Back to school

When I received a call last year to apply for a teaching position at the community college several things happened very quickly in my head (in no particular order):
- Oh cool, I can teach people about what I love to do
- Wait, if I'm teaching the class, then who has to grade things? Oh.
- Do I really know that much about interiors that I could actually teach someone else?
- What if I forget to wear pants? (Obviously that was just a dream...)
- What should the students call me? Professor? Instructor? Maybe just Erin?

My first semester teaching went awesome. I had three students (yes, only THREE, how awesome is that?!) and it was a perfect way to get my feet wet in teaching, without being overwhelmed with twenty students.

As it turned out, I was (am) an awesome teacher! (All my students told me so, so its not like I'm patting myself on the back here...its a fact; and no I didn't pay them to say nice things about me!) I didn't realize how much I actually knew about interior design, until I was with a bunch of people who didn't know anything about interior design. (And boy did I feel smart!)

Next week the Fall semester starts and I'm so excited! I'll be teaching two classes and everyone who I tell, all say the same thing, "I wanna be in your class!" hehe

I'm totally geeking-out here, but one of my favorite things about teaching is all the ORGANIZING I get to do. All the prep work, all the labels and tabs and new pen smell...ahhhh, its wonderful!

Puppy love

Erinteriors has recently joined forces with MDG Flooring America (my local flooring showroom) to offer our clients both of our services!

Here's how it works:
You walk into MDG, buy a $75 gift card (which is applied towards your flooring purchase!) and then you receive one hour of my professional help, for free!! (Not like Lucy van Pelt offers professional help...The Designer is IN!)

Now's the time, if your looking at getting new flooring, but don't know what to pick- or need guidance, walk right in and let us help you!!

MDG + Erinteriors, making your home more beautiful, one square foot at a time!

Ok- now that I'm back from my commercial break, you might be wondering about why the title of this post is puppy love and where the connection lies...well, lemme tell you:

Tonight I met with a client, who purchased the $75 MDG gift card, so I went out to her house to help make the selections and guess who met me at the door?

A HUGE Golden Retriever named Harley.

Now, most Golden's are, well, golden, in color. Not Harley. He was like a (large) scoop of vanilla ice cream. He was beautiful! Big black eyes, perfect round black nose- my heart just melted too when I saw a huge portrait of him on the wall.

See, this is where having the career that I do really blends the best of both worlds for me. I get to help improve the living space of clients, while meeting with their wonderful animals.

Another reason to celebrate meeting Harley today? It was his seventh birthday!

Now, don't get me wrong, sometimes clients animals just get. In. The. Way. One dog, for example kept trying to bite at us (and the samples I was holding) until finally, he did bite my co-worker. Needless to say, we ran (not walked) out of that house...

Holy moly!

Erinteriors.com is officially up and live!!
Hooray!!!

Go check it out. No really. Stop reading this and click here to see the portfolio I've put together over the years.

I'm so thankful to work(-ed) with amazingly talented designers, architects, craftsmen, suppliers and carpenters. My ideas aren't worth their salt if I don't have great people standing along side me to make it happen!

The Help

My mother in law is very generous. For her birthday she asked for a Kindle Fire, she now had a slight problem. She already had the "old" Kindle. (Oh dear, what a problem to have, right?) Well, going back to her being generous, guess who benefited from this? ME!!

One book I've been wanting to read has been The Help and now with the Kindle I was able to. Here's the thing, at first I was all anti-Kindle. I was on the side of the fence about "wanting to hold a book" and "that new book smell...can't get that with a Kindle, hu?!" Yeah, that all changed when I started using the Kindle.

First of all, I didn't have to hold a book. HA! Secondly, I was able to flip a "page" with the touch of a button. I'm right handed, but I hold my books with my left hand, and guess what? Those thinkers down at Amazon had the thought of putting forward and back buttons on BOTH sides of the Kindle, so no matter which way you held it, you could "flip"! Thirdly, I didn't have to turn my head (this sounds like I'm really lazy, right? But I'm not, its just annoying when you have to flip the page and then, turn your head. Uh, the pain!) And fourthly (yes, I just made that up) its just cool!

So I'm reading The Help, all about being a maid and telling your maid stories in a book. This got me thinking about what kind of stories we have, being in the design field and going to people's homes all the time. I was at a meeting yesterday with the guys at New View and asked them what kind of funny stories they had to add to our own version of The Help...

"...we walk into this one clients house for our initial appointment. She's in her forties or so, and leads us right into the kitchen. We notice, slumped over in a chair, with a blanket over her, an eighty year old-ish lady.
"Excuse me for just a second, I have to finish feeding my mother", she says, "but please ask any question you might have."
So I begin with my standard, "How long have you lived in the house?"
"Oh, about fifteen years. Mother, eat!".
All of a sudden the blanket talks back, "no."
"Mother. You. Have. To. Eat!" "I don't wanna."
"The doctor says you have to eat, now EAT!"
"No."
"...and what exactly would you like to redo in the house?", I ask trying to keep her on track with our appointment.
"I gotta poop!" the blanket says.
"You called us out to look at the laundry room, right? Which way is that?" Completely distracted the client says, "uh, through those doors. I gotta take my mom to the portable toilet over there, you can just see yourselves to the laundry room. I'll be there in a minute."

Yup, being a designer is totally glamorous. All the time!

Summer camp, already!

I'm all about giving back, so a few years ago I started working with the local SPCA as their humane educator. I go and talk to kiddos in the community about proper ways to meet/greet dogs, how to be a good pet-parent, what are signs of animal abuse- all very important topics to bring up (so, if your not in my neighborhood and can't come to one of my presentations but want information, email me!)

Anyway, one of my big give-back initiatives with the SPCA is running their summer camp. We started it last year and for an entire week we talked about animals to kiddos, younger kids in the am, older ones in the pm. It was amazing to see their little minds figuring things out and making crafts for the animals and just learning as much as they could about animal care.

This year I'm doing it again, although not running both the am and pm groups (just the am- pretty sure Mr.Pricklepants wouldn't appreciate me being gone all day...) and guess what? After a year of planning, its coming up next week!

I'm so excited!

Starting point...

When we found out we were pregnant lots of things went through my mind. Obvious things like how thankful I was that we were actually pregnant. More random things like, how exciting it will be to take a little one on my trips to Home Depot (yay for orange!). Very important things like, when can we plan our first trip to Disney World? (How tall do you have to be for Space Mountain?)

But one thing I didn't have to think about AT ALL was the nursery design. You see, hubs and I, we are planners. Specifically me for things like say, a nursery. I've been dreaming of having my own baby since I was, er, a baby myself...(for real, my siblings would torture my baby dolls just to get their jollies. Evil I tell you!! But, enough of that...)

So many, many, many months before we got pregnant, I already had a folder set aside on my desk containing the selections for the nursery. At one point I had made so many selections, I had to put together a spread sheet to contain everything (pricing, where I found it...) I'm pretty sure it was after I made the spread sheet I realized, "I'm not even pregnant yet. I really need to stop." So, I deleted the spread sheet, tucked the folder away (just to the back of the folder stacker- not in the bin...) and went about the rest of my life until that day when I got our positive!

That's when it all changed. Things got kicked into high gear. Suddenly nine months didn't seem that long (especially since we were already three months into this when we told the family!) Six months to take all my plans and make them reality. (You know how they say it takes more than a year to plan a wedding...which really, a wedding is like, what ONE day and then done. How is it fair that you only get NINE months to plan for something that will change your entire LIFE? Just sayin'...)

One thing we didn't have to worry about was the dressers for the nursery. You see, when we got married, we inherited my husband's childhood furniture, which was his mother's childhood furniture. (And I know what you might be thinking "oh, probably looked sad and dated!"- but here's the thing, it wasn't!) You wanna talk about furniture with TIMELESS style...and not just like, "timeless Traditional" or "timeless Neo Classical" no, I just mean like, 100% timeless. See...

The only thing that needed to happen before putting them in the nursery was staining them. So...we (and of course, when I refer to "we" here on out, I'm talking about the hubs and his dad- because of course, I was pregnant and therefore couldn't "help" because of the "fumes" and "dust" and something about not wanting our child to have six toes on one foot or something. They started to sand them....

 I couldn't get over how GORGEOUS the wood was underneath all that original stain!!

 Lil topsy turvey...

 Grandpa adding the stain (check out our awesome riding lawn mower in the background!)

And, in the end the dressers came out beautiful...the only hiccup was the stain smell lingered for SOOO long. Honestly, we left them in the garage (with the door open during the day) for like two weeks and when we moved them into the nursery, we still had to leave the window open...but it was worth it...

Now, before you start yelling...YES, that beautiful dresser is inside the closet. Why? Because there just wasn't enough room for it in the room itself...and quiet honestly I love putting a dresser in the closet...especially when I knew nothing of the babies would be long enough to take up all that space!

You wanna see more pictures, don't cha? Well guess what...you just have to wait! I'll do a big ol' reveal here in a little while, but, as the title implies, this was just the starting point :)

I didn't know...

Becoming a mom has taught me a lot that I didn't know about myself, like:
- I didn't know I could stay up most of the night and still function in the morning
- I didn't know I wouldn't be able to sleep even when the baby is sleeping- for fear that he might wake up any minute now...
- I didn't know I could lift so much (car seat+baby= awesome arms!)
- I didn't know how fast two hours go when he's sleeping and I've got lots to do
- I didn't know spit up would/could come out of his nose (first time it happened I was certain he was broken!)
- I didn't know that screaming babies in public make people look at you like you did something wrong (because, of course I'd CHOOSE to leave the house while my son is upset? No, it just happens!)
- I didn't know I'd be on the verge of tears almost everyday, just because
- I didn't know I could cry as often as I do (because, before he came along, the last time I cried was 1999...or something like that)
- I didn't know how comfortable I'd be breast feeding...anywhere (including the mattress department of Macy's...)
- I didn't know cloth diapers would be so easy
- I didn't know that one very small person could be so very, very loud at times
- I didn't know that walking into a room with a baby everyone stops and says "awww, its a baby" (even though, my entire life before having him, I was that person who'd 'awww' in an instant!)
- I didn't know how much love my heart could hold
- I didn't know how many pictures our memory sticks can hold (we've only reached capacity once...)
- I didn't know that loud noises (like my hair dryer or vacuum) wouldn't bother him. At all.

I know there are so many things still that I don't know about myself, but four months into this mommy business and I tell ya, one thing I do know- I KNOW his smile and laugh reaffirm my faith in God everyday! How else could someone so perfect be put in my life, if it weren't for the grace of His hands!

I'm so thankful to be able to spend my days with someone who, for now, can only communicate his wants/needs with either a smile (that melts my heart) or tears (that melt my heart, for another reason...) Ahhhh, I just love him to itty bitty pieces!!