Bullhead House Remodel {The Kitchen Backsplash}

Like I mentioned before in my previous posts, the house was super tile heavy and another place to get rid of those tiles was the kitchen backsplash. I wish I would have thought about this before the cabinets were finished to avoid the clean up again, but hey ho! After the cabinets were done, the kitchen backsplash just looked off. We have black granite countertops with some gold/browns in it so it was so hard to figure out what would look best for the backsplash.  I went to the store day in and day out, trying to figure something out and finally decided on 2x2 marble hexagons. With the white and gray tones, I figured it would pull the white from the cabinets and the blacks from the granite to tie everything together. Lucky for me, it worked out and I'm happy with the outcome. You can't really notice from the pictures but I ended up doing a redo here because I didn't like how the end pieces came together. We started off with mini cigaros and I ended up switching to regular cigaros. Cigaros are the things that finish off the marble off at the edges. I've learned a lot about construction lingo after spending the last 2 months with the contractors! They're like my best friends now!

Another plus about this whole thing was that I got the materials at a discount! My friend, Luzette, works for Emser Tile & Stone and was able to make a phone call so they could give us "employee" prices. Now for marble, this is huge! We pretty much got everything at cost or close to cost so from here on out, we went with Emser for the rest of the materials for the house updates! Thanks Luzzy! 

Before - how we bought the house

Before - with the white cabinets finished

During - looks so much better with those tiles out!

After - I got the guys to change out the outlets as well to white square ones {they were cream round ones before}

Bullhead House Remodel {The Wood Floors}

Our biggest project for the house was replacing the tile and carpet with wood floors. We didn't want to spend too much money on it since we weren't sure what our ROI would be here in Bakersfield, so kept it in the low middle range. We shopped and shopped and shopped for wood that we liked and boy was that a hard decision! Of course, all the ones that I really loved were 8-10+ a square feet and with 1350 square feet, that would have been crazy expensive! We were looking for a medium color wood with more brown and gray tones than red and yellow tones. We originally chose this hand scraped hardwood from Lumber Liquidators, but when we were going to order it, we found out that it couldn't be glued and needed to be nailed down or installed with a special membrane. Back to square one. 

The one to the right...

After a few more shopping trips, we ended up at Lumber Liquidators again and found an engineered hardwood, with the color we wanted. However, we were a bit hesitant because the wood came in difference sizes and we weren't sure how that was going to look. By this point, I was pretty tired and just wanted to get the darn thing started so we just went for it and couldn't have been happier.

They laid down the floors, added new 3 1/2 moldings, painted the moldings, cleaned the floors all in about a week or so. There were 3 guys working at a time. Now that everything is done and kind of settled with the floors, the only thing that drives me crazy are the glue spots around the house! I mean they cleaned the majority of it off but there are still spots that are hard to get off because the floors aren't the shiny sealed kind so it gets in all the grooves and stuff. Anyways, lets just say I've put in my fair share of floor scrubbing for a lifetime. Ha. We will see how well I can keep these floors cleaned. Here are some pictures! The house looks totally different now!

Before

During

After

Stay tuned for the guest bathroom updates! 

Bullhead House Remodel {The Fireplace}

As you've probably noticed from my house hunting pictures, our home was very tile heavy. Our main goal was to get rid of as much of this tile as possible. We started with the smaller areas, one of them being the fireplace. I really wasn't sure what I wanted here, but we wanted to put something that gave it a bit of a more rustic feel but yet keep it pretty modern. Something with a little bit of texture. We decided to go with a medium beige split face panel travertine for the face of the fireplace and then used a 24x24 kale blend tumble paver as the seat. We kept the old glass and just spray painted the gold, black and added new hardware. Now, we have a brand new fireplace! Not sure how often we will be using it here in Bakersfield, but it looks so much better!

Oscars Party w/ Nerald

I miss having parties. We haven't been able to have anyone over at the house because currently, the guest bathrooms are not functioning and who wants to have a house party with no potty? We could offer our master bath but, I personally don't like using other people's master bath and I'm sure our guest would feel the same {maybe not, but that's just my opinion}.

With the inspiration from my instagram feed and reading blogs, I thought it would be fun to throw Gerald and I an Oscars Party! An excuse to eat and drink, and do something cute, sure why not? Out of the 9 movies nominated for Best Picture, we've only seen 2: "Captain Phillips" and "The Wolf of Wall Street." With that said, trying to choose the winner from each category was tough as we didn't know much about any of them! I printed out this ballot from Living Locurto, and Gerald and I took our guesses before the show; the winner would get a prize.

For appetizers, the Pioneer Woman was featuring these two recipes so I gave it a try using my own little twist..

Puff Pastry Pizza - Because I couldn't find puff pastry at Trader Joe's, I kept it simple and bought some garlic naan bread to use as the dough instead. I used mini portabella mushrooms and a mix of mozzarella and parmesan cheese. So easy and tasty!

Cream Cheese Wontons - I was too lazy to go to the Asian market to get wonton wrappers so I used some spring roll wrappers that I already had in the fridge. I added chopped fresh jalapenos to the mix since we had a lot on hand. Instead of the soy base dipping sauce, I just used a store bought sweet chili sauce that we typically use for eggrolls. This was a hit with Mr. Pena!

*I also made little shrimp rolls since I already had some shrimp thawed and was frying anyways!

Popcorn Cupcakes - I saw this blog post from A Beautiful Mess and thought, how cute! However, I wasn't in the mood to spend time baking, so I made my own version of popcorn cupcakes using Ghirardelli's brownie mix and Trader Joe's caramel popcorn. I made the batter as instructed and scooped it into gold foil cupcake liners. Halfway through the baking, I topped a few off with some of the caramel popcorn! It was an easy, yet cute way to incorporate the popcorn to our Oscars Party.

Last, but not least, you can't have a party without the booze! We decided to use La Marca Prosecco for tonight's event. I lined the rim of our champagne glasses with non-toxic glitter and topped it off with a gray and white paper straw. Lucky for me, I already had these things on hand =)

Well, there you have it, our first Oscars Party! I would like to call it a success; maybe next year, we can have some friends over. Oh and in case you are wondering, Gerald won the Oscars ballot with 8 categories correct. His prize - dinner at Red Lobster! I refuse to eat at Red Lobster with him so since he won, I agreed to go. I will let ya'll know how it is...haha! Hope you guys had a great Oscars Night!

Marc & Edita's Wedding {Austin, TX}

We flew into Austin for a quick weekend getaway to celebrate Marc & Edita's wedding. Airfare was way cheaper flying out of LAX so we gave it a try. We left bright and early on Valentine's day at 5 am and got to LAX around 7:45 am {LAX traffic sucks}. Our flight wasn't until 8:41 so we had plenty of time, but any additional traffic would have probably been no bueno. Next time, we will definitely consider spending a night at a friend's place beforehand. Anyways, a short 3 hour flight later and we were in one of our favorite city!

We kept the weekend events to a minimum since we knew the wedding day would be a full day in itself and didn't want to be tired out.  The wedding reception was held at the Bob Bullock's Texas State Museum, so a majority of us stayed at The AT&T Conference Center on Campus. Our room had a view of the beautiful UT Tower. Looking at the Tower always brings back such great memories of college and makes me super proud to be a Longhorn!

With it being Valentine's Day, Gerald and I decided to check out a local cafe for a low key meal. We  typically don't go out on Vday; I prefer to cook a nice meal instead but since we were away from home, we had no other choice. We went to Epicerie Cafe & Grocery, which was just like being at home. Epicerie is like a cafe/grocery store where you can buy your own meat, cheeses, wine and other food items to enjoy in the cafe or take home. They also have a cafe menu you can order from. We opted to do a charcuterie platter with a bottle of white wine and enjoyed it out on the patio. After the bottle of wine, Mr. Pena got hungry and decided to order an oyster poboy from their cafe menu which was pretty yummy. After our low key meal, we headed out to the Domain to try and do some shopping, with no luck. It was fun to browse anyhow. The retail shops are dead on Valentine's day; guess everyone is out on their hot date for the night =P This was our 10th Valentine's day together and it just gets better every year!

Now, on to the pre-wedding festivities....The wedding party was having their rehearsal dinner at Z Tejas on 6th Street, so after all the wedding rehearsal stuff was done, we headed over to meet up with the group for some pre-drinks before the pre-wedding party at J. Blacks on 6th Street. We ended the night at 3 am with a trip to the Halal Boys on Guadalupe for a late night snack! How old are we?? It's always nice being around friends and when that happens, we think we're back in college again! 

We slept off Friday night's fun well into Saturday afternoon in order to prepare for the actual Wedding Day festivities. The ceremony was held St. Theresa's in NW Austin. It's been a while since I've really appreciated a good wedding ceremony homily and this was one of them. The priest kept things very real and it made for an interesting and funny ceremony; it kind of reminded us of our wedding day when Father Roy goes..."Well, if you aren't going to kiss her than I will..haha." The bride and groom even handed out communion to everybody at the ceremony; that's a first! If you knew Marc and Edita, you would know that this is a huge thing for Marc, so we had a little laugh out of it but at the same time really respected what they did to make their wedding day special. 

Now, on to the party! First off, Gerald and I had to stop by Lick for a pick me up and TX sunshine =) I had a grapefruit ice cream with champagne marshmallows! So refreshing!

Like I mentioned earlier, the wedding reception was held at the Bob Bullock Texas State Museum.  I didn't even know you could have receptions here and I loved it. Loved how it was so open and conveniently for us, the bride and groom sat our table, Dirty 6th, right by the bar! They had a photo flip book booth set up and our friends had way too much fun with that. I can't even show you what they did. Lots of drinking, dancing, and laughter was had by all! Here's a photo recap of the night... {I realized I really need to invest in a nice point and shoot since most photos are taken with my iPhone these days and I'm tired of carrying around the SLR}.

We ended the weekend with a meal at Coco's, an old stomping ground, and then walked around campus for a bit. Oh the memories that were shared! Another great weekend in ATX that just went by way too quickly... 

Hook 'Em!