There are carpet samples on my table.

Last weekend I went full out on our office. Coming from an itty bitty basement suite, having a designated office space when we didn't even have enough space for all our dressers in our itty bitty bedroom has been a bit of a dream. Naturally, for the first month of home ownership we completely neglected that dream and focussed on the more important ones. Like guest bedrooms and linens in the bathrooms. Priorities and all that.

Our office was completely neglected. It was the "throw that box in here until we decide what to do with it" space. So I spent the entire day turning it from tripping and dying hazard into functional space. I even put together an IKEA desk all by myself because Karl was working.

The people that lived here before us had a couple kids, and they each had a room. The girl's room was painted a dark grey and had hot pink curtains with daisy ribbons to tie them up. While I really liked the wall colour when we used it in our old bathroom, it didn't really "go" with my dark bookshelf/desk combo. Plus it made the room look kind of depressing.

So I did what any logical forward thinking person would do. I decided to paint the room after I'd quasi set it up. Makes sense right? Well, it was a good excuse to finally take down the curtains at least.

Three coats of Friendly Yellow and two days later our room is looking boss. I may never buy paint from Sherwin-Williams again no matter how well priced it is, though. Holy draaaaama. And by drama, I mean mostly between me, the roller, and the floor getting splattered by poor quality paint. It took an entire can to do that little room and there is nary a drop left for when we decide to spackle the holes in the wall. Because we're really good at doing things in order. There was a lot of whispered prayers as we painted the final coat on the room, trying to squeeze every drop off the rollers that we could.

Anyway, life hasn't just been about painting lately. It's also been about vegetables.

I bought kale on a whim after my mom left, thinking I'd give kale chips another go and if that didn't work out at least my smoothies would have some kick.

Yeah, I'm basically a kale chip making genius. And by that I mean I looked up a recipe online for them and basically ignored everything it said about seasoning and just followed the cooking instructions. I'd link you to the recipe but I can't find it. Basically you toss/massage the kale into 1/2 tbsp of oil and then sprinkle some salt on top. Bake for 10ish minutes at 300, rotate the pan, and do it for another 12 minutes or so. Bing bang boom. And all of a sudden there's lots of little delicious kale crunchies in your teeth.

I made three batches of chips and one slightly bitter taco salad for myself out of a head of kale. It was like the vegetable bargain of the century.

Okay, confession time. I'm eating kale chips as we speak. And drinking tea. Because I just didn't feel legit enough blogging about home improvements and making kale chips without actually giving into how pretentious I am right now.

We're having weekly bbqs at work now and I brought veggies last week. Apparently my healthy co-workers don't actually go for vegetables when given the chance to over indulge on baked goods (who can blame them?) so I ended up with a LOT of broccoli, carrots, and cauliflower. I was going to make a soup but it all sounded like a lot of work so I attempted the whole cauliflower popcorn thing. Let's just say it didn't work out as well as my kale chips.

Someone recommended that I broil the broccoli for ten minutes until all the sweetness in it crystallized. I figured what the heck and threw the leftover broccoli under the broiler tonight while making a stir fry and then promptly forgot about it until the smoke alarm went off. Believe it or not it was still edible, but nothing crystallized or anything like that. It ended up a lot like my cauliflower popcorn but I ate it because it wasn't full of disappointment.

My husband is also hanging our new blinds from Jysk in the room at this exact moment as well. I'm a firm believer in not tackling challenging things that require putting holes in the walls after 9 p.m. but he sounds like he's finally having some success so I'm not going to complain. Also, $12.99 for bamboo blinds? No complaints here.

Anyway, I'm having a friend over on Saturday and family over on August long weekend so once things are tidied up a bit more around here I'm going to take some "as is" photos of our place for you to check out. Work on our basement also starts this week so it'll be good to snap some sexy before pictures. The pictures are sexy because our basement has sexy lighting and wood panelling. In case you were worried about things getting out of control here.

And on that note, I think I should go to bed.