Lion King

Derrick and I saw the broadway show Lion King last week and it was amazing! I saw it once before when I was 13 I think and I remember it being great but it was better this second time. We saw it with Alexander and Holly and we had amazing seats.

And cupcakes! DPAC is an awesome venue with plenty of food and vendor options.

 

You can't take pictures but I was able to snag this one of the curtain before the show started.

The musical is so beautifully done and the costumes are out of this world. It takes a Disney movie and completely sophisticates it. I could watch it over and over. You can google the musical to see some pictures of the costumes but I took a few pictures of the big program we were given to post on here.

Adult Simba.

Scar.

The cheetah was my favorite animal. There are strings from the actor's head to the cheetah's head so when she moved her head the cheetah's would move in the same way. It was amazing to watch.

If you ever get a chance to see it, do it! It's well worth it!

Memory Lane

A good friend of mine's mom died two weeks ago. She's my age! You're not supposed to lose your mom when you're 28. It's heartbreaking. Dawn was one of my greyhouse roommates and my other friend Madi and I met her for coffee last week to take advantage of her being in town. It was a bittersweet reunion but we tried to make the most of being back at our old stomping grounds. 

We lived in a big, old, grey house owned by the Presbyterian church where we were all involved in the campus ministry. We just so happened to be meeting for coffee just down the street so the three of us decided to crash our old abode and see if the current tenants would let us in. 

Spoiler, they did! These pictures are horrible but it is what it is. 

This house was old and drafty and moldy, but we loved it! We had great memories here and probably some of my best college years were those two years.

The current tenants are 6 sorority girls. They were super sweet but when they asked us when we lived here they said "oh my gosh, that was so long ago!" Definitely not in college anymore. I would pay lots of money to re-live those years.

In our old kitchen. Not much had changed there.

Dawn and Madi both lived on the old porch turned bedroom. 

This was my bedroom for 2 years! We think it used to be a walk-in closet. Great size for a closet! Tiny for a bedroom.

I could literally touch both walls.

The current owners have made the layout really weird but it's too hard to explain if you never been there. The living room was the same though! Same layout and everything pretty much. That's where our giant TV went too. 

My heart breaks for Dawn but I hope Madi and I were able to distract her for a while and I think we all enjoyed the walk through memory lane. Thanks to the current girls who live there for letting us crash their pad!

Garage Makeover

Derrick had President's day off on Monday so he helped me build some shelves for our garage. Ever since I built the workbench in there I was itching to get the rest of it under control. I had a vision of a shelving unit on this wall so that we could use the vertical space in our garage. Our garage is super tall. 

I found some plans on Ana White's site and on Monday we braved the ice and made our first trip to Lowes. A second trip followed almost immediately because we forgot five 2x4s.

They came together pretty quickly. We had to build them around the electrical panel so that it could still be opened and the cover could be removed if necessary. Apparently you're supposed to leave a buffer around your electrical panel........oops.

Derrick's preferred leveling method was with a ball. They passed my test with an actual level and his test with a ball so thumbs up all around!

The trickiest part was attaching the outside frame to the cleats because the shelves are only 15 3/4 inches wide. That meant I only had 15 3/4 inches to get in with my drill and screw all the cleats to the frame. It was a tight fit and I had to change drill bits every time for a short one and then an extended one to get it done.

The workbench was a lifesaver for this project and worked so well! It's very nice to be able to clamp things to it and to not have to worry about dinging it up.

Weight test passed.

And done!

The whole point of this is to be able to use our garage for storage/working and still be able to park in it so the next afternoon I completed phase two. I don't have a good before picture but that space to the right of this picture is a little alcove in between our steps and the wall. We currently stash our golf clubs, sports bags, and lawn mower in this area. We decided to build a second set of identical shelves in this spot for all of our sports equipment.

The only difference was we made these shelves only 12 inches deep which turned out to be impossible to drill the cleats to the outside frame. I had a Tim Gunn moment and made it work. In the end it's nice and sturdy and worked out perfectly!

Here's where we ended up!

So much better right??

The sports shelves are a game changer. We left just enough room between the shelves and the stairs to put our golf clubs and the top shelf is easily reached from the stairs although our less used items go up there. Bocce anyone??

We ended up taking the big pegboard down because it just wasn't being efficiently used and it ended up feeling kind of forced. I did put in a smaller peg board to use some of that wall space but the shelving space and shoe cubbies are working much better for our needs.

All of my scrap wood is on the top shelf. Eventually when we end up with more stuff...probably inevitable, I may work on finding a better solution for the scrap wood because it's a lot of wasted space up there. For now it works great.

Now...the other side of the garage isn't looking so hot yet. The main reason is the old desk that I just need Derrick's help loading in the car to take to the dump.

The other reason is our leaking water heater. Yep, the water heater has officially busted and is currently soaking the back corner of our garage. We're going to be upgrading to tankless in the next few days (hopefully!) so that will allow us to put this side of our garage back together and it will also free up a lot more space in that corner for lawn mower storage.

I'm super thrilled with how the shelves turned out and how our garage is shaping up. It's way more efficient and the goal of being able to walk around all sides of our cars is still in tact!

Now, I'm off to pick up my girl Crosby! She had her teeth cleaned this morning and I've been worried about her all morning!

Galentines day to Valentines Day!

Where are my fellow Parks and Rec fans?? If you don't watch Parks and Rec....go..go watch it now! If you do watch Parks and Rec you'll know that Saturday was Galentines day! February 13th where we celebrate gal pals!

I snapped my closest gals this message:

This snapchat was received well by everybody except Derrick. Sorry babe, ovaries before brovaries.

February 14th is reserved for celebrating our special lady. Crosentines day.

Sunday was our sixth anniversary with the Cros. Six years since some other person wanted to adopt her and I couldn't bear to give her up. We took a chance on wimpy pants Crosby and she has returned the love in spades. She carried her new rope toy around all morning showing off that it was her day.

I guess Valentines day is also for celebrating those you love so Derrick and I made pancakes together. Hearts, initials, and wedding dates. Crosby got a C.

After breakfast we took Crosby to play frisbee at her favorite place.

This was the aftermath of that. We think she's getting arthritis in her right foot so lately anything with lots of running and jumping has her limping for a few days after. She thinks it's worth it though. She's getting her teeth cleaned on Wednesday so I'm planning on talking to the vet about prevention or treatment. We started her on fish oil this weekend but I'd be interested to find out what else we can do for her. She's only 7. She's got 80 years to go so we need to get ahead of this!

The kitchen looks like a disaster because I was busy preparing Derrick's valentines present and when I cook all drawers and doors stay open.

Strawberry heart cake! 5 layers tall and too big for the cake holder. Derrick is hard to shop for...he doesn't typically want a lot and if he does want it, he buys it! With cake, you can never go wrong! Me on the other hand, I always have things I'm ogling over :)  Last week Derrick bought me a chair...or gave his blessing to me buying a chair... and I called in my Valentines day present.

It's from World Market and I LOVE it! I didn't like the wing back that I recovered...I just did such a poor job on it, so I'd been keeping my eye out for a replacement. We got this one one sale plus with a coupon. It's going to take a little while to break in...the cushions are pretty firm, but I am so happy with it and it helps expand our color palate in the living room. Derrick also surprised me with the euro shams to our bedding set on Valentines day....he knows the way straight to my heart!

Valentines afternoon we had practice with our high schoolers which consisted of them earning Valentines day candy for good defense and good decisions on offense. We're finally starting to get some flow and it's fun to see.

Our hot Valentines date was playing our final indoor games. Indoor ultimate is one of my new favorite things. Outdoor is great, of course, but indoor is so fast paced and the lack of wind/bad weather makes more things possible with the disc. We won both of our games and ended the season 3rd overall!

I hope you had a great Valentines day with your loved ones and I hope you had a great day celebrating Crosby!

Current View

I've been trying to get out of my house and work from coffee shops more recently. I find it helps me focus on my work without getting bored of being at the office. I also think my work life is about to improve (not that it's been bad by any means) because an old friend from high school just joined our office and we've had a great time so far catching up and going on office tours together!

Work is looking up!

If you're sitting at work looking for distraction you should read this Ultiworld article about my little bro: http://ultiworld.com/2016/02/09/unc-wilmington-wins-instant-classic-dgp-thriller-umass-qctu-final/

He was interviewed for the article and Derrick and I are dying to see the game footage. We were getting twitter and text updates during the games and I was sitting in our giant bathtub (fully dressed, no water) staring at the screen waiting for the final text saying they'd won! It's fun to have a superstar in the family :)

Folding Work Bench

I built something else! I'm on a streak right now. While I was building the shelves for our master bedroom  I was doing most of the work in our kitchen on the kitchen table. Sawdust got everywhere and it really wasn't super ideal. I decided it would be better to do this type of work in the garage but I don't want to lose the option to park in the garage. Dad made us a makeshift work table out of an old 

desk when we moved in and it's worked great up to this point. The problem is it's built out of a broken desk though so it's not sturdy enough to do projects on and the surface area isn't really big enough. Plus we have accumulated more tools and garage stuff and the wall has gotten a little disorganized. So, the plan is to convert that whole wall to tall shelving units.

In my head I was picturing a fold down work table that I could mount on the left wall and only fold down when I was doing building projects. That way, when I was done we could just fold it up and Derrick could still park in the garage. I did some googling and found the perfect tutorial!

This is a youtube video of what I built.

 

She had plans that you could purchase for $5 so I decided it was worth it since it was my first big project and the plans included step by step instructions and a cut list. It was much easier to follow plans on paper then having to constantly have my computer up and trying to figure out from this video what I needed to do next. I didn't do a step by step tutorial or pictures because they are her plans and I didn't think that was right to copy her but I will tell you, it worked! The plans were awesome!

Here is my final product!

I made a scrap wood latch at the top to keep it locked in place when it's folded against the wall. 

The legs were the trickiest part. I had to use a jig saw to round the top of the 2x4s but my jig saw is on it's last leg and the blade kept falling out. I ended up having to hand saw it with this massive sword saw. It worked but it's not pretty.

And then I got the table down and one leg was sitting about a half inch off the ground. I'm not exactly sure how that happened but I had to screw a scrap on the bottom of that leg so it sits on the ground like it's supposed to.

It's a beautiful sight!

I'm pretty proud of this. It's my first big project that I built from scratch and it turned out just as I pictured! I did most of it in a few hours last night until my drill died, then I finished it up this morning.