A House Update: Details

Seeing as I haven't given a house update since right after we moved in, I think it's time for another peek.  Now that the Christmas decor has made its way up to the attic, some of our standard decor is coming out, and the Carnival Season creations are making their debut.  The Arvins' "tourist season", as I've started to call it, is just beginning.  The guest rooms are booked most weekends through the end of March!  I won't have as much time to work on little projects around here, but we're so excited to host great friends and family for the next 2 months!

In the meantime though, let's focus on a bit of normalcy, shall we?  Before things get too purple, gold, and green around here, I'll share some pictures of the little details I've been loving so much.

We'll start in the living room.  I made the garland for about 5 bucks with wood beads and twine.

Bywater Musings

It's that time.  Time for another neighborhood tour!  Woop woop!  I feel like I've done this before... again... and again... But when you're a serial mover, you have a lot of 'hoods to explore.  So let's get this show on the road.  

The Bywater is a historic neighborhood (Surprise surprise, right?  Apparently we dig the old houses.) that butts up between the Industrial Canal, the Marigny, and the Mississippi River.  Getting accustomed to directions in the city is tricky... it's shaped like a crescent, so the usual grid-style setup in which most cities are arranged doesn't apply here.  

As a native New Orleanian book shop owner put it during a discussion the other day, the Bywater has only become a "celebrated" area of the city within the last few years.  For a large amount of time it was primarily inhabited by families of low socioeconomic status, which emphasizes my interest in learning the history of the buildings and families that resided here.  Unfortunately, it makes it really difficult to actually find any information or photos of the Bywater from its early days.  No one wanted to take pictures of (or even write about) a poor neighborhood.  It's a shame.

Here's one awesome one from a market that was just down the street from us in 1895:

source

Stripping 101: I'm Taking it All Off

...of the front door, that is.  My mother just breathed a sigh of relief.

Ever since we bought this house, we've talked about changing the exterior paint colors.  I don't mind the current colors, but once the house tells us it's time for a paint job, we'll probably pick something brighter.  My first goal was to paint the front doors a bright red.

Like this place around the corner from us:

The Table Tale

I sneaked in a shot of our new dining room table in this post about our Christmas decor, but didn't get to share the story of where we found it.

It started with an endless search for an inexpensive table... Okay, it only took about a month, but I had a burning desire to fill that empty space in the dining room.  This is the "dining room" sans dining room table and plus desk and office chair, from when we first started settling in.

Having it My (hall)Way

Happy Twelfth Night, friends!  This marks the beginning of the Arvins' first Carnival Season.  Naturally, we're observing the holiday with a parade and King Cake tonight.  Hope you all can celebrate a little, even if you're snuggled inside trying to avoid the frigid temperatures up north!

Okay, let's cut to the chase.

I have a horrible habit.  I love books and am, in fact, a frequent book-purchaser.  But I have this tendency to get all excited and buy way more books than I can read.  Then most of them just sit there with their stiff binding and untouched pages.  I know.  It's shameful.  I blame it on my obsessive need to multitask.

What makes things more challenging is that Will loves books, too (Except he actually reads what he buys.  Overachiever.).  Long story short, over the past few years, we've developed quite a collection.  We actually had several giant boxes of books that lived in our basement in Indy, because we had nowhere to put them.  The same situation applied when we moved into our current house.

Then, a couple weeks ago we stumbled upon Maple Street Bookshop Uptown.  We're suckers for used book stores (especially the cute and tiny ones).  And this particular one was closing down (sniffle).  When we visited, they were having a final sale... paperbacks $1, hardcovers $2.  Whaaaaat?!  We bought... oh... about 20 books.  Yea.

Here are a few of the new (old) additions in Instagram style:

2013: How did we do all that?

Like many others, it seems, I've been reflecting on 2013 and all it offered us.  It's hard to believe that we were sitting in our home in Indianapolis a year ago today, knee-deep waist-deep in renovation projects with no knowledge of the big changes that would be coming our way.