Last Thursday was Thanksgiving. It was also my birthday. It was also the day HH hung a bunch of stuff in our house. He knows me all too well. I’ll take home decor projects over traditional birthday gifts anytime.

We finally added curtains to the picture window in the family room. It’s an improvement. What hasn’t improved is my ability to shoot directly into a window.

The curtain panels are from West Elm and you can find them here. I bought them over a year ago when they were on sale with free shipping and I had a stash of gift cards. The rod that West Elm suggests using with the panels doesn’t come long enough to work with our large window. Ideally, I was wanting a plain matte black curtain rod with enough thickness to it to hold its own above the big window. I finally found this less expensive simple rod that fits our window but the diameter doesn’t allow for the curtain rings to slide over.

I resorted to buying two $7 packs of metal shower curtains rings from Meijer to hang the curtains. I actually don’t mind the ring on ring action. It feels casual and undone. If I ever tire of the look, there’s enough length to the panels for me to remove the tabs & rings and sew a rod pocket into the top. By then, maybe our kid/guest bathroom will be complete and I can use the shower curtain rings in there??

One day we’ll add some textured woven blinds to fill the gap between the top of the window and the curtain rod. I’m thinking I’ll probably have to buy two or three narrower blinds to extend the full width of the window as a single blind that size would be crazy expensive and might sag. I’m also going to woo HH into building a window seat bench with open cubbies in it for toy and book storage. Or I might go all Ana White and bust it out myself. I keep asking HH to show me where all his tools are and how to use them but he keeps doing everything for me. I think he’s afraid I’ll mess it up. Which is highly possible. But it wouldn’t be the end of the world, would it? I should totally start wielding some power tools.

The curtain panel on the right is doing one of my favorite curtain tricks: hiding the big a$$ subwoofer on the floor. My feelings towards this piece of home entertainment equipment are similar to my feelings towards the surround sound speakers in/on the wall. As long as HH keeps hanging stuff for me, I’ll keep covering up his ugly speakers. Hehe.

Love the narrow ivory frame around the panels. You could DIY something like this with inexpensive gray curtains from IKEA by hot gluing narrow ribbon along the edges or even painting the narrow frame around the panels. In fact, you should do this. Don’t be lazy like me.

HH assembled and installed this shoe cabinet next to the front door months ago. I don’t speak of it because we don’t use it yet. Our original front door is, well, original and still out of order. Once we start accessing the house through the front door, this slim cabinet is going to be all the rage. Last week, I was feeling brave and ventured up into the attic to rescue the capiz mirror. It’s from a Ballard Designs outlet near Cincy and it used to live in the master bedroom of our previous house. It’s found a new home in our new old home. I love seeing the reflection of the kitchen in it.

Eventually, we’ll hang something on the other side of the window to balance out the mirror on the left. Not necessarily a round mirror though. That would be too matchy.

HH also hung a light over the dining table. Surprise! It’s the Hoyne pendant and it’s pretty much the most amazing light ever. We had purchased a really inexpensive FOTO pendant from IKEA and spray painted it matte black. HH had been trying to install it for months with no success due to a missing bracket part that IKEA was refusing to send us and HH was fuming over the idea of having to go buy one. After the snafu, I realized the solid pendant probably wasn’t a great choice for the room. The dining table needs direct light and the FOTO would have provided that but the rest of the room also needs lit. The ceiling light is the main artificial light source in the mudroom. There is a small can light in the laundry nook but it doesn’t provide enough lighting for the rest of the room.

This pricier pendant is the result of a new collaboration in the works {I can’t divulge all the details yet!} and it was my inspiration light. It’s the light I was dreaming would live in our dining room/mudroom and if I’d have had $350 burning a hole in my pocket I would have snatched it up before now. With the open weave of the Hoyne, the rest of the room recevies light – not just the dining table. The shadows that the light casts onto the ceiling at night are beautiful! And I like how the pendant lets natural light from the window and the french doors pass through.

Did you notice a change in the location of the dining table? When we moved, we thought we’d like to have the table over by the sofa for a casual place to eat. But after living with our mudroom/dining room for a while now, we’ve found that placing the table in the center of the room works better. We toss mail on it when we come in. I fold laundry on it sometimes. It’s multipurpose. Of course, we still need chairs around the table but having the table in the middle of the room makes the room flow so much better and keeps all the big furniture from tilting the visual weight of the room to one side. It reminds me of those fancy entries you see in magazines where there’s a big pedestal table gracing the middle of the foyer.

The sofa is staying put but I’m going to make a slipcover for it. And add pillows. Ahhhhh. Pillows.

So stuff is happening here. Slowly but surely. It’s starting to look and feel more like home with each tweak.

images: Dana Miller for House*Tweaking

Truth: We juice. As in fruit and vegetables. {Or is it fruits and vegetables? Ah. Irrelevant.} After watching the compelling documentaries, Fat Sick & Nearly Dead and Food Matters, earlier this year HH and I were inspired to start juicing. Neither one of us was looking to lose weight or cure disease {which juicing can do}, we were simply hoping to optimize our physical and mental health, be proactive, prevent disease and set a good example for our kids.

One thing I always had a hard time with in my past job as a retail pharmacist was regularly getting asked by obviously unhealthy customers with nothing in their grocery cart but sugary drinks and packaged foods, “What’s best for {insert ailment, symptom, disease, complaint here}?” The answer I wanted to give wasn’t the answer they were looking for. What I really wanted to say was, “Go put everything in your shopping cart back on the shelf. Then head to the produce section and fill ‘er up. When you get home, go for a walk. That’s the best thing.” It would have been a good start and I probably would have been fired on the spot. Our society is funny like that.

After a little research, HH purchased the 8004 Omega juicer.

That was six months ago and we’ve been giving our juicer a run for its money ever since. We juice once in the morning most days of the week. We both feel good about getting in a bunch of healthy stuff at the beginning of the day so even if we don’t do a great job eating right the rest of the day, at least we started the day right. Hey. We’re not perfect. And Thanksgiving {a.k.a. the day we show our gratefulness by indulging in gluttony…what’s up with that?} was just last week so this post is rather timely, isn’t it?

Anyhow, I’ve been receiving more and more questions about our juicing experience so I thought a little how-we-do-it post was in order. Be warned: we’re not professional juicers. If there is such a thing. We could be doing a lot better and we hope to continue to improve upon our juicing experience now that we’ve made it a part of our lives and are committed to it.

We have a few juicing staples that are included in every juice we make: kale, spinach, carrots. Other produce we use and move in and out  of rotation are: celery, cucumbers, melons, pineapple, apples, tomatoes and whatever else is getting a little too ripe in our fridge.

Per the first image of this post, the end of our island across from the fridge is our juicing command station. It looks intense but it takes less than a minute to set up the juicer. Before beginning to juice, I cut up anything that’s too large to fit into the juicer. Basically, anything larger than ~1½” in diameter gets cut down to fit in the shoot.

Then I turn on the juicer and load the produce into the top. The juicer comes with a nifty handheld plunger to push the food down into the juicing chamber. We’ve discovered that starting with softer things {like the leafy veggies, cucumber, pineapple and tomatoes in this example} and ending with harder produce {here, the carrots} works best to extract the most juice possible. The firmer produce sort of cleans out the juicer.

There are two tubs under the juicer to catch the juice and pulp. This is what the extracted juice looks like after some spinach leaves make their way through the juicer.

This is what the spinach pulp looks like at the end of the juicer. It crazy how dry the pulp is. Nearly all of the juice is gone.

Here’s where I started adding the carrots. You can see how the juice and pulp change color as I add different foods.

Everett LOVES helping with the plunger and asks, “Can I be your squisher?” every morning. It’s so easy a four-year-old can do it!

Look at that pretty pulp.

The juicer does make some noise but it’s nothing loud. We’ve yet to have anything get stuck. There’s a reverse switch in case that happens.

On this particular day, I was juicing just for this post so I didn’t make a full batch. The juicer can handle much more. We drink up as soon as the juice is ready.

{Everett was still in his ‘army’ pajamas.}

Layne and Everett drink the juice too – albeit smaller servings. When we first started juicing, we paid the boys 25¢ for each glass of juice they drank. Bribery. We do it. A month into it, though, we let the pay slide and the boys still drank the juice so we no longer have to bribe them. I did buy some stainless steel straws that seem to make the juice more palatable for the kids. For particularly ‘robust’ batches, we’ll add some ice cubes for the boys too.

How does the juice taste? Well, it depends on the ingredients. It helps to have a little sweetness in there to balance out all the green so that’s why I include pineapple, apple, honeydew, cantaloupe or watermelon. Does it taste like fried chicken or chocolate cupcakes? No. But it doesn’t taste like poop either. {Not that I know what poop tastes like.} Now that we’ve been juicing for several months, I actually crave the juice but not in the way that I crave tasty foods. I don’t crave the taste. I crave the effect. It’s difficult to explain. My body craves it as opposed to my taste buds craving it. It’s weird.

And the juice is actually filling. Not in a way that makes my pants feel tight around the waist but in a way that leaves me satisfied until late morning.

To clean up, I dismantle the juicer and rinse all the parts. {As of right now, the pulp gets trashed but it would be great to compost.} Then everything minus the actual juicer goes in the dishwasher on the top rack. Yes, there are a lot of parts. Eight to be exact. But that comes with the juicing territory I guess.

The juicer gets prime real estate in a drawer close to the sink since we use it so often. As far as kitchen utensils go, the juicer is heavy {~20 lbs} and it’s easier not to store it up high.

So, yeah, I spend the majority of my grocery shopping time in the produce section and I usually have to buy fresh produce twice a week. I’ll be honest. {This is Honest Monday after all.} When we first started looking into juicing, trekking to the grocery store more than once a week sounded like a pain. Now that we’ve been doing it for a while, it’s just become a part of life. We buy organic whenever possible. Yes, it’s more expensive. But it’s our health! When you compare the cost of a trip to the doctor/emergency room/hospital/pharmacy to the cost of a few pounds of produce…well, I think you know which costs more in the end. Plus, my skin has never looked so good! And my skin used to be infamous for acne breakouts. Hell. Now that I’ve just celebrated a birthday and I’m officially in my mid-30’s, I’ll gladly pay a little more at the grocery store to reap beauty benefits.

In the Food Matters documentary, one of the speakers made a comment about our society having things backwards. We gladly stretch our pursestrings for a nice big house but complain about the cost of healthy food. Where are our priorities? This whole downsizing adventure is looking better and better every day.

As I mentioned, we’d love to improve our juicing experience. Adding in some wheat grass and spirulina is next on our list. What about you? Have you ever juiced? Any recipes you want to share? Do you have a juice bar in your city? HH and I have casually thrown around the idea of opening a juice bar. We’d offer organic produce from local farmers and let customers gather their ingredients into a basket then we’d juice it for them OR they could order from a simple juice menu. And I think there should be a drive-thru. There aren’t enough healthy drive-thru options out there.

One thing is for sure. I haven’t thrown out overripe produce in months. I’m not above juicing wilted lettuce or mushy strawberries. I’ll juice anything.

FYI – I wasn’t compensated for mentioning any of the products above. I’m just sharing our juicy experience!

images: Dana Miller for House*Tweaking