January Barkbox and Sophies Half Birthday!

Today we are talking about Sophie's January Barkbox and also her Half Birthday!

Sophie's Barkbox arrived last week and she is always obsessed with the contents!

How cute is she when it arrives?! What a little sweetheart.

We always get so much use out of the toys and she is obsessed with all the treats.

This box had a snowman which broke apart into three pieces. There is the body, the head (which holds treats) and the stick arms that can also be removed and make a great fetch toy.

I was a little surprised since all of these treats had some sort of fruit or vegetable in them that Sophie ate them! She often doesn't go for treats with fruits or veggies but she loved them! 

The long term chews are getting less long term but are still her favorites.

I'm sorry this picture is so blurry but the other toy she received in this box was a winter hat. I kept trying to put it on her head but she wanted to just squeak it. 

Here is the snowman with the treats popped in him. 

Here is the other bag of treats she received. She loves these too!

Another long term chew! This was a great box and Sophie loved every item inside. If you haven't gotten a Barkbox for your dog yet definitely order it right now!! Here is a referral link for you if you want it: Try Barkbox

Also last week we celebrated Sophie's half birthday! She turned 6 months old and we can't believe she is getting so big so fast!

Tim ran out and grabbed her a birthday cookie that we cut in half for her half birthday. Of course she didn't like it, but don't worry we had plenty of other treats for her too! 

Oh gosh I just love my little family so much. 

Do you celebrate your dogs birthday? What about half birthdays? Are we totally insane? :)

Have a great day everyone!

Living Room Updates

Hi again! Today I'm showing you some living room updates we made! Every corner of our house is a work in progress and I'm quickly learning that even when I say something is "done" I mean "done for now" 

If you are on Instagram check out MyTexasHouse who has a house that is GOALS but also continually is changing things which just goes to show that even when your house looks perfect you can still want to change things up!

So today is all about our living room updates. I finally convinced Tim to hang up our Etsy sign from Pallettes and Peonies. I saw this originally on The SunnySide Up blog and absolutely loved it. 

We debated where on the wall to place it but ended up going just about center. I am considering putting a shelf on either side of the sign but I haven't fully decided yet. I just don't want it to look overcrowded, I much prefer a very simple and clean look.

If you have any suggestions please leave them in the comments!

This is what the view of it looks like from the kitchen. Very simple but at least there is something on the wall now!

The other new update in our living room is our new coffee table....

Instead of the bulky, wooden top coffee table now we have a smaller, bright white table. I love that it matches our small table from At Home.

I picked up this new coffee table at Wayfair and I'm so glad it helped pull the room together.

Sophie just loves to jump in every picture that I take of the house :)

I think this coffee table fits the space much better than the other one did. It also is a lot lighter weight and just brightens up the whole living room.

I also pulled Sophie's old bed out of the living room. Girl doesn't need two beds in the living room right?! We also picked up a new bin from HomeGoods to hold some of her toys because her toy bin was overflowing! Little spoiled pup.

I don't feel like this room is complete at all despite getting a new rug, new table and new wall art in here. I definitely am considering another small table and lamp in the back corner by the side of the couch. Like I mentioned before I am still figuring out if I want anything else on the wall. I also still want to change out the fan, which is a project for another day.

We have been living without coasters for awhile in fear that Sophie would eat them. While at HomeGoods I found marble coasters that are super heavy. I know that Sophie won't be able to eat them and they look great and fit into the aesthetic that I'm going for.

While I look at the pictures I can see how badly our couch needs to be cleaned, I desperately need to order a steam cleaner.

Here you can see our new toy bin how much less crowded it is with only one bed! I still am figuring out how I want to set everything up. I know I keep saying that everything isn't complete but I'm sure everyone is feeling the same about their own homes. In this picture you can also see our new little door mat that I picked up from Amazon. I actually picked up two of these and put one by the kitchen side door as well. I'm not 100% sold on them but they were only $17 a piece so they work for now!

Here are the marble coasters from HomeGoods. They are heavy and solid and work great!

Clearly someone is interested in them :)

So those are the updates to our living room! I will keep you updated as we make more updates!

Food Storage When You Don't Have A Pantry

I feel like almost everyone in America has a pantry in their kitchen. Unfortunately we don't and that was a bummer when we fell in love with our house. The good news is I can share how we are creating more spaces for food storage and how we make it work in our house. Let me know if you have a pantry in the comments!

We have a double cupboard we have dedicated to food storage. It originally had three shelves inside but I decided not to put one back in after we painted our kitchen cabinets. I thought this was a great idea but in reality it made more sense to have all three shelves for more storage so I ended up putting it back in this past weekend. 

Let's start by cleaning up and cleaning out! I pulled everything out of the cabinet to throw away anything expired and organize what we wanted to keep.

We have so much candy right now. There is still leftover candy from Halloween and we accumulated more candy over Christmas. I guess we will be sharing with guests for quite some time!

At this point I had emptied out the bottom shelf and put all the contents on the counter. See how much room the bottom shelf had? It was a little ridiculous and I felt like we were just piling things on top of each other and it was just creating a huge mess!

Here's the after! It's certainly not as Pinterest perfect as many pantries I see on The Home Edit Instagram page but it is functional and works for now! With having three shelves there is less room for stacking and that will hopefully keep us a little more organized!

Our basement door is right next to this cabinet so I use the back of the door for a little more storage. 

We purchased this unit from The Container Store back when we lived in our apartment. It worked great in our pantry there and also is doing a great job on our basement door.

It works really well for canned goods and other condiment containers that are unopened.

The last place we are storing food is on shelves on our basement stairs. 

Tim and my dad installed these three shelves from Home Depot and I am so thankful for this extra storage space.

This area is great for rice and other unopened grains.

We also use it to store pasta, unopened chips, potatoes, and coffee.

The built-in shelf underneath holds all alcohol, which we have a ton of and I'm not sure how we accumulated all of it!

So that's how we store all our food without a pantry. It may not be Pinterest worthy but it certainly woks for us while we don't have a pantry! 

Let me know if you have a pantry and how you store all your food!

Have a great day everybody!

Straightening Up The Office

Happy MLK Jr Day! Are you off work today? I am and am greatly enjoying my long weekend. I honestly spent most of Saturday laying on the couch resting up from the week but yesterday I did manage to get a ton of laundry and cleaning done which made me feel super productive.

Sometimes I get super hard on myself because this house is moving along slower than I thought it would. I came in thinking we would do all the projects in one weekend and we would instantly be amazing at renovating. News flash: we have NO idea what we are doing. Neither of us has a clue and we've been learning a LOT throughout the process. I will go into more detail in another post but we had a huge fail yesterday! It involved yelling and tears and feeling like failures because we purchased parts that were too big. 

So for now I'll stick with what I'm good at, organizing and cleaning! Let's get started in our office closet which had turned into my Monica closet.

This closet was full of gift wrap, my wedding dress, childhood items, bags, games, and other random items.

It was truly a mess and I pulled everything out, sorted through it all and when I placed everything back inside....

Still pretty full but it looks SO much better! I am so impressed that I managed to put almost everything back in, but more organized. There were a few things that went to the basement but it was all childhood toys that I want to save. There were also bins of toys and other gifts I've picked up on sale and those were able to go downstairs in my stockpile.

I still have room to grow on the top shelf if I need to store more items.

The fact that you can see the floor in there is huge since before you couldn't!

Now, let me show you what the office looked like after Christmas when all of our Christmas gifts were piled up inside.

Insane right? So much stuff and it just looks like a total disaster.

But now....

I just have pictures that we haven't hung up yet, a few things left to put away and our new coffee table we need to put together but are waiting for Wayfair to send some parts they left out of the original package. It's not perfect but looks SO much better!

This is the other side of the room. It's definitely not complete but I will keep you updated as we continue to update this area!

I am really happy that this room is *almost* complete and at least looks presentable if people come over to visit. That's the number one thing I'm going for in our home. I want everything to look presentable even if it's not 100% perfect and there is still a ton of updates we want to do.

Have a great day everyone!

Sophie's Week

Today I'm sharing a sad story. Sophie unfortunately had a rough week last week. She stole a grocery list from Tim on Monday and when he took it back she jumped up to grab it and when she came back down hit the coffee table and hurt her left shoulder. We spent six hours at the emergency vet while they examined her and then took her back in for sedated x-rays. Luckily it appears to just be a muscular issue, but she is on pain medication and we are trying to get her to rest as much as possible.

Here she is after her morning of sedated X-rays. Poor little sweetheart.

She's doing lots of resting.

Eating fake donuts...

While mom eats really Allie's Donuts (a Rhode Island classic) but I thought it was cute that we matched with our blue donuts.

I can't wait until she can run and play again. She really is so sleepy from the medication and we are trying so hard to take care of our little girl.

She's such a good girl and we hate for her to be in any pain.

Hopefully she will be back to new in a few weeks!

Hallway Wall Decor

Hey everyone! 

We finally have stuff up on the walls in our hallway! Slowly things are happening around here!!

I originally planned on doing a gallery wall, similar to the one we had in our apartment above the couch. You can see that gallery wall in this post. The reason I decided to not do that in this hallway is because I thought it would be too overwhelming. I don't like things to look cluttered and I thought the wall would look far too cluttered if it was filled with frames.

For this project I laid out exactly what I wanted and then coerced asked Tim to help me. I am very impatient when it comes to measuring and making sure everything is perfect where Tim is a perfectionist. He carefully measures and uses the level so I put him to work getting the three items up on the wall. 

Here he is hard at work! 

I love that it's super simple with only three pieces. I will change out the pictures in the future but for now I have a picture of Tim and I from Florida in 2016 and a picture of Sophie in the other frame from this Christmas.

The palette sign I believe is from Target and Tim picked this out for apartment when we first moved in there back in 2016! 

The glare makes it a little hard to see, but I'm just thankful we had some sunny, warm days this past weekend that I will take all the sunlight we can get!

I'm very pleased with how it came out and that's one thing I can check off my to do list!