Blurb book is in!

For those who don't know, we tried to have our wedding on a pretty tight budget. We used a pretty inexpensive photographer who gave us the rights to our photos, all of which were given to us on a CD. We didn't bother ordering any prints or albums because we figured we could get what we wanted later, and hopefully cheaper. I did quite a bit of research on online photobook sites, and was able to make our own book for a fraction of the price. I looked into shutterfly, mypublisher, snapfish, mpix, picaboo, iphoto, kodak.... and blurb. I knew that I wanted our book to be large (in number of pages and dimensions). There was no way that 20 pages was going to cut it when we had almost 2,000 photos to choose from. Most books were priced based on 10-20 pages, then had a flat fee per additional page, ranging from $0.99-2.99. Most had relatively small page limits, around 50. Some got horrible reviews online. Some of the page-building software was so confusing that it required a PhD in god-knows-what to navigate. Some were just downright expensive ....and then there was blurb.

I spent some time reading user reviews and trolling their message boards, and it seemed like it would fit our needs well. Their software (Book Builder) was easy to use and had plenty of pre-done layouts. It was easy to build my own layouts when I wanted to... their edit screen is like graph paper, and all you have to do is click and drag image boxes where you want them (it is even kind enough to give the dimensions and values for x and y axis). Their books can accomodate up to 440 pages and come in a variety of finishes and sizes.  In comparison to the other photobook sites, they were much less expensive for larger books (but similarly priced for small page numbers). We decided to give it a shot, and are thrilled with the results!

We ordered a 13"x11" 160-page hardcover album with image wrap (where a picture is printed directly on the cover instead of using a dustjacket) on premium paper for $130 after shipping. The day after we received the album in the mail, I got an email from our photographer advertising a special she was running on photobooks... $275 for a 10-page 10"x10" album. I consider that quite the savings! It took me about a week to put together and edit our book, but it was definately worth it. You can view a preview of our book here.

Our first Google

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As most who know me are aware, I'm a major geek. As such I've been religiously watching our site traffic with google analytics since we started the blog. I'll certainly talk more about this in detail (when maybe there is something interesting to say), but for tonight, we've received our first visitor that located us via search.

While it is entirely likely that they did NOT find what they are looking for, their search is also a humorous confluence of two posts: "500 days of summer purse"

Kitchen update

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I knew that when we bought our place, it had two major problems... the first being an infestation of 8o's builder-grade honey oak, and the second being mustard yellow. Everywhere. I have been whittling away at these problems and am hugely impressed with the progress. Daniel allowed me to paint our kitchen cabinets (which ended up biting him in the ass when I was unable to re-hang them on my own... he ended up yelling "I AM NOT A CARPENTER!" in a fit of outrage). But I digress. I painted our kitchen cabinets (BM "black bean soup" in case there are any other paint junkies out there) and we swapped out the rusting over bronze hinges for some decent looking ones that were cheapish at lowe's.

With the money we got as wedding gifts, we decided that it was time to get rid of our cheap-o white appliances and buy something a little nicer. We sold the old ones on craigslist (all except the dishwasher, but that is a story for another day). What started as the easiest thing ever... set our budget, go to sears, pick out something decent, have it delivered, pay the bill... ended up not being so. Refrigerator #1 was 1/16" too wide due to our less than stellar measuring skills. Refrigerator #2 did NOT match at all (we had to order it because it was not in-store to see ahead of time). Come to find out, the refrigerator space is an odd size and finding one to fit it that was stainless steel was going to be a very difficult task. After exhausting our options at lowe's, home depot, sears, best buy, the great indoors, and menard's,  a coworker of Daniel's suggested abt. We looked online, and there was a whopping ONE refrigerator that met our needs and it is finally here! Before and after pictures are definately in order....

BEFORE: