Wedding Planning Start-up

It’s Wedding Wednesday!  At least I have now designated a day that is dedicated to Wedding things - A little tribute to our recent wedding and some inspiration/tips/tricks for all of you out in the blog world.  Our whole wedding day was beyond anything I dreamed of.  Everything came together perfectly and I didn’t stress one bit ‘day of’… really!  We had the most fantastic family and friends there to celebrate with us.  My word ‘day of’ was “Yay Marriage!” J

So, today it is all about starting your long adventure of wedding planning.  After Hubs proposed, I started surfing the web for ideas.  It was pretty easy for us to pinpoint the type of wedding location we wanted.  We are boaters by summer and skiers by winter.  Since we wanted to have our wedding somewhat local and wanted to bask in some lovely sunny weather, “On the Water” was it. 

But, before we made a hit list of locations to visit, we needed to know what we could spend on our venue which meant we needed to know how much we could spend overall on our wedding.  If you have no idea what a “good budget number” is, do a little Google search.  This will give you a feel for how much certain aspects of your wedding can cost.  I had done this before / talked with friends to get an idea of what their budget was for their wedding.  I realized that you will spend half of your money on the venue, food, and bar and I was amazed at how much invitations and cakes can cost!  Then, it is most important to have “the talk” with whoever is paying for most of the wedding before you start anything.  I wouldn’t schedule meetings with vendors until you have accomplished this task, no matter how daunting and/or scary it may seem.  Honestly, I thought it would be easy to approach my parents and say “hey mom / dad, what you got to spend on this shin-dig?”.  But, in all honesty it was very difficult – I didn’t want my parents to feel that I ‘expected’ them to foot the bill.  But lo and behold we got our magic number and made sure to include everything - honeymoon, rehearsal dinner included ... anything that 'smelled' like 'wedding'.

Once we knew our “target number” I then did a quick Google search for a budget breakdown.  I used Wedding Wire’s (www.weddingwire.com) budget tool which allowed me to plug in my overall number and it in turn spit out a nice little breakdown of what to expect to spend on each category.  Once I tweaked the numbers based on subsequent vendor research my budget looked like this:

I will probably elaborate more on this another time, as this was just a guide in the beginning and I cut costs in categories by DIY-ing and finding ways to save money.  But, all in all, making a budget was paramount to the beginning of the wedding planning process and one you don’t want to skip over because it could lead to a broken heart down the road when you start looking at all the different vendors.

I've got the Blues...

... Blue-ish Paint that is.

As you know from my previous posts I am dying to lighten up our master bedroom and ‘the other’ room as I will call it.  I haven’t had much success in paint colors for both rooms and have spent the past month looking for inspiration.  Most of my blog stalking has unveiled a trend in light gray-ish/blue-ish/green-ish paint colors that give the bedroom space a calming feeling.  My first attempt to find that new calming color didn’t wow me.  Aqua Breeze and Water Mark from Behr just had me feeling blue, as in too much ‘light blue’.  Hubs “warned” me that he didn’t want to wake up to a “baby blue” space.   I agreed.  Spending some more time really searching the web, I realized I needn't to calm the blue and green down and add some gray.  I just think my fear of gray had me heading in the wrong direction at first.  So, back to Home Depot I bought the following sample paints:

1)      Gentle Tide by Glidden (they no longer have a sample of this color, but I just had to tell them the color name).  (I was inspired by the pic below)

2)      Quiet Moments by Benjamin Moore

3)      Healing Aloe by Benjamin Moore

4)      Woodlawn Blue by Benjamin Moore

Gentle Tide {via}

Tested all 4 all over the two bedrooms last week, but it still left me confused.   So back to Benjamin Moore and Behr’s website to come up with more colors

1)      Coastal Fog by Behr

2)      Lookout Point by Benjamin Moore

3)      Polar Ice by Benjamin Moore

4)      Windy Sky by Benjamin Moore.  (Inspired by the pic below)

5)      Glass Slipper by Benjamin Moore

Windy Sky {via}

Now, some of those colors on our walls below.... 

Left of window, top to bottom - Coastal Fog, Lookout Point, Windy Sky

Right of window, top to bottom - Gentle Tide, Lookout Point, Windy Sky

The 3 big sample areas, top to bottom - Gentle Tide, Lookout Point, Windy Sky

Yes, I may be slightly obsessed ….I just feel like I have to get this one right.  I was hoping that the third time would leave me with the answer.  Well, it did!  I picked Gentle Tide and purchased a Gallon tonight!


P.S. I plan to use Gentle Tide in bathroom too.  I will wait until the bathroom renovation that is in the works... hopefully this winter, fingers crossed.

Tackled by Paint

My last post gave you a glimpse at our Vibrant Casa the day the keys were handed to us 2 years ago and it was officially ours (and the banks).  Now it’s time to see where a little lot of painting got us.  All the paint is Behr, from Hubs' favorite store ever, Home Depot, besides West Marine.

I feel like I must write a disclaimer here... I apologize for the move-in mess (at least I am pretty sure we were still organizing here).  I obviously didn't clean up for these pictures.

Living Room – Antique White

Living Room and Dining Room - Antique White

(see the Dining Room in the back there...)

Kitchen – Spicy Cayenne

Master Bedroom – originally Gray (can’t remember….oops)

Master Bedroom – now Hawthorne Yellow (Benjamin Moore) color matched at Home Depot

Guest Bedroom/Office/Dog Room/Storage – originally Gray (can’t remember…oops)

Guest Bedroom/Office/Dog Room/Storage – now Hawthorne Yellow (Benjamin Moore)

color matched at Home Depot

Notice the new hardwood floors.  More on that in a future blog post.

Bathroom – Spicy Cayenne

Started with a light green that we didn’t like, so we used the rest of the Spicy Cayenne… for now.  I have had major plans for the bathroom too since day 1 .. if only money grew on trees.

How we selected our color scheme … a shot in the dark, kind of.  We knew we wanted a more “low key” color in the Living and Dining Room, so Antique White seemed just right.  Although the kitchen was tiny, I really wanted a cozy feeling to compliment the cabinets (that we knew would always stay).  Plus, I wanted to experiment with colors and step outside my comfort zone… Spicy Cayenne was that color and I am still in love with it!  The bedrooms are still a “disaster” as I like to say.  I wanted a calming feeling in the rooms so I originally went with a gray .. lets just say gray and I didn’t work out for these room.  We found out that our master bedroom pretty much never gets natural sunlight unless it is between 4 pm and 5 pm during the summer and the gray I picked out was just too gloomy.  Our non-existent natural sunlight was one reason why we went with lighter hard wood floors – to lighten the space up.  At the same time we installed new hardwood floors one year in, I started looking at yellow paint and found “the perfect” yellow while browsing a Pottery Barn magazine.  I loved it at first but have realized that this yellow is just too “bright” for me to go to sleep to or wake up to.  It would be great for some type of living space, but I feel like it is yelling at me as I try to unwind for the day .. not good.  So, today, recent inspiration has come to transform these rooms into a more calming space using light gray/blue/green color.  More on transforming these spaces soon, so keep posted!



Our Vibrant House - Before

Time for a little intro to the homestead.  Hubs and I live just on the outskirts of DC .. about 5 minutes away - across the river on the VA side.  If anyone knows the area, it by far isn't the cheapest.  We could have moved to the suburbs of DC but 1) we work in the DC area and 2) traffic would be an absolute nightmare leaving two very unhappy people at the end of the day.  And who wants to go home grumpy after a long day of work!  So, we did tons of research, visited a ton of houses, and very soon fell for a little place in an old garden style condo building ... that fit the budget.  We're on the first floor with only one neighbor, so it totally makes us "feel" like we are living in a house, at least that is what we tell ourselves.  There is even a park behind us the that the pup can play in! 

The place totally needed a good facelift when we purchased it.    The previous owners apparently loved every color in the rainbow so we knew we would be painting the entire 800 sf place in 1 week before moving in.  Being built in the 40s and renovated in the 80s with no new updates since the 80s, we also knew we had our fair share of renovations.  Lucky for it - we both build buildings on a daily basis and absolutely love a good challenge!

Without further ado - Our Vibrant Casa Before we tackled it with paint brushes.

 Living Room and Entrance (main door to the left of the window)

 

Dining Room - Right and Left Walls

Kitchen (the only room without paint)

Master Bedroom - Left and Right Walls

2nd Bedroom (to be Office / Guest Room)

Full Bathroom

There you have it! A glimpse at our house before we started DIYing everywhere!

Hello Blog World

I must say that I am pretty pumped to start this blog.  Why?  Well, over the past year I have been a consistent reader of many blogs (my now hubs would say obsessively so) mainly because I was planning a wedding.  My morning routine consisted of 1) coffee (essential), 2) read new blog posts.  Well, I am now married as of a month ago and no longer needed to plan a wedding.  Although I still as of today read wedding blogs, I only really read my top 3.  This was a problem - my morning routine was disrupted.  I found the fix when I decided to google "richmond diy blog".  One of my friends had told me that the previous owners of the house she just bought had a DIY blog, and hubs and I are total DIYers at home.  I didn't find that blog, but I found another - www.younghouselove.com - and I was immediately hooked.  When I say hooked, lets just say that I read the e-n-t-i-r-e blog from its conception in 1 week (hubs looked at me like I was crazy).  Well, once that was complete (I am very task oriented as you can see) I went to some of the blogs they follow, found one I liked, then went to more, etc.  I now have about 5 added to my morning routine = success.

Priming the Walls of our First Home (I think there is more paint on us than the walls)

So, coupled with the inspiration I gained through the blogs I read + the fact that I have had the blogging itch for about 6 months now + my urge to DIY = Start Blog (note: I am an engineer hence my love of math).  Plan to see plenty of "stuff" as I will call it for now on my blog.  Wedding planning tips and ideas, DIY home projects, and our obsession for anything that involves the water (i.e. our 80 pound Labrador Grouper and our boat - aka second home) and thus the name for "the blog"... like my spin on the word "nautical" (P.S. 'tying the knot' was our wedding "theme")? 

Yay Wedding Day