Girls’ Day Out

I realize it’s been over a week since last I regaled you with office updates. Since then I received and put together the cabinet and it’s pretty much wonderful.

It’s actually a bathroom floor cabinet from Wal-Mart, but whatever. It suits my needs just fine and it looks great! Except for this little oops right here.

I promise I followed the directions and, in fact, read them over and over again to make sure I was putting the shelf in the correct way. Apparently I was not. Which isn’t such a big deal because when the doors are closed you can’t even see the shelf. But still.

So yesterday Katie and I took a little road trip (more on that in a jiff) and I bought this tape and now it looks like this:

And I’m pretty much in love with the cabinet. Except for the bathroom-esque door knobs, but that’s easy enough to change. I will be looking for knobs to match the desk.

As for the rest of the office, nothing has been done. I’m waiting for the fabulous bookcase Todd is going to build me. He has the supplies and will be starting on it this weekend, but he had to finish these first:

He MADE me shutters for our bedroom! It’s really hard to tell in the picture, but there is still some finish work to be done to the window frame because, as it happens, our windows are anything but square. So shims were made and some creative hanging happened, but they look fantastic and will be beautiful when everything is done. And that will be when I paint the bedroom and the window trim. Which will be when my office is done. Which will be when And I have no idea when that will be.

Okay. So now we’re all caught up on the office happenings. On to the road trip I mentioned above.

Katie stayed down at school this summer to work, take classes and do an internship at a local museum. She is now home for about three weeks before she starts her SENIOR YEAR OF COLLEGE! How my baby is now a senior in college should be its own post full of nostalgia and tear wine stains and wonderment, but that’s for another day.

Anyway, we decided we had to go to Hobby Lobby because she needed fixings for her apartment and I needed a white board and calendar for my office. (See? Everything comes back to my office.) But no road trip, however long or short, is complete without some fuel for the road in the form of Starbucks something or other. So we stopped for our brew of choice and hit the road for Exton.

As I said, I was on the lookout for a dry-erase calendar and a memo board. But I didn’t want something boring so I made a dry-erase memo board out of a shadow box and pretty scrapbook paper. I added some twine and embellishments for clothes pins so I could hang notes and such. I’m kind of enamored with it.

 

But it wasn’t all about the office. I also wanted to pick something up for our mantel because it still had this:

But all Hobby Lobby had was Fall and Christmas stuff so we decided we had to get serious and go to Kitchen Kettle Village. Kitchen Kettle Village is in Amish Country in a little town called Intercourse. “Intercourse” means conversation, people! It’s full of all kinds of trinkets that say I <3 Intercourse. But no, that’s not what I was looking for as mantel decor.

This is what we ended up with:

And it will probably just stay there all year around because we are Americans all year around. And because my seasonal decor game is weak. I may throw a pumpkin or a Christmas bauble up there as the season dictates, but then again, I may not.