Maybe the dingo ate your baby...

We realized a lot of you haven't met our wild dingo dog, Lexi.  We honestly think she has some wild dingo in her because she's unbelievably funny looking and she's the craziest dog either one of us has ever met.  She was an impulse buy (let that be a lesson to all...), and we rescued her from county animal control in March 2008.  One of my friends (thanks Erica!) came into the lab and told me our local animal control was overflowing with dogs and they were putting a lot of them to sleep.  So of course being the idiot I am, I went to their website and saw a picture of an innocent looking Lexi.  I called Austin and he called to see if she was still available...but they said she had already been adopted.  So exercising some lack of judgement for the second time in one week, Erica and I decided to drive out to animal control on my lunch break and "look around".  Well as soon as we walked in, little ol' Lexi was sitting right there with her sad puppy eyes.  I was suuuuper excited and I called Austin to ask if I could get her.  Apparently we were both having lack of judgement issues because he said I could (he maintains his story of "even if I had said no, you still would have come home with her").  So we bought her for $5, drove her to our apartment, stuck her in the bathroom (obviously we were ill prepared), and I went back to work.  He won't admit it, but Austin was excited about her because he went out and bought her a collar and leash, and made it home before I did.  Which was apparently a good thing because she had utterly destroyed our bathroom with pee and puppy teeth. 

So long story short, that first episode of destruction was ceeeeertainly not the last, but she's cute and we somehow still love her (no dad, we're not taking her to a farm and dropping her off...).  Even though she tears around the house like a banshee, she's the sweetest dog ever so we've decided she can stay.  So what is she?  Yeah, no clue.  She's obviously 100% mutt...and maybe 33% german shepherd, 33% boxer, and 33% wild dingo??

Puppy Lexi

Hiker Lexi

Truck Ridin' Lexi

Rootbeer Bone Chewin' Lexi

Pet Friendly Must Haves

Austin and I have three rather destructive and rather furry pets.  One of our biggest challenges in decorating our home is trying to find items that are virtually indestructable, and yet still attractive.  There are some things that I would looove to have, but have learned to live without (i.e. white carpet, ha!).  Here are some extra pet friendly things we've found so far.

One of the best purchases we've made is our living room furniture, which we happened to get super duper lucky with.  When we lived in our apartment we had mom and dad's old, heinously ugly plaid couch.  Their cats had basically destroyed it and so we had a slightly less heinous slip cover.  So anyways, I stopped by Grand Home Furnishings on my way home from work (the day after we closed on the house) and they just so happened to be having a huge Memorial Day sale...um, YAY!  I bought a chair, a love seat, and a couch all for 800 bucks (without Austin even seeing them, hehe, oops!).  But the best part about our new furniture is that the cats have a hard time destroying it.  Apparently microsuede is not their choice of clawing material. 

So you may have noticed my awesome placemat idea.  Our cats seem to have a clawing preference for only 2 places in our house - the base of the chair in the living room, and our boxspring.  I haven't quite figured out a solution for the boxspring yet, but don't worry, I'm on it.  However, when it comes to destroying my area rug, I'm a step ahead of them.  I found these bamboo placemats at Bed, Bath, and Beyond for $1 each.  Best dollar I ever spent.  Now the cats can claw the heck out of my bamboo placemats, while my area rug remains like new.  Perhaps it's not the most attractive solution, but it's better than having to buy a new area rug every 6 months.

Speaking of our area rug, here's Lexi demonstrating it's durability.  This is the second rug we've had while living in our new house (hence the need for the placemats...).  I contemplated for a looong time when buying our second rug because I wanted something that would actually last.  I ended up purchasing it from Crate and Barrel.  It's an indoor/outdoor rug and in the description, it said "to clean, simply hose off."  BINGO!

Window treatments prove to be another dilema for us.  I used to be a fan of curtains, and I tried them in many different fabrics, at several different lengths.  However it always resulted with the cats swinging from them like Tarzan.  I finally got sick of spending money on curtains, only to have them destroyed, so I turned to valances.  They still give our windows that finished look, without having to worry about the cats climbing them. 

So yeah, our pets definitely put some restrictions on what we can and cannot have in the house (notice the lack of houseplants, because houseplants = puked up leaves), but I think we're learning.

Our First Home

First things first, I'd like to introduce our little red shutter cottage home!  Ok, so maybe at this point it's more like a tiny house in need of some major patience and TLC.  We officially closed on our house on May 22, 2008 (the day before my dad's 60th birthday!) and immediately moved in over memorial weekend.  We couldn't have been more excited to get out of our tiny apartment and actually have room for Austin's copious amount of man toys.

Finally finding a house was certainly a trying escapade, to say the least.  With our meager budget, it was difficult finding a house that wasn't one winter away from being condemmed and wasn't a mobile home poorly disguised as a "small rancher".  Our main concern was location, location, location.  My dear country boy wanted to be as far away from civilization as possible, while my Mazda 3 wasn't loving most of the mountain driveways we found.  After nearly a year of countless drivebys, viewings, and many weekends spent traipsing through the woods and up mountains, we found our house!  We immediately made an offer, went back and forth a couple of times, signed our lives away, and officially became old people, I mean, homeowners!

Here's the front of our house! (notice the great need of landscaping...yikes!)

Here's the back of our house, even though it kind of looks like the front.

So now that you've met our house, stay tuned to see us renovate it from top to bottom!