Minty Fresh

 One of my resolutions for 2013 is to start becoming more aware of what I am eating, and trying to eliminate preservatives in my food. Not only am I watching out for myself, but I am also trying to do it for my pup as well.  I want her to be as healthy as possible, so I have her on a grain free, high protein, organic food.  I decided today that I was going to make her some home made dog treats!

Missy loves anything peppermint, which is weird, I know.  She digs in purses to get gum, she loves having her teeth brushed, and would eat the candy canes off our Christmas tree! I always try to find treats that are mint flavored, but they are impossible to find!  Even online, there are hardly any recipes on mint treats!  I combined a few recipes together to create this one, and Missy loves them!  If your pup doesn't love mint like mine, you can add more peanut butter or some chicken broth.

The recipe is as follows:

2 cups whole wheat flower
1 cup oats
2 tbsp peanut butter
1 tbsp baking powder
1/2 milk (I used almond milk)
1/2 cup water
1 1/2 tbsp mint extract

Preheat oven to 375. 
I kneaded the ingredients together by hand, and then used a rolling pin to smooth it all out.  I then used this cookie cutter in the shape of a dog bone from a local dog store.  I then put it in the oven for 20 minutes! 

She sure looks excited about these treats...

 I was able to make 15 full sized bone treats, and 14 smaller ball sized treats. 

Shes looking a bit more excited now! 

 Yep, She loves them!

First "Pinspiration" Project

This is my first attempt at a "pinspiration"project! I have seen many awesome projects that I cannot wait to do in the upcoming weeks!

 I have a ton of old Bath and Body Works Candles that have no useable wax left, so I keep them in my linen closet for no reason other than I'm a candle hoarder. I had no idea what I was going to do with these jars, but I knew I kept them for a reason! As I was browsing through Pinterest the other day, I saw that you can easily remove the wax out of the candle jars to create a universal container! I was sold.

I ran to my nearest empty candle to try it out!  This one had about a quarter inch of unusable wax on the bottom, and it worked perfectly.  It your candle has a lot more wax than this, it may take longer for it to work. 

I started by putting some water in a saucepan and bringing it to a boil.

I then carefully poured the boiling water into the candle jar.  Leaving the boiling water in the container melts the remaining wax down to a liquid, and it all rises to the top.  As the water cools, so does the wax.  It's so simple that I felt dumb for not thinking of it!  I was able to pull out the wax in one piece and the container was perfectly clean! All I had to do was rinse it off and it is good to go!

I have no idea what I am going to do with the container now that it's clean, but I have some ideas! I might use it to store some cotton balls or q-tips, or possibly make another Pinterest project and add some glitter to the bottom of the container!  The options are endless! 

I hope this gives you some ideas for your empty candle containers, and I will let you know what comes of it!

Welcoming in 2013

2012 was an amazing year full of wonderful accomplishments, and I hope 2013 is even better!  In 2012 I was able to graduate college, get engaged and buy my first house- a lot of major milestones!  For 2013, all I can hope for is health and happiness for all my friends and family! 

We have a lot of exciting plans for our lives and home in 2013, and I hope to capture them all in this blog to share with you all. 

We wish you all a Happy New Year!

xoxo
Emily and Matt

Tis The Season

Christmas is just a couple days a way, so I thought it would be fun to do a Christmas decorations post! Since this is our first Christmas in the new house, we don't have a lot of decorations yet, but we were able to gather some new and old things to create a "festive" look in our home!

The most obvious thing we did was place lights on the outside of the house.  We compromised since Matt loves colored twinkling lights, and I like solid white ones, so we have the twinkling color lights along the roof, and white on the bushes.  I have to say, I kind of like it! It gives an added flare without being too gaudy. 

When you first walk in the house, we have this bare corner, so I put this little standing Santa in it! He's so creepy that he's adorable! Sometimes I jump when I walk in at night and forget he's there, but I love him! 

We then have our Christmas tree, which I would like to have full of sentimental ornaments eventually, but right now we have a few meaningful ones and a lot of silver glitter balls! Matt and I also like to put candy canes on the tree for an added little something.  Finally, I have this cute silver bow on the top of the tree that I cannot get enough of! I love it. 

Since we don't have a mantle to hang our stockings, so my mom bought me these mantle hangers that I hung on the windowsill to hang the stockings.  We also lined up all of our Christmas cards on the windowsill,  and they ended up looking really nice!

Finally, my FAVORITE piece of decoration is this lantern from IKEA.  Normally I have a candle in it, but for the holidays, I put in some ornaments, and I think it looks really cute! I'm a little sad to have to take the ornaments out!

 

That is it for my decorations! I hope this showed you a little bit more on how we decorated this year, and gave some ideas! 

If you have any cool ideas you think I would like, let me know!

Curtain Mission

We recently bought curtains for our living room at Ikea and we thought we found what we were looking for.  We wanted a white curtain that looked a medium thickness that we could close when needed, but would normally keep open.  Instantly, I knew they weren't exactly what I wanted.  I was hoping they would be a crisp white, that would make our light gray walls pop.  Instead, they are a light cream color that do nothing.  They do add some dimension to the room, but it's not me... 

(On a side note, disregard those horrible paper curtains... we are figuring out something else there)

As you can see, the curtains don't do much.  So what is a girl to do? Go on Pinterest, of course! I was able to find an awesome tutorials on how to stencil curtains, and I love it!

An inspiration photo from pinterest, not my own.

Tutorial for this picture

I am hoping if I can stencil these Ikea curtains, I will love them more!  I am thinking of doing a blue/gray to go with the walls as well as our accent color of blue!

So this is the project for the week! I will post back on the results!

Also, let me know if you have any suggestions or ideas!

 

Palette Knife Art

Now that we are a bit more settled into this house, we are working on making it more "homey".  We are still in need of some more furniture pieces and shelving, so in the mean time, I figured a piece of art will work well to add something to look at! 

I found this idea on BowerPowerBlog http://www.bowerpowerblog.com/2012/07/knife-art/ and loved it.  I loved the simplicity and dimension to it.  I loved the colors she used and had already planned on using a similar color scheme, so I changed it up a little bit to go with what I wanted, and I couldnt be happier with how it turned out!

I bought a canvas from Michael's for about $16, which I was happy with. I went into this thinking it would look horrible and be a waste!  I bought a variety of paint (All Martha Stewart brand) in colors ranging from green to navy blue.  I wanted to have a lot of dimension and a very "beachy" look.

 
I didn't have a real palette knife, so I used a putty knife that we already had, and it worked out great!  The process was really, really easy.  I just dipped the knife into each of the colors and the slapped it onto the canvas and pulled it down a bit.  It was pretty easy to eyeball the length and since the knife was an inch wide, I knew it would always be the same width.  I tried to vary up the swatches so they wouldn't all look the same, and I love the result! 

This was really the easiest thing ever.  I am no painter- I am the person that has trouble making a symmetrical stick figure! So if I can do this, anyone can!  It was actually really fun!    

The Halfway Bathroom Fail

Well,  I should probably admit that I am not perfect, despite popular belief (kidding!) and I sometimes have bad ideas.  In the beginning of the bathroom remodeling idea, I knew what I wanted, but thought it would be a good idea to save some money and do things the cheap fix way.  Boy do I regret that. It ended up costing us way more money. 

It was my genius idea to simply paint the pink tiles white, which I thought would be a good temporary fix until we were able to save up more money.  I'm sure this would have been a MUCH better idea if we had ceramic tile in there instead of plastic tiles from the 1950's.  I did do my research and learned that a good primer would keep the paint on the plastic, so we bought Kilz primer and Rust-oleum white paint .  It looked so good! 

We then decided that instead of buying a whole new vanity, we would just use the old one and repaint it a dark espresso color and buy a granite countertop.  I spent a TON of time sanding that stupid thing and priming it, only to have the tacky faux wood sticker on top to ruin my life.  I painted it all and overall it was acceptable, but not good.  In some areas that had the sticker, there were uneven patches and grooves in it, despite all of my sanding.  It was just a fail. 

We figured if the vanity was the only fail, we were doing okay! And then, the tiles all went downhill...  As we were painting, we noticed a few loose tiles, but thought it would have been okay using liquid nail on them.  As we were painting on the second coat, all of the tiles started popping off! Not just one or two, no, all of them!!!  I'm sure it was just the cheap tiles being screwed with and covered in chemicals, but holy cow! It was not a happy moment in my life.  Looking back, it sure made the tile removal process quite easy! 

Overall, this fail taught us that a temporary bandaid isn't worth it, and that if you are going to spend time fixing it, do it right.  I couldn't be happier with how the bathroom looks now, and maybe it is a good thing that we had a failure right off the bat! Now we know!

Hope this post teaches a lesson!  If you are going to do it- do it right!