Words to live by.

(from poorly written history on Flickr.)

Before & After: My studio.

If you would have asked me a month ago which room I thought we were going to finish first in this house, I wouldn't have responded with my studio. In fact, we had barely talked about what we wanted to do with it. It's really a strange room, if you can call it that. We're not actually sure if it was meant to be a room, or a large closet. Someone mentioned to me that there used to be baby rooms built off of master bedrooms, so maybe that's what it originally was. Either way, I fell in love with it right away despite the fact that it was covered, floor to ceiling in ugly, stained carpet squares. Seriously. 

We ripped out the carpet on the floor the first weekend we lived in the house and didn't do much after that. I set up my desk in there a couple of weeks before Christmas to work on some gifts and soon after decided that it would be nice to paint the floors white to brighten up the space a bit. So we did that. And the room was cleared out and one thing led to another and the next thing I know our good friends, the Tomlinsons, are helping me rip down all the carpet squares and sagging plaster wall. 

Luckily Ryan has had some experience with drywall (we had none) and was super motivated to help us get it hung while they were staying with us. Then they left and the mudding was up to us. I have to say, I'm no Bob Vila, but I'm feeling pretty good about my drywall mudding skills after this project. And Andrew even got to use the rasp that he had just gotten for Christmas. 

After the drywall was complete we cleaned the layers of dust and painted. We had finished painting the floor prior to demolishing the wall so it got fairly beat up in the process. I decided to leave it as is because I liked the distressed look and I knew I wasn't going to be able to keep it perfectly white for forever. I had an idea to use lathe to create a pin board of sorts for the wall that my desk would be against. It took me two days and a few splinters to finish it but it was so worth it. I LOVE it. It makes the room.

It's probably pretty obvious, but the room is 100 times better than it was when we started. Just painting it white made it so much brighter and more welcoming. I'm really excited to have a studio again, especially one that's designed exactly the way I want it. The only thing it's lacking is a sky light, hopefully that will come some day when the weather is warm again. 

More pictures from the remodel are on my Flickr page here.

Elephants make the perfect gifts.

My grandma loves elephants. So, for her 80th birthday I wanted to do a special drawing for her. Here's a sketch I did of it. 

"I carry a log - yes. Is it funny to you?"

Andrew and I have been watching Twin Peaks for the past couple of months. It's one of my favorites and I always felt like it was rather fitting to watch it when the weather is cold and gloomy. I drew this picture of the Log Lady in my sketchbook when I was watching it the first time around. There are just too many good characters in that show.

Twenty Twelve.

We celebrated the New Year at our house with some good friends of ours. Party hats + noise makers required of course. Maybe it was the fact that I was a little under the weather, but something about this New Year's celebration seemed drastically less eventful (special? magical?) than the years past. Although I suppose it's slightly been going downhill in importance since I reached the age in which I was staying up until midnight on a regular basis anyways. Either way, it was really great to spend time with our friends who we've neglected since this whole home buying thing began. It's been a stressful and tough year, no doubt about it. I have a feeling that 2012 is going to be pretty awesome though. 

I didn't make any goals for myself this year. At least not yet. I have some things in mind that I want to accomplish, most of them involving the house, but I don't want to miss any opportunities that present themselves to me. If all goes well I will have a brand new studio to move into within the next week and that is something I'm really looking forward to. 

A week off.

I've had a lot of time off due to the holidays and it's extremely refreshing. We've been to a lot of family get togethers, had some of our closest friends stay at our house, enjoyed slow mornings together and spent a lot of time working on the house. Here are a few moments.

Oh, and the decision to paint my studio floor white evolved into us tearing down the carpet squares covering every surface, and tearing down a sagging plaster wall, and learning drywall skills. I suppose a before and after will be in order once it's all done. 

The struggle with the spritz cookies.

Spritz cookies are my dad's favorite. Spritz cookies are a struggle.

Over the years we have learned that there are three variables that can go horribly wrong when making spritz cookies. Number one - the cookie press/gun. Number two - the dough consistency. Number three - the flavor of the dough. Failure to succeed at any of these variables can result in: hand cramps, crumbly cookies, cookies in the shape of mushed blobs, cookies with too much almond flavor, cookies with no flavor, or a wasted hour of your life.

This year we went through three guns and in the end decided to finally retire one of them. And after a couple of sheets of un-recognizeable, but tasty, cookies blobs we finally succeeded in making a few trays of perfectly wonderful spritz cookies.

Blanket of white.

Even though I was running a few minutes late for work this morning, I stopped to snap some pictures of the blanket of white.