Amazing Christmas ornament craft!

I’m so excited about the Christmas ornament project I finally finished today (with moral support from Anna)!

INSPIRATION PHOTO:

I think I saw this on Facebook.

I wanted to do this because we have soooo many ornaments that we don’t always get to use but I miss seeing. And I didn’t want a wreath because I had lots of big ornaments that wouldn’t have fit well around a wreath. (I used a deep mirrored tray.)

So the ornaments range from things I grew up with on my parent’s tree to handmade ornaments from both grandmas to mementos from family and vacations to favorite TV shows and hobbies and favorite things…and more!

It only took about two hours!

I am soooo thrilled with how it turned out!

Slowly but surely!

Tom started the install of my pull out drawers for the Tupperware cabinet on March 20. Unfortunately he wasn’t happy with how one drawer was sliding so said he’d fix it—so I left all the contents on the island. Fast forward a week and he tells me it’s fine and I can put everything away. Men!

And somehow we’re missing the bottoms to ALL of these since the kids last fixed the cabinet. Imagine that. Noone has any idea. So either they’re lying about what they did the last time or they’ve managed to lose 11 bottoms in two weeks.

All the swears, you guys…ALL.THE.SWEARS

I screwed it up when I did a shirt like this for his 11th birthday, too. I managed to fix that one but this one I’m just leaving.

I asked and turns out I did design it correctly but I forgot to “weld” the design to print as one solid piece… so the Cricut assumed it knew better than me and rearranged the design to use less vinyl. Lesson learned.

(It says years/days/months instead of years/months/days.)

Aaaand now new flooring.

When you decide the laundry room floor needs to be replaced before the new machines arrive in three days…

Tom did this today. He’s awesome. (Oh, and he has time to do this because he hasn’t actually had a full day of work yet even though Monday was his first day!)

But check this out. This is what he found when he removed the vent cover! If you look closely you can see something growing in the second pic. Good lord—what on earth happened in the laundry room?!

This feels more daunting this year.

For the most part I have always replaced regular decorations with holiday—like normal everyday things on shelves/walls got replaced with wrapped boxes/kids artwork. Candles and candlesticks got put away and replaced with reindeer and small trees.

But this year I’m rethinking.

Maybe it’s because we JUST finished redecorating the living room (and there’s lots more stuff now).

Or maybe it’s because we’ve only had one Christmas here and I just don’t have a set place for everything.

Or maybe it’s just because I’m exhausted.

Or maybe it’s because I forgot I bought a lot of clearance stuff last year.

Or maybe it’s because I usually end up doing 85% of it by myself…

I cannot understand how this happens.

When we moved in, I sorted and organized ALL the Tupperware and got rid of ALL mismatched pieces. Fast forward to now and after sorting, this is a FRACTION of the mismatched pieces.

How? How the hell does this happen? I am missing like six bottoms of one type of container. SIX! That’s not just misplaced or accidentally ruined. And some of the missing pieces are sets I literally just bought within the last two months. GRRRR.

One word: kids.

So I finally took pictures of most of the newly redesigned house.

FYI We have had a few changes since these pics—that teal ottoman and gray loveseat are gone (long and sordid story that ends with us telling you to avoid Roomplace like the plague) and we have a leather loveseat on order. Missing rooms are the dining room and front room because we’ll need to rearrange that furniture again. I finally got around to taking the pics specifically because the ottoman was going away.

My friend Jodi Van Leer (J Van Leer Designs) was amazing in helping us figure out what we wanted, shopping for things, and pulling everything together. We trusted her implicitly and we couldn’t be happier!

Tom got to play woodworker and built:

  • the walnut mantle surrounds
  • the cabinet doors
  • the birch forest (using trees we brought home from my parent’s house in the upper peninsula!)
  • the stacked wood wall in the bar (my Pinterest idea)
  • and new built-in shelves for the liquor in the bar (so now he finally has his “me room” (and not just a me wall!)—which we’ve named Ground Control)!

Other changes include:

We absolutely love everything and when it’s picked up and free of kid shit it’s freaking amazeballs. It was a shit ton of work and expense and we pretty much got it all done in two months to be ready for the big party! But we finally have our forever home that looks put together and adult!!

P.S. Here’s a Before and After!

And now for the high ladder work!

We had a generic white ceiling fan in the living room but wanted something with a bit more pizzazz since we were redoing everything else…and with the high ceilings we also needed help! This is our electrician Jorge (he’s been doing jobs for us since we moved to Gurnee four years ago)!

Out with the old!
And here’s the new one! It’s bigger!

We also got a new chandelier for the foyer…which also required Jorge.

The Original — nice, just not my style

So now I’ll take a minute and tell you some backstory: I found this chandelier on Facebook Marketplace back in May. It was expensive but was being offered at less than half price (I googled). But it was exactly what I wanted. Something I would have only dreamed of getting but never would because of the price.

So we discussed and decided yes. We offered $750 but she declined saying they paid full price. We still wanted it. But we had to borrow a truck and then we just couldn’t connect and then she was on vacation for six weeks… But we lucked out in that we were able to pick it up the day before Jorge was scheduled to come.

We went to pick it up and the lady was super nice. We chatted and told her we were military, this was my dream chandelier, etc. and she offered to buy the bulbs too thank us for our service! Wait, what? Seriously? We knew the bulbs were going to be a couple hundred dollars (we needed 36 and they are specialty bulbs) so we asked again to make sure. Yes, she was sure!

We chatted more and I ended up inviting her to our upcoming party, and she said she would order the bulbs ASAP and drop them off at the house!

It’s huge.

We then shared a few texts picking out the bulbs we wanted (we had the same ones in both our carts) and then she even dropped off four bottles of Prosecco for our party! So the whole thing just went off perfectly.

Anyway. Back to the install.

Since it was so big and heavy, Tom and I even had to help!

Using straps because it’s almost 100#.
This is where I helped — I pulled on one of the straps to pull the chandelier out of the way of the ladder as they raised it.

Getting it to this point took two days and about four hours! It took a bunch of trips into the attic to reinforce the bracket and do the wiring and who knows what else.

And then it was time to install the lightbulbs!

And holy crap. It was just a little bright.

https://youtube.com/shorts/jUVSENjWPWo?feature=share

The light was obviously meant to be in just a bit bigger room. Or maybe a bigger non-enclosed space? Or less-bright lights? We all got a good laugh out of it regardless. And long story short, the bulbs are dimmable so we will eventually change one of the three switches to a dimmer.

But it’s perfect and I love it.