Grandma.

I was planning on putting up some pictures of our new entertainment stand with info on how we did it this week, but a wrench was thrown into the plan on Thursday morning. I got a phone call from my dad telling me that my Grandma was dying. Cory and I packed up the car at 10pm, picked up my brother, and drove to St. Louis. We got there around 4AM, and after a quick nap, there was a whirlwind of activity. We all met with Hospice Care around 9:30 am, and by 5:30pm, Grandma was at home in her own bed, just like she wanted. Unfortunately we could not stay as long as we would've liked due to everyone's schedules, so we had to say our final good-byes the next morning. We'll be thinking of her over the next few weeks, but sadly, I'm sure we'll be making the trip back down very soon.

I Love You, Grandma!

We've got Stripes!

Here is what our "living room" looked like before we moved in:

BLECH! (...sorry previous owners...)

We finally got some paint on the walls a couple weeks ago (I know, I suck at blogging as things are happening). We are huge Wisconsin Badger fans, so we wanted to do a Badger theme without having bright Cardinal Red EVERYWHERE. We settled in a red, white, and brown theme.

We started by painting the largest wall a nice, rich red (Behr's Paint & Primer in One in Allure). The rest of the walls were covered in two coats of an off-white (Behr's Swiss Coffee). With a couple of coats, and a few touch-ups to go, the room looked like this:

(Please ignore the crazy amount of things on our floor)

After living with it for a couple of days, I decided that the Swiss Coffee alone was just too light (for those of you who don't know me, I don't do well with lack of color!), and was trying to figure out how I could add color without straying from my color scheme. Inspiration struck when I was watching TLC's What Not To Wear and the room Stacy & Clinton were in while tearing apart this poor woman's wardrobe was horizontally striped with light browns. Perfect!! 

I was nervous about picking a color to coordinate, but I ended up with one that was just two shades lighter than the Swiss Coffee (Behr's Oyster). When I was painting it in the wall, I was pretty sure it was too light and was NOT happy about needing to do it all over, but it started out perfectly. My mom came over to help us measure, tape, and paint because she's fully awesome.

I was SUPER impatient and wanted to take all the tape off an hour after we painted, but it ended up needing an extra coat, and Cory convinced me to be patient (i.e. bribed me with food). FINALLY, we took the tape off (seriously, that's my favorite part), brought the couch in, and hooked up that TV!

...aaaaand here's our after:

I love my stripes!

To be perfectly honest, the room looks different already, but I'll be posting soon with how we made our super cheap and super awesome entertainment unit.