What Ana Does

This winter I'm all about updating our Powder Room -- the bathroom off the kitchen our guests use. It's ugly. Just plain ugly. I painted it last year and switched out the horrible light fixtures, just to improve it a little, but now I'm ready to tackle it. Before - The Powder Room when we moved in With a small budget, I was planning to work with the vanity and either paint or tile-over the floor. I think the floor is the main issue. Replace the faucet and tile the wall. Maybe some kind of window treatment. Oh, and replace the towel bar with hooks. I really don't like towel bars. They never look organized -- always messy.  But Dave offered $3k from the house budget ... and I was off to the races! I'll hire a handyman to replace the floor and install a NEW vanity. Yay! And I'll tile the wall and paint the remaining walls.  Now, I have to make a decision on the vanity. They're expensive and will direct the rest of the finish choices. Here's the three choice...

Yup, so I broke down and nailed a piece of wood to this wall. So there. The Bisecting Piece of Wood I didn't secure it too tightly, so basically I'm still looking at it as temporary. I keep walking past it thinking ... do I like it there? Is it annoying? Will I want hooks on it? Will it look better once the whole wall is white? Etc. Etc. Sometime decorating your house just takes extra time and thought. Related Posts:  Here's where I coined the term The Wall of Restraint So, here's the post where I congratulated myself on  not installing hooks on this wall. And here's the post where  I installed hooks on the wall near it . And, lastly, here's the post from 2012 when  I was so in wuv with this pea green color.  

Brides Are So Pretty Remember when summers were spent at friends' weddings? In lieu of vacations, you'd take weekend trips to wedding destinations, get dressed up and dance with all your friends. Really, it was a pretty great way to spend your summer weekends. Then, you get into your late 30s and find no weddings on your calendar for a full year or more. That's just how these things go, I guess. We went to a wedding last fall in New Jersey, and that was the first one in about a year. My brother, who is in his late 20s, has seven weddings this summer. Seven. And it got me thinking about weddings in general. First of all, if I had had Pinterest  or Instagram before my own wedding 11 years ago, things would have gone down a lot differently. I am completely jealous of all those lucky brides planning their own weddings with access to that brain trust of ideas. Not to mention TinyPrints and Etsy (where were you when I needed you!?) I mean, you girls have no excuses...