Cake! Cake! Cake!

23 Dinosaurs for My 23rd Birthday!

Eric & Ariel's Wedding Cake!

(I just did the top cake!)

My cousin Zephyn's Birthday Cake.

The Desk

As promised, here is the desk reveal. Fortunately, my "before" picture looked especially sad and cluttered so the transformation will look especially remarkable. And there is nothing I love more than a dramatic reveal. Well, except maybe for a really cute cat video. Anyway, all I did was sanding, paint and installing new handles. This past week ended up being especially gloomy and wet so I made the best of things and turned our kitchen into a temporary shop for a few days.

 In the interest of making my projects as economical as possible (and because I really like the colour!) I decided to use the same turqoise-ish paint from the kitchen storage bench. Regardless of already having all of the painting supplies, I still ended up at the hardware store an unacceptable number of times. After expressing my frustration regarding the multiplicity of Ace voyages I undertook, my roommate Rose informed me that every project requires an average of three trips to the hardware store. I felt slightly consoled-after all, someone has to be the outlier.

Here's the final product, complete with a chair from Ikea (love!) I painted pink:

This finished piece combined with my full bookshelf makes this corner my favorite part of my room! So far at least.

 
Join me for my next blog entry about the best cakes I've made since moving to Carmel! Hint: one of them involves 23 of these friends. . .

Home Improvement Part I: The Bench

A recent slew of home improvement projects has encouraged me to abandon my long hiatus from blogging. After moving into our new Carmel apartment, Rose and I diligently have begun the task of constructing a space that is definitively not a college residence (despite the fact that our apartment bleeds vibes that feel suspiciously like South Campus Apartments at Anderson. . .)

With my birthday coming up this weekend I am staying plenty busy but thought I would start with a quick entry about a beautiful bench I purchased at a garage sale that was on the side of SR32 somewhere between Noblesville and Anderson. Rose and I also picked up a few old trunks with the intention of restoring them, but that is an entirely different, and significantly more epic, story.

So this lovely $20 piece just needed some rags, sandpaper and a lot of paint.

A few trips to Ace and several Google searches later (as it turns out, I need a little help to navigate projects that actually involve the hardware store) and the bench transformed into this vibrant piece.

In addition to adding the pop of colour by the window, it also solved our kitchen storage problem. No more aimless clutter on top of the refrigerator!

I'll try to keep updated with the apartment progress and will even attempt to be more diligent with documenting things with pictures. (Hmmm, I'm pretty sure using a form of "diligent" twice in one blog entry is overkill. Next time I'll pull out the thesaurus.)

Check back Sunday to see the results of my desk project!