The Trouble with a Pre-lit Tree

As mentioned in my previous post, we have already come across some decorating obstacles this year and we haven't even gotten through half! There's always a thing in decorating every year that causes me an exorbitant amount of frustration during the decorating process. The thing that follows me around in every project, even when I get to something easy that I have done many time with no problems, there the thing is, looming over the entire project, a menace to my Christmas spirit. This year that thing, that menace, is the lighting!

Last year we made two major Christmas decoration purchases: My big, beautiful, 9 foot, pre-lit, fake-but-doesn't-look-fake Christmas tree for the living room and we made the switch from some hand-me-down icicle lights to the C9 LED lights. We made these investments thinking that they would look good, but also make our lives easier. The LED lights are supposed to allow you to plug in a million strands to one outlet without shorting anything out and the pre-lit tree is only three pieces instead of 72 and is PRE-LIT!

Tony attempted to put up our Christmas lights outside the day after Thanksgiving. He plugged in each strand in the house to test it before putting them on the roof and all worked well at first. Then he gets to the last 3 strands that wimped out on us last year halfway through the Christmas season, and of course only half of them work. So we took an hour and a half to part out the last three strands and make one Franken-strand.  Once that is up, we had two additional strands that we bought this year so that we could do some additional areas that we had not done previously. Apparently this years warm-white of the same brand, is not the same as last year's warm white...BAAAAH!!! On top of that, once the lights that made it onto the house were plugged in, there were huge spans that didn't light up, so frustrating!

Christmas Decor Inspiration: 2012

It's officially Christmas decorating time!! I usually start heavily decorating the day after Thanksgiving, but we had some lighting issues that held us back (a problem that requires far more patience than I am equipped with - by the way) which is giving me more time to organize and get some inspiration for this year's decorations.

I don't know if I mentioned this, but I am CRAZY fickle, specifically when it comes to color. I change my holiday decorations every year and it gets more and more expensive. So this year I have decided we will be getting pretty much new EVERYTHING (except the tree...we got my ginormous tree last year!). Really, this is a practical decision...or at least that is what I have convinced myself. I want to go with all neutral essentials: stockings, tree skirt, bigger home decor items, etc. Then I can change out the small details with a new color or two every year. The problem then became finding the right style of neutrals that would be lasting for at least the next decade and easy to build on with an array of colors.



                             

I love the simplicity of this mantel arrangement.  Mixing soft, comfortable textures with shiny,    more glamorous textures is the direction I would like to go in. It won't limit what I can change out or add to over the years if I build a cohesive mixture of textures now. The boxwood topiaries add an organic touch and the punch of color up high draws your eye up  and creates a nice frame for the overall scene. 

These mercury glass hurricanes are trendy, but are neutral and versatile enough that they can be timeless too. I would love to figure out a way to successfully create the mercury glass look. I've seen a ton of how-to's, but none of them really look like mercury glass....probably why it so expensive!

Top 10 Ingredient Substitutions

Happy Thanksgiving everyone! If you're hosting Thanksgiving this year and you're anything like me, you have forgotten some ingredient that you thought you had or skimmed over in the recipe when you were making your grocery list. You can't very well leave all of the other things that you have started cooking and, well-intended as they may be, if your guy isn't the one who regularly cooks or does the grocery shopping, whatever he comes back with has roughly a 20% chance of being exactly what you need. One of my favorite cook books, especially around the holidays, is the America's Test Kitchen Family Cookbook. It has a ton of product recommendations and pictures so that  you know you are getting the desired results. One of the awesome things this book has to offer is a list of emergency substitutions for ingredients that you may not have on hand, check out the top ten below. I wish you all happy, safe, and sane cooking!

To Replace	Amount	Substitution
Baking Powder	1 tsp.	1/4 tsp baking soda + 1/2 teaspoon cream of tartar (use right away)
Heavy Cream	1 Cup	1 cup evaporated milk (only use this for soups and sauces)
Fresh Herbs	1 Tbsp	1 teaspoon of dried herbs
Sour Cream	1 Cup	1 cup plain whole-milk yogurt (and visa-versa if you forgot yogurt)
Buttermilk	1 Cup	1 cup milk + 1 Tablespoon lemon juice or white vinegar (Let stand to thicken, about 10 minutes. Not suitable for raw applications such as buttermilk dressing) Also - this really makes you think twice about cooking with butter milk - no?
Wine	1/2 cup	1/2 cup broth + 1 teaspoon wine vinegar (added just befor serving) 1/2 cup broth + 1 teaspoon lemon juice (added just before serving) Vermouth makes a good substitute for white wine (But really, if you forgot wine just give up now!!)
Confectioners' Sugar	1 Cup	1 cup granulated sugar + 1 teaspoon cornstarch, ground in a blender (not a food processor) - Works well for dusting over cakes, less so in frostings and glazes.
Cake Flour	1 Cup	7/8 cup all-purpose flour + 2 Tablespoons cornstartch
Dark Brown Sugar	1 Cup	1 cup granulated sugar + 2 Tablespoon molasses (pulse together in a food processor)
Unsweetened Chocolate	1 Oz.	3 Tablespoons cocoa powder + 1 Tablespoon vegetable oil 1 1/2 oz bittersweet or semisweet chocolate (remove 1 Tablespoon sugar from the recipe)

Our Home

My name is Lauren Musick (pronounced like music, but spelled more awesome) and I live in Texas with my husband, Tony, and our two dogs, Maggie and Vincent. We bought our house a little over three years ago as an investment property, in a matter of speaking. My husband is a construction manager for a local home building company, so his skills were completely wasted living in an apartment. I love home decorating and designing, so I was climbing the walls in an apartment as well. I painted every wall in our 1100 square foot apartment twice in a two year period trying to make it feel more like home. After the second coat, it just wasn't cutting it. It was still a space that wasn't ours, but in colors that we liked(ish). We were 26 and 23 (I'll let you guys figure out who's robbing the cradle), buying a home was something that other people do....you know...grown ups. Then came the government's incentive to buy a home.

Very suddenly we were swimming in a sea of affordability calculators and savings plans and FICA improvement plans......and worst of all......priming the apartment back to white. It was definitely a learning experience for us (for example, buy the good primer...it may be more expensive but it requires 3 less coats than the cheap stuff). We were finally going to purchase our own little piece of the world.  Tony and I were very lucky to have people in our lives that we trusted to help show us how we needed to get this transaction done with as few headaches as possible.

We finally found our house in the spring of 2009. It was a great floor plan, with great potential, it was just super basic and super off white.  We had a lot of big plans for this house from the day we signed the papers, but as most big plans go....there was a holding pattern. We didn't do anything to the house for a year, except paint it (colors that only lasted 2 years!). We decided to live in the house a bit to see what really needed to be changed. Once we got our heads out of the clouds we decided to take a look at what practical changes could be made to the home for two reasons: 1) Make it more ours and NOT like every other house in the area, and 2) Improve our resale value. We finally got to making our changes the Fall of 2010 and we are hoping to finish all of the major changes by the end of next year, the little stuff is never done with me in the house.

This blog is intended to show our journey in making our house a home for us and all who enter. From cooking and cleaning to decorating and demolition, we cover it all.