With all the holiday decor recently put away until next year… these are currently my favorite nooks in our tiny home.
Goodbye 2015. Hello 2016!
Today is the last day of 2015! It has been a year filled with learning lessons, personal growth and putting down roots in the place where we feel God has planted us. This year has taught me more about patience and hope-filled waiting. I am so looking forward to 2016 and the wonderful things and the hard things that are coming, knowing that God has used this year as a special season of preparation. Here’s to leaning in closer to Him in 2016.
One of my favorite songs from Sleeping at Last, “January White,” always starts playing in my head around this time of year. See below for a free printable 8×10 print that I designed with a line from this song that is filled with promise.
Happy 2016 friends 🙂
Aubrey
DIY wall sconce.
We’ve been slowly but surely been piecing together our tiny condo ever since we got married. It’s been really fun designing our interior decor together, and it helps that we have a similar design aesthetic! I call it “comfy mid-century mod.”
Recently we repainted the walls to a light grey (Benjamin Moore’s “Alaskan Husky 1479”), and I love how it makes our place feel light & airy. There is a corner of the sofa that was lacking in the light department, however, so we’ve been on the look out for a plug-in wall sconce for a few months now!
Urban Outfitters had a very mid-century brass sconce that I had my eye on for awhile… but it was always out of stock, and $70 more than I wanted to pay! (Side note… of course when I went to find the image tonight on their site, I couldn’t find it because it is officially out of stock!) Here it is in its beauty:
Their Eyeball sconce is nice looking, too:
Then this weekend we happened to drop by Restore in Beaverton, just for fun. We generally walk through the dimly-lit warehouse dreaming of all the things we will be able to buy on-the-cheap someday when we are homeowners, and usually there isn’t much we would consider for our current tiny home! But this weekend, Steve spotted a couple of plug-in wall-mount fixtures that needed a little love but had a whole lot of potential! The best part: $2 each. We were sold, so the grey duo came home with us.
After taping up the cords with painter’s tape and laying out some paper, I spray-painted them twice within an hour, with this lovely gold metallic spray-paint from Craft Warehouse that I bought for under $5 (with a coupon of course! Always a coupon.) Rust-oleum Specialty Metallic in “Metallic Gold.”
We are thrilled with the results! The gold is not too yellow, and not too shiny – but has a nice shimmer.
Here is the “before” of our living room at the sofa – lovely when it’s a bright day, but not great for reading at night:
And after!
O {tiny} Christmas Tree
Yesterday was a lovely Saturday and we decided to go find our Christmas tree while it wasn’t raining. We ventured out Springville Road and found a tree farm off the beaten path!
Just like last year, we chose a tiny tree, a little over 2 feet tall.
Benefits of a tiny tree:
1. It takes about 10 seconds to cut one down.
2. They are half the cost (or less) of a normal-sized tree.
3. Takes up a very small footprint in your home {our primary reason for getting one!}
4. Uses less lights and ornaments if your collection is small.
5. Makes people laugh when they see you “carrying” your tree through the parking lot at the tree farm.
5. They are just so cute! See?
This year, our second married Christmas, we have had fun pulling out the ornaments and decorations from last year and putting them up in our tiny home. I love the idea of slowly growing our Christmas decorations with meaningful additions to our collection as we go through more and more Christmases together. I suppose there is a reason that our parents have such large collections of stuff since they’ve been collecting for many more years than we have!
I am actually very thankful for this season in life that we are living in a tiny place that we affectionately call our “condito.” While there will be a season someday that we get to fill up a larger home with furniture & items of our choosing, for now it is refreshing to have only so much that goes into our home. To have to “make it work” while we are living here, in a sense. I was having a conversation with a friend at church today about how you never feel like you have enough room, no matter where you live – one of those silly human tendencies. We like to have our stuff and look forward to what is next. I am thankful that especially in the hustle & bustle and more-more-more mentality of this season, we come home to our simple and comfortable house that feels like ours for now, and get to focus on enjoying the things we are already {more than} blessed with.
you will go out with joy and be led forth with peace;
the mountains and the hills will burst into song before you,
and all the trees of the fields will clap their hands.
Isaiah 55:12
November day.
((Welp)) I haven’t posted anything since January. My fear in starting a blog was that I would feel some sort of weird pressure to post regularly and if I didn’t then I would feel guilty. Apparently the guilt didn’t push me to over-post this year! We have been on some wonderful getaways and I have been trying to document our lives with my camera, but not all of them have made it into blog-form. I started a flickr, which was an easier way to mass-upload photos! https://www.flickr.com/photos/128195273@N08/ (my photostream)
Yesterday we decided to venture out in the bitter cold for a photo adventure in the Pearl District. We were absolutely freezing the entire time but still managed to have a blast walking around quiet Sunday streets! After an hour we made our way into some way-too-expensive stores to warm up… pretending to be actual customers.
A pretty way to end November. {And a 4 day weekend… wish we had more of these!}
Steve Tate is 28.
{I like to rhyme.}
Since Steve turned the big 2-8 this weekend, we decided to skip town and celebrate together. We took Friday and Monday off of work (currently we are on the train back home… I am sad but atleast there is free wireless so I can revisit our weekend through photos!) and spent Friday night downtown at the Governor Hotel in Portland, then headed to Seattle by train. It was great not to have to worry about a car, and just travel by bus and by foot once we got there.
We loved the Governor Hotel, with its classic & masculine design charm.
Our hotel was a block away from First Presbyterian Church where we tied the knot {almost} 6 months ago, so we had to visit and reminisce.
The next morning we ate a hearty breakfast and walked to Union Station to train-it up to Seattle. The train ride was beautiful and seamless until we came to a very abrupt halt in Auburn, only to find out that the train had hit a pedestrian… horrible moment. We were stalled for 2 hours in Auburn and then finally made it to Seattle, along with many an enthusiastic Seahawks fan. [We quickly caught up on our football stats. hehe.]
On Sunday I wanted to show Steve around my old turf at Seattle Pacific, so we wandered around the campus and Fremont. The sky was a pretty light grey color all day.
Downtown Seattle wanderings.
Today started with some coffee & HGTV (Property Brothers, anyone?) and was followed by a trek across town to the train station, so we could head home.
(King Street Station went under a huge restoration since I was there last! Amazing architectural details, looks so clean and fresh).
Happy 28th Birthday, Steve Tate. So glad we got to get away to celebrate your life this weekend. You’re a good husband to me and I am enjoying traveling the marriage learning curve with you. Thanks for dreaming with me and adventuring with me, and for putting up with being my best photo model all the time. ❤
{Also I think this post serves as great advertising for the Herschel backpack Steve toted around all weekend!}
Beach.
Last weekend we spontaneously booked a night at Cannon Beach, to have a little retreat after the heaviness that was the end of December, with Steve’s grandfather passing away on Christmas Day. We love beach getaways. In September we were so excited to get away to the beach for a weekend we had planned a month in advance, only to realize we had planned it on the stormiest weekend of the entire fall, SO stormy that we went home a day early! So we thought this past weekend made up for that 🙂 Of course mini-retreats are always short, but we were so happy to be at the coast for this gorgeous weekend.
Our little bunny friend, who hung out right outside our room. Eating grass. Constantly. Steve had a new name for him every time we walked by.
The cutest and most well-behaved pup we met in a shop, Lily.
That sunset… I didn’t want to leave the beach, long after the sun had disappeared. The colors were a.maz.ing.
The next morning I woke up with a start when I realized the sun had already started to rise! I jumped out of bed and grabbed my camera to go catch some early morning-light goodness. I think God was beckoning me to come outside and witness His beauty.
So thankful for Sabbath days.
(So is this pup. ^)
❤
The “picture perfect” myth
Our day together started with a tense car ride as we had missed a turn that made us late, and my eyes could not stop checking the passenger seat overhead mirror a hundred times JUST to make sure my makeup was still on and my hair was curled since the air conditioning was blasting my forehead with icy air. You can’t tell from our engagement photos that we didn’t resolve the tension between us until after the photo shoot, when I was relieved to be out of the spotlight and Steve was relieved to be done reassuring me I looked pretty. And guess what? The pictures turned. out. beautiful. Like a summer dream. I am still amazed by the beauty captured that day. (Thank you jamieraephoto.com!)
While our eyes feast on the beauty displayed on the screen, we can escape to a moment without conflict, where we create the sounds and the feelings behind the photo. The opposite vantage point is to be behind the camera, pre-edit, when it’s hot & sticky and you’re annoyed and worried about how you look on camera and if your true beauty will actually show up through that lens that is pointed at you and clicking away like mad.
And there is that {dare I say beautiful?} balance: the beauty that exists in that one moment of a frame, mixed with the raw reality that existed to create that photograph in a living breathing hurting world.
And don’t we see it and participate in it everyday? There’s a reason I get to a point once in a whole where I need to turn off my phone and stop looking at people’s lives from the outside in. As beautiful as we ALL are… In moments of weakness I find myself stuck in the rut of comparison which will undoubtedly steal my joy. And yet… That picture is once again just a frame, just a moment, of that life I am coveting through my miniature screen. Your life and my life are just as beautiful, even if you didn’t get the best photo while picking out your Christmas tree. Sometimes an image can’t capture the moment you’re snorting with laughter while your husband “cuts down” the first Christmas tree of your married life that happens to be 28″ tall and that he can carry in one hand. Those memories are meaningful and no one can steal them from you and you don’t need to validate them with picture perfect evidence for all to partake in. They’re yours. And pictures are an amazing gift that we can hold onto on darker days when we need to remember that light, and older days when we want to remember that youth. But they don’t make anyone’s moments any more or less important than yours and mine.
chasing the light
We all have those things about ourselves… that we hold deeply inside of us and wonder if we are alone in our wonderings, alone in our fears. Fear is a notion I’ve been thinking about a lot lately. I’ve always battled fear, big fear and little fear, and sometimes it has been the victor in my life. The moments that fear wins are not pretty. And the moments I win over fear I always feel empowered and strong, the way I believe God has created us to be.
Getting married to Steve in July was a big triumph over fear. As much as we loved each other and knew we wanted to spend our lives together, taking the step into a covenant in front of all our loved ones, and taking an oath with God at the center was a heavy and big decision that would greatly impact the rest of our lives! But as we neared closer to the day, and were both able to bring our fears to the light, they became smaller, and we walked closer and closer to our big day with an excitement for what was to come. And we made it. All that to say… ever since then I have not been a stranger to fear in the least bit! I am more aware of my fears than I have ever been in my life, and it takes intentionality to decide and live a life of freedom and fearlessness.
I named this blog “chasing the light” because I believe we have the option to choose light or darkness every day, all day long. And light = life, and darkness often = fear. I strive to live a life of chasing the light, and my life is so much brighter and beautiful when I am able to do so. I have also recently picked up a DSLR camera which is bringing me so much joy and I learn about light. Light is what brings photography to life. My friend Jamie was the first to introduce me to this art a couple of summers ago when she asked me to model for a photo shoot. I had the best time as we drove around that late summer afternoon, “chasing the light” and taking beautiful pictures. I want to live my life chasing the light and making beauty out of simple moments. Because they are all a part of this beautiful gift called ‘life.’
chasing the light. 