Best of July 2016

It’s hard to believe that another month has gone by already!  Summer is flying by!  Time for another “Best Of” monthly post!

Todd’s parents came to visit and we took them to Coasterra for dinner. 

On the same day, we went to the San Diego Symphony’s Bayside Summer Nights “Star Spangled Pops” concert on July 1st.  Lots of patriotic music and fireworks afterwards!

Todd’s parents got to hear Todd speak at the annual American Mensa conference, which happened to be in San Diego this year.  Todd gave a talk about how to make friends as adults (because we all know how hard that is!)  They were so proud of him!

We also walked at Miramar Lake.

Wore these heels to work.  I don’t normally wear heels at all because I hate being uncomfortable, but these 3” heels are actually quite comfortable. 

Went running at the coast.  Oh San Diego, how we love you.

Todd participated in the “Cake Off” contest at work with his chocolate caramel cake.  Sadly he did not win.  I’m pretty sure it was rigged.

We tried out a new-to-us restaurant called “Brothers Provision”. 

We had a weeknight movie date to see “Kiki’s Delivery Service”, because we love Miyazaki’s animated movies.

We got a new refrigerator.  Our old one came with the house when we bought it in 2001.  It was time.  Todd was very excited!

You might be wondering, why are they buying and upgrading and re-doing all these things around their house?  Well, we’ve saved up some money, and we believe that things around the house should enhance our everyday experiences rather than annoy us.  So, as much as we’re able to make our house a place of comfort, that’s what we’re doing.  New windows?  We’re enjoying them so much.  Opening them every morning and every night is a great everyday experience and huge upgrade from our old windows.  New office?  LOVE the experience of being in it now that it’s open, airy, organized, and bright.  New fridge?  It’s big and all the food is organized and it’s energy-efficient.

We donated the old fridge (still works), two bookshelves, and a big filing cabinet.  Todd had to take the doors off the fridge and got help from our neighbors Tyler and Fred in order to get the fridge out our front door.

Todd officially joined the San Diego Triathlon Club.  He went on two bike rides with them, plus a couple of ocean swims (but I don’t have pics). 

I took a Friday off and spent the 3-day weekend painting my craft room and hauling all my boxed up stuff back into the craft room and organizing it.  Here’s a peek, but I’ll blog the craft room makeover later in August.

We tried a new Hawaiian poke place called “Poke Go”, not too far from us.  I deemed it pretty good.  Nice to have poke not too far away.  It’s a decent closer-by choice for sure. 

We went to a concert at Open Air Theater and we saw Howard Jones…

OMD (Orchestral Maneuvers In the Dark)

And Barenaked Ladies (our 5th or 6th time!)

It was like re-living high school and grad school all over again!

Todd went salsa dancing with some co-workers.  He’s in the Swing Dance Club at work, but this was different type of dance.  They got lessons too!  Next time I’ll be joining him.

I printed out photos for the first time since last September (10 months ago!).  I’ll be scrapbooking again soon, now that I’ve made over my craft room.  For various reasons I haven’t scrapbooked since 10 months ago.  I feel like doing it again.

Dad & Shelly came to visit and we celebrated their combined birthdays with lunch at Duke’s La Jolla.

Followed by a walk around the Cove.

Went to the Padres game downtown at Petco Park with AJ & Meera.  They ended up beating the Cincinnati Reds 2-1 in 10 innings.  Love hanging out with AJ & Meera!

Cooked a bunch of great meals at home.

We helped Noodle celebrate his 6th birthday by letting him lick some Cheetos.

Some more Noodle antics in July:

I didn’t take any photos, but I got to have lunch with my scrapbooking friend Pearl and also visit her new house.  I loved it, and loved spending time with her!

I’ll blog my craft room makeover in a couple of weeks.  We are SO looking forward to August because we’re taking a week off work and just staycationing here in San Diego.  It’s our favorite thing to do! We love San Diego and living here is a dream.  And also, Peppermint will be coming to visit! 

The Great Office Makeover

If you’ve been reading my blog, you know that I’ve been dedicating myself to self-improvement and also home and organizing improvement the last few months.  I was tired of living in a space that was uninspiring and surrounded by things I didn’t love or were not useful.  We had an epiphany of sorts in April when we went to see some new construction houses near our house.  We liked the houses but it wasn’t like our house was crappy compared to those new houses.  We really love the layout and “bones” of our house.  Plus those new construction houses cost about $300k more than our house.  That’s a lot to take on financially when we only have nine years of mortgage payments left.  So instead of buying a new house, we decided to use some of our savings to spruce up our own house!  We like our neighborhood and neighbors, so why not just upgrade our favorite spaces and things we use, and stay here! 

One of the spaces in our house that was uninspiring was our office.  Our home office is actually a bedroom downstairs. (The other three bedrooms are upstairs.)  It is next to the family room.  It is north-facing, so it does not get a lot of light, especially in the winter.  We had painted it gray when we moved in years ago.  After a while, we realized the gray color didn’t do the room any favors when it came to lighting.  We decided to paint it white.  In order to paint, we would have to move our furniture out of the office.  So I decided we should go big or go home and just completely makeover the office.

Before we did anything, Todd & I drew out our room to scale onto graph paper and cut out our furniture to scale.  We moved everything around on paper a lot.

But finally picked this configuration.  We wanted our desks against the walls so that the room will seem spacious and open.

Picking the perfect white paint was quite difficult.  We got swatches and taped them onto all four walls to see the how the colors looked in different lighting during different times of the day. 

We narrowed it down to two white colors and then got samples and painted spots onto the wall.  We finally picked Benjamin Moore Simply White in eggshell finish.  It is a soft white that looked good in any lighting in our office.

We didn’t take any proper “before” photos and only thought to take photos when we were starting to pack our stuff up. 

Here’s basically what the room looked like before, but not always this messy, LOL.  I had shelves and file cabinet in the recessed space where the closet is.  (We took the doors off.)  Our desks faced each other.  The room looked cramped and small.

Todd’s side of the room.

The corner by the door.  It housed our two tall filing cabinets, plus junk on top.

After packing and moving all the furniture out, this was what it looked like.

This was the recessed closet space.

The corner with the filing cabinets.

Todd’s side.

All our furniture and packed up things went into the living room.

We both painted the room.  Todd mostly taped and used the paint brush for edges and corners, while I did the rolling.

The next two photos, you can really tell the difference the white paint is going to make in the room to make it look lighter and brighter.

After two coats of white paint.

After letting the paint dry for a couple of days, we started moving back in.  First in were our desks.  They went according to plan and they fit perfectly into the space!  My desk is lower than Todd’s because I’m shorter.  (We have the Galant desk from IKEA.  They are height-adjustable.  Unfortunately these particular models are no longer for sale.)

Now for all the “after” photos!   We also had all 22 of our windows replaced with new windows in the meantime between May and now, so now we have a white double-pane low e3 window in the office, completing the transformation.  We will probably install some blinds at some point, but we like just the window for now.  This windows faces our fence so nobody can look in anyways.

My side of the room.  I kept the right side of my desk totally clean so that I can craft there should I choose to do so, rather than go upstairs to the craft room.

I may add some shelving or art work on the wall above my desk.

I also bought a new monitor.  It is an ultrawide monitor.  I don’t like the look of double monitors, but I do a lot of work with two windows open side-by-side, so the extra-wide monitor totally works with how I work.  It’s very pretty!

I can see so much more photos in Lightroom, ha ha!

We were able to purge and consolidate our files into just one filing cabinet.  I may try to paint it someday, but it’s just the beige original color for now.  My photo printer sits on top of it.  I have some crafting supplies in my IKEA Raskog cart in the corner.

I designed the configuration of these IKEA Besta units so that most of the selving are closed instead of open.  I wanted doors and drawers in the shelves.

I realized that the reason why our old office looked so messy was because of all the open shelving.  There’s just no way to make office supplies, printer paper, and photo papers look neat on open shelving.  So now these are behind closed doors.

The drawers hold other non-neat stuff such as cords, chargers, gadgets, etc.  This was also on open shelving before and everything just looked messy, even when they were organized.

We installed a TV above the door so we can have the option of watching TV or have TV on the background when doing things in our office.

We’ve also utlized the ledge in my corner of the office to put big storage boxes up there.  I had purged a bunch of files, so some of the boxes are empty for now. 

Here’s a look at Todd’s side of the office.

Notice anything on the floating shelves?

Todd also has his music workstation on his side of the office.

Here’s a quick look at before and after again.

Now our office is a neat and more inspiring place to hang out in.  After purging and getting some new furniture, everything has its place.  It’s a space I look forward to spending time in, rather than dread.

I’ll be re-organizing my craft room next.  And I’ll blog about our new windows sometime in the near future.  Thanks for stopping by and taking a look at our office makeover!