Happy Friday!

I’ve been reading lots of interesting articles lately and I’ll share them soon, but my favorite discovery is Style Me Pretty’s new home blog.

I was a huge fan of SMP during my own wedding planning and was honored when they featured our wedding. You can see that here.

Now, they've created a living section to their blog. It's full of DIY projects, inspiration photos, and amazing house tours + food and recipes!

So, check it out and be inspired.

xoxo

OK, maybe not van Gogh…BUT, I am pretty excited to share an original Erica Day painting!

I actually really like painting, but don’t consider myself very good. I took a few art classes in high school, and I loved them all, but I definitely don’t have the eye for shadows, depth of field, and never ever ask me to paint people.  It will seriously wind up looking worse than this.  However, when a groupon for a painting glass with wine came up my girlfriends and I jumped at the chance to do it!  It’s through Art UnCorked, and they are an awesome company!  They have a painting picked for each night they do it and you can sign up online for a particular night based on if you like the painting or not.  Then, during the evening (ours was from 6:30pm-9:30pm on a Monday) they go through how to paint the featured painting, step by step, and really break it down so even the novice painter (ahem, ME) can do it!  They provide everything: aprons, brushes, the canvas, and paint!  Some spots let you BYOB, but all places let you purchase food and drink during the evening. My girlfriends and I made a night out of it and met a little earlier and had dinner together + some margaritas  You can even decide to paint something different altogether; there was one woman who painted her own painting and didn’t follow the instructions at all and it was fine!

So…here’s the painting…it was called Japanese Bonsai on Cliff.  Here is the one the instructer did:

Here’s my painting half way through the class…

Yeah, I know…not looking so good. BUT THEN….this happened!

That’s my version!  The instructor was so great when I was having trouble at one point when all my leaves/buds looked horrid. It’s not perfect, but I’m pretty happy with how it turned out!

So, if you live in the SF or San Diego area you should totally check them out! My friends and I are already planning to attend another one soon.

For those of you in different cities, here are some I’ve found:

New York City

Washington, DC

Another Washington, DC place

Baltimore, MD

Minneapolis, MN

Los Angeles, CA

So, happy painting!

xoxo

That’s right, Porch Potty! If you’re a city dwelling person you might know what this is, but I’m sure some of you are scratching your head and wondering what the heck I’m talking about.  Well, as you may remember, our puppy is coming in about a week and a half!  It suddenly dawned on me that I should probably start getting all the supplies I needed that I wrote about here.  One of the things Paul and I have talked about is what we’ll do in the middle of the night when the puppy needs to come out of his crate to go to the bathroom.  We live on the third floor of an apartment complex so the thought of waking up at 2am, taking the puppy out of the crate, and walking all the way downstairs and outside seemed pretty unappealing to us.  So, we did some research and many people who live in cities have turned to the porch potty!  As you can see though, the cheapest one runs about $225 if you buy it from a retailler- bananas! No way were we going to do that…

So, being married to a mechanical engineer has its perks!  Paul and I decided to just build our own and found another couple who did the same thing and used their tutorial as a template for our own.  We changed a few things though- mainly we didn’t build ours on a slant since we are just going to put kitty litter under the fake grass and therefore the urine will clump up and we can scoop it out.  So, here’s what you’ll need:

The tools you’ll need are:

circular saw or chop saw

drill with bits

nails

screws

utility knife

staple gun

Here are the steps with pictures (sorry for the poor quality-I only used my iPhone for these)

1. Cut your piece of plywood to the size you want your box. (we had a leftover piece from our headboard and had enough to make a 2′x3′ box, which we thought was a good enough size for us)

2. Cut the 2×6′s to the sizes needed for the border of the box. For us, that was 2 pieces that were 2′ (24 inches) and two pieces that were 40 inches (longer than the 3′ side since it overlapped with the 2′ side borders)

3. Cut the 1×4′s for an inner lining-this is what the fluorescent light covers with lay on.

4. Before you nail the inner lining of wood to the outside border, you first need to get the border all screwed together. Then, you screw the base piece of plywood into the border.  First, we used a drill bit to make a pilot hole for the screws so that the screws didn’t split the wood once we drilled them in.  The drill bit looked like this:

Then, we drilled the screws in:

For the base piece of plywood, we drilled a few screws in on each side to fit it all together.  Then, we used nails to nail in the inner border pieces to the outside border.

5.  Next, we made a center support with the scrap pieces of 1×4′s. This was so the fluorescent covers would have some more support once they were on top.

6. Cut your vinyl matting to line the bottom of your box using a utility knife. Then, use a staple gun to keep it in place.

7. Cut your fluorescent covers (you can use any crate like material for this part, it doesn’t have to be these covers) using snips to the size you need for your box.  We stacked two covers on top of each other for extra support and then used zip ties to hold them together.

8. Finally, cut your fake grass to lay on top of the covers!

The idea is that we can lift the fake grass and fluorescent covers up and pour kitty litter in the box on top of the vinyl matting.  When our little guy uses the box the pee will drip through the covers into the litter and just form clumps that we can scoop out easily.  We can then replenish the litter when needed and not worry about cleaning collecting pans or anything.

We’re hoping our little pup uses the porch potty since it will make waking up in the middle of the night much easier; I’ll report back once we get him soon!  And, for those of you who may be thinking we’re being a little too lazy for people who are about to get an active puppy, don’t worry, we fully plan to exercise our pup a lot. I plan on running with him once he’s old enough to run 3+ miles and we have a park right next to us we can take him to, so we will be plenty active with him. We’re just trying to make our nights a little easier

I’ll leave you with a picture of one our maybe pups!  Here are 3 from the litter- we don’t know which one we’re getting yet, but one of these guys could be ours!

xoxo