Guest Bathroom Re-Do

Last year I wrote a post about our disastrous bathroom-redo attempt. Long story short, we had the bathrooms painted and I gave Eric a picture of what color I wanted for the walls in the guest bathroom that looked like this:

(this was the actual picture I gave him)

What I got was this:

Ok Ok maybe that's just what I saw in my head every time I walked in there, which was not often because it nauseated me to be in there. This is what it actually looked like:

It's not as bad as Frozen, but not what I wanted at all.  While trying to figure out how he and the paint guy came to this color I came across this infographic and it all made perfect sense.

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So much truth in one picture, right?

For the last year the bathroom looked exactly like it did before we painted but with purple walls. I threw everything back in it because I refused to do any decorating until it was repainted.....that is until Eric went out of town to a fishing tournament last month. *muahahahah*

As I was walking the dogs one morning I decided that was it I'd had enough of the hideous bathroom.  I went to Walmart, picked up some paint and paint supplies and headed home to paint.  Of course I had a near panic attack when I looked at the dot of paint on the top of the can and convinced myself that I had picked out the same hideous princess purple that was already on the walls.  But thankfully I did not.  See???

After a few hours and a couple of coats of Soft Dusty Violet paint I finally had my peaceful soft purple oasis that I wanted.

Who wouldn't want to hang out in this pretty bathroom all day long?!

For comparison:

It may not look like much but trust me it's a HUGE difference in a small room!

I was so excited about it in fact that I spent the next afternoon at Hobby Lobby and World Market picking out decor for it!

vase/sconces/lotus candle holder

My original plan was to do succulents in the planters, but Hobby Lobby was out of them so I went with the moss and a pack of fake air plants and voila! The lone fake succulent in the small jar in the top left pic came from the dollar bins at Target.  #winning

I would still like to replace the towel racks, light fixture over the mirror, and maybe the faucet someday but I am so happy with the color and decor I was able to change it should hold me over for at least a few months. 

.....and by the way it only took him 3 days to notice it after he got home.

Pretty Princess Purple

When we purchased our house 6.5 years ago every wall was drab boring shade of egg shell.  I don't know if the previous owner painted it all neutral colors so it might sell faster or perhaps they just liked boring walls.  I don't know but it's not my style.  The only thing we actually did to the house in the 2 days between closing and moving (which we did in 1.5 days and is a whole other story that involves having to stay in our new house because a certain boy who I live with got the water shut off at our old place, but I've clearly moved on, right?) was paint the living room and our bedroom because I had to have some color on the walls.  Since then we have painted the hall area, the kitchen, and the laundry room.

The two rooms I have wanted to paint for quite a while now are the bathrooms.  They were both definitively seashell-themed, due to the seashell borders that adorned both bathrooms.  I wasn't crazy about it but someone gave us some seashell bath towels for a wedding gift and I had a random collection of seashells laying around so I went with it.  It's just the bathroom after all, right?

The only thing keeping me from taping everything up and painting were those darn borders.  I dreaded having to pull them down, so I just left didn't bother with them.

About a month ago Eric randomly brought up painting the bathrooms so I jumped at the chance to change things up and bombarded him with Pinterest images of color schemes for the guest bathroom.  I have been wanting to paint it a dusty purple color with copper and white accents for the last few years, so I was pumped for the chance to make my vision a reality! Finally.....NO MORE SEASHELLS!

This is the picture we settled on.  I actually wanted the bathroom to be a plum color but he talked me out of it since the bathroom is somewhat small and he was afraid to paint it such a dark color.

It's light, it's bright, it's airy, and I could totally visualize our new guest bathroom oasis!  

And then I came home the next day and saw this.......

Now before you tell me it doesn't look all that different that the picture above, trust me it does.  The color is quite vibrant in real life.  It has almost a pinky undertone to it so it assaults your eyes every time you go in there.

Eric assured me that he took the picture above to the paint store and had them match it, but I am not so sure.  Purple if a very tricky color and if you aren't careful, your dusty purple all of a sudden becomes a pretty princess purple.  Purple's tricky nature is the precise reason I did not have a plum/silver/black wedding....one wrong step in choosing colors and my bridesmaids could have ended up looking like purple people eaters, and I wasn't willing to do that to them.

You tell me....does this look like the same color when they're next to each other?

Me thinks no....they are most definitely not the same.  

Because of my feelings about the color, I have made ZERO efforts to decorate this bad boy.  The towels that came out of there went right back in, and will stay there until the next time Eric goes out of town and I am home alone for the weekend.  The borders are gone so it won't take near the effort it would have to repaint the walls.  I think he thinks I am kidding about it, but I am most certainly NOT.
So the moral of the story is to always always always go with boys to pick out paint colors so that your beautiful dusty purple bathroom does not end up pretty princess purple.  For the record, I finally got Eric to admit he was not wild about the color either, but he doesn't care hate it enough to repaint it....and this time I have actual paint samples.....

High 5! It's Friday!

Good news, I think my nose/head issues from earlier this week were allergy related to the pollen that made an appearance earlier this week.  The Bradford Pear trees (pretty flowers, but gosh they stink) bloomed this week and I think that's what got me.  I am 100 % better now, just in time for the weekend.  Thank goodness!

#1

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We are down to one week before Divergent is in theaters!  I am so excited for this movie because I LOVED the books.  Eric doesn't know it yet, but he's going to enjoy the movies, too.  I broke the ice the other night when we were watching tv and a preview came on. It didn't get much of a rise out of him, but then again the Hunger Games trailers didn't either and he has enjoyed the first two. 

#2

I have a new-old favorite snack....good old oatmeal.  I know I ate it as a kid but I recently re-discovered it on our trip to Colorado and I can't get enough of it now.  It's become my go-to 10AM snack at work....it's just enough to curb my food craving and it's so tasty!

#3

I went shopping this morning before work, on my dresser.  I was looking for a pop of color to wear with my green shirt.  I usually wear some kind of long gold or metallic necklace with this shirt, but I saw a picture of someone wearing a similar color shirt with a bright necklace the other day and loved it.  I have had this necklace for several years and have not worn it too often, but I am thinking I will be wearing it again!

#4

This happpened again this week.  I had some leftover brussel sprouts from the other night, so I whipped up another batch of Brussel Sprout Hash with Whipped Goat Cheese.  It was just as good as it was the first time.  I decided to swap the pearl onions for chopped sweet onions because lets be honest here, ain't nobody got time to peel and chop an entire bag of pearl onions.  I learned my lesson the first time.  They may not be as cute as pearl onion, but they taste the same and took about 1/20 the time to prepare.  I have updated the recipe I posted the other day with this important chance.

#5

We've done a bit of furniture swapping/redecorating in out living room.  It took some of it a little while to grow on me and I am waiting on Eric to remove one more large piece of furniture, *cough* the recliner *cough* but I am a fan now.  I have even put a few more holes in our walls and hung a few things since we have some new bare spots on our walls.  The monogram that I stained is now above the mirror on our "hallway" wall and I framed my favorite mountain picture from Colorado and hung it up. I am thinking a living room update post is in order next week (once the recliner is removed, of course).

Happy Friday!  

Back Porch Update

If someone told me 6 months ago that this fall we would have screened in our carport, put up new a new carport, and had everything completely finished, I probably would have laughed and told you that you were crazy.  We started entertaining the idea of screening in the carport earlier this year, started the project in August, and as of last weekend it is 99% complete!  I am absolutely THRILLED with the result and have said on multiple occasions that I wish we'd done this sooner. The first phase was the framing in and screening in of the carport, which also included the television that was hung on the wall and a couple of cabinets.  We didn't have a counter top for it so we stuck a table on top so it was usable.  It worked well, but we knew wanted to put in an actual counter top, stain the cabinets, and do something with the floor because the concrete was stained with oil remnants and who knows what else.  Last weekend we made all of those things happen.  I came home from work one day and Eric had leveled out the cabinets and put a counter top on them.  That night he stained the floor with concrete stain to paint and seal it. He put the cabinet in the next day and hooked up the water...yes we have a sink in the counter, too.  Next it was my turn.  I decided to take on staining the cabinets...easy enough, right?  It is if you read the directions on the stain.....  Apparently I was supposed to wipe the stain off after I painted it on (which to be honest doesn't make a whole lot of sense because if I'd wiped it off it would not have been as dark and I wanted it to be...just sayin).  I painted on 2 coats and 24 hours later it was still wet and sticky; and 48 hours later it was still wet and sticky.  It was around that point that we realized what I'd done. It FINALLY dried about 6 days after I applied the stain after we left the fans on full blast for a few days.

Our plan was to break it in this past weekend, but then winter decided to give us a little preview.  I told Eric there was no way I could stay outside in the cold to watch football.  I think he was concerned about the cold, too because when I came home Friday afternoon there were two tall heaters (like the kind restaurants use on their patios) in the carport.  I am pleased to report that they did the trick and even though temps were in the high 40s on Saturday night, it was toasty warm on the porch!  I never even put on my jacket.

Here's a few before and afters.  I still can't believe the transformation!

Top: the very beginnings of the project.
Bottom: the finished product!

Top: the very beginnings of the project.
Bottom: the finished product!

So what's the 1% we have left to do?  That would be to finish up our counter top.  The plan is to cover it with beer bottle tops.  We have about 1/3 of what we need.  We add to it weekly, but are accepting donations to the cause. We'll even let you drink the beer...just send us the bottle caps.  =)

To say that we are thrilled with the results is an understatement.  This project has been the best thing that ever happened to football season at our house, by far, and the dogs probably love it more than we do (as you can see from the pics above).  I think I even have Eric convinced to serve Thanksgiving dinner out here!

Screened in Carport Plus a New Carport...CHECK!

I kind of thought that after we finished our laundry room makeover that we would be done with our home improvements for the year.  With football season getting under way we've run out of free weekends to devote to major projects.  However, my always eager to do something husband had other ideas.  One of the things on the back burner of our house-to-do list was do something with our back porch/carport.  We've know since we moved in that we wanted to do something with it, we just weren't sure what.   Earlier this  summer we decided that something would be to turn our carport into an outdoor entertaining area where we could grill out, hang out, and watch football games.  I was on board with one stipulation...we put up something to put cars under.  I am not a fan on parking my car out in the elements, and as a 28 years old homeowner I feel like I have earned a covered parking spot.

We finally got our heads around exactly what we wanted to do a couple of weeks ago and as of yesterday it's done!  Our outdoor oasis!  We still have the aesthetics to work out and Eric has additional plans for an outdoor kitchen are that will be a gradual process, but the major work is complete!

So what did we do?  We screened in our existing carport and had a new carport built on to it.  We also had the small patio area in the back covered so that we can grill when it's raining, and installed 4 new ceiling fan/light combos in the screened in portion. To say that we're pleased with the results is an understatement.  I have spent at least 30 minutes out there every afternoon (most days more).  The dogs love it, too.  Our backyard is not fenced in so we've never been able to leave them outside by themselves.  When we put the doors on we intentionally had them open in to the room so that we could put the dogs out there and not worry about them getting out.  I think Hawk thinks it's his own personal outside room (kinda like the pool is all his, too) because he stays out there all afternoon when I get home from work.  I try to call him inside and he just looks at me like I'm crazy to think he would want to leave his happy place. The other two were unsure of staying out by themselves at first but they've caught on quickly.

We hired professionals to install the new carport, but we did the screened in portion of it ourselves, with the help of some friends.  We have a friend who is an EXTREMELY talented carpenter who was there for the entire process.  If it weren't for him it would not have turned out as amazing as it did. We spent about a day and a half framing, screening, trimming, and putting up lattice.  We were not initially planning on putting lattice up, but decided that if we wanted to be able to leave the dogs outside by themselves we'd have to.

Here are some progression pictures.  I still can't believe it came together as quickly as it did!

 This is the left side of the back of the house.

 This one is the right side of the back of the house.

Here are some inside looking out progression pictures.  

You better believe I didn't let the guys have all the fun.  I was out there with them the whole time and I even got to use the nail gun!  It's the little things, I tell ya!  My major jobs were door handle installation and cleaning the ceiling.  We've been in our house for 3 and a half years and it was empty for 2 years before that, so I know that it has not been cleaned in at least 5 years, but then again who sets out to clean their carport ceiling?   Since the carport is now an "inside" space I decided it needed to be done and I spent the better part of 4 hours on a chair with Clorox and a rag wiping it down.  It was tedious, but every single person who came by that day commented on how nice it looked which gave me motivation to keep going.  It was nice to have something besides raw, red finger tips to show for it, too!

1. The ceiling before...you can't see from the picture but there was a layer of dirt on the entire ceiling
2. The ceiling after...all clean!
3. One of my sturdy door handles installed.
4. My poor baby fingertips...my pinkys got the worst of it!

I guess we can cross this project off our list now!  I will have updates as we carpet, furnish, etc., but I feel like the brunt of the work is now done and we can enjoy it!  Don't worry we have!

Lunch for 2 on the back patio?  Don't mind if we do!

The only thing left now is a name.  Because a space like this deserves a really good name, so the suggestion box is open!

Laundry Room Makeover

When we moved into our house we had a surprisingly short list of things that we wanted to change about it. Our house was empty for a year before we bought it so we bad pretty much a blank canvas to work with and we were very fortunate in that there were very few things we HAD to do when we moved in.  We painted our bedroom and the living room, and put in gas logs (best thing we ever did!), and moved in 2 days after we had the keys in our possession.  Like many homeowners, the longer we've lived there the more changes we've decided to make. In the three years we've lived here, we have painted the kitchen, hung the tv over the mantle, and painted the"hallway" from the living room to the other 2 bedrooms to match the living room.  I use the term hallway very loosely.  It's a square space that has 5 doors and one tiny wall that is not worth hanging anything on. This meant that as of last summer we were able to say that we checked off everything we wanted to do to the house. Yay!

But then we started thinking, and Eric started brainstorming (which means something is going to happen since he is not just a schemer, he is doer, and once gets and idea in his head it is almost always going to come to fruition). We decided that the laundry room could use a little face-lift.  Our laundry room not only serves as a laundry room, but also as an entry way of sorts since we rarely use our front door and our car port is behind our house. My only stipulation? Do NOT remove my laundry room door. He was convinced he would have to, but we were able to find a way around it. =)

Ok enough talking about the whys and hows...I am going to let the pictures do the talking. The pictures on the left are the "befores" and the pictures on the right are the "afters."

This is looking at the wall where we keep our keys and what not.  The door with the blinds is our back door and the other one is the door that I could not let go of to the kitchen.

This is the wall where the washer and dryer are. Cabinets = no clutter! 

The "other wall." This is what you see when you first walk in our back door.  It doesn't even look like the same room to me and I LOVE it! We moved the rack from the washer/dryer wall to this side so I'd still have a place to hang clothes dog leashes. 

I am still shocked at the difference the changes make in this room. And it makes me so happy every time I walk in the house. =)  I am so glad to be done with that ugly eggshell color on the walls.  Our entire house was that color when we moved in, but I am slowly but surely removing it one room at a time.  I picked out the paint color on a whim on Saturday morning, and am really happy with how it looks.

While the cabinets were going up my job was to stay out of the way, so I decided to see what kinds of decorating ideas I could stir up on pinterest.  Since I had no idea we were tackling this project until the day before, I really had not had time to think about decorating. I found a couple of ideas and ran with them and I really love what I ended up with.

The black signs are pieces of wood I purchased at Michaels and JoAnn's for less than $10 per board (with 40% off coupons!).  I painted them with chalkboard paint, and wrote the words on myself with chalk.  The pants phrasing I found on pinterest, but Eric was the one who suggested the sock phrase.  I love love love them!  I want to add a little container to the one with our name on it to put chalk in so people can leave messages like they used to do on the white board (see before pic above).  I hot glued white ribbon to the backs to hang them. The laundry sign and the giant safety pin were Hobby Lobby finds.  I saw some giant safety pins on pinterest and fell in love with them.  I was going to order some but decided to check Hobby Lobby first, and hit the jackpot!  I made the key holder myself last week, and the last thing I added last weekend was the rug.  Eric highjacked my front door rug a couple of weeks ago because our old back door rug bit the dust.  Not only did it not match, my front door was getting lonely, so I was excited to find one that matched so well. 

 I think the craziest part of this is that we did all of it (except for the accents which were finished up later that week) in ONE day. Paint, cabinets, reorganizing....done last Sunday.  I still can't believe we did it that fast, but I am so glad we did!

Now onto the next project.........=)

Laundry Room Project #1: Key Holder

I have always been a fan of creative key holders. Maybe it comes from the J key holder that has always been in my parents' house. Maybe it's because I am REALLY good at losing my keys if I don't have a specific place to put them.  If I have to have something to help me keep up with my keys it might as well be cute, right?

Hang 'em here!

When I moved out on my own I found a super cute key shaped key holder that I used, which I still think is super cute, but with our laundry room makeover I decided it was time to get creative and make something new. Plus 4 key hooks were just not enough for us. Ridiculous? Yes, but apparently we have a lot of keys!

For whatever reason, I had visions of a brightly painted chevron key holder that would really pop against our dark bluish gray walls. I had a cheap wooden picture frame that I bought in the Michael's dollar bin years ago. It's a large frame but only holds a 3.5" square picture which makes it hardly worth using to frame a picture.

I scoured Pinterest for chevron painting tutorials, and came across this one. It's for walls, but I figured I could just pare it down a bit so that it would work on my frame. I opulled out my ruler and pencil and got to work. Once I had the lines drawn I started painting my chevrons. It took several coats and my lines are far from perfect, (I am not the best line drawer or painter by any means.) but I was very pleased with the result.

I have quite a few bottles of craft paint from other projects and ended up recycling the green from an old project.  The yellow came from Wally World...a whopping 65 cents.  When I finished painting I decided it needed something in the teeny tine picture hole.  I toyed with the idea of hanging a "C" in it, because I loves me a monogram, but when I was at Michael's I could not find a C that I liked. I came across the key charm in the jewelry section for $3 and decided that I had to have it.

My orginal idea...I found a sketch app for my ipad and have fallen in love it! It's turned me into a doodling fool!

If I had purchased all of my supplies new I MIGHT have spent $10, and that's only because I would have had to purchase an entire picture hanging kit and a paint brush. Since I had those things, I only spent $3.65.

I called in the expert when it came to putting the hooks, and picture hanger thingys on the back, but then again isn't that what husbands are for? He was happy to help, and we had it done pretty quickly! The only mess up we had was only putting one picture hanger on the first time. It looked great but when we hung the keys it tilted to the side, so he took that one out and it 2 on the back the second time.

Not sure why the wall looks green, it's more blue in real life.

So there's my latest DIY project.  I have several more up my sleeve that will hopefully involve chalkboard paint and giant safety pins!  Have I mentioned how much I like to decorate?!

A Weekend Recap Full of Unexpected Productivity

You know those weekends when you have absolutely nothing planned but end up doing more than you thought you would have accomplished in 2 or 3 weekends? Yeah that was our weekend. I felt like I was still trying to recover from our weekend in the mountains and was looking forward to getting some sleep.

1. Bangin' Good Shrimp for dinner Friday night
2. Ice cream and hot chocolate for dessert =)
3. The HC Lady Hawks, not only made it to the NCAA tournament for the first time in program history, but also got just the 2nd NCAA postseason win for an HC team (besides gold because they're really good and win every year). They ended up losing in the second round but this team's accomplishment is HUGE!
4. Hawkey dog playing in the "snow." Peanut and Hollow spent the day curled up on blankets at home.
5. Our accumulation of white stuff!
6. Hallow watching White Fang with us. Every time they shoed White Fang on the screen Hallow ran up to the tv and barked like crazy!  We had to hold him for the majority of the movie so we could hear it.
7. I FINALLY beat Level 33 on Candy Crush.  I've only been stuck on that level for a week.  Yes I realize it's a pretty stupid game, but it's so addicting!
8. Eric touching up the trim in the laundry room next to our pretty new paint job!  Buh Bye yucky boring eggshell color!  

Friday night I came home with plans to make some bang bang shrimp for dinner and start a weekend of vegging by the fire because it was supposed to be COLD! When I got home Eric informed me that he'd spent his afternoon helping his mom move and that it would be nice if we could go help on Saturday morning, too. Ok no biggie. The only thing I had to do this weekend was clean the house and I will do just about anything to get out of that.

Saturday Eric was up at 6:30 ready to go. I told him he'd have to wait until at least after 7 before I was getting out of bed. Shortly after 7 he hollerd into the bedroom that he was going to pick out paint for the laundry room....wait paint?! I was out of bed, showered, and dressed in about 10 minutes. There was no way he was picking out paint by himself. Side note: we've been talking about redoing our laundry room for about a year and the process expedited itself unexpectedly this weekend.

After a quick trip to True Value, a gallon of Mackerel paint in our possession, and a trip to Hardee's because I told him I had to have some food if expected any work out of me, we were headed to his mom's house. While Eric installed her dishwasher, we made some real progress and managed to completely empty 2 of her rooms in about 4 hours in an Alabama snowstorm. Yes it snow flurried and sleeted on us all day while we were moving her and I don't think the temp got above 40 all day Saturday, in March, in Alabama. Global warming my foot.

Eric had his heart set on some seafood étouffée Saturday night so we came home that afternoon, cleaned up a little bit and he made some for dinner. I ate a corn dog since I barely eat seafood by itself, much less in a soup. Luckily we had some friends come help him polish off the soup.

Since I knew we were planning on working on the laundry room on Sunday I took it upon myself to clean out the laundry room Saturday night because that's the kind of crazy stuff you do on a Saturday night when you're married. =) I am so glad I did because it took a while and was much easier to do without Eric trying to throw everything away.

Sunday morning we were up and at 'em bright and early again. I went to early church so I could spend the rest of the day on the laundry room while Eric taped it off and took out the existing storage and washer and dryer. By the time I got home he had just started painting, so my timing was perfect! We put 2 coats on it before we went to his grandma's for lunch (and ate waaaay too much). When we got back Eric and his buddy got to work installing the cabinets, while I washed my car and made myself otherwise pretty scarce. My ultimate goal was to stay out of the way.

We  I finished putting everything up about 8 pm last night, and I am soooooo excited about how it turned out!!! I cannot wait to share some pictures! I have a bunch of before and after pics. It is really hard to believe that it is the same room. The paint and the cabinets make it look completely different. I have some major decorating projects to do in the near future. Since I was not anticipating tips room makeover happening for some time, I was not even thinking about how I wanted to decorate it, but now my mind (and my Pinterest boards) are moving a hundred miles per hour! Hopefully I will be able to accomplish the decorating this week! Now if I could just decide which projects I was to take on!

These are some of my favorites!

Chalkboard Frames                                 Giant Pins and Laundry Sign                                              Key Holder

Seashell Frames

When I was at my parents' house over Christmas I found a bunch of seashells I had saved in one of my [many] boxes. Our bathrooms are beachey themed (thanks to the borders that I can't convince Eric to take down) so I did not mind bringing that box home to add to my collection.  There were several decent sized and still intact shells in the box that I did not want to just put in a bowl, so I decided I would do a little DIY project with them and some frames I had leftover from another project.....and ended up with these!

I took silver 4" x 6" frames and painted them sage green.  Then I cut 3 pieces of scrapbook paper to fit in the frames. Then I hot glued my sand dollar, starfish, and seashell to the scrapbook paper and VIOLA! instant wall art! I ended up putting the glass behind the scrapbook paper because the frame backs were too loose without it.  I love love love it!

Living Room Re-do

Since we moved into this house Eric has wanted to mount our television over the fireplace, and I have resisted his attempts fairly easily until last month. He just happened to have a job at a guy's house who mounts televisions...yay. Long story short, he talked to the guy and 2 weeks later had him scheduled to come hang it up. Much to my dismay it looks pretty good, and it actually gives us a lot more space in our living room. It is a large open room with doors on all 4 walls, which has been quite a challenge to decorate because of the massive wall space due to the vaulted ceilings. To give you an idea of how tall it is, we were able to re-hang a massive clock 3+ feet in diameter ABOVE the television which is ABOVE the mantle without it looking crowded. So off to Hobby Lobby I went to find "art" and "decorative things" to put on the walls. When I started decorating when we moved in I was trying to get away from my symmetrical tendencies that I have never seemed to be able to let go of, so I bought 1 wiry candle sconce to put on the wall with some pictures I had. It was alright on the wall but after we rearranged, I decided I needed to balance it out. Lucky for me they had ONE left, which I snatched up, along with a gorgeous mirror (both 50% off) to finish up the wall.

So here is an original/redecorated shot for you of the entire room. Eric and Hawk wanted to make a cameo in the pictures. And yes there is a deer head mounted on the wall.....that's another story for another post.

We have a lot more floor space with this layout, and now I have a lamp to read my Kindle by without having to turn on the overhead light. I am happy with the result, but don't tell Eric, I can't let him think he had a brilliant idea or anything ;-)