The Brown Brick Road

Capturing our adventures one photo at a time...

House Tour

Something a little different around here this week.  I love reading home design blogs and magazines and seeing where other people live so I thought you all might enjoy seeing a little more of where we live!  I had these photos taken back in July for another project that a friend is working on.  That project has been a bit delayed so I thought it wouldn’t hurt to share them with you here now.

You might remember when I showed you some of these family photos from Lauren at Peppermint Photography…

I was about 5 months pregnant there and had her come because I wanted some good pictures while our family was still 3, but it also gave me a chance to get Lauren to take some awesome photos of the interior of our house.  Now, let me say this – I am definitely not an interior designer.  I peruse blogs, rip pages out of magazines and pin things like everyone but definitely don’t think I really know what I’m doing.  In putting our house together, I just tried to go with what I liked – and what I like is color, a few unique pieces to keep things interesting and an overall happy space.  I was working mostly with a ton of “hand me down” furniture from my parents house in Arkansas.  I put “hand me down” in quotes because it’s not like I was getting old, ragged pieces of furniture. I was lucky enough to get beautiful pieces that I could never have afforded on my own.  The trick was taking these antiques or pieces with a slightly older feel and making them more modern and young.  Fabric can do wonders for that!

Ok, enough chatting…let’s get on with the house!  Today I will share the front living and dining room.  These are the first two rooms that you see when you walk into the front door.

The couch, two chairs, coffee table and table in the bay window were all “hand me downs”.  A little bright pop of apple green really livened the chairs up I think!  The sconces are from Horchow, the lamp is from At Home, and the mirror over the fireplace is from Ballard Designs.  The throw pillow on the couch was Robert’s grandmother’s and is really special.  She passed away not long after we moved in and that pillow ended up matching the greens and patterns of our fabrics so well that we just had to give it a new home.

Looking into the dining room you can see the greek key fabric on the chair better.  You know I can’t resist a good geometric print!

I know they might be trendy right now, but that doesn’t stop me from LOVING my Jonathan Adler chippendale chairs and my mirrored buffet.  My favorite part of the room though (and one of my favorite things in the house) is the crown chandelier.  I mean…it’s a crown hanging in my dining room for goodness sake!  I’m just fancy like that!  🙂

Robert and I randomly found the two watercolor florals while shopping for outdoor furniture at Summer Classics.  Never expected to find art there but I love them for the space!  I also have to mention the painting above the buffet.  It’s an oil painting done by the amazing Rich Flynn at our wedding.  He was set up at our reception and completed the painting from start to finish by the end of the night.  It is such a cool piece and something I will treasure forever.

The geometric gold mirror in the picture above is another one from Ballard Designs.

Hope you guys enjoy this, the tour continues tomorrow!  Happy New Year’s Eve!  I’m off to pop some bubbly….

Deck the halls!

As I mentioned last week, I changed up our exterior Christmas decorations this year a bit.  Growing up, we always had wreaths with traditional red velvet bows on all the windows of our house…

and I loved how it looked all lit up at night!  My dad always did the BEST job getting those trees completely covered in lights!

Man, I love that house.  My parents sold it about 4 years ago and I miss it and everything it stood for every single day.

To capture that traditional holiday feel, I decided our house needed wreaths with red, velvet bows on every window too!  Thanks to Susan’s extraordinary bow-making ability, our house now looks like this…

I absolutely love it!  Our Christmas tree shines through the window that is set back on the far left and the garland on the stair rail is lit up at night too.

It looks so merry to me!

Can’t forget our fancy mailbox too!

All we need is some snow on the ground!  It makes me so happy every time I drive up to the house!  I think Spencer likes the decorations too…

Merry merry!

 

Candy House

Growing up, one of my favorite Christmas traditions was the candy house that my brother and I would decorate every year.  It’s sort of like a gingerbread house but it is a house made of wood that we would cover in icing and candy.  I always loved doing it!  Here’s me and my brother with our candy house circa 1986…

Oh yea!  We still have that original wooden candy house but it’s staying at GJ and Daddo’s.  But, over Thanksgiving, my mom surprised me and my brother with our own candy houses hand-made by my dad and Marc!  Best gift ever!!  I am SO excited to start the candy house tradition with my boys!!

On Friday, Maxwell, Spencer and I set out to decorate it.  We had plenty of icing and candy…

First we covered it in icing.  Maxwell was a big help…

A really big help…

Yep, such a big help.

See that side of the roof?  That’s about all the icing he actually got on the house!  🙂

Unfortunately, my other helper was feeling a little bah humbug during the decorating process…

I think he was just sad he wasn’t getting to “help” the way Maxwell was!

We then put all the candy on and, again, my assistant was really helpful…

How did I get so lucky to have such a good helper?!  🙂

In the end, we ended up with a fantastic looking candy house (that Maxwell actually really did help decorate)…

and two happy boys!

Can’t wait to continue this tradition every year!  Ho ho ho!

Weekend goodness

We had all kinds of weekend goodness around here!

1. We got all of our Christmas decorations up inside and out!

2. Spencer slept in his own room for the first time and slept great!

3. AL beat GA to be the SEC Champs!  Roll Tide!

One of these things made me really happy, one of these things made Robert really happy, and one of these things made us all really happy!  Can you guess which is which?

What made me really happy?  Spencer sleeping in his own bed!  It was so nice to sleep in my bed for the first time in 6 weeks without a baby either laying on me or right beside me.  He slept ok on Friday night but Saturday night he slept GREAT!  He ate around 7:30 and then after a bath and some rocking, I put him in his bed at 10:00 and he didn’t wake up until 1:30.  I got to bed at 10:00 so that was 3.5 solid hours of sleep for me!  hooray!  I fed him and then rocked him for just a bit and he went right back to sleep in his bed until 5:00.  That meant another 3 solid hours of sleep for me!  hooray x 2!!  I fed him, rocked him and put him back in his bed asleep where he stayed for about another hour and then Robert got up and held him and let me sleep until 8:00.  hooray x 3!  I feel like a new person!  I’m so glad that Spencer did well with ZERO crying except when he wanted to eat. This kid is proving to be a pretty easy baby!

The monitor view of him all snuggled up like a burrito in his swaddle blanket in his bed…

and happy in his bed on Sunday!

What made Robert really happy?  Roll Tide of course!  It was QUITE a game against GA and I wasn’t sure Robert was going to make it through at some points but the Tide pulled it out and we had quite the celebration around here!  The celebrations continued the next day when Maxwell wore his cute new State Traditions shirt and “butt-ball” hat!

What made us all really happy?  Christmas decorations!  Everything is up inside including our tree!  We also got all the new decorations up outside on Saturday.  Unfortunately, some of my lighted garland didn’t light up when I plugged it in on Saturday so I need to replace that.  I also need to add one more wreath so will share pictures when it’s all complete.  In the meantime, here’s a sneak peak of our mail box all done up by Susan!  It’s holly jolly festive around here!!  I love Christmastime!

Hope you all had a great weekend too!

 

Fruits of my labor

Have I mentioned how great my tomato plants are doing?  They’re growing like weeds…well, not like weeds but like tomato plants!  🙂  My bigger, roma sized tomatoes aren’t quite ripe yet but I’ve gotten lots of cherry tomatoes already. We got over a dozen off this weekend and were able to make a pizza using nothing but our home grown tomatoes!!  How’s that for cool!  I feel so farmer-ish.  In fact, the pizza not only had our home grown tomatoes, but was on my homemade pizza dough, using my homemade pesto that I made with basil from our garden!  whoa…Martha Stewart here I come!!

If you’re curious, the pizza recipe I use is from The Pioneer Woman’s first cookbook.  It is by far the favorite dinner of both me and Robert.  Take the time to make your own crust too – it’s not hard and so good!  Check out this post she did on pizza – Pizza Two Ways – we make ours the first way but add fresh basil at the end.  So. darn. GOOD!  It’s just pesto, fresh mozzarella, tomatoes and fresh basil.  We probably have it at least every other week.

You can also get a glimpse of our new deck rail in that last pic.  It looks great and I’m so glad we decided to do it.  I’ll take some better pics of it next week.

Here’s two quick iphone pics of Maxwell.  The first is from the day of his haircut last week and, with this expression, it totally looks like he’s saying “where’d my hair go?!” (which is what I was thinking!)

And this one is from yesterday.  His short little do is starting to grow on me I think…but I still wish it would just grow period!  🙂

That’s all for today!  See you tomorrow for the holiday special!

ps – am I being a little dramatic about this haircut?  Perhaps…