lovely house!

We've had lots of friends staying with us and lots of parties the last couple of days, so we've been working like CRAZY to get our house put together! It's still not done (there are still a few rooms that need a lot of work!), but we're doing pretty dang well, I think. :)

To see BEFORE pictures of the house, check out one of our old entries:

http://dailyduncan.blogspot.com/2009/03/new-house.html

And now, the AFTER pictures!!




I decided to follow an Asian sort of theme, so you'll see the rice paper lanterns and umbrella, as well as lots of bamboo. I also wanted to tie the dining/living rooms together with shapes, so there are circular objects everywhere (umbrella, lanterns, mirror, cast iron decor, vases, etc.). I'm still looking for a glass circle coffee table and end tables, but since we're on a budget I'm waiting for something to turn up on Craigslist or DI (where I got almost all of my decor stuff anyway!).

P.S. We put lightbulbs behind the umbrella and in the lanterns, so it looks awesome at night and makes up for the fact that there's no actual light fixture in the living room. :)



Thanks to mom and dad for the awesome couch... there's no way we could have ever afforded something so pretty and comfy! Most of our big furniture is from either of our parents... we're very, very lucky. :)



This little wall thing was a fun project... I found a clearance display bookshelf at Ikea, painted it cream/white to match everything else, and mounted it on the wall. so it's this fun wall/shelf/box display thing now. :)



You can see the little shoe bench thing hiding behind the chair by the door. That was the first furniture we bought for the house - Ikea, of course, and we put it together the first night we got to sleep in the house! This is our compromise... I hate putting shoes away in the closet because you only need them at the door.. but Chris was tired of tripping over my *cough* excessive number of shoes... :) So the shoe bench keeps us both happy!



I know you can't see it well, but the picture on the wall is pretty awesome. We decided we needed a good picture of Christ in the living room, and so we went through our handful of gift cards. Turns out, we had a Deseret Book gift card for $40 in there!! So instead of paying $48 for the picture/matte... we paid $8. :) woohoo!



Sorry the picture's kind of dark... our curtains are really cool - they're this awesome olive greenish pattern. :)





I know it's hard to tell what this is, but we found really cool vinyl wall stickers at Ikea. They're these pretty gray/silver cherry blossom branches, and then I mounted pictures (in DI frames, of course!) in the branches. Right now we just have lots of our engagement/wedding pictures up (narcissistic, right?), but will fill in with others as we have time to print more.



This is the random china hutch thing built in the dining room... since we obviously don't have china or any expensive little trinkets to hide away in here, I tried to make it a little more useful and personal to us! Maybe I'm crazy, but I think violins are absolutely beautiful... so I put our three on display! Yes, the one on the right is my awesomely sexy electric violin... mmmm. :)



Yes, this is a picture in our bathroom, but it shows one of Chris' newly acquired talents! This bathroom was terrible at first... no mirror, no light fixture, and two gaping holes where lights had been - one in the ceiling with wires, and one empty one in the wall. Chris figured out how to rewire from the ceiling hole to the wall hole, and put in this lovely fixture all by himself! We're going to patch the ceiling hole eventually, but for now we just enjoy having a well lit bathroom and mirror. :)



Yes, this is a chicken coop. Yes, this is our backyard. :) Yes, my dad is crazy!!!

So here's the story: my dad has always wanted to have a farm... something about the American dream that his Japanese heart just warms to, I guess. :) So, after listening to him try to convince Mom for years, my sister Kristen just bought him a couple of baby chicks for his birthday! He loved them, but wasn't sure what to do with them... I think he kind of assumed they would just die, since baby chicks have something like a 90% mortality rate in their first few weeks of life. One even had a blocked vent - which is as nasty as it sounds (basically, its poo got stuck on the way out, which made a big chunk of dry poo stuck to its little bottom... which blocked other poo from getting out... ick), although we did some 'surgery' and fixed it! - but they both lived by some miracle. Dad kept building progressively bigger coops for the growing chicks, but they really didn't fit so well in their house. :)

Since their neighborhood covenants don't allow chickens, Dad convinced me to adopt the chickens! He's been in Rexburg a couple weekends a month, building this amazing coop all by himself - crazy guy! He finally finished it a few weeks ago, and now we have chickens! They're really beautiful... one is a dark gold, and the other is red. They'll start laying eggs in a few weeks, so woohoo - fresh eggs for breakfast every morning! :)

We haven't named them yet... any ideas? I'm leaning towards Sodom and Gomorrah, but no one else likes those names. :) Oh well. Dad still calls them "Red and Goldie", but that's no fun!


Anyway, I know this has been a ridiculously long post, but I wanted to share pics of our little house. :) There are other rooms where we've done lots of work (including our lovely kitchen which is now painted an awesome shade of RED!), but this is the part of the house that is totally done! whew!