Breakfast Nook Dining Table

Choosing a dining table for our breakfast nook was not an easy process. We knew we wanted a farmhouse style table. One big problem we kept running into with finding one to go in our nook was the size. The farmhouse tables tend to be pretty ginormous. Our breakfast nook is definitely not built for a ginormous table. I searched high and low and I kept finding huge tables with huge price tags. Josh talked about building one off and on for a while. Since we had so many projects to work on already, I just wasn't hearing it. I'm a do-er. Josh is a it gets done when it gets done-er. I didn't want a dining table when it got done, I wanted it now - so I kept searching for a table to buy. Well, after enough looking, I decided maybe building was the best option. Josh was going to be leaving for Nashville a couple weekends ago and I decided - meh, maybe now is a good time to build a table. He won't be home to force me to slow down, so why not? I was going to surprise him with it, but I can't keep secrets from him and I ended up hinting that I may work on a dining table over the weekend. Fail. 

Here are a couple

This is Pottery Barn's Benchwright table. I love the look of that table. I do not love the price. $1,300 for just the table...no thanks!

I also found this one at World Market that I loved. It was less than half the price of the Pottery Barn table, but too long.

Anyway, I started researching like a crazy woman. I found Ana White's website back when we were house shopping in MD and I saved (this was before Pinterest) a bunch of projects that I wanted to do. One of them was our bed, that my dad built. We never actually built any of them. Nevermind that...there were tons of projects that I WANTED to do. I knew she had some great stuff, so that's where I started. Don't worry, I didn't just pick a table to build without consulting Josh. We looked at some of Ana's plans together and he actually picked the one I ended up choosing. It was actually my second choice. Once I was committed to it though, I was in love with it.

These are the plans for Ana's knockoff.

So...Friday after work, I went to Lowe's to shop for wood. Let me tell you, it's not super easy to find nice, straight boards at Lowe's! We had gift cards though, so I was set on getting everything from Lowe's. You can't beat free! I bought a few other things and the supplies for the benches (which I didn't end up making), so I'm not 100% sure how much I spent, but it was roughly $250. That's with getting a LOT more stain and poly than we needed because we will use it in other projects (and with a 10% off coupon). That's a heck of a lot better than $1,300!

Anyway, here are some pictures of my progress...

 This is my little workspace...before I got it dirty.

 Partially assembled legs

 This is my progress at some point Saturday

 The frame is getting there!

 Almost ready for the table top...or so I thought. The ends were not very stable and I messed up some of the boards on the inside so that the table just was not going to sit even. I thought the table was a goner and there was no way it was going to end up in the house. I decided to start staining and figure the rest out when Josh got home. At this point, it wasn't possible to finish it before Josh got home anyway. I decided to wait until he got home so he could help me fix my mistakes.

I stained the undersides and everything because I thought it would be much easier before I added the table top. I was right. SO glad I did that.

 

I went ahead and stained the wrong side of the boards too

I left it like this until Josh got home. I had exhausted my ideas and I didn't know what to do to fix it.  We spent a full night going over all the issues and trying to figure out how to fix it. In addition to the ends not being very stable, some of the pieces of the frame were sticking up farther than they should have been and they were going to prevent the boards on the top of the table from sitting flat. Not a good thing. We had to take some pieces off and re-attach them, we had to re-cut some of the top boards, we had to plane some of the boards underneath because I didn't nail them evenly, we had to sand a LOT of stuff that probably shouldn't have needed to be sanded in order to get them even. Between the 2 of us, we figured it all out!

 Josh nailing the boards on. Getting close!!! 

  

Hours of sanding and lots of wood filler later...

Time to stain! - We used MinWax Dark Walnut - We both love the color!

 

 Finishing up the stain

 About 8 coats of poly later, it's in our breakfast nook and we love it!!! 

For the poly, I got MinWax's Oil Modified Water Based Polyurethane in Satin. It was super easy to work with and you only need 2 hours between coats. It was more expensive than the oil based stuff, but with the easy cleanup and the fact that we only needed to wait 2 hours between coats (vs 8), I thought it was worth the extra money. The link above is for the gallon, which is definitely not necessary for this project.

I love everything about it!

I found these chairs on sale at Target. I spent a total $235 on all four chairs, so roughly $485 on the table and 4 chairs.

Yea...that's a LOT better than the Pottery Barn table or even the World Market table that was a LOT less. I'll take it!

On top of saving the money, I know this is a solid table and we get the satisfaction of knowing WE built the table that our kids will do their homework on, dye Easter eggs on and spill their cereal on. Even before kids, we'll have many game nights and breakfasts here. I think we'll have lots of great memories here!

Meet Sir Poops a LOT

This is an old story that I never posted, but our little friend came back for a visit this week, so I feel like it's still an appropriate time to share it. From about the first week we moved into our new house, I started to notice MASSIVE amounts of bird poop on the sides of both of our cars AND on the driveway. I looked around trying to figure out where all these birds were perching. Surely, it had to be 4 or 5 birds! I didn't see anywhere they could be targeting our cars from.

This picture doesn't do it justice.

Well...one day, I was about to take Bailey out for a potty break and I see this little guy. My first thought was - "Awwww, how cute!" I love Cardinals! I think they're such beautiful birds! Then it hit me and I probably said something not nearly nice as "Awwww, how cute!"

This little guy is responsible for all the poop on the cars and the driveway! How do you make a bird stop perching on your car? And why on earth does he like perching on our cars so much in the first place?!?

Josh figured that out a few days later when he was working from home on a snow day...

Yep...this little guy likes to fight himself in the mirrors. He will fly from car to car and fight all of the other male Cardinals who like to hang out on our cars. It's almost too cute to get mad at...almost. So we started tilting the mirrors in to keep him off. It works for the most part, but we don't always remember to tilt them in. 

I still don't know why he chooses our cars other all the other cars in all the other yards in the neighborhood. 

Anyway, thanks to Jen, this little guy has been named Sir Poops a LOT.

Now, to get the garage organized enough so that we can fit both cars in it. haha...

Friday Favorites!

Woohoo! TGIF! I've been SO ready for this weekend for no particular reason at all...anyway...here are my favorites for the week!

1) Dating Anniversary - Monday was our 14th dating anniversary! We've been together for half our lives now! That' pretty crazy! We didn't do anything crazy...just had a low key dinner at home. We grilled out and watched Mockingjay. I'm so thankful to have such an amazing husband and best friend. I'm really excited to see what this next year brings for us! 

 

2) Dining Table - Josh was out of town for a bachelor party last weekend and I decided to get handy. I built a dining table! Sort of. I'm not finished, but I got a LOT of it done. I thought I would be finished by now, but we've been taking advantage of the nicer weather to tackle some outdoor projects we've been putting off. It's supposed to be gross and rainy on Saturday, so we hope to finish it over the weekend! 

 

Here's a sneak peak of the dining table...

We still have a long way to go, but the majority of the hard stuff is done (I hope!)

3) Gift Cards - Directly related to the dining table, of course. Thanks to amazing friends and family, we had a ton of Lowe's gift cards between Christmas and housewarming gifts. I was able to purchase all of the supplies for the table with the gift cards, so it's almost like it was free! Not really, since we could have used the money for other things we'll need at Lowe's, but it was still nice. :-D

4) Weekday Visit from Family - My parents and aunt came to visit me Wednesday afternoon. They brought us some pallets and other wood for some other projects we want to do...eventually. Haha. I'm really excited about the projects and I'm really excited that the wood was free! It's SO nice to be able to see my family on random days during the week though. They stayed for a couple hours and we had lunch together. We got LED recessed lights to put in the kitchen a couple weeks ago, but we hadn't gotten around to installing them yet. Daddy installed them for me while he was here. Yay for another check off the to-do list!!!

5) Weather - I mentioned that we haven't been holed up working on the table it the garage because we've had nice weather this week. It has been amazing! I've really enjoyed working with my office window open and not having to use heat this week! We have grilled out for dinner twice and it has been amazing. I wish the weather could always be this nice!

6) ACC Tourney - This is a favorite and a not favorite, I suppose. We had a really really horrible game against Duke last night, but we had an amazing game against Pitt Wednesday night. I'm hopeful that we'll make a nice run in the NCAA tourney! 

2014 Recap

Wow! 2014 came and went SO fast! It's nearly 1/4 through 2015, so I feel like a real slacker for just getting this posted! I started on it forever ago, but it was really difficult to figure out what we did each month since I basically failed at blogging in 2014. Let's hope I'm better at it this year!

January 

 We started our new year with some of our best friends, Jen, John and Baby Z! We had a low key night in and we enjoyed every bit of it!

February
We went to the Dominican Republic!

We thought this would be the perfect time to escape the cold. We were right, but we were off by just a couple days! A snow storm caused our flight to get cancelled and we weren't able to get another flight for a few days. We ended up being snowed in at Anna and John's house. It wasn't how we planned to spend our Valentine's Day, but we still had a blast. We shifted our trip around and only had to shorten it by 1 day.

 Playa Fronton...such a gorgeous beach!!!

The boat we had to take to get to Playa Fronton. Totally worth it!

Dirt cheap and delicious street food!

March
We celebrated our 13th dating anniversary!

We went camping in Greenridge! This was my first primitive camping trip. I had a great time, but there's no way I could do more than 2 nights like this!

April

Josh started his second job and things got REALLY busy!

My family came to visit for Easter and we spent the day in DC

May
We spent a week at the Outerbanks! This was our first time visiting. We rented a  house on a 4x4 beach in Corolla with Anna, John, Andrew, Kristian and Chris. We were able to bring the dogs and we had a blast!

We had some great friends get married!

June

 We celebrated our 4th wedding anniversary!

We had some MORE great friends get married!

We went camping at our friend Cory's house. He has a ginormous yard and lives near the West Virginia border, so there's lots of hiking nearby.

 The guys playing kickball

Four wheelers

July
 We went back to Cory's on the 4th for some hiking. It was an absolutely beautiful day!

NC Civil Memorial in MD. This was really cool to see!

August 

My cousin who was like my big sister growing up passed away. It's still hard to believe she's not with us anymore. This is the last time I saw her, Thanksgiving 2013.

My little fur brother also passed away (on the same day actually). We had Harley since he was born the day before Josh and I started dating. This is the last time we saw him, when my family came to visit for Easter.

We went to Spain!!! Such an amazing trip!

 At the market. They had SO many fresh juices, infused oils, salts...anything you can think of!

 La Segrada Familia...Easily the most beautiful building I've ever seen.

In Toledo, probably my favorite city in Spain

 Toledo again

Madrid!

We celebrated Josh's 28th birthday while we were in Spain!


September

We went to go see Billy Currington in Baltimore with the Smiths! We had a lot of fun and met a really nice couple from Georgia.

We got to seethe Orioles clinch the division!!!

We went to Boston for the weekend with Dave and Theresa.

We ran in the Dogfish Dash for the second time.

We had a great time, but I let myself down by not finishing the 10K. I opted to do the 5K about 2 miles into the 10K. Oh well. At least I did it.

October
We went under contract on our house in NC.

We went to Vegas for Jen's 30th birthday!!!

We celebrated my 28th birthday by going to Fogo de Chao, a Brazillian steakhouse! YUM!

November
 We had our first date night in DC! I can't believe it took us so long!!!

We went home for Thanksgiving and watched UNC get beat up by my Wolfpack! Woohoo!

December
Probably the craziest month ever.

We went to NYC

We bought our house in NC AND sold our house in MD exactly a week later. Super stressful time

We went home for Christmas and woke up on Christmas morning in our new house. :-) We didn't have a tree, but we put a few quick decorations up when we got in on Christmas Eve.

 My goals for 2014 were to:

Get back to my goal weight - Didn't happen, but we had a LOT going on. I'll hit this one in 2015!

Get organized - I did get our house quite organized, then we moved out of it and most of our belongings are in our garage or Jen's garage at this point - I'll have to start this organization thing over too. 

Meet our financial goals - Yes, we did meet our financial goals for 2014. Our savings account isn't quite where we hoped it would be, but that's because we didn't start 2014 out with the plan to buy a house! The down payment we were saving has been spent!

Friday Favorites!!!

Woohoo! So glad it's Friday!!!

1) Wednesday weather - Wednesday was absolutely GORGEOUS! It was the kind of day where you don't want to go outside because you're afraid  you won't come back in for work. I don't think 77 degrees ever felt so nice! All this ice and gloom has not been amazing, so a warm, sunny day was very welcome. Josh and I had planned to grill steaks since it was supposed to be warm. We were going to attempt to be productive other than that.The Martins asked us if we wanted to hang out, so of course we said yes! We didn't know when we would get another day so nice, so we decided to take advantage of it and worry about being productive later. That was a great decision and it was definitely a top down kind of day!

Sorry for stealing you pic, Anna! I didn't take any of my own!

2) Peru!!! - We've been saving for, talking about and planning a trip to South America for quite some time. We were originally planning on going in April, but then we bought a house. Of course, that changes things. We threw around lots of other ideas to see if we could still make the trip work. We considered going over Christmas break (which is definitely NOT the best time to go due to the weather), next Spring, then this summer. We looked to see when we could hike the Inca Trail (passes are limited and sell out months in advance). We just paid our deposit and we'll be hiking the Inca Trail this Fall!!!

This was originally going to be a 3 week trip to Peru and Ecuador, but with Josh's job change, we wouldn't be able to pull a trip that long off for quite a while. This one will be just over a week, so we're considering another trip later in the year (possibly over Christmas break since we'll both be off work around that time). 

3) Free Pallets - I've found a ton of pallet projects I'm interested in and we've decided to incorporate them into our new bar design. My parents picked up a bunch for us and they'll be bringing them to us within the next few weekends. Woohoo! I love free stuff!

4) Sling TV - We're always looking for ways to save money, and cutting out cable is a great way to do that. We heard about Sling TV a couple months back and we decided to look into it rather than jumping into a contract with a cable or satellite company. It's only $20 a month and we get the majority of the channels we really enjoy. You can add on extra channel packages for $5 a month and since there's no contract, you can drop those packages (or Sling in general) whenever you want. We just got it this week and we were able to take advantage of a promotion to get a free Amazon Fire TV Stick. It's still a new service, so there is definitely room for improvement, but for $20 a month, I'm really impressed and I don't think we'll have any desire to pick up a big cable bill in the near future. 

5) Hatchery - Hatchery is a subscription service that allows you to sample really cool cooking ingredients. You get a box with about 5 ingredients in it. Mine just came in over the weekend and I'm really excited about it. My box will probably get its own post once I get a chance to try some of the ingredients, but here's a teaser for now. Isn't it cute?!? 

 I really like that most of the ingredients aren't something you would see in a typical grocery store, so they're likely things I wouldn't have discovered on my own!

6) Atlanta - Josh has a class in Atlanta the last week of March. Since I work from home, I decided to ask my boss if it was OK for me to work extra remote from Atlanta the week he's away. She said yes! I love her for being so flexible with me! It really means a lot to have a boss who is so big on work-life balance! We're going to stay the weekend after so we can visit some friends! We went to Atlanta with the Martins a few years back for a football game and I've wanted to go back since then. The hotel is booked and we've decided to drive down, so now we just wait. We have just over 2 weeks, so I know it will be here quickly!