While the cats away...the moose will play!

My daughter Rio was OBSESSED with this moose head from ZGallerie the moment she saw it back in December. Soooo being the ever loving mommy that I am, I bought it for her for her birthday in January.
Weeeell, when her beautiful moose was delivered and she shared with her boyfriend where she wanted to hang her wonderful piece of art, he was slightly hesitant to say the least! A moose head in the kitchen Rio?? Trust me! She would say over and over.

The two of them have been working on their kitchen for a few months now. Her boyfriend made the cabinets and dining table and they were just doing things as they had the time. Fast forward to last weekend. Her boyfriend went out of town for a week, and Rio went to town!

She made the wood counter tops, painted the walls and pleaded with her dad to hang the moose.
Had she had time she would have made the missing drawer fronts too!

I love her sense of style and ability to find goodies anywhere and everywhere!

The little glass vase thingies and the broken clock are Goodwill finds :) don't know if she plans on fixing the clock, but I think it's kinda cool broken! Oh and her boyfriends reaction when he came home?? He loved it :)

In other news: my house is rolling full steam ahead!! Kinda scary! These are just some of the things going inside the cutie :) Insulation, sheet rock, roofing and stucco are just some of the happenings this last week! Hubbs is on a roll! We're hoping for an end of September move in!! YAY!!!!!

Simplify, simplify... :)

It's summer. And it's stinkin hot :( The thought of turning on the oven sounds about as fun as wearing a black sweatshirt and hot mopping a roof! (my brothers favorite saying!) So when I came across this yummy dinner made with one pot- that's right! one pot! I thought I should share it with you!

Rigatoni with Goat cheese. And these are the ingredients. All 5 of them! It cooks in no time and it's TASTY! As you can see I used Linguine because that's what I had, and I am the queen of making do!

I served it up with a salad of whatever I had in the fridge, which happened to be spinach and arugula dressed with olive oil and sea salt. Our current fav summer white wine Kono, a Sauvignon Blanc from New Zealand was perfect!

I think the hubbs enjoyed it :)

As always, Wallace was invited on hubby's lap after dinner and was sooo curiously wanting to smell the wine. Hubbs offer him a swig...

To which he replied "Comment osez-vous! Vous savez que je ne boire du vin francais!"

Well worth the wait :)

The windows are here!!!!! After waiting for what seemed like forever, the beauties finally arrived :)

The hubbs spent HOURS on Saturday scraping, scraping and scraping. The original windows on the front of the house had been painted and sealed shut :(

This front window was love at first sight for me. With everything else in the house completely destroyed by the all the "remodeling"' in the past, somehow these gorgeous windows survived. I wanted to replicate the same window for my kitchen.

Weeeeell, here she is. Can you spot the error???? Yeah, the pattern is UPSIDE DOWN!!! Such a bummer after all that waiting!! So hopefully the fix won't put us behind and we can keep on truckin!!

So now it's crunch time. I need to be picking tile, wood flooring, lighting, paint colors, plumbing fixtures etc. etc. etc!! And what do I do instead???? I buy these cute sticker roses and put them on my bathroom wall! (come on! I'm in a rental and dying here!)

The hubbs says it looks "granny". I don't care! It made me happy :)

Now I need to git to gittin!!! Do you find yourself doing mindless projects and totally avoiding what you really should be doing?????

Dresser redo #2 and a birthday too!!

This week in Cali was filled with crafting, fireworks and a birthday boy. I swear I do more things than redo dressers and cook yummy dinners! Who am I kidding? No I don't! I LOVE LOVE LOVE to find crap furniture and love it back to beauty :) I found this dresser at my fav Salvation Army for $50. Kinda expensive I know, but she had fabulous legs and suuuch potential! The poor thing had been stenciled to death and had those "onlays" hot glued to her. She was then finished with a fabulous coat of I don't know what, some sticky stuff that took FOREVER to sand off!

Soooo with the combination of some green paint, 2 vintage handles and A LOT of (the hubby's) elbow grease...

She's a happy girl :)

 My sweet son turned 20 yesterday, July 5th. I guess after living with a crrrazy mama like me, it would only be natural that he would end up with the same love of old used furniture.

He bought this chair for $10 at an estate sale and spent his birthday painting her.

She turned out like this :)

The happiest of birthdays Ryne!

I love you,

Pearl :)