HOBO Wallet

I have had a hobo wallet for the past 6 almost 7 years. I have had two. My first was light blue and the one I have now is off white... or once was.
I absolutely love these wallets, though sadly mine now has seen better days. My bestie got me this one when I graduated college. So it is going on almost 3 years of use.

I have wanted a new wallet for a while but now they have some spring colors in which I like more than their winter collection. Here are the ones I am debating between.

  (Same wallet just in yellow. This is the vintage Lauren)

I think right now I am leaning towards this last one since it is a little different than the others I have had. Thoughts?

Norfolk City Guide

One of my favorite blogs to follow Design Sponge featured a local city guide for Norfolk! Thought I would share the link. It has some of my favorite spots listed. Like Thrift Store USA and Razzo's ( the restaurant Zach took me to the night he proposed). There are a few places I feel like I need to check out now.

Here is the guide!
Enjoy!

Roidizer

I found a photo app I like! Finally!

I love my pets! Lammy and Zeba my moms dogs are also featured! Baby Penguin is just too cute!

Office Curtains

The office is so close to being done I can almost taste it. I am bursting with excitement to have the rest of my house back in order and a bright and cheery studio space to work in. The floor is officially complete with three layers of clear high gloss sealer. Only things left to do are to paint the trim again since we've caulked up the holes and crack between the wall and put poly on the desktop. I'm going to tackle these two things when I get home tonight and then we are going to start moving stuff back in!

I've been thinking about what kind of curtains I want in the room. I really want a big bright and bold print. I still stand by the fact that there is way better selection with shower curtains rather than window treatments out there. Here are some I saw at Kohl's:

This website has some awesome fabric selections but its pretty pricey. I love this:

Sadly that fabric is no longer on the website in those colors. This would be perfect for my office. I suppose I could always look at the fabric store and sew some curtains myself if I can't find anything I like. However it would be much easier just to buy some. Marimekko has everything from fabric to wallpapers in an assortment of bold prints. 

This website Romo also has some nice fabric prints, of course they are out of my budget. They aren't as bold as I want either. They aren't all florals, I just liked these...

Not sure where else to look. Target used to have some nice shower curtains but last time I was in there they were bare, must be getting in a lot of new merchandise in their bath department. Maybe there will be a new wondrous curtain waiting for me next time I go there. The office has two windows. So I need one panel for each window and they will be able to be draped to the side. 

Urban Outfitters actually has some real cute curtains, and they really aren't that expensive.

I've also been thinking that I want my Dunny's displayed in the office somehow. They have been in a box for almost a year now. I still have to figure out if we have the wall space where they will still be visible...

Changes

I am ready for some changes. Finally I feel that things are looking up. My thyroid situation is mostly under control. I find out tomorrow if my meds need to change or if my prescription now is doing its job. After that doctors visit I decided it was definately time for me to start running again. The thyroid issues caused me to gain weight and prevented me from doing physical activity. I am so happy to finally get back in shape and I am determined to do it.

I haven't really run since last April. That was when I started having a lot of problems. Saturday morning I decided I was going to run and I fully expected it to be an entirely pathetic attempt with lots of walking. I figured it would be like starting over. I decided I would run/walk for 30 minutes 3 to 4 times a week. I also recently bought some 3 lb and 8 lb weights plus I have an exercise ball so I can do basic exercises from home.

Saturday morning before work was my first attempt, it was 30 degrees out and definately hard to get my butt out of bed at 7 am to run, but I did it. I also did way better than I expected. I ran a loop around my neighborhood twice. I am thinking it is about 2.5 miles but I need to drive it with my car to check. I managed to run the entire time too! Granted thats pretty slow if it is indeed only 2.5 miles. But I accomplished my goal of running for 30 minutes and I did it without walking. I felt so good afterwards too. Made me realize I do actually enjoy and miss running. I think I had been so disheartened from my past attempts at running that completely failed. The most recent involved me thinking I was going to faint after only 2 minutes, granted that was due to my thyroid.

My legs and abs are extremely sore today but I am going to attempt run number two tomorrow morning before work, sore or not. You don't lose weight making excuses! Tonight I am going to do an arm and core body workout of some sort. Hopefully I can squeeze it in between finishing laundry, making dinner, and helping zach cut and paint the trim for the office. It's going to be a busy Sunday night at the Johnson household. I feel way happier and motivated being busy doing things rather than turning into a couch potato at night watching shows that I don't even like.

Our living room, hall, back room, and bedroom are still exploding with all the stuff from the office so we are doing our best to get the room finished so we can have the rest of our house back. Still left to do:

• Cut trim
• Paint trim ( luckily it is already primed)
• Install trim
• One more coat of paint on the desk
• Poly on the top of the desk
• One more coat of paint on the floor in the corner where the desk was ( I will do this tonight)
• Paint floor with sealer, we've already noticed the floor is getting dirty and scratching real easy, hopefully sealing the floor would fix that.

My goal is to have these things completed before we go out of town this weekend to visit our friends Chris, Candace, Ryan, and Megan in DC. I'm real excited for this mini vacation, but I really don't want to come home to a disaster of a house. I can't even tell you how many times I have tripped in the past week. I will be glad to have all that junk ( which is mostly mine, hey I have a lot of art and craft stuff) back in its place and out of my way.

This week may bring about another change too but I can't get too excited yet, only time will tell!

I will leave you with this sneak peak at the office. My fan project is complete, and I am in love. I will have to give a before and after when I actually do the whole office makeover post. It was a real dated brass and ugly wood fan before. Zach did most of the work for this. He took the fan down, took it completely apart and everything to spray paint it. We even put the skrews into cardboard and spray painted them as well so they don't stand out. I went and got new pulls and new fan light covers.

Knitting

I really haven't knitted much this winter, which I really need to finish my blanket that I started over a year ago. It is near complete so there really is no excuse. Saturday I got to work at the sales center, which is still completely dead. I did go to work prepared and ready to knit. I made this entire scarf for my boss that day.

Now I am really wanting to knit more before it gets too hot!

Office Progress!!!

The office is coming along. I am hoping by Friday it will be mostly done! The floor is painted except for the corner where the desk is currently sitting. The two walls behind where the desk is also needs to be painted still but all the other walls and the ceiling are complete! We ripped out the trim so hopefully tomorrow we will have the new trim painted, and installed. Then we can move the desk back in place and finish up the remainder of the painting in the room. Right now the house is exploding with all of the things in the office that needed a temporary home while we get the office in shape. I will be glad to have my living room functional again.
Heres a sneak peak of what things are looking like right now. Zach sent me this from his phone... so sorry that it isn't the best image!

Once the room and desk are painted then I can get some curtains and I also have been thinking I want to paint the dated old brass ceiling fan a bright green and the blades white. I would prefer getting a nice little chandelier from the thrift store and painting that but Zach really wants to keep a ceiling fan in there. So I will attempt to revamp the one we have. From what I read it shouldn't be too hard, aside from taking it down and reinstalling it. I can't even tell you how excited I am to have this room finished and functional as an office/ studio space!

House Progress!

Our office/ studio space is by far our biggest project going on right now. It is improving though right now it is a bit of a mess.  Since I want to paint in there we decided to remove the carpet. Underneath the carpet (Zach and Dave did all this demo) we found asbestos tiles. Eww. So armed with their respirators they ripped that up. It looked like laminate parquet tiles. Now we are left with this black asphalt tar junk and permanent dirt lines from the tiles. There is no way this stuff can be scraped up so we are going to prime it with concrete floor primer and then paint it with concrete paint. We've already got the paint (it is like a very light powder blue) we just need to get the time to work on it. Hopefully this gross floor will be looking pristine very soon.

Here are some pictures of the room right now. That black bookcase will be getting chucked very soon now that I have a new bookcase thanks to our friend Erin, but more on that later.

I've painted some swatches. This is the color the accent wall will be, Summer Blue:

Next to the blue I painted a swatch of Cloud Nine but it is really hard to even tell, the biggest difference is the paint I got is eggshell and all the walls in there now are a high gloss.

I did a swatch on the ceiling too, you can actually tell a difference there because right now the ceiling is a tan color.

Walls and ceiling paint color is Cloud Nine:

Floor color is Pale Star:

The desk will be painted white too. So we have a lot of painting to do in the office, but as soon as thats done I think it will look 100 times better. I can't wait. Zach and I just need some days off together to work on it.

The back room/ den/ converted garage/ Zach's man cave, yes this room has too many names, has come a long way too. We've hung curtain rods and moved the curtains we had in the bedroom back there. We've finished the old dresser that we refinished. I'll give you  guys a nice before and after. Plus we have gotten  a fabulous new bookcase thanks to Erin. I have wanted a bookcase like this for a long time too. We actually were going to build one for that exact spot. Here are some pictures!

Before:

After:

 Hard to believe that came from a thrift store for $10!

Here is the new bookcase!

I just love it! We will eventually paint it but that is probably a long way off. We need to paint the back room too, not sure how soon that will happen either. Eventually we will probably get a sectional for the room too.