Thursday, August 26, 2010

Cheers to Missoula

Tonight we headed to Downtown Tonight, at Caras Park.  It was the last one for the year and all about the GRIZ.  It's a fun, family event, with lots of food and live music.  It makes you feel like part of the community and it reminded me of how much I love where I live.

Cheers to Missoula!




Happy Champagne Thursday!

Wednesday, August 25, 2010

Goodbye Knotty Pine...Hello Bistro White

One of the reasons I started this blog was so I could document all of our projects around the house.  Even though our house was fairly new, NOTHING in our house matched, think black/brown (rustic looking) light fixtures, brushed nickel hardware in the bathroom, black knobs on all the kitchen & bathroom cabinets, black door hardware, dark hardwood flooring, log stair case & fireplace mantel and knotty pine doors and trim.

My first project was making all the knotty pine disappear.  In my opinion it was the biggest eye sore and didn't match any of our stuff.  (I do know that a lot of people like the look of knotty pine, we are in Montana after all.  No offense, it's just not our style.)  Anyways, it needed to be changed.  After bringing home about 20 different white paint samples, we slowly narrowed it down and decided on a nice Bistro White.  We chose a semi gloss paint, so it would be easy to wipe up any messes.  We do have a little guy running around here that likes to get his hands on everything :) At the end of March, I began working on my month and a half long project of painting our trim and doors.  Needless to say it was a lot of work; taping, sanding, priming and two coats of paint on everything, one room at a time.

Here are a few before shots:

This might have looked great in a cabin, but not in our house.

See what I mean about not matching?

In order to get a nice even coat on the doors, we took them all down and sprayed them in garage.  It was quite the set up.

We had to set the doors up accordion style.  All the doors were standing on pieces of wood and then they were nailed together at the top, with tiny scraps of wood.
Tip from Chris:  When using a paint sprayer, make sure you cover EVERYTHING you don't want any paint on.
And while we had all the doors down, we swapped out the black hardware for some nice, new brushed nickel hardware.

Here are a few after shots:

Ahh...What a difference a couple coats of white paint will make

Matches our decor much better

So worth it!  I am 110% happy with the end result, however it is not a project I would like to do again anytime soon.

Cheers!

Monday, August 23, 2010

Happy Birthday Mom!

Happy Birthday Mom!  Thanks for everything you do for us!  It is greatly appreciated!  Hope you have an amazing day!  We love you!



We are celebrating you today!
Cheers!

Thursday, August 19, 2010

What kind of Champagne do we usually drink?


What kind of Champagne do we typically drink on a Champagne Thursday?  The answer...Cristalino!  We like to call it Cristal for short :)  It's a little cheaper than the real Cristal though.  It's been voted Value Brand of the Year for last 3 years and we can usually find it for around $7-8.  Can't beat that!  We love it!


Cristalino!

Value Brand of the Year
Cheers!

Happy Champagne Thursday!

BTW - We are celebrating my new blog tonight :)

Cheers!
Melissa



Wednesday, August 18, 2010

Finding our house

Chris and I knew we wanted to come back to Montana once we started having kids.  We both grew up here and knew we wanted to raise our family here.  We loved Seattle, but felt Montana was a better fit for our family.  The beginning of 2009 we started looking online for houses in Missoula. We were not seriously looking, just seeing what was out there and starting to get an idea of what was available, neighborhoods, prices, etc.

I should also mention, that we were not very happy with the place we were renting.  Although it was in a great location and our commute to work was less than 10 minutes, it was an older house that needed some updating.  We had done a little updating ourself, but didn't want to put too much money into it because we were only renting.  The one thing our landlord did while were living there was paint the house purple!  We came home from work one day and it was purple.  We were a little annoyed and ready to get out of there.

We had visited our friends Matt and Katie and their little boy, Thatcher (who is just a few weeks older than Parker), in Missoula, over Christmas, in 2008 and loved the neighborhood they lived in.  We or at least I was hoping to find a house in the same neighborhood.

Well, our search didn't take long at all.  The end of January, we found our house on Craigslist and as luck would have it, the house was in the neighborhood we wanted.  I was so excited!  The only picture posted in the ad, was an exterior picture, but we knew we wanted it.  I made Chris e-mail the seller right away.  About a week later, after asking Chris multiple times a day if he had heard anything about the house, the seller finally e-mailed us back.  Since we were in Seattle, it wasn't super easy for us to look at the house.  Luckily my parents were only a couple hours away and made a trip over to Missoula to look for us.  They were super excited about the idea of having Parker 115 miles away instead of 600 miles.  They liked the house and took pictures for us.  After talking to them and looking through the pictures, Chris and I made an offer on our house, contingent on us looking at the house the following weekend.  We had a 3 day weekend, so we took Parker on a little road trip to Missoula, to look at our new house.  We loved it, our offer was official!  There was a nice family renting the house and they were in no hurry to move, so that gave us time to wrap things up in Seattle before we were ready to make our big move.  I don't think either Chris or I thought we would find our house as quickly as we did, but it was meant to be.

It was hard to leave Seattle and say goodbye to our friends and a job I loved, but we were ready for a new adventure with our little boy.  So, at the end of June we packed up our purple house and headed east, to Missoula, MT.

Loading the U-Haul in Washington
Our new house!
Happy to be out of the car and in our new home

Cheers!


Tuesday, August 17, 2010

Welcome to Champagne Thursdays!

Welcome to Champagne Thursdays!  Let's see where do we start?  Our name?  Chris and I first got the idea when we watched Failure to Launch.  It's mentioned briefly in the movie, but we liked the idea and began our own Champagne Thursday tradition.  There is always something worth celebrating!  






Stay tuned for more updates on what we are celebrating!


Cheers!
Melissa