Dana Burland

It’s a wild and wonderful thing to be showered. Even wilder and wonderfuller to be showered twice. Last weekend we were in Metro-Detroit again for a Blinder hosted wedding shower. There were M&M’s with our names on them, spring flowers, mimosas and presents and family and friends I’ve known my whole life all in one room together—including my sister who flew in from Oregon just for this. FROM OREGON! All this love and stuff and thought and care for us, just because we love each other. That’s what I meant by wild and wonderful. We’re so thankful and spoiled and blessed and counting down the days until we’re surrounded by all of our fabulous family and friends again. Thirty days to go!

  Our neighborhood has stray cats. Not one, or a handful, but gobs of them. Neither Ben or I are cat fans, we're both allergic and one of us thinks they're "soulless". Occasionally I've seen a stray walk the balance beam that is the top of our backyard fence and twice we've seen extra brave cats come up to the deck. Each time one of us runs out to scare them away. This is a no cat zone--except for Neil. I saw Neil hanging out near the shed in our side yard one day while I was watering our five daffodils. At first I prepped to shoo him away, but Neil looks young and... well... kind of adorable. While watering the Swiss chard that sprung up over the last few weeks I made Neil a deal. Don't eat my garden, beg for food or come up to the deck and you can stay near the shed in the side yard. Before we drove across the state last weekend for our last wedding shower I took Ben out back to show him the daffodils and Swiss chard, and there was Neil. Ben...

It’s 7am on a weekday. I woke up later than I should and Ben is only a quarter of the way through his ignoring-the-snooze-button routine. When I come out of the bedrooms on a sunny morning like today it’s easy to think someone left a few lights on overnight. The front rooms are glowing and they fill the edge of the hallway with bright, beautiful light. Usually I do a quick circle of the kitchen, dining room and living room to make sure that no one I’m thinking of didn’t leave any lights on overnight open the blinds and curtains. It lets even more raw sunlight in and makes me fall even more in love with our modest little house every time I do it. Everything is painted, everything is put away, wedding planning is in full swing as are our regular day jobs. I don’t always look around and appreciate this place we’re in, but when everything is still—the pipes haven’t started clanking together because the shower isn’t on yet and no new dishes have piled up in the sink—I’m overwhelmed wi...

I’ve got a little come-home-from-work routine. I get the mail, put my lunch bag in the kitchen, open wedding RSVP’s and immediately add the responses to my spreadsheet and “seat” guests via sticky notes to my seating chart. Then, I go on with my night as usual. As pre-wedding planning usual. With just over a month until the wedding, it’s little details time. Everything else is pretty much done. The ceremony programs are at the printers, the guitarist knows what songs to play when, the caterer is aligned with what our timing is. What now? Nothing now—I’m not fussing over it. I’m spending my nights getting back into running outside (when it’s not SNOWING), taking an extra mid-week yoga class and putting laundry away before it sits in a basket for a week. Ben and I took our waffle maker for a spin the other night. I’m in bed every night by 10pm. We’re exploring our yard in the Spring. We’re relaxed, and it’s lovely. These black bean spread tostadas I made tonight were just as no-...

Out of all the rooms in our house, the office has been a real labor of love. When we toured the house I knew exactly how I wanted to set the third bedroom up so we could both work in the space together—bringing that idea to life didn’t happen as quickly. The room is a little awkward shaped due to a hall closet jutting into the room. The awkward wall looked perfect for a nine foot fake built-in desk. As soon as I had Ben’s buy in, I wanted, no, needed to get to work on it. I was dead-set on one solid nine foot piece, but after some research we determined the $200 quote from our local lumber yard to custom cut a piece that large was not worth it. But what if we got two pieces and glued them together to make them look like one piece? Welp, we’re more of assemblers , less builders at this stage in the home ownership game and quickly figured out that would look pretty janky if we tackled it ourselves. So I gave in to two desks. We could easily find a piece of wood with the l...

  I’m one drenched, soggy, sopping little lady after a lovely wedding shower Saturday afternoon. Ben’s family threw me a beautiful wedding shower complete with lots of great women, a slice of cake the size of my face and gifts and gifts and gifts and gifts and where in the world are we going to put all this stuff?! It’s overwhelmingly fantastic (overwhelmtastic?) to be so celebrated, loved and showered. I don’t quite feel that loving Ben, and our commitment to love each other, makes me deserving of a table’s worth of new kitchen/home gadgets but I’m thankful for it none the less. Actually… knowing how many spoons Ben uses regularly to keep his cereal addiction going, maybe I do need that silverware set. My kitchen cabinets are stocked, my heart is full and my hand is cramped from thank you card writing. It must be nearing time for a wedding.

We've got a whole lotta mystery around our yard. Thanks to a few hefty April showers and the green thumb of our home's previous owner, there's a lot blooming or near blooming on its own. Please little plants, just keep doing your thing. I'll try to take care of you, but I don't have a stellar track record . Last week a couple sprouting green leaves gave way to bright yellow daffodils, our garden has some Swiss chard popping out on its own and a few more buds are threatening to burst. I'm dying to know what's coming next, so I walked around the yard and snapped some photos. Then I hopped on to The Google and ran an image search of each one. Where that failed, I tried Googling a description of the plant by typing in the most random phrases like... spinach looking leaves with purple buds. So descript! A few minutes later, I think I have a guess as to what's coming later this summer. I'm expecting a Virginia bluebell bush, some cuckoo ...

This is one post in a series of posts about my work involvement in the Steelcase Store relaunch. For more details, visit here ; for less details, check out my recipes and stuff . You know what’s amazing —my Ramen noodle honey vegetable soup. You won’t find the recipe on my blog, though. It’s kind of a weird, acquired taste kind of thing. I just know it’s not da bomb for everyone, so not high on my list of things to share. But sometimes, when you work too closely at something, it’s hard not to think it’s amazing. This is why we did user testing. In August I drove down to Ohio to sit behind a two-way mirror as volunteers tried to buy product on a not-yet-finished version of our site. Aw c’mon, it’s not as creepy as it sounds! They knew we were there! And they were paid! One lady even turned around and waved to us at the end of her test! Anyway, the feedback was critical to the success of our site. During the week I was there, we moved content and links around and ended up with so...

I was afraid when we left our apartment—our wooded, pond-overlooking, suburban apartment—for a more urban neighborhood that we wouldn't have the same wildlife showings. We saw gaggles of ducks regularly, beavers, turtles and blue herons, not to mention the entire family of squirrels I was supporting through bread handouts. Well, silly of me to be concerned. We've got squirrels, including one who spent the entire afternoon as I was working from home stuffing straw into his mouth and running up our neighbor's tree to build his nest. We've also got neighborhood feral cats, which I'm not a fan of but still kind of think are cute (don't tell Ben). And as of last night, we have turkeys. Nature, I love. Turkeys, I hate . We might have to sell the house over this.

This is one post in a series of posts about my work involvement in the Steelcase Store relaunch. For more details, visit here ; for less details, check out my recipes and stuff . The business requirements determined how the site would work, but how would it look ? For that, we needed a site map and style guide . Come Spring 2014 I, along with my coworkers, were feeling overwhelmed with the idea of building one consistent site from three old ones. Some content was out-dated, some was broken, and I needed to better understand what content was coming over. You know, it’s like trying to avoid having three variations of spinach dip at the family picnic. I started by creating a site map, a big spreadsheet with one line for every single page that would be on the new site. I met with coworkers to determine pages that were crucial and pages that weren’t of value. The completed map helped me visualize our content, establish a hierarchical structure for the site and show the team content ...

Man ever since the snow melted, we've been busy. Here's what's been happening: Meyer May House Last weekend was a working weekend for me . But since our development company from Ohio was in town, a coworker/tour guide offered to walk them and anyone else interested through the Meyer May House on Sunday.  The Meyer May House is a Frank Lloyd Wright designed home from 1908, now Steelcase owned museum. Steelcase bought the house in the late 80's and left no detail out as they restored it to its original glory. The house is incredible with geometric pattern, attention to detail and unobstructed floor plan. This is definitely a must-see for anyone in town next.     Kalamabasketball With two big college basketball games on this past weekend, including Michigan State, we had to celebrate Saturday some how. So we drove down to Kalamazoo and spent the afternoon/night with Ben's high school/college pal Allan and his fiance Jessie. Even with the turnou...

This is one post in a series of posts about my work involvement in the Steelcase Store relaunch. For more details, visit here ; for less details, check out my recipes and stuff . You know what I like to do? Build stuff. Immediately. Without reading instructions. Super fast. Which, you know, always turns out swimmingly , right Ben? Thankfully, the M.O. of my team at the start of this project was quite the opposite. The first few months I was involved included many day-long business requirement meetings. In a big group, we captured everything we needed the site to do, and then everything we wanted on top of that. In some cases, our shiny new system offered us more functionality than we requested, so we talked about how to harness some of that new power and what to leave out. A good example of our needs was for more information when selling conference tables. Customers were frustrated that the largest size conference table would arrive to their office and the box couldn’t fit thr...

Hang up that roller and put the paint tray far from site—we’re DONE with painting. Inside at least. We saved the biggest project for last—the kitchen and dining room. It’s a big combined space with lots of do-this-before-this steps to consider, and for a long time we didn’t have an agreed upon game plan. The first task was the ceiling. A noticeable patch from an old track light needed help, as did the mis-matched ceiling paint. To whoever decided on two different shade/finishes of white for the same ceiling—I’d like to invite you over for after school cookies, and only have amazing smells, crumbs and a half empty glass of milk for you when you arrive. The walls were a challenge, too. We have a long soffit stretching from the dining room through and around the kitchen, a built-in wanna-be cupboard, wood paneling that we considered getting drywalled, and a shade of red in the kitchen that I do like but didn’t know how to tame. We decided to trust our neutral gray and relied heavi...