hand delivered..

We hand delivered our profile to the agency today around lunch time after we left a doctors appointment, blood work and all of that good stuff (nothing bad, all good, all good!)
Actually, we had to take 2 copies of the profile. This felt really good to get out of our hands. Trust me. It was time to get that document out of our hands.
I will post pictures later that I took of the two books that we left at the agency.

The little lady at the front desk (their Secretary) loved our profile book and was tickeled to death when she started looking through it. She said that she wanted to look through it before she took it back to the director because she gets to see the profile books that come through being the front desk person. She told us that the birth families will really love what we have created since it was like a keepsake.
She asked us, how did you get these pictures printed on the pages perfect like this and shaped like that. I looked at hubby and smiled. It was all of his design work. It was truly a work of art and printed on paper that you would publish a book with colored photos, in terms of paper quality.

We were also able to meet the new director over the agency and she was thrilled that we brought the profiles in. She advised us that they are showing the profiles this coming week and she was very excited. The Director was going to go ahead and take our books back to her office to lock them up and the Secretary told her that she wanted to look at them first and she took them back from the Director! Old School, I tell ya!

Our profile was a total of 20 pages (including the BM letter, that we addressed by saying Hello). We had tons of pictures of family, events and everything. We designed it like a book and had each page printed on 12x12 pages. Everything was color and each page was designed differently. After my husband brought the printed document home to put into the book last night I saw some small errors (nothing big). We can fix those and when we print more copies and they will be perfect in the event that we have to take more. Hopefully not because we put them in nice books. We would hope that the person or persons that look at our book will almost feel like they are apart of our family after seeing our profile book.

My husband even asked me, " They're not going to let people walk off with the book if we haven't had a placement with them, are they?" I said, "I should hope not". They are big books, and really only the families who select the adoptive family should take the book. Thats just my opinion, because it is a such a personal keepsake document, why would anyone want it if they didn't select the family?

I will try to do a post another day on the order of our profile and how we arranged it.

often forgotten...

The laundry room is a room that is often forgotten about when decorating a home. For some reason, I believe that all rooms in a home should have a personal touch. This is probably about the only room in my home that has not been painted with our personal preference. It still has the Krisp Khaki that we chose when we had our home built. I realized when we had our home study visit when I showed the room it was neat and orderly and had cute little baskets and was organized, but it lacked character. It is almost like I just forgot about that room!

Even though it is not a place where you will entertain or anything, I feel like when you open the door to a laundry room it should be refreshing too. Big or small, the rooms can have a cute personal touch.

I found 4 vintage pieces earlier this week to use in the room. I was able to get 50% off on all four pieces ( $4.00, $5.00, $10.00 and $13.00) for the vintage look. I really think they are cute and all I need to do now is decide on what color I would like to brighten up the room.

I already have cute little wickered baskets in there to hold little things as well as a chrome spacesaving rolling cart for all of our laundry needs that slides in between the washer and the sink.

My next project is to have cabinets made for the room. Our friend that did our custom closet is going to do the cabinets for the laundry room to replace the white, metal rack. I have the color and glaze picked out for the cabinets and he has the design based upon the room measurements. I really would like to take advantage of the ceiling height with the cabinets. He gave us a great quote and I am going to move forward with that project this fall.

I really prefer to have all cabinets to have everything tucked away inside neatly. I am not sure why I did not have cabinets done when we built (I guess it was not a priority at the time). I figured these cabinets will eventually add value to the home when things turn around with the real estate arena.

This room is often forgotten about. Even without cabinets in a laundry room, it can be dressed up with art, a fresh bright color of paint that opens up the room, and baskets to organize clutter.

project for the week

Yesterday I went to a few of my favorite stores during the day. It was amazing that everyone was having sales. I went two craft stores and found this at the last and they actually had all of the picture frames 50% off and mostly everything in the store (that I picked up anyway) was 50% off except for the wooden block that I purchased.

I was able to get some really cute picture frames for practically nothing and I picked up a wooden block that I am going to paint. I will try to remember to show the finished product.

By the way, Michaels also had a great sale. I was able to get 45% off on my scrapbooks. I felt really good when I left there.