Real Weird Blog
A fun blog about real life and the real weird things we encounter.

Hi visitors! I am so happy to have you here. Please have a look around and let me know what you like or don't like :/ Leave a comment or send me an email! I love to hear from my readers.

Living Room Design Ideas


The living room before we moved in. I would never own a leather  sofa.
Let me start by saying I hate the current color of my walls. The picture above is from before we moved in. The curtains and the light fixture are the only thing still the same. This yellow is so ugly and not in the best condition. Before we moved in I planned to have gray walls and a red couch. Easy choice. We have had red couches for the last 4 years or so and I love gray! I had chosen a nice medium gray. Exactly what I wanted. I couldn't wait to have the keys so I could finally have my gray walls and red sofa. Just after moving in I got started on painting the living room. By "started" I mean, I finished ONE wall.  Even though only one wall is finished, I love the way it looks. I planed on painting the other walls, but then I guess I got lazy and unmotivated. You would think these hideous yellow walls and the fact that squares have been painted around all the outlets and switches would be enough, right? Nope. :( It is now 5 months later and I still have 1 gray wall and 3 yellow walls with gray squares around the outlets. Really? Who does this!?! Who does this for 5 months?


But I mean, that's all fine because I can just paint the walls gray whenever I feel like it and just be embarrassed until then. I had people over for Thanksgiving, even with the mismatched walls and the ugly broken sofa. We had been looking for another red sofa to replace the old one almost, since the day we moved in. I also considered choosing a gray or black sofa but really, I wanted red. I mean I HAD to have red; I had already painted that one wall gray. I guess black would have worked too.  


I bought a gray sofa. Not just any gray, the exact color gray of the walls wall. About 1 month ago I became impatient. I was tired of sitting on our old red sofa that was falling apart and stained from our 2 year old. I think the sofa was more embarrassing than the walls. It was my birthday and I could not think of anything else I wanted or had been wanting more (except for maybe tattoos, but that is more of a process). We visited a new discount furniture store in our area and narrowed it down to two couches. A RED one and a gray one. The red one was about $100 less and much smaller. We chose the gray one. Why did we choose the gray one. :(


Now, I am left with this dilemma and BB Muffins is no help. He could care less what the walls or sofa look like. I don't think I can deal with all that gray. I don't like tans, definitely not this or any yellow, not blue (our kitchen and 1 of the bedrooms are shades of blue already and I have this thing where I don't any room in the house to have the same color, is that just me?)not neon green (our laundry room (below) is now painted neon green and that experience was awful) not white (how boring), and nothing too dark (I like to changes things up and don't want to deal with trying to cover something dark). In case you haven't been keeping track that pretty much covers all of the colors except reds, purples (which I think is the only color BB Muffins would oppose), and orange. 


I love the green for the laundry room, but not for the living room. I was thinking a light mint green might look nice or bright red. I don't think I could handle bright red for the whole living room. Maybe I should just do a red accent wall just behind the couch and then do gray for the other 3 walls. I love the modern look but modern is hard to pull off with a 2 year old. There are always toys everywhere. I have recently created a Pinterest board for my living room inspiration. I have only found 2 things I sort of like so far. If you have any ideas leave a comment with your Pinterest name and I can invite you to pin to the board or you can just leave a link below with your image.

I also want to give a special shout out to my Realtor +Judith Loving. She has been so amazing during this process. I messaged her to get her to find the pictures from before we moved in and within a few minutes she had emailed them to me. Not only that but she offered to have a designer come out and give me some tips/ideas. I cannot wait! :) I will be sure to post all the details of that visit; we haven't set a day yet. I will also be sharing more about our house buying story in another post.

tl:dr
We bought a house, painted one wall, then bought a couch the same color as the wall. Now, I need to finish decorating this room. I started a Pinterest Board for living room design ideas. And last but not least my Realtor +Judith Loving is the BEST!


Mailbox Monday!



Just as I promised, I kept better track of my mailbox freebies this week. One of the most AWESOME things I received for free was the Samsung Note 2 case and TecTiles for my husbands phone. The retail price on the Samsung case is $39.99 and the TecTiles are $14.99. This offer was available for a short time for customers who had purchased a Galaxy Note 2 or Galaxy S3.
What the heck are TecTiles? They are actually pretty cool. TecTiles are small programmable square stickers. You can program them to change all sorts of settings on your phone or start applications and alarms. We plan to put one in the car. When we turn on NFC and touch our phone to the square it will automatically turn on Bluetooth, open the music player and start playing music! How sweet is that?

I also received a Kroger coupon book with 4 coupons, a sheet of Disney stickers, a CPU magazine and a BOGO John Frieda coupon.

Wanna see what I got in my mailbox last week?

Share your mailbox goods in the linky below! I would love to hear about the awesome things you received.
I will monitor the linky to keep out anything that does not involve mailbox freebies. I would LOVE it if you would subscribe or like or tweet or any of those fun things as well. If this goes well, I hope to make this a weekly feature. :)



Sun Sunday 2



I had not planned on Sun Sunday being a normal thing and then last Sunday's post was the 2nd most popular post on the blog. Here is an image of the Sun going through its Solar Max cycle. That cycle will peak sometime this year. Basically this means the Suns solar activity will reach its peak this year. How cool!

Check out the NASA details here.

How to Track your Giveaways



For many bloggers, hosting a giveaway can help get traffic to your blog. Once things get going you may find yourself posting giveaways quite frequently. As a part of my New Year resolution I am going to be more organized so, I created a simple form to help me keep track of my giveaways and the winners. There are sections to track the company I am working with, the prize and the winner information. I thought I would share it here just in case someone else was looking for a way to track giveaways on their blog.

If you are like me and like most bloggers just starting out you are probably watching your Alex Page Rank and hopping for something awesome to happen. No? Well, I can't possibly remember all of the numbers I see when I check the page. I am not sure a paid subscription is what I need this early in the blogging stage. So, I made myself a simple spreadsheet to keep up with my numbers once a month or so. It also automatically calculates the difference in the new number and the previous number for the overall rank and the US ranking. Here is the page rank tracker just in case you might want to give it a try.

I also made a tracker for all of my affiliate links. Each sheet is a different category. Just click the link to be taken to Google Docs where you can access the spreadsheet. They certainly are not the prettiest but they are functional. :)  Feel free to share any blogging tips you may have. Trying to come up with a spreadsheet to help you along the way? Just let me know, I would be glad to help! What do you use to manage your blog?

Be sure to check out my current giveaways.

Need help with your blog or need a blog button? I would be glad to help! Just leave me a comment or send me an email. :)