Christmas

It’s hard to believe it’s been a month since Christmas when we still have our Christmas decorations up. Nick told me not to take them down until February lol. They make our home so happy and festive.

Uncle Peter took us out on his boat for the Christmas Ships Festival, where a choir on the Argosy Christmas Ship sings Christmas carols in Lake Washington. Thankfully, the weather cooperated this year!

We spent Christmas with family at my grandparents’ cabin. Uncle Peter got remote-controlled helicopters for himself and Uncle Eric and it was fun watching them play. Another highlight was that my cousin, Keegan, got a drum set. Aunt Brooke (his mom) was thrilled about it.

Seahawks

Seattle has been going nuts about the Seahawks going to the Super Bowl again. Did you guys see their last game against the Packers? It was intense and I still can’t believe the Seahawks won. Lots of cheering and fireworks outside after that game. Neither of us are really football fans, but even we had to admit we enjoyed watching it.

Around the House

It’s not terribly exciting, but Nick and I framed and hung some of the photos we’ve taken in our stairway. In the picture below, the collage frame on the left has some of the zoo pictures we’ve taken. The photos on the wall on the right are our favorite photos from our Wallace Falls hike.

Inspired by Saturday’s episode of Gardening with Ciscoe (a gardening advice show with a goofy local gardener), Nick and I went to Molbak’s to get ourselves our first indoor plant. We were planning on getting a Chinese Evergreen, but we went with a Dracaena instead when we saw the price tag ($50 for a little plant? Sheesh!). So say hello to Wallace the Dracaena (pictured above)!

We painted the entry, stairway, living room, mantle, and kitchen. We liked the greyish color the previous owners had chosen, but we still wanted to give it a fresh coat of paint, so we picked an almost identical color. The mantle was light grey, which we changed to white. We also painted the recessed area above it. All of that’s not super noticeable, though. The biggest change is that the kitchen went from cream to green, which we love.

Living Room & Kitchen – Before

Living Room & Kitchen – After

We also finally got around to doing something with the recess above the fireplace. It’s a really stupid spot to have a TV, so it’s just been collecting stuff. Until now! We found out that our TV stand cabinet fits in there PERFECTLY, so we got another one and we’re using it for extra board game storage. We’re going to get something to hide the cables.

Mantle & Recess – Before

Mantle & Recess – After

And here’s another view of the kitchen:

Kitchen – Before

Kitchen – After

That is, until one day last month when I serendipitously saw Tuft & Needle mentioned in a comment on a blog I follow. Promising quality mattresses for a fraction of the price of what you see in a mattress store, I decided to investigate.

American-made mattresses for reasonable prices

Tuft & Needle is a company founded by two software engineers from Silicon Valley. They are dedicated to making quality mattresses without gimmicks and price gouging. Their foam mattresses are made in the USA using American materials, eco-friendly, and 100% recyclable. They have a 30 night trial during which you can get a full refund for any reason and rather than returning the mattress to them, they hook you up with a charity to donate the mattress to. They also have a 7 year warranty to cover any defects or malfunctions.

That all sounded fantastic and then I saw the reviews and I was blown away. Everyone was raving about it and the few who didn’t love it were still impressed by Tuft & Needle’s customer service.

Tuft & Needle makes two different mattress models: 5″ thick ($200-$500) and 10″ thick ($300-$600). At just $500 for the 10″ thick queen size mattress, it seemed like a fairly safe gamble, especially with the 30 night trial. It even came with free shipping. Nick was skeptical about buying a mattress online, but having grown up with the internet, it didn’t seem that strange to me. I used a referral code I found online and got $50 off. Nice.

Referral codes: Gift $50, Get $50

Mattress arrived compressed and wrapped in plastic

Speaking of referral codes, I found out that using one not only gives you $50 off; Tuft & Needle also refunds $50 to the person whose referral code was used… up to the full price of the mattress. Holy cow. I posted my referral code a few places online and within a day or two, three people had already used it. The next day, I saw my credit card had been refunded $150 and my mattress hadn’t even shipped yet! O_O

Super fast delivery

Four days (two business days) after I placed the order, Tuft & Needle emailed me to let me know the mattress was on its way. It arrived via Fedex three days later (one week after I ordered it).

It came in a 67 pound box that measured 67″ x 15″ x 15″. The foam mattress inside was super compressed and rolled up in plastic. We took it upstairs, put it on our box spring, and began removing the plastic. When we cut through the inner plastic, the mattress started to suck in air and expand, which was pretty cool. The unboxing took no more than five minutes and probably a couple hours for the mattress to fully expand (though most of it happened within a matter of minutes).

Nick trying out the new mattress

A good night’s rest

Nick and I have been sleeping on the mattress for three weeks now and it has been great. My main concern with a foam mattress was that it would sleep hot, but the foam Tuft & Needle uses is breathable and heat hasn’t been a problem. The firmness suits us well (we’d give it 7 or 8/10 in firmness) and our quality of sleep has improved. Definitely worth the buy.

Thinking about getting one?

If you’re looking for a new mattress, Nick and I highly recommend that you check out Tuft & Needle. Make sure to use our referral link to get $50 off!

Updates

September 17, 2014 – Referral program ended: Tuft & Needle ended their referral program today, so the $50 off referral links will no longer work. You can read Tuft & Needle’s statement on ending the referral program on their website. It’s a bummer that they aren’t doing referrals anymore, but I get why they ended it. Nick and I are still very happy with our mattress and think it’s still a bargain even at full price.

August 6, 2015 – Extended trial: Tuft & Needle’s trial period has been extended to 100 nights. It’s been a year now that we’ve had our mattress. We still love it and haven’t had any issues.

(Cross-posted on my other blog, http://xaben.com)

The news has been going crazy over today’s snow for the last week or so, claiming that we would probably see 2-4″ in Seattle. We didn’t get that much, but any snow is enough to make schools and businesses close and a lot of people (Nick included) just stay home.

The snow will probably be gone by late morning and we’ll get up to a high of 44° later today.

I hope you all had a wonderful Thanksgiving! We went up to my grandparents’ cabin and had dinner with the family.

We also had a good time playing with Lego over the weekend. We even built a Lego ornament for our tree, based on an instruction guide I found online.

And yes, that is a Yoda Santa hat on top of our tree.

Decorated for Christmas

Lego ornament

Dining table & chairs

We were asked the other day if we had gotten a dining table yet. Whoops, guess we forgot to blog about that! The dining table we got is perfect for our new home. It is a gateleg table that seats up to 6 people. We usually only keep it opened halfway, which is perfect for just the two of us. When we want it out of the way, it folds down into a pretty compact console table. I love the purple dining chairs we got, too. They’re really comfortable and I don’t think the picture quite does their color justice.

Living room + bar stools

We also (finally!) got some bar stools. It was surprisingly difficult to find some that were bar height (rather than counter height). We visited lots of furniture stores and very few had any stools that were bar height. We narrowed it down to a black bar stool that had a back, but couldn’t swivel and a teal bar stool that didn’t have a back, but could swivel. We went with the teal ones, which look great with our rug.

Outdoor Bistro Set

So that we can enjoy our backyard a bit more, we got an outdoor bistro set over the weekend. We had been browsing for small outdoor dining sets for a while and fell in love with this set’s mosaic stone tile tabletop. We like that we can eat outside now and it’s nice to have somewhere to sit when we’re grilling.

We’ve been neglecting the garden lately since we’ve been so busy, but we had some time this weekend to tend to it. Nick and I are both totally new to gardening, so it’s been fun learning about taking care of everything. We want to plant some more herbs, but we’ll have to wait until next year for that.

There isn’t, however, a nice way for me to get to work via bus. It takes me about 45 minutes to get to work in the morning and an hour home in the evening (yay traffic). I usually see several other Smart Car drivers during my commute, though, and their smiling and waving helps makes the drive more bearable.

Living Room

Our rug arrived yesterday! Hooray! We weren’t expecting it for a few weeks, so we were delighted when we got a phone call saying that it came in early. I fell in love with the rug when we first saw it 2 months ago and although we’ve done a lot of rug shopping, we never found one we liked better.

We went furniture shopping on the 4th of July, which is when we purchased our sofa. We visited a dozen furniture stores to get ideas and we ended up finding a super comfy couch that we really liked. We weren’t planning on buying a couch that day, but we couldn’t pass up the 4th of July deal on it.

Bedroom

After 6 years of not being able to sleep in because of the sun shining through the windows, we knew we wanted curtains for our new house right away. Neither of us were very knowledgeable about picking out curtains, but I think we did a decent job. We found some dark brown curtains that block a lot of light and a set of sheer curtains. The sheer curtains also came in a “curtain scarf,” so we got one of those, too, to make it look pretty. The curtains match our bedding set really well and give the room a nice finished look. And we love that the sun won’t be able to wake us up unwillingly anymore!