stuart lean over with his monkey arms to paint the corners that I couldn't reach.

....I think I'll have to share a video of monkey arms with you at a later date...