On Friday, we held a farewell party for one of my friends, Yolanda, a member of our Officer Spouses’ Club. Instead of holding the party at a restaurant or someone’s home, we decided to hold it somewhere else…but we still wanted to have food and cocktails. Rather than doing a potluck thingy, I just had everyone give a few dollars and I supplied the food and drink.  The place we went was 45 minutes away, so I had to plan on serving things easily transportable…which was a little harder than I thought it would be! Transporting everything I usually use during a party nearly filled up my whole trunk!!! I ended up serving:

Red wine, white wine, and cranberry/champagne cocktails

A selection of cheeses and nuts

Terra Chips (LOVE these!)

Berries with a fruit dip

Chicken Salad sandwiches

Chocolate truffle cupcakes

Jordan almonds

So how do you make a fabulous-looking moveable feast? Here are my top tips:

• Bring a tablecloth. This makes ALL the difference!
• Provide nice plates/ cups/  napkins.
• Coordinate your serving dishes….even if this means their all white plastic…at least they match!
• It’s okay to take shortcuts.  I made the cupcakes and the fruit dip, but I bought the Jordan Almonds, chips, cheese, fruit, and chicken salad (Trader Joe’s Wine Country Chicken Salad…yum!!!).

These tips can help you spruce up your next Girls’ Night Out, Dinner Party, or family picnic!

One of the women I work with asked me to put together a graduation card for her to give to her granddaughter. It needed to be extra special, as she is taking her granddaughter to HAWAII for her graduation gift!  Of course, I was up to the challenge…and this is what I came up with:

I was so happy with how it turned out!  I hope her granddaughter likes it, too!  Happy Thursday!

So this really has nothing to do with baking, military life, decorating, organizing, or even pop culture…but I saw this video the other day and I just HAD to share it with you! There is a company that specializes in making projections on buildings that seem three dimensional…the result is pretty darn awesome.  Check it out:

Today’s twenty dollar tuesday tip is pretty simple.  First I have a personal question for you: is your box spring currently exposed? If I walked into your bedroom right now would I see that lightly padded box supporting your mattress?  If it is covered, is the thing covering it frumpy or outdated?

If you’ve answered yes to any of these questions, my friend, you’re in need of some help. You need to cover that box spring right up.  The problem is that dust ruffles can get a big pricey. Luckily, I have a cheap solution! Go to your local Target or Wal-Mart. Cruise those endcaps until you find a sheet (the same size as your bed) in a color that will match or coordinate with your current bedding. You can usually find these for under $10.  Go home. Remove your mattress. Place either a fitted sheet or a flat sheet directly on the box spring.  If it’s a flat sheet, pretend it’s a mattress and do those military corners. Replace the mattress. And voilà! Instant box spring cover.

And there you have it, folks, another Twenty Dollar Tuesday!!!!

Just in case you’re wondering, I am as obsessed with this new room in person as I am here on the blog.  It really is amazing, I feel like we’ve gained a whole second living room in our house! So, continuing my post from yesterday…

5. Install new hardware. These were the old knobs on the built in closet:

They were awful!  $16 in new hardware later…we had a wall of much more stylish cabinetry:

6. Change what you hate! My hubby and I both HATED the vertical blinds down in the previous room. It would have cost NOTHING to take those down, but we didn’t do it until now. If you have something like this in your house, change it! There’s no time like the present!

7. Shop those garage sales. Be sure to take advantage of Saturday morning garage sales. I found the really cool old trunk (which was a foot locker in WWII!) for $35 at a garage sale. I loved that it had a bit of military history itself, it seemed to really work for the room. It had been spray painted army green, so I just spray painted it white to coordinate with the rest of the room!

8. Edit. Edit. Edit. If you look at the before pictures, there is a lot of junk laying around the room. I asked my hubby to go through all the stuff in the room with me, and tell me what was important and what wasn’t. There were these little fish sculptures in the room that I thought were really important to him. I was trying to figure out how I was going to fit them into the decor, but when I asked, he told me they weren’t important to him at all!  So what things are important to YOU in your room?

9. Don’t be afraid. I’ll admit that decorating a whole room all at once…the sanding, the painting, the potential to fail miserably…was a bit intimidating. But…I just kept telling myself, “If this turns out horribly…it’s not really going to be much worse than it was before!” And that helped inspire me!  And when you have to force yourself to go to bed with a room half primed, five pieces of furniture in some stage of transition sitting in the garage, and covered in paint yoruself, just remember…these are all signs of CHANGE!

10. And last but not least, it’s ALL worth it in the end! My hubby LOVES his new room. He was down there almost all weekend, and all evening tonight.  It’s almost like we don’t even remember what the old Man Cave looked like!

So on that note…good luck with your next project!!!

Alright, so you want to know more about how I stretched my dollar; here are my top tips:

1. Paint really does do wonders. Right after we painted, the room instantly felt different. So if you want a quick room update, drop the $60 or so and buy some paint!

2. Secondly, shop in your own house! I talked about this a few days ago, but just as a reminder, the dresser that is our new “entertainment center” and the bookshelf that now houses the wine, scotch, and cigar collections were all unused pieces that we already owned!  The bookshelf was just in our guest bedroom closet. It was ugly brown, so we just painted it cream (with a $1.00 can of unclaimed paint I got at Lowe’s) and painted the backs blue (with another can of $1.00 unclaimed paint). The dresser, I didn’t have to do anything to!

3. Craigslist. Craigslist. Craigslist. I purchased the blue accent chair for the seating area, the floor lamp, and the desk all on Craigslist. The chair and the lamp were ready to use as is, but the desk, you may remember, looked like this:

I briefly thought about stripping and staining it dark brown to match the entertainment center, but then I remember how LONG it took me to strip and stain my armoire last summer. So I decided just to paint it! I chose Navy Blue as one of the primary colors in the room, as so many of my hubby’s accessories are, well, Navy Blue! Here’s how it turned out (FYI…the color is actually Navy blue, not royal blue as it appears in the photo):

I knew I wanted a brown leather accent chair to use as a desk chair to tie the office area with the sitting area (where the dominate piece of furniture is the massive leather couch we already owned). I found one on Craigslist for $25. But, I was greedy, and offered $20 (I’m such a tightwad sometimes!), and lost. So then I had to splurge and buy one for $60 at Ross (which has an AWESOME home department, by the way!) I suppose $60 is still a pretty darn good price for a chair, but I was bummed that I had missed out on the $25 one!  I guess I should have taken my own advice and bid full price since I really wanted it!!!

4. Dress up your windows. One of the things this room was desperately missing before, was window treatments (by the way, my hubby HATES the term “window treatments”, he cringes every time he hears it!). There were vertical blinds (ick!) above the sliding glass door, and nothing above the window. Curtains and hardware can get quite expensive, so I needed a CHEAP solution. You may remember that I recently purchased new window treatments for the living room and got rid of these heinous wood curtain rods:

Well, I saved them “just in case”, and I’m so glad I did! I ended up taking a bit of Navy blue spray paint to them.  For curtains, I simply purchased canvas drop cloths at a home improvement store for $10 a panel. And here’s the result:

Not too bad, eh?

And that’s all I’m going to leave you with today. Tomorrow I’ll finish up my Man Cave diatribe, and then I’ll tell you about the plans I have in store for my next project… I can hear my hubby cringing already!

So I apologize for being MIA. It’s been a cRazY week! Not only have I been trying to get the Man Cave wrapped up, but we’re having 40-50 people over (Navy thing) tomorrow night!!!!  Ahhhh. Oh yeah, AND we’re providing all the food and drinks!  AAaaahhhh. Luckily, my sister Caroline has been here and she’s been an extra pair of hands. My hubby has been doing the shopping, yard work, house clean up for the party, while Caroline and I have been putting the Man Cave together.  Even with her help, I’ve been up till 1 or 2 am every night this week!  Yikes. Needless, to say, I’ve needed a lot of caffeine to power through my work days!!!

So, I tell you all this, not for your pity (okay, a little for your pity), but mostly because I’m going to reveal the Man Cave pictures tonight as it’s FINALLY finished! BUT…I’m not going to show you all the details until this weekend. Because, my friends, it’s 1:09am!

If you’ll remember, here is what the Man Cave looked like before. It was sad and pitiful and we didn’t spent time down there because it was sad and ugly.

And here is the before desk area:

And with some painting help from the hubby:

And lots of supervision from Caroline:

Here is what it looks like now!

As for the budget, I came in slightly over $300, which includes all the paint. We did, however, altready have the couch, entertainment center/dresser, bookshelf, and we just recently purchased the desk on craigslist. (But I did paint the bookshelf and desk). There are still a few things I’d like to purchase, but I’m pretty happy with where the room is now.

It was also a really neat project, because although my hubby helped paint the room, he knew nothing else about it. He hadn’t seen any of the new purchases or the painted furniture, and he knew nothing about my design plans. Muahahah. So tonight, I totally surprised him with the completed room. He was so excited, and it was so much fun to give him such a neat room–he deserves it!

And with that note, I’m off to bed! Be sure to stay tuned this weekend to see just how I did it all!

-This American Wife

First of all, I have to show you what I was doing tonight:

Yeah!!!!  I found out today that on Friday, we’re hosting a party for 50 or so, and we’re apparently also in charge of food…SOOOO…I’m trying to make sure the Man Cave is all put together before then! Yikes. But, the painting is all done.  I think we’re only going to need one coat (fingers crossed). Either way, it looks GREAT!

Anyway, today I wanted to share with you my friend Jenn’s wedding invitation. She and her fiance are both pretty amazing with Adobe Illustrator and such, so they designed and put together their own invites! Talk about ambitious! And they look AMAZING!

Here are the pics. First of all…they were wrapped in brown craft paper. And when you unwrapped the craft paper, here is what you saw:

And when you opened the box…you saw this:

You can’t really see it above, but that little green tag had an embossed “J K” (the couples initials). And check out the edge of the invite there…here’s a close-up:

So cute! The actual invite part looked like this:

Simply stunning. And the other invite stuff was in a little pocket. I love how the design on each card looks like one design when they’re layered.

And one of my favorite parts was the RSVP card…you have to read it:

Great, right? And another highlight was the map they created. Such a nice touch:

I just love it all! I think they really did a great job of setting the tone for their wedding!

What will you do for YOUR next party invite?!?

So usually my idea of a fabulous dessert is something like this:

or this…

But, I recently tried Pioneer Woman’s Apple Brown Betty (recipe here), and it’s now my go-to fast and easy dessert…and boy is it yummy!  I made it tonight because we had company coming over and I wanted something impressive and deliciouso, Oh, and because I had about two minutes to make dessert!  I love it because it consists of apples, sandwich bread, butter, and brown sugar–things I almost always have on hand.

And this is what you end up with (Pioneer Woman’s photo, not mine):

I know, I know, it’s not chocolate, but it is SO good. Try it. Seriously. Now. You could even pretend it’s breakfast!

I served it with a little homemade whipped cream.  If you’re still buying Cool Whip, stop now. Homemade whipped cream is the easiest thing to make EVER….dump whipping cream and a bit of sugar in your Kitchen Aid  mixer with the whisk attachment on high for 60 seconds or so, until it looks like Cool Whip. Your guests will be so impressed!

P.S. If you do make this, close your eyes when you add the butter…then the calories won’t count!

So it’s been a busy weekend filled to the brim with decorating stuff.  Friday afternoon, my sister Caroline and I went to the home improvement store to purchase paint for the Man Cave!  We settled on Valspar’s “Jekyll Club Pulitzer Blue”.

No, the paint is not actually up on the walls yet, BUT the room has been cleared, cleaned, and the walls are all spackled!  We hope to paint tomorrow or Wednesday.

So why didn’t we paint?  Well, because we did a million other things! Caroline and I went garage saleing yesterday morning. And I have a new favorite iPhone ap–iGarageSale. It pulls garage sale listings from craigslist (where I usually get my garage sale listings) and superimposes them on a map.  You can scroll through the listings or search them for keywords and then tag your favorites. You can then have your map display only your favorites, and even give you directions!  Pretty cool, eh?

We ended up getting “stuck” at this Estate Sale for over an hour.  We only ended up buying one thing there, but it was sooooo cool.  They were selling EVERYTHING in the house.  And it was open for people just to walk through. Kind of creepy and really neat all at the same time.  Both Caroline and I fell in love with this room I dubbed the “Hardy Boy Bedroom” because it looked like the Hardy boys lived there. It had two twin beds covered in plaid blankets, a bunch of fishing poles tucked away in the corner, a closet full of old cameras and projectors, a dresser covered in atlases and gazetteers, the shelves were lined with model airplanes, and the bed was littered with old catchers mitts, baseball bats, and baseballs, a small table in the corner held some science experiment equipment. Seriously, it was so cool. We didn’t end up buying anything out of the room, it wasn’t exactly my style, but it was just so  awesome that both Caroline and I had to spend some time in there!

Anyway, so after the garage sales, we hit the thrift stores. We got home and were both pretty pooped so we took some naps, then got up and did some projects related to the man cave renovations, which will remain secret at this time. I’m trying to surprise my hubby with the new design (he knows the paint color, but not much else), and he’s a blog reader, so I’m going to save all the project details until after I reveal the design to him!

Today, the hubby, my sister, and I drove down to Pasadena to visit the Pasadena Showcase House for the Arts. If you’ve never been to a showhouse, be sure to look up one in your area–they are so neat. Basically, a nonprofit organization picks a house (usually a mansion), the family moves out, and participating interior designers in the area each are assigned a room to decorate. The organization then charges people to tour the home. The nonprofit organization raises money, designers get publicity, the homeowners get a free renovation, and the visitors get lots of great ideas! The Pasadena showhouse is one of the best I’ve ever been to. I think my hubby and I both decided we like last year’s a bit better, but the house this year was pretty incredible. You can learn more about the Pasadena Showhouse here.

I’m so excited to finish up with my redecorating of the Man Cave. I’ll be sure to share lots of pictures with you!