Our First House

Today we closed on our first house. I know we moved out the other day, and honestly these last few days our stuff has been out of it has made me disconnect from it. But its still our first house. We put a lot of work & love into this house and we are sad to not finish all the projects we dreamt about. I love these pictures of the changing house now more than ever.

Moving In! May 2011

Fall 2012

Fall 2013

August 2014

 We went back today to drop off our garage door openers and to say goodbye one last time, and I was a little sad standing in Evelyn's room. I spent many late nights and early mornings in that room with our sweet girl. Jordan slaved away putting up the chair rail and we spent so much time in there. Our bedroom doesn't feel the same, and the house just seems like a shell for what it held -  which is really how it should be. But there are still so many memories in that house for us, and we will always cherish those.

Evleyn's Room After! 

Evelyn's Room Before

Kitchen Before

Kitchen After! 

We met the people buying our house today and they seemed like wonderful people. They are just pregnant and will love the house like we did. They were the first people to see the house and are very excited about it and said no other house compared to our house. That made me feel really good that they will enjoy it as much as we did. I guess thats all you really want when you say goodbye to your house and the hard work you put into it.  You want somebody else to appreciate what you did there. And I think they do, and will make it even better.

Walking up those steps today was familiar and comfortable, but now its time to step outside our comfort zone and take an adventure. Goodbye Wheatlands house.

Sunday Project

 We've had this problem in our house. It was the late 90's every fixture craze of being gold. The nasty, tacky, shiny fake gold. Gosh, I can't even explain how much I hate that! Who would chose to put that in a home? Well apparently when our house was built in the early 2000's the previous owners decided it was an okay thing to have. I say yucky. But if that was (one of) my biggest complaint, I could handle it.

Old, nasty light & UGLY faucet! 

When we first moved in 2 years ago, we had to change a few light fixtures first because they were AWFUL!! Our main floor lights were definitely priority. We didn't need anything fancy, but we didn't want anything shiny chrome either. We went with some brushed nickel, and everything looked 100x better! 

The thing we did wait on was our bathrooms. There was nothing wrong with the lights and the faucets, and we wanted to replace much of the flooring in the house first, so we dealt with the ugly apartment style bathroom lights for a while. I can't even explain to you though how terrible our faucets were. They were nasty shiny chrome and the handles were the same, stupid shiny gold! Who combines those 2 awful things in 1 faucet? Yuck, yuck yuck! We finally decided it was time to switch that stuff out. Not some big home make-over project (we've got another project in the works, besides the babies room!), but just a swap. We went to the store and found great light fixtures for all 3 of our bathrooms and got new faucets too. What a difference those things make! I am shocked by how much brighter everything is! 

But then came my next project idea. We have the raw edge, basic mirrors in our bathrooms. Now, I really can't complain about them because they are huge and serve their purpose just fine, but they are definitely not the prettiest. I've been wanting to update them, but don't feel like buying new mirrors and then fixing the wall behind the mirrors if the new ones were different. That sounded like way to much work for me! So, I turned to trusty ole' Pinterest and found a great idea! I would put up tile around the mirror and, BAM, new looking beautiful mirror. I have to say, Jordan wasn't completely envisioning my plan and I'm pretty sure he thought I was going crazy. The guy at Home Depot thought I was some stupid housewife who saw this idea on HGTV and thought I could do it on my own. And I have to admit, I was a little skeptical myself. But I started with our half bathroom because if I royally screwed up, it was a small enough mirror that it wouldn't cost an arm and a leg to replace. 

The tile before

MOST amazing product! 

Jordan and I spent some time picking out the tile and of course, we picked out one of the most expensive ones. It was still only about $10 a sheet, but compared to some other ones, it was a bit more pricey. We found some awesome tile adhesive at Home Depot and bought a package of that and headed back home. This adhesive stuff is my favorite thing ever. You literally peel off the back side, stick it to the surface you are tiling (counter, backsplash, in my case a mirror) and then peel off the other side that has a different adhesive and stick the tile right onto it. Again, I was a bit skeptical, but it was soooo easy and worked out perfect for this project! I highly recommend this stuff, turns out its what my parents used on their backsplash in their kitchen! 

Up close of the adhesive sheet

I cut each tile out separately and chose not to get and grout, for many reasons. First, I've never grouted before. I wanted this to be a "me" project and not something that Jordan had to help me with, he has enough stuff to do around the house. Second, the example I found on pinterest didn't use grout and it looked fine. And third, how was the grout going to reflect in the mirror? The edges are exposed and you can see the back side of the tiles reflecting. 

So, here is my finished project! 

After cutting the adhesive paper, pulling the tiles off their mesh backing and sticking them all together, I think it looks pretty darn good! The whole thing only took about an hour to put together. We haven't hung it back up yet because we need mirror glue to stick it back up on the wall, with the bottom brackets still in place. 

I can't wait to do this with our other mirrors. I just have to find the right tile and go for it! It is so super easy and I think it will make such a difference in our room, along with the new lights and faucets of course! I really want to go show that Home Depot guy how silly he was for underestimating a lady on a mission! 

Baby Prep

Jordan and his guns!

Jordan has been working so hard on getting our nursery baby ready! It was a pretty boring room, and from the beginning before I knew what kind of theme, paint color, etc I wanted for the room, I knew I wanted a chair rail and maybe some wainscoting. So my wonderful husband had to get started on building it! I am against buying things straight off the rack apparently, so we had to "create" our own chair rail. So many things in the store are too traditional, or too ornate, or too frumpy for a nursery. We like simple, clean lines, so thats what I was going for. Easier said than done. But this is what we came up with! We still need to paint the new chair rail all white, and what is below it white also, but its coming together! The color on the top half of the walls I am still not sure about, so I've got to test out some paint colors once it gets a little nicer and we can have the windows open to air out the house when we are painting!

Our animals "helping" out

One of the best days so far in this baby prep is when we got our furniture delivery! Our animals were all about "helping" out when we got the furniture and couldn't stand to be out of the room as we were figuring out where to put it! I'm sure we are going to change it all about 90 times before the baby comes, but for now, we are just going to keep it where it is and see how we like it! Jordan had a fun time putting together the crib! It is so much better in person, in our house than it was in the store! I absolutely love the clean lines and simplicity of it! It will be perfect for a little boy or a little girl and that makes me so incredibly happy!

Our beautiful crib! 

There are so many more things to think about when it comes to getting a nursery set up and ready for a baby. I'm probably over-thinking it all, because after all, its just a baby's room, right? With all these perfect pinterest nurseries and blogs about how to make the best, most chic baby room around, its hard to keep up - especially when you don't know if you're having a boy or a girl! Its even more frustrating that all the stores sell stupid, tacky, themed bedding sets. I mean, people actually buy this crap! There are some seriously hideous themes, and the sad thing is, there are people that think they are cute! I don't want a specific theme and that makes it 100x more difficult to find things I like. I'm finding myself piecing together parts of different sets to make a simple and clean baby room! I have to keep telling myself that all this stuff won't really matter, but I still want it to be perfect and put together and wonderful for our sweet baby!

Its time for me to just take a deep breath, relax, and go with what is simple and easy to put together and make our baby's room perfect. It may not be "pinterest perfect" but who really cares? I don't have to prove anything to anybody, and my baby won't ever know a difference!

Yearly Traditions

Since we moved into our house just over a year ago, I have been thinking about traditions to have for our family as we continue to grow. Sometimes I feel like some people have too many traditions and all they do is all their traditional activities and never do anything new. I don't want to get stuck into always doing the same things just because its tradition. And sure, some traditions are good to continue. I think we may have continued a great tradition earlier this week.

When we first moved into our house, my friend took a picture of us as we were moving in. We were in our front door and it was really cool. Last fall we planted  a tree in our front yard and thought it would be cool to photograph the tree growing each year to see how much its grown. Last winter I took a picture of the front of our house to document the tree being in our front yard. This week we decided to take a family picture out by our tree.

So here it is. Our dysfunctional family photo by our tree! Chloe (our dog) is licking her lips (an annoying habit she always does) and our two kitties are in the doorway looking left out. We sort of planned it that way. Anytime we go out front, the cats come to the door and look jealous that we are all outside and they are stuck inside. But I think its great. Its our perfect family! 

But thinking about this as a tradition. How many traditions are worth it? When do you know when you over-do the tradition of traditions? I feel like every family has to have some and there is deep meaning in doing something that reminds you of family or certain happy moments. Can you try too hard to make those memorable moments? I feel like you can, but how do you know you are? I guess there can't really be clear cut guidelines, but hopefully you just know. I think a good judge of over-doing the traditions is when every family trip, dinner, or holiday is stuck with only one way to do it because of the tradition. The best memories tend to come when nothing is planned and when true memorable moments can naturally happen. Just let things happen. I guess thats a good way to  live! Maybe that should be my new mantra...