Fall in Frankfurt & A Kitchen Makeover

OCTOBER IS HERE!!!!!!! My favorite month of the year has arrived.... and just like every year, I am overwhelmed with excitement, love, & hope. Our calender for this month is car-raz-zay..... We have almost every day booked! EEEEeeeee!!! Pumpkin festivals, pumpkin picking, apple festivals, Halloween, family coming in town, birthdays (Nate's, Pop Pop's, Lollie's, & mine!) and of course the holidays looming in the future. When Dana was on TDY the week before last, the weather turned cold, so I hopped into the spirit of things and made oatmeal cookies with spiced wine. Which, turned into a photo-op. Any excuse to play with Alfie. This oatmeal cookie recipe is my favorite. I made them in 8th grade at Hudson Middle School in Home-Ec class. I guess you could say this is where the Martha-Stewart creative side in me was born. Needless to say I still have the recipe on the same sheet of paper with all of my mark-ups (a perfectionist even then...) to make sure nothing went amiss. Please make them. They will warm your heart and awaken the spirit of the season within you! I happen to know two little monkeys who loved them (Lily & Sam Aiduk) so they are definitely kid-approved! I use butter sometimes instead of shortening but both work great! Let me know if there is something in the photograph that you cannot read and I'll get you the information. Also, as a closing to this section, I'd like to add that our Home-Ec teacher's name was Mrs. Baker. Doesn't get any more cliche than that.


The week before last I went to pick D up at the airport in Frankfurt. His traveling buddy's flight didn't get in until four hours later, so we had time to kill. We had decided to wander into downtown Frankfurt. Of course there was an autumn festival going on!!! I was so excited!!! We got some brats to snack on and simply wandered. It was also really awesome to be in a city again. I forget how much of a city girl I am.... it's hard to ignore when skyscrapers send me into a frenzy full of glee. I love the way a skyline can shape someone's view. It imprints a memory that cannot be erased. It was also fantastic to be among upscale shopping again... my heart leaped at the sight of this gorgeous pair of ankle boots. "Why am I so in love with these?" I thought to myself... upon closer inspection they were Valentino. Go figure. We really had a great time.... plus, it gave me a chance to scope things out for when the Wollschager-Ndjerareou clan gets here in almost two weeks!

Before Jen Wall left Germany, she introduced me to 8tracks. This company is genius. For any mix tape lover that had a tape deck in their dash in high school, this site is for you. "8tracks is handcrafted internet radio. It offers a simple way for people to share and discover music through an online mix, a short playlist containing at least 8 tracks." I'm obsessed. I am up to my eyeballs in autumn playlists. Today's blog post was written to The Ultimate Autumn Study Playlist. Ah-mazing. If you like chill folksy music, highly reccomend you check it out. Oh who am I kidding I don't care it's your genre or not... LISTEN TO IT! Thanks JW.... as always, you rock.

This church is ridiculously cool. Liebfrauenkirche (The Church of Our Lady) is a Gothic church in the northern town of Frankfurt . It was built in several stages from 14 to 16 Century and is now a monastery - and as a Catholic parish church. From 1415, the south facade of the church was remodeled. From this period dates the most important architectural treasure of the Church, a tympanum with the Adoration of the Magi from the workshop Madern Gertheners. I love that all of the tracery in all of the arches is different.... how freaking cool is that?!?!?

Me- "OH MY GOD there's a hole in that building!" D- "Um yeah..." Me as I try to run and drag D at the same time-"Let's go look at it!!!! Cmon!!!!"

These blue dudes were handing out free samsung fedoras. So, naturally we snagged one.

They lady painting reminded me of Dick Van Dyke in Mary Poppins. If only I could jump into the paintings....

So this part of Germany is not only wine country, apparently it's apple country too. I have never seen so many apple trees randomly while driving. Still waiting to go pick them!!!

D and I finally got a chance to stop by a real Starbucks! I was sooo jonesing for a PSL. Turns out, they don't have those.... but they do have the Apfel Crumble Latte which totally satified my fall sweet tooth!

I said my name one time and they totally spelled my name right! I love Germany!!!!

I will always be a "Tudor" at heart. This one is for you PT. Miss you.

I'm obsessed with this door. and the high rise... good gracious me, I'm a city girl at heart.....

So while the kitchen was the first room I was able to get to a manageable state, there was so much more fine-tuning I wanted to do before it was "complete". We are still lacking one piece of furniture (Which we could pick up this weekend!), but since I've made so much progress I figured I owed you an update. I want to go through all of the shots of the kitchen... from the very beginning....

This was the kitchen in the beginning. Circa December 2011. White walls.... and our proud IKEA purchase.

Then came the warm brown paint. And my husband with the ultimate manly power tool.

So the shelf was up and full of stuff.

Then surfaced the problem... the shelves were crammed full of stuff. It looked so unappetizing and it was hard to find and pull out what I needed to bake.... So here is the official before picture.

It was time to organize what I managed to cram into the IKEA furniture. I wanted things to be easily accessible.... labeled... and of course oh-so-pretty. Buying the popular baskets were out of the question as they are usually somewhere around $15.00 a basket. (WTF?) So it was time to get creative. I remembered that the post office here on base had a plethora of different size boxes. Important note: Priority mail boxes are FREE. So I hijacked about twenty. Seriously. For all they know I was sending an amassed amount of wedding gifts to a newly married couple (I know dad... too soon...). Then it was time to assemble and re-size each box to fit the shelves. Then came my favorite part. PAINT FEST 2012. I don't know why it's so freaking liberating to paint with red paint. I think I associate it with coloring on the walls with a red crayon. It feels forbidden, therefore it's fun to do. Here is a photo of the drying process. It took several coats. But I painted with a tiny roller because I didn't want brush strokes. I won't lie, this was a tedious process. One I thought I would love... and by the end of it I was uttering animal like sounds of frustration as the boxes needed yet ONE more coat of paint to cover the USPS logo. *sigh*

Once the boxes were finished..... it was time to figure out the labeling process. I had many MANY thoughts on how I wanted to do this.... ranging from cutting out wooden blocks and painting them with chalkboard paint.... to just writing on them with paint pens. The second suggestion was ruled out immediately because I knew just how long it took to paint those boxes... so any labeling process destroying that was out of the question. I do love vintage-y things so I began to research vintage labels. I stumbled across a couple of images that caught my eye resembling apothecary jar labels. PERFECT. Then it was as simple as recreating the design in Adobe Illustrator & Photoshop. Ya'll know me, never satisfied unless it was something I created for my own purposes. This meant adding a logo of sorts. I cant tell you how happy I am with the results. Even Dana (who took a while to pick up on the fact that the storage had changed, bless his heart) was super happy with the organization. I would still like to create fabric liners for these boxes, but I don't have the fabric as of late. Another IKEA adventure perhaps? Here are the after photos!

Mike! This is your wedding gift being put to it's intended use!!!! Thanks so much for the awesome storage containers!!!!

I also really wanted some form of a calender in the kitchen. D and I have really busy schedules and we were constantly overbooking. Instead of opting for the synchronized digital iphone calenders I wanted a more old fashioned way of keeping track of our lives. If I write something down it's commmited to my memory.... Originally I only had a one month calender up, and after two months of that we decided that we definitely needed to see farther in advance. This was the solution and I have to say, again, I'm super pleased.

It's been a heck of a week for us... with D's pre eye surgery appointment and my impromptu hospital visit we're exhausted. And what better thing to have ahead of us than a three day weekend! This is our last weekend at home before the family gets here. D is taking me to France next weekend for my birthday!!! I am so unbelievably excited! So this weekend we're trying to get everything in order.... Last minute furniture purchases, cleaning, organizing, trips to the storage in the basement, etc. I even got a package from Target today containing the new duvet covers!!! Things are well on their way and will only be picking up speed from here! Sarah and I have already discussed our shopping trip to H&M in K-town. I hope everyone has a wonderful weekend!!!!