Bathroom Update

After showing you one of the upstairs bedrooms, I thought it was only fitting to show you its bathroom, too.
Before:

Notice there is no mirror above the sink.

(All the little signs state that the house has been winterized.)

After:

My pop of purple.

All of the photos are from my trips to Italy.

Glad to be finished painting this bathroom! Paint colors are Wet Pavement and Oatlands Violet, both by Valspar. Even though it wasn't a very large room, there was so much to paint around that the taping took forever. Still a couple things to do, but it is mostly complete. What do you think?

Updates Upstairs

Like Cary mentioned in the last post, we've been turning the house into a home. We've been focusing a lot of our effort on the lawn and the upstairs. Here's a few pictures of one of the upstairs bedrooms.

Before

View of the closets

The window

After

We painted the walls in Valspar's "Wet Pavement."

I've been inspired by the white and grey decor that has been so popular lately. I've been doing it on a budget, though. We got the headboard from a family member, and the bedding was on sale. I got the window back in college and just painted it yellow to match the decor.

The cute night stand was found at a yard sale by Cary's mom, and the lamp belonged to my Mom. Both got a fresh coat of paint to update them a little. (There's more to see, but that's all for now. It is still a work in progress.)

Home buying process

While looking over our blog recently, I realized I wrote a post the week after we closed on our home but never published it. So here goes, 6 months late...

Now that we have moved in and gotten settled, I thought I'd write a little bit about our experiences with home buying. We began with figuring out what we wanted in a house. We wanted 4 bedrooms, 3-4 bathrooms, a decent yard, and a front porch. We also wanted a reasonable commute. Then we used online searches (mainly zillow.com) to find homes in the area we wanted that also met our criteria. From there, we would drive to the houses to look at the exterior in person.

We ended up buying the very first house we saw. We called Century 21 on Memorial Day on the way home from a wedding and an agent was willing to meet us that day to look at it. We decided to meet the following day and go through the home. Kelly fell in love immediately, but unfortunately, the price was too high, and I wrote it off. We looked at several others, some smaller, some bigger, different features in each, but we always compared it to the first one, none able to measure up.

Our church did a sermon series on prayer and one of the sermons was on praying big prayers and specific prayers. The take home message was: pray in such a way that a human couldn't cause what you pray for. We took that to heart and started praying about the house. We prayed about the specific home we wanted and the specific price we hoped to get. God answered our prayer, and we got both.

From the time we first looked at the house to our closing date was 4 months and the time from our first offer to closing was 7 weeks. We were able to take advantage of the low mortgage rates (3.375% for 15 years), which have actually fallen a little more since we closed.

Below are some before and after pictures for the first 6 months. As we've both learned, buying a house is just the beginning; the rest of the time is spent making it yours.

We had the front railings repaired and cut down the jungle in the side yard.

We repaired the screens of the back porch and manicured the lawn a little.

Had the holes in the garage repaired.

Paint, Paint, Paint!

Since moving into our house we have bought at least half a dozen gallons of paint, painted two bedrooms, and"touched up" several walls in the kitchen and master bedroom.
I've recently painted some furniture, too....trying to join that whole re-purpose revolution. So that means cans and cans of spray paint.

We have plans to re-do the front porch, and we have bought paint for that as well. It seems like we spend many Saturdays at Lowe's or Sherwin Williams! The cans are piling up, not to mention our attic is full of paint cans from the previous owner, most of which are no good anymore. Anyone need a gallon of pastel purple? Yea, neither do we!
Have you seen this service from Lowe's?? Among other applications, the Home Profile keeps track of all of the color formulas for your home's paint. Now you don't have to keep paint cans for years and years or just guess at the formulas or paint color names.

Potato Soup from Scratch

Dinner last night=Potato Soup from Scratch
I was inspired by Ree's (the Pioneer Woman) blog, the Tasty Kitchen. She featured a Cowboy Potato Chowder here. I changed the recipe to suit what I had on hand, and in the end it turned out pretty good.

Start with the chicken stock and water and bring to a boil. Add your spices now, too.

Add the potatoes

Once the potatoes are soft, add the milk, or in my case, half and half.

Allow to simmer. Time to make the roux which will thicken the soup. I am no expert at this step so I will not go into detail here. Please refer to the website for this one. My first attempt was weak, so I started over and doubled my ingredients. I think this ended up making the soup a little too thick, but Cary liked it, so in the end, it worked.

Add the flour to the olive oil...and be patient (again, refer to the website for this step).

And the best part, the bacon. This was Cary's contribution to the meal prep.

Combine all the goodness above, plus a tablespoon of butter, allow to warm through and through and add shredded cheese and yummy garlic toast. Dinner is served.

Our Trip

Back in January we took a trip out West to Park City and Las Vegas. We went with a couple friends, Brandon and Kathryn and had an awesome time. Luckily, Kathryn took a ton of photos and shared them with me (most of the ones on this post are hers).

As our luck would have it, Utah was experiencing the driest winter on record. There was very little snow in the low-lying areas. Luckily, the guys still found some good runs.

While the boys skied, Kathryn and I enjoyed the spa, explored Utah and found the HGTV Dream Home.

We found this wolf, I mean dog, outside a store in Park City. Luckily, he turned out to be very friendly!
The boys grew "mountain men" beards...even scarier in person.
Cary and Brandon skied Park City Resort and Deer Valley.

The Dream Home wasn't open for tours, so no, we did not go inside. The security guard was very nice, though and answered all of our questions. Wonder who the lucky winner is?!


We also ventured to the Olympic park which is now a museum as well as a training center. We were tempted to try the bob sled run, but decided to let the boys be the dare devils during this vacation.


The second leg of our trip was in Vegas. We spent some time at the tables, went to a Cirque du Soleil show and climbed Red Rock Canyon (plus found some burros).

Packing for two different climates can be a challenge...luckily, it all fit!

We stayed at the Palazzo Hotel, which is next door and connected to the Venetian. All of the casinos were decorated for the Chinese New Year, with a Dragon theme (this is the year of the dragon, by the way).



Kathryn and me at Caesar's Palace. The casino was decorated with flowers, plants and all sorts of Chinese lanterns.

We couldn't miss the fountains at the Bellagio. Gorgeous!

The Eiffel Tower lit up for the evening.

Red Rock Canyon

Possibly the best photo of the trip:

***Thanks Kathryn for the photos!

Organizing the Garage (Part 1)

Sorry we've neglected the blog for so long. We've been busy tackling home improvement projects around the house and keeping up with Asher. One of our first projects was organizing the garage.

Although the garage is great for storage, there is only so much floor space. Plus, Kelly and I are bound and determined to actually park BOTH of our vehicles inside our garage. So we are combating the clutter with "shelving units" made by Rubbermaid. They are called fast tracks and are a system of tracks and hooks that anchor into the studs and drywall. You can find them at Lowe's or Walmart.

This is part one of the garage organization project...check back for part two.