We got back from our honeymoon a couple weeks ago and it has taken me forever to go through the 774(!!!!) pictures Luke took while we were there.  Granted, as I am posting this and looking back through all of them, I am so happy he took so many.  But it’s still my excuse for taking so long to blog about it though… ;)

I’ve decided to split the honeymoon post up by cities visited so it’s a bit more manageable.  We started in Paris so that’s where we’ll start now.  We then went to Rome, Perugia, and Dubrovnik so stay tuned for those posts shortly :)

To be honest, we liked Paris the least of everywhere we went but we did still have a blast.  Our Parisian hotel was definitely our favorite.  It was called The Hidden Hotel.  If you are planning a trip to Paris, I highly recommend it.  The staff were overly friendly and helpful, everything was pristinely clean and taken care of, and just the general ambiance was very calm and inviting.  I digress…we arrived in Paris just in time for a late breakfast so we checked into our hotel and found a breakfast café close by.  Luke ordered some smoked salmon thing and I got a galette.  I thought a galette was a tart until I read the description in English and it said it was a “savory crepe” so I tried it and it was eh.  By savory crepe it meant it was a wheat-flour tasting crepe.  Not the best.  But anyway, we then walked around the city for a bit and ended up at the Arc de Triomphe which was our favorite (which we were both surprised by) attraction in Paris.  I know, “what about the Eiffel Tower??” -that was definitely cool, but it was built up in our minds and we already knew it would be cool.  We weren’t expecting the Arc de Triomphe to be HUGE and feel like it was at the center of the city but it was, and that was super cool to be surprised by.  Here are some pictures:

We walked over to the Eiffel Tower a little later that day. It was definitely meaningful and aw-inspiring seeing such a famous monument.  It was interesting because you can see it from miles and miles away so when we first saw it from maybe 2 miles away, we thought it was much smaller than it actually was once we were standing under it.  Once we were there we got our Parisian on and laid in the grass in front of it for a while.  A) it was romantic and B) we were insanely tired of walking at this point, so it was a win-win J  Here are some pictures:

Dinner the first night was one of the best meals I have ever had in my life: The Hide.  We started with the most amazing, buttery, perfectly cooked escargot tucked inside of a warm popover-like roll with a garlic and white wine sauce around it.  Is your mouth watering, because mine is writing this. We then had a salad with scallops on it and some kind of lamb dish that I don’t remember but here is a picture of both:  They were seriously insanely amazing.  Omgosh. 

The next day we walked around some more and went to Montmartre, the art district, to pick out some art to bring home. Montmartre is a hill that overlooks all of Paris and is also home to the Sacre Coeur. The views from the top were breathtaking. It was probably my favorite out of everywhere we went in Paris because it felt more real for some reason, which is a stupid description, but that’s all I’ve got.  We found some awesome pieces of art to bring home and then just wandered around the rest of the day.  We also tried our first French macaroons at some point that day.  They were amazing too.  

This is the view and also me eating a croissant.  We literally ate the whole time....

That night for dinner we had our only “weird French” meal.  See pictures below.  Our pallets are not refined enough to even understand what we ate, so it was basically lost on us but it was still very good.  I feel like it should have smacked us in the face with amazingness though and it didn't. 

On our last day we did the hop-on-hop-off bus and I wished we had done it at the beginning so it could have helped us get our bearings straight. With the bus we were able to see all the big attractions including the Louvre, Notre Dame, Place de la Concorde, and the Champs-Elysees. 

We also stopped in a real creperie to get a crepe and I definitely wish we had done that the first day too, so that I could have had 27 more of them…it was amazing and definitely much better than any crepe I’ve ever had before. 

In summary, when you go to Paris, Stay at the Hidden Hotel, eat at The Hide, do the bus tour the first day, eat a crepe from a real creperie the first day, and check out the Arc de Triomph.  :) and also drink lots of coffee....

Organization: Filing and Organizing Papers

Since it was so gross, rainy and cold (45 degrees!!!!) this weekend I decided to take the opportunity stuck in the house to organize all the papers that have been piling up unorganized in the beautiful desk we found at an antique store.  Since we got married, bought a house, started new jobs etc, we seem to have wayyyy more important papers that we must keep forever and ever.  

I pinterested ideas for how to organize everything and decided to use a colored system with the following categories:

• Green- Banking and Bills
• Yellow- Income and Taxes
• Blue- Keepsakes and Important Docs
• Red- Medical, Home and Auto

Once I came up with the large categories I sorted all the papers into very specific piles. Lots of piles only had a couple papers in them, i.e. voter registration which has only 1 lonely receipt. 

If you're planning to tackle this, your manila folders will be different but some of my favorites are:

• Wedding cards
• Love notes
• Other cards to keep
• Jewelry info and insurance 

Sidenote: I got a little carried away and made another file box with just my stuff including recipes, event and wedding planning materials, and hobbies. I am super excited about it!

 

Weekend Recap: Birthday Weekend

This long weekend was so wonderful! On Friday night we stayed in and watched an episode of Star Wars (Luke is trying to catch me up on them- I had never seen any of them and apparently that is not acceptable).  

On Saturday we took it easy again, did some errands, rested my hip and painted a bamboo sideboard we bought when we first moved here.  We initially had our TV on it but Luke has since hung it up so that it makes more space and I LOVE it! I decided to go bold because, why not?!  The thing cost like $40 and if the color was a total miss, I could repaint it!  

Here's how it turned out:

We woke up Sunday (my birthday) and Luke had decorated the house with "happy birthday" streamers, signs, and tulle my mom secretly sent him. It was the sweetest!  He then made me pancakes.  I may have talked him through every step but he really did everything himself and they were amazing!  I was very impressed. I am lucky to have such a kind, loving husband :)

Here are my decorations! :)  

After pancakes I decided I wanted to go out to the "country" (suburbs) for something different, because I love a road trip adventure, and I needed to breathe some fresh air!  We looked up where to go/ what to do and decided on a vineyard about an hour outside of the city.  We drove the hour to it, pulled up, and it wasn't even a vineyard! Yes, it was a very pretty building, but there were no grapes growing there, no pretty views, no fresh air!  We decided to drive around a bit more to see what we could find.  I pulled up the map and a riverboat casino showed up.  Luke and I looked at each other and shrugged, why not?  So we adventured our way to a riverboat casino in the middle of nowhere.  When we walked in we brought down the median age... but it was still well over 60 years old.  Still, we decided to go with it for a while- it was an adventure after all!  We got some cash, went to the craps table, and tried our luck.  An hour later we were up a good amount of money and pretty pleased with our decision!  After I rolled, we cashed out and called it a day but it was such a fabulous, ridiculous adventure and I am so happy we did it.

This is us after we cashed in our winnings.  Very happy..... :)

After our casino adventure, we headed home where we were so lucky to visit with one of Luke's good friends from high school who was in town.  They talked nerd, I tried to keep up and surprised myself at how much I have learned in the 3 years I've been with this guy.  Uh oh....

After our visit we got all fancy and went to dinner at our favorite Italian restaurant that happens to be 25 yards from our house.  We had a fabulous meal, amazing wine, and topped it all off with tiramisu and espresso.  It was a perfect dinner (and I didn't take a single picture!!!)

On Monday we met our friends from DC (originally Luke's friends from Wake Forest.)  We went to our first Cubs game and it was so much fun! I finally got some sun on my translucent self and just got to hang out and soak up the pretty weather.  It was such a perfect end to an amazing birthday weekend.

New House Projects: Kitchen Cabinets

Since our furniture was going to be so delayed (2 weeks) we decided to make the best of our completely empty living and dining rooms and paint our TERRIBLE kitchen cabinets.  While I don't have anything against oak, when it is used in combination with a yellow floor, yellow walls, and yellow backsplash, it is not the best looking kitchen in the world. Here is the story of our newly painted kitchen cabinets!

Here they are before:  

We took them all down and laid them all out on the floor.  Luke took all the hardware off of them while I started sanding the part attached to the wall.  

 Here they are!  Notice the super pretty and stylish track lighting.  

After a light sanding to get the glossiness off of them, we wiped everything down really well, allowed it to dry for a couple minutes, and then primed everything.  

Then it was time to paint! We decided to do the upper cabinets a snowy white (how punny of me) and the lowers a blue gray to try to pull more blue out of the countertops than green.  We put two coats on each side of everything.  This definitely took a bit of time because of the drying time in between coats, but we got it done in about a week.  We would do one coat per night and then flip and do the other side the next night.  Luke had a blast (not really, he hates me).

Here is the finished product! How could you not love that!?  It is definitely much better than the originals and only cost about $200!  We decided to keep the old brass hardware on them to save money, and they really don’t look that bad. 

First project down, many, many more to go and I am so excited about it!  I love having projects again!  All of our stuff is also here to the kitchen is completely moved into and finished (for now). Next up (after unpacking all the boxes) is painting the walls and seeing if we can DIY knocking out the silly boxes the people put into the ceilings.

If you have any questions about painting your kitchen cabinets, let me know! I definitely learned a lot while doing these and am happy to share my wisdom ;)