Football season is back! Alabama printable

It's the most wonderful time of the year. Football season is back in the South! Normally, I would have already had our home decked out in crimson and houndstooth, but since we are getting our house ready to put on the market, the Realtor has us "de-personalizing" our house.

I just couldn't go through football season without all the pomp and circumstance, so I packed some of it up and brought it to work. This is the first time that I can actually proudly display my school memorabilia because for the last 6 years I have worked for a different school. They don't really look too highly upon you hanging up other school's stuff in your office in the recruiting department.

I took a quick minute on my lunch break earlier this week to create this printable. It's formatted for an 8x10 frame. You can download it here.

More updates on project Sell This House soon!

10 Perfectly Peachy Recipes

To say that I love peaches would be an understatement. I love peaches any way you can prepare them, in a pie, in lemonade, in my sangria, in a cobbler, and even right off the tree. This seems to be a really good year for peaches here in the South, and I  haven't been able to get enough lately. In honor of my favorite fruit, I have compiled a list of great peachy recipes for you. Don't like peaches? Check out the other yummy recipes on my dessert pinterest board.

Source: MyRecipes.com

I've made this peach cobbler from MyRecipes.com several times and it never disappoints!

Source: RecipeSweet.net

Holy yum! If you are looking for something easy and sweet to add to your weeknight dinner, check out these brown sugar baked peaches from TheKitchenIsMyPlayground.com. I am not joking when I say I could have eaten the whole pan by myself and pretended they never existed. What peaches??

Source: TheStyleDossier.com

I haven't tried this peach sangria yet, (although I did throw together a similar one this summer that I never got around to blogging about), but it looks amazing. White wine and peaches? I believe I will.

Source: BestFoodies.com

Like this blogger, some of my favorite childhood memories are of sitting at my great-grandmother's house watching her make fried peach pies. These are uniquely southern and oh soooo good!

KeyIngredient.com

I love strawberry shortcake so when I saw this peach version, I had to share! I can't wait to try this one.

Source: TheThingsILove.com

How cute are these sugared peaches with vanilla cream??

Source: WeekOfMenus.blogspot.com

Peach cupcakes with homemade peach icing. What a great idea!

Source: http://hungryaustralian.com

Made with Prosecco, this peach bellini sorbet looks so refreshing. This would be great on a hot Alabama afternoon.

Source: http://www.alaskafromscratch.com

Grilled peaches paired with vanilla ice cream just can't be beat. Grilled is probably one of my favorite ways to eat peaches. It's so easy and really brings out the flavor!

Source: http://drinkedin.net

I'm not going to  lie, this peach lemonade isn't a walk int he park to make but trust me, it's worth it.

I hope you've enjoyed these peach recipes! We are headed to the beach this weekend which means one thing in Alabama, a stop in Clanton, AL to Durbin Farms! When I get back, I will have to use some of these recipes!

Fun on a pretty summer day

Is it just me or is it super hard to get motivated to do housework on such a pretty day? With my new job keeping me super busy, the hubby and I decided to take the weekend off and go visit my dad at the house he is building on the lake. He is building the entire thing on his own (you see where I get my love of DIY now??) He also just got a new puppy, an english bulldog, named Duke. I thought it was an excellent opportunity to try out my new work camera and get some practice taking photos. Here are a few of my favorites.

Simple Summer Centerpiece

I  thought it was time to freshen up my dining room table. I was tired of dusting around the plates so I went with a simple clean look this time.

The runner was a steal at Home Goods for $12 and I already had the vase and the fake hydrangeas.

Sometimes simple and clean makes the biggest impact!

DIY Faux Board and Batten and Update

Good morning! Whew has it been a week. Since I last posted, I have quit my day job and accepted a new position that I am scheduled to start on Monday. This is an exciting opportunity for me to grow a career that is actually in line with my communications degree.

In the mean time, I have had a week vacation that is wrapping up. You know I couldn't sit home for a week with out a project so I decided to install Faux Board and Batten in our dining room.

[caption id="attachment_728" align="aligncenter" width="346"] BEFORE[/caption]

 

[caption id="attachment_827" align="aligncenter" width="345"] AFTER[/caption]

Since we already had a substantial chair rail and good baseboards, I wanted to add to the existing trim, not completely replace it. (And I didn't want to drop hundreds of dollars on this project) After wandering around Lowes and Home Depot for longer than I'm willing to admit, I decided to use 1.5 inch lattice strips.

I gave the wall a good coat of primer and then measured  each wall to determine my spacing. Then I measured again. Then I messed up and had to measure yet again. I stress measuring because I ended up making 3 trips to Home Depot for lattice and several trips to the in-laws to re-cut boards that were not the correct length. It was easiest for me to make a drawing of the room with the measurements and then label each piece with the letter of the corresponding wall on my drawing. You think you will remember which board goes where, but they start running together very quickly. I used my nail gun to attach the boards adding a top and bottom piece as well as a vertical piece every 2 feet. 

Then I caulked around the edges and painted the wall and all of the trip in a gloss white. I took a step back, looked at the wall...... and HATED it. Yep, it looked like I had glued yardsticks to my wall. See how rough it looks in the pic above?

What to do.... What.... to.... do?

I searched the internet and found where others have tried this project using MDF boards. Perfect. Except when I went to buy said MDF boards, I couldn't find 1.5 inch anywhere except online and that just wouldn't do.

The next morning, I got really friendly with my sander and spent a good amount of time sanding the crap-ola (yes, that is my technical term)  out of the boards until they were smooth.

 Then I re-primered and painted and now they look much better.

I can't wait to finish the room and do a results post! Now that my week off is over, I'm having a hard time finishing it up.

I hope you have enjoyed it!

Getting ready to sell....

Hubby and I bought our first home with the intention of it being a starter home. We planned for 3-5 years in this house and this is year 2. While we are not planning on selling any time soon (probably a few years), we have decided to focus our "projects" on things that will make the house easier to sell/raise the value. As the housing market begins to make a slow recovery, we want to put a little extra thought into the things we decide to spend our time and money on to ensure that we will get back what we put in to the house.

After searching blogland for ideas on where to start, here is the beginning of our list:

To Do:

1. Paint the kitchen.  This is the only main room that didn't get a paint job when we moved in and the walls are pretty dirty.

2. Paint the trim through out the house. I actually started on this one tonight. First I had to clean all the trim with a magic eraser, but my next step is to paint.

3. Add board and batten to the dining room (and maybe living room)

4. Paint living room and dining room a neutral color (not everyone loves bright yellow, even though they should!)

5. Paint the front door. Nothing says welcome home like a freshly painted entryway!

6. Finish landscaping the front flowerbeds and entryway. (We started this summer but never finished)

7. Organize spare rooms and closets. This needs to be done anyway, but no one wants to check out the size of the closets in a house to find we have randomly thrown everything we didn't have a place for in there!

Wish list:

1. Granite counter tops. We currently have old school white laminate counter tops. Granite will definitely increase the value of our kitchen but it comes with a hefty price tag. For this reason, this is on our wish list and not our definite list.

2. Update hardware. While we did change out all our cabinet hardware and most of our lighting, our door knobs are still brass and our faucets are still chrome. I would love to change everything to oil rubbed bronze but there are so many doors!! I'm thinking about following one of the tutorials out there to spray paint my current ones, we will see!

3. Add a patio area. We currently have a small covered patio area, but I would really like to extend it out behind our dining room window and add an area for a table and chairs.

Do you have any suggestions about improvements that makes a house sell faster/for a higher price? We would love to hear from you!

Master Bedroom Summer Make-Over

So I know you are all dying to know what I did to the house while hubby was gone for a week. Well... I didn't do anything dramatic, (except clean, which trust me, at that point, was pretty dramatic) but I did re-do our master bedroom for summer. After a trip to IKEA while I was in Atlanta for the weekend, I came home with a full bedroom worth of new textiles for summer to give our room a lighter feel.

When transitioning to summer in my home, I focus on making our spaces lighter and airy. We have pretty dark walls in most of our rooms so I try to use textiles and fabrics to brighten up my spaces.

Before: (Terrible photo, I know, this was one of those last minute "dang it, I forgot to take a before" photos.) This look is great for winter but I wanted to brighten things up for summer. You can't see in this photo, but we had tan black-out curtains.

After:

I have loved this duvet cover for a long time, I'm so glad I could finally make it work in our room. I also changed out tan curtains for white. It is a lot brighter in the mornings but maybe that will help me drag myself out of bed!

I still need to change the lamp shades to white, but over all I'm super happy about our summer look!

What changes do you  make in your house for summer?