The Final Rosé

i'll never forget the fist time i tried hosting a girls night. it was in college and i tried to make spaghetti. i had different colored bottles of andre chilling in the fridge while i dumped both angel hair and spaghetti noodles into the pot of boiling water.  i thought i had entertaining down to a tee. 

over the last ten years, my entertaining style as evolved a bit. here are some shots from last night's Bachelorette viewing party. i kept the food simple since it was a monday night, but used some decorations from previous events to make the night seem special. 

In my opinion, you can't go wrong with a cheese board. They work for most occasions, and they look so pretty that they double as decorations!  I'll do another post on the formula i use for a killer cheese plate.

Creating the Kitchen

we recently bought our very first home. luckily, we had an incredibly talented realtor on our side  and she was able to get us the house we wanted in a very hot market. our goal in our first house was to get something in a desirable location that had the space we needed to entertain friends and grow our family. we ended up on a great street with friendly neighbors in a home that had a decent amount of curb appeal. the inside had a great flow, but i knew that we had to make some cosmetic changes, especially to the kitchen. since we knew that we didn't intend for this to be our forever home we tried to keep the updates minimal so we didn't break the bank. here's the original kitchen:

and here is the kitchen after

our biggest priority was a new backsplash and new appliances. those two updates made a big difference on their own in terms of brightening the space. we also upgraded the countertops to quartz, which was by far the best decision we made. they are beautiful and incredibly resilient. to top off the work in the kitchen, we added some recessed lighting to make up for the lack of natural light. i also switched out the lighting above the island, although they didn't make it into my poor iPhone pictures.

Hello... It's Me

much like a first date, a first blog post is totally awkward but necessary if you want to get to the interesting stuff. sadly, unlike a first date, there's no wine to help you through it. (it's monday afternoon and even I have my limits.)

i've started The Girl on Gramercy to document the life we've built in raleigh and to share the things that inspire and excite me.