Valentine's Day and House Projects

It's become a yearly tradition that I make Peppermint Patties for Valentine's Day.  I use this recipe.  I add a little bit of red food coloring to make the middle pink and then cut them out with heart shaped cookie cutters before dipping them in chocolate.  I've also found that I like using Bakers semi-sweet chocolate to dip them in rather than chocolate chips because it goes on much smoother and easier.

These things really are so delicious.  

When Tim asked me what I wanted for V-day, I gave him a list of house projects I wanted him to do. We're romantic like that.

My List:

1. Finish hanging the kitchen light

2. Fix the drywall in the guest bathroom

3. Finish the shelves in kid's bathroom

Months ago, I ordered a new light to hang above the kitchen table and we finally got it just a few days before V-day.  Tim hung it up for me right away, but both the electrical cord and chain still needed to be shortened for it to look right.  So on Valentine's Day, while Peyton and I were at a friend's  house for a v-day party, Tim fixed it for me. 

Below is the before picture of our previous light fixture.  This light fixture came with the house. There's nothing really wrong with it except that it's just not my taste and it doesn't really enhance the space in any way.  It took me a while to figure out what I wanted there instead though (choosing light fixtures are hard for me), so I waited until I found something I loved.

The Before:

And here is the after!  

We bought the Marseille Globe light from Magnolia Market.  I fell in love with this light when I first saw it in a home on Fixer Upper.  (Please tell me you watch this show on HGTV!)

I love that it's rustic, but simple too.  I think it adds some really fun character to our kitchen.  

Last week, I decided to give our downstairs guest bathroom a small makeover.  I've never blogged about this bathroom before because it's in our basement, there's not much to it, and we don't use it very often.  But it's the one that our guests use when they stay with us and I've been wanting to make it more inviting.  I've just never been very inspired on how to update it.  Then while I was at HomeGoods last week, I came across a small chippy painted cabinet that I thought would look perfectly cute hanging over the toilet in that bathroom.  Well, then I decided I needed to paint the walls before I hung the cabinet.  And then this led to also wanting to paint the sink base.  And since we were already doing everything else, I thought it would be best to go ahead and update the mirror too.  (Does this remotely sound like that children's book, If you give a mouse a cookie? Ha!) So one thing led to another and before I knew it, I had taken out the old medicine cabinet/mirror and we had a giant hole in the wall.  You can see straight through to the storage room. Oops!  So patching that drywall is also on Tim's V-Day project list.

And hopefully I'll have a little mini-bathroom makeover to show you guys soon. 

And the last project he's working on for me is the shelving in the kids bathroom.  This one is nothing super exciting, just one of those things that needs to be done.  When we moved in, I took the old shutter door off  the front and left the shelves open because I love the look of open shelves.  The problem was that it looked very sloppy and unfinished in places.  It's been bugging me all this time, but it's always been near the bottom of the to-do list.  Then a few weeks ago (right before he left for Belgium), Tim ripped out all the shelves and the molding, patched and sanded the walls, and then I painted them while he was out of the country.  So now I am just ready to get this job finished and be done with it. 

 The before:

This past weekend, he put in floating shelves for me, and already it looks so much nicer than the old shelves.

Hopefully in the next few days, I will get them painted and then I need to hunt down some baskets to fit inside them.