diamond in the rough.

my aunt and uncle sold their house about a month or so ago and while i'm sad that that means the end of pool parties, bonfires, and lots of open space for our big family to roam... i'm now the new owner of the dresser below! hootie hooo for free dressers with awesome lines and bad cell phone pics you send your cousin on your way to the office! really though, isn't she a beaut?? we got rid of my old ikea dresser in the guest room (which had traveled with me from my parents house, to rental house, back to my parents house, to another rental house, back to my parents house, etc.) a while ago and have been in desperate need of a replacement ever since. i had been looking on craigslist, overstock, higher end stores, etc. but never really found something that spoke to me... and was in our price range. AND THEN! oh that garage sale glorious day! we were helping out my aunt and uncle at their garage sale and my eyes fell on this dresser of perfection and my aunt said "take it! for free!"

"ok!" i cried!

exclamation point!

as you can see from the picture above... kind of... the dresser was in need of a little love. it had been my cousin Erin's... Beyonce Erin... and as most childhood furniture becomes, was a little beat up.

so Kevan and i tossed her in the back of my mom's car and brought her home. 

as i said before, she needed a little work and my initial plan was to sand it down then spray it with a new coat of white. 

we ended up spraying it with Zinsser Strip Fast and sanding it down after that. These are the tools we ended up using:

some sanding things

steel wool

Zinsser StripFast 

gloves... definitely need gloves

picking tools

i keep saying "we" as if i had some huge part in this whole thing. you can probably tell by my description of our tools that i didn't. in actuality, our day looked more like this:

i threw the ball for the girl, while the man sprayed that shiz down. i did help... he just did much more than i did. the Zinsser spray was really easy to use. it came in the tin pictured above with a spray bottle, as well. you just fill the bottle, spray down your furniture, then wait about 15 minutes. 

it'll all start to kind of bubble a little and turn neon green... at least ours did.

so you peel away the layers and layers and layers of paint and then surprise! it's not too bad underneath.

we sanded for hours, after taking most of the paint off... i can definitely say "we" on that one. ugh and it was so damn humid that day. fine dust + manual labor + minnesota humidity equals nasty. 

at the end of the day we were left with this:

 she's still a little homely, but once we started to strip her down we knew we had to go ahead with the stain. i'm pretty sure Kevan has stained the whole thing, but i'm not sure. after i put all of my blood, sweat, and tears into getting that paint off, he took the dresser into the garage and made me promise i wouldn't peek. and i haven't... too much. i haven't really looked, like up close and personal. 

so i guess for now this is a to be continued... for me too. can't wait to see the finished product! 

Queen Bey.

oh my god we saw Beyonce.
in the flesh.
and it was amazing.

i was at work last thursday when i got a text from my cousin Erin, asking if i wanted to go to the Liffey in downtown St. Paul to try to win tickets for the Beyonce concert.
"mehhhh... i don't like traffic," was my response. i don't like traffic?! who says that??
in my defense, we'd be going at 4:30 (yuck i hate traffic), i doubted we'd actually win, aaaand i changed my mind relatively quickly after realizing that the concert was that night. win or lose, i'd get to hang out with this lady for the night:

awww! cousin heart squeeze!

it almost felt like a lucky night from the get-go. it only took us 15 or 20 minutes to get there. we parked in a sweet lot a block from the Liffey and the X. I met Falen from the Dave Ryan in the Morning Show, which i listen to religiously. i got to catch up with my world traveling cousin. and then... they pulled her name out of the box! out of like 30 or 40 people, they picked Erin! floor seats none the less! 

i, of course, missed the whole thing. she had gone up to hear the names being called while i stayed at our table... doing this:

taking an embarrassing amount of selfies and creepy pics of Erin pre-win. do i even have lips in this picture? weird.

fast forward to amazingness:

she stomped, she belted, she smiled, she warmed my soul.
she was perfect.

life is but a dream, beyonce. life is but a dream.

hear ye, hear ye!

it's official.

my future son-in-law was born today and i must say that Kevan and i are quite excited.

we are more than thrilled that Katie and Wills loved our lineage enough to arrange the marriage between our... wha? huh? creepy? moi?? never... ok. always.

a girl can dream, right? if my 15+ year love affair with William (yes, my car in high school was even named after him...) amounted to a large pile of squat, at least i can hope for the best in my future offspring. 

but really... i mean really... perfection. am i right??

gah. i die. 

that baby has been born into one unreal gene pool. 

and i can't wait till he marries my daughter.