#48: Go to the Guinness Storehouse in Ireland

We ended up in Dublin three times during our recent UK/Ireland trip and had four flights in or out of the Dublin Airport! Seattle/Dublin, Dublin/London, Bristol/Dublin, and Dublin/Seattle. That airport became old hat after a while. This might make more sense if I explained our itinerary:

Fly into Dublin
Drive immediately to Galway (2 nights)
Drive to Portrush and the Giant’s Causeway (1 night)
Drive to Belfast (1 night)
Drive to Dublin (1 night)
Fly to London (4 nights)
Bus to Bath (1 night)
Train to Oxford (1 night)
Fly to Dublin (3 nights)

When we vacation, we go hard! The itinerary was ambitious but I never felt like we were moving too fast. We reserved the same Airbnb host for the one night we had to spend in Dublin before flying to London as well as the last three nights before flying back to Seattle. Already knowing how to get where we were staying was really helpful by the end of the trip – by that time you’re getting tired of navigating and feeling lost.

One of the highlights of Dublin is the Guinness Storehouse. Whether you’re a fan of the beer or not, it’s a fun place to visit! The top of the storehouse is a bar with 360-degree views of Dublin where you can enjoy your pint of Guinness. The storehouse is in a more industrial section of Dublin, away from the throngs of tourists. On the way we encountered a teenager whose brogue was SO strong we could barely understand what he was saying. We finally figured out that he was asking us to buy beer for him and had to turn him down. Ha.

#16: Repaint the kitchen

I knew moving into our house that the first repainting job would be the kitchen. Not that it was particularly bad. But I wasn't quite feeling the mid-toned gray that was in there - it made the kitchen unnecessarily dark. We lived with it for over a year while I tried to decide what color I wanted in there instead. A light sandy tan to go with the tile? Classic white?

Here are some terrible cell phone pictures of what it looked like with the gray (after taping).

Then I saw these images on Pinterest.

And my interest in mint was born. The tile in the inspiration pictures was very similar to ours, we also had white cabinets, and I found the mint color intriguing. I worried it might be too trendy but I figured we could always repaint at some point if we got sick of it. I ran it by Mark and he was surprisingly on board. So I bought a few samples and slapped them on the wall and we eventually decided on Breath of Spring by Behr.

For my first ever attempt at painting walls, we definitely chose the hardest room. We had tons of cutting in to do around cabinets and trim, not to mention the taping beforehand. However, since the kitchen mainly consists of cabinets, there wasn't really much surface area to paint. Just lots of prep work! We spent one evening taping, the second evening painting the first coat, and a third evening painting the second coat and removing tape. The whole process was relatively painless, or at least much less of a pain than I thought it would be! 

I love the end result. There is just enough surface area to make the mint a nice focal point, but still subdued. Plus, it's so much brighter in there!

#62: Create a gallery wall

I really love the look of mismatched frames on the wall and thought it would be a great collage idea for our living room, which still had a lot of empty wall space a year after moving in. Frames can get expensive but that's where the mismatched frames come in handy - I picked up most of these from Ross or Marshalls on sale! No need to matchy match when you're going for this type of look.

Here's my gallery wall. Not quite a full wall but you get the point.

The pictures are all from our travels or from our wedding. I like that they all have a personal connection - a story in each frame.

Speaking of stories, funny story: Mark happened to look over my shoulder and burst out laughing as I was writing this post. I said what, one of my 100 list items was to create a gallery wall, so here it is! And he said the reason why he was laughing was because in his cursory glance of the photo, he thought oh, that's a nice living room, not even realizing that it was ours! Made me laugh.