We think it's what you call a "Blogaversary"...

Hello friends! It seems as though we hit a little milestone here in the land of MAHAH. Originally this blog was intended to provide our wedding guests with information and updates about our big day. That was back in July of 2008, when we had planned our engagement party and just wanted to scream from our Brooklyn rooftop "WE ARE GETTING MARRIED!!". Once our DIY Wedding had passed, we got our hands on a house to see if we could unleash our DIY potential. Looks like we were secretly carpenters, fixer-uppers, gardeners, painters, contractors, and crafters after all. In one short year, we accomplished so much we wanted to break it down and share. Hopefully this will act as inspiration to all those who read!

Joey found his inner furniture maker:

Here is the table for the foyer he built, along with a link to how to make your own!

Here is the progress with the massive King Sized Bed we have taken on.

A'la Young House Love's inspiration, the built in's for the guest room, almost done! - Soon we will reveal! Promise!

A very cool door, for a very cool room!

Some smaller projects we worked on:

A wreath for every season!

Quick ottoman update (my love of burlap!)

Cozy Couch Pillow

Print Your Own Fabric Bed Pillow

Icky Brass floor lamp transformed into super chic lighting.

Animal Art

Animal Art 2

Stumped: a story of a lamp

Our mudroom Makeover (yes, we only finished one room)

If you read here often, you know our decision making skills are hugely flawed. We take a loooong time to pick furniture, and when we can't find exactly what we want, we have a go at making it ourselves. Somehow we accomplished a few fab finds.

Our love of the oversized chair!

India called, they said I can keep their 1880 pillars!

Chest obsessed

Also a new desk (I promise to show off soon!), The Ikea chairs in the mudroom, and those amazing pillars circa 1880 from India, we will reveal when the bed is done.

As for numbers, new friends, and all that fun and nerdy stuff, we have mixed feelings to be honest! First let us express, that we didn't start blogging in a dedicated fashion until December of 2009, when we transferred our blogger account over to squarespace. So these stats are from December until this week.

We have made 55,305 new friends this year!

We have had 120,012 pageviews

254 of you have expressed your friendship in the form of a comment

We have receive one piece of hate mail expressing we should "kill ourselves" - ouch

Lana has filled 2 whole composition books with home improvement ideas

 600 of you follow us on Twitter

 We have loaded 1,994 photos onto our flickr account - post home ownership

 1,090 is the cost of our heating bill each month during the winter - boo!

We have made 378 tweets

We have bought 14 throw blankets to keep cozy

Three animals run this house! Rocket VonScience, PorkChop VanderSandwich, and Zoey Frankenstein

There are six "animal heads" around our home

6,200 is the square feet we must conquer and design

We don't know if our "stats" are good or bad to be honest. We are just excited if one person reads our blog each day. It's pretty nuts all the amazing new people we meet, and get to keep in contact with! I had fun at the Nate Burkus Show with Kate and Cristin:

We are super excited we started the blog, and encourage you to reach out and let us know if you want to see more or less of something. We want to hand out a HUGE HUG and say "Hey You! Thanks for reading our blog!".

Big Love,

Joey and Lana

PS! Keep posted! In the next few days we will be doing a *special give-away* to celebrate all you DIY lovin' MAHAH readers who have kept us movin' along this year!

...and a bit about Joey

Joey - I spent my formative years in a town about 25 miles or so from Houston, Texas called Friendswood. Growing up with my wonderful parents who made trying anything I could think of possible. Baseball, Soccer, Lacrosse, and Karate were all things I had a passing interest in before my mom signed me up to take piano lessons. Piano led to saxophone in the 5th grade, which led to guitar. And after I decided the guitar had too many strings I took up the bass, drums, and singing. Playing in a local band I had the dreams of every garage rocker. But when superstardom seemed like a fantasy not worth chasing, and selling Mazdas at the local dealership lost its luster, I decided to move to NY.

I began an internship at a jingle studio in Manhattan shortly after moving in 2003 and slowly crept my way up the music composition ladder until I got where I am today; writing music for films.

Along the way, some not so unimportant things happened. Like meeting my beautiful wife, getting married, and as you could probably guess, buying a house.

Lana and I have always been fans of people who do for themselves what the commercial masses cannot provide. Anytime we cant find the perfect match for our respective tastes we just make a project out of it. (Sometimes to our benefit and sometimes not), but we never let a lack of know-how stop us from trying.

There are more projects in our minds than time in the day, so I'm sure that we will keep ourselves busy, and hopefully entertain and inspire some new do-it-yourselfers.

Who the heck do we think we are...

We are going to tell you our story. We get emails all the time asking about us, our home, who we are and what we do - so we decided it's time we formally introduce ourselves! After all, we have been blogging for a while now - it's only fair!

Lana - I grew up in South Florida in a beach community. I went to private school almost my whole academic life, played soccer for 14 years, and was your pretty average kid. My father had a set up in our garage where he would often build or fix things for our home. I was obsessed. Little boxes filled with shiny nails and screws all organized for any possibility your mind could create. I often took the dolly and nailed boxes to it trying to build my own "car". Then, my father did the most amazing thing ever. He built me my first house. It was two stories and had a tree in the middle. I remember putting curtains up and spending time in there dreaming of when I would have my very own home. Sadly when we sold the house, the new owners took down my life-size doll house.

At 19 I moved to NY to work in the entertainment industry, which I did for five years before I became a marketing consultant, vegan truffle maker, learned to sew, garden, met my wonderful husband Joey...wait. I am getting ahead of myself. Learning that I loved the freedom of consulting, I dove into a variety of things I always wanted to do. When I met my super-amazing-musician-husband, who had a flexible lifestyle, I knew I met my match. We shared an apartment in Williamsburg, Brooklyn where we became DIYers. Now I say "became" like it's something we just took up. I don't really mean it like that. I mean it in the sense that we found a partner in eachother to accomplish projects. Then the wedding came, and were were total DIY fanatics and did the whole thing ourselves, from invitations to what people threw as we walked down the isle to decore. This blog actually started as a "do-tell" of our wedding planning! Unexpectatly, we bought a house just a few months after marriage. We actually had paid for our whole honeymoon, then discovered our closing date was smack-dab in the middle, hence, we never took our honeymoon. We figured the house was a once in a lifetime shot (we wanted this one!), and we could always take our honeymoon at a later date. So just a few days before Halloween 2010, we moved into our starter castle (hehe) and began really learning how to do every ourselves. It's a big change moving from a 1000 sqft Brooklyn apartment into a 6,200 sqft house, with land! Our weekends of hanging with our friends all day and night in the city turned into basically living at Home Depot, Lowes, True Value, Target, ABC Carpet and Home, etc, etc...Oddly enough, we enjoy it just the same. It's been a wonderful thing to have people over to our home. Have a backyard, play music as loud as we want, enjoying a driveway (our parking tickets were thousands a year), and feeling the pride homeowners feel.

As for what I do on a daily basis - it's A LOT. I work full time marketing (more like 60 hours a week!), own two companies, and run this household with Joey. We have two puppies, which are more like our children. Their names are Porkchop VanderSandwich and Rocket VonScience. I believe in a home cooked meal, so I always make the time to cook at least four nights a week. I love gardening, sewing, and making vegan desserts (something less guilty about it). The best part of the day is laying down with the Hubs McGruff and our two pups and taking in all we accomplish every day.

So that's my story. I am going to pass you over to Joey......in just a little bit!