Thursday, October 30, 2014

The key to my...heart?!

Or not....Chance and I do not use our keys because of the push to start so I'm never able to find mine buried in my purse so instead we open the garage door, with the garage door opener, obviously...

So it opens, we pull in and now we are at the back door...we still don't have keys in our hands so we removed the handle and replaced it with a Keypad handle.

Lazy?! Probably...Genius?! Maybe...But talk about convenient!



NO KEYS!!! NO KEYS!!!

Wednesday, October 29, 2014

No more weeds!

We went to Chance's parents and for a house warming gift they got us a weed eater which we definitely needed!

Chance and his dad are twinsies :)


Thanks so much Jeff and Renea that was very nice of you guys! We love it!

Tuesday, October 28, 2014

Sprucing up the Kitchen!

Chance and I wanted to dress up our kitchen so we thought we would start with kitchen hardware.

So off to our new favorite place, AKA date night at Home Depot.


We found the drawer pulls I wanted...and then Chance pointed out a different style. I immediately shot it down because for so long now I've wanted the half moon shape that is all over Pinterest right now. He kept pulling me back to this one kind and I'm so glad he did, because the more I looked at them the cooler they became and I haven't seen them anywhere, so glad I have something different than everyone else. 


Chance sent me a picture while I was at work of his progress and I noticed all of my spices were out of the drawer and on the countertop. My first thought was "OMG those were organized alphabetically!" and my second thought was "OMG I love the drawer pulls!"

So when I got home I went straight to my spice drawer to see what kind of havoc he caused...and this is what I found.

They are alphabetized and everything! He knows me so well and know's I would've said something about it.

We picked out cabinet pulls (they are actually the same one's my mom is getting for her kitchen) but they didn't have enough in stock....so that's on hold for now. 

Sunday, October 26, 2014

My world is complete!

Trying not to be so dramatic...but seriously it is!

And want to know why?!

Because of this little puppy...




















I'M.OBSESSED.

Go get one now if you don't have one. I don't know why I'm so intrigued but I seriously love it. I cook everything on it! It's like having a mini hibachi in your kitchen.

Thanks mom for this house warming gift, I love it...in case you couldn't tell ;) 

Saturday, October 25, 2014

A mini update!

So here are some pics from around the house that I have been taking to show friends. They aren't blog ready, but everyone keeps bugging me for photos so I hope this keeps you entertained for now :)

Study plan:
  • Shiplap the clock wall with a white wash and then rehang the clock.
  • Curtains, of course.
  • The rug was outside on the patio, but it's so big it swallowed the rug, it probably won't be staying here either.
  • The desk and chair are actually going in my craft room, the bedroom that has the accessories all over the floor, so for now they sit here.

 Foyer plan:
  • We should probably finish painting ;)
  • Do a cool wood feature on the red clock wall
  • Hang the red clock

Kitchen plan:
  • Buy the same rock as the fireplace and rock the barstool wall
  • Finish painting!
  • Install cabinet hardware
Dining room plan:
  • Again, finish painting
  • Hang bamboo shades
  • Hang curtains
  • I did buy a red side table but thought the large wall needed a bigger piece so I've moved it (pics below)

Laundry room plan:
  • Remove the laundry rod going across and replace with cabinets for closed storage...and because I can't even reach the shelf
  • Put a countertop above the tops of the washer/dryer for folding space
  • Install some sort of ironing board that folds away
  • Maybe start looking for our iron...still haven't come across it!


Living room plan:
  • Oh boy, where to begin...this room needs a ton. 
  • Paint, wallpaper, furniture, bamboo shades, curtains...the list goes on and on!


The living room hall...not sure what to call this area. Its the area right behind the back of the couch that leads to the guest hall.
  • This is the red piece I orginally had planned for the dining room, but too small. It's a perfect size for this wall and will look even better once we replace the carpet with wood.


Wednesday, October 22, 2014

Sanding...Sanding...and more..Storage

Let the sanding begin.

I hope Chance has been resting his elbow because he will be using a lot of elbow grease on this project! Or so I thought....please tell me why he ended up using the sander and I ended up hand sanding the drawers, something is wrong with this picture!

But I will say I got tired pretty quickly so I just kind of ran the sand paper over it a few times, and then Chance had to go over all of it with the sander...so I guess he did more work than me ;)

My mom was moving office's and their new one can't store as much stuff as their old one, so she was getting rid of these filing cabinets...O.M.G. another thing I couldn't imagine not having.

I will post a pic soon of the number of storage containers we now can put up in the attic that are empty because of what we have in these filing cabinets now. Eventually I will get around to labeling them too!

Yes...those are a ton of bags of trash. We had so much bubble wrap, paper, and trash from the move that we filled a ton of bags and have yet to haul them off. For now we are putting them out with the trash every Tuesday...one..bag..at..a..time...because that's how small our trash bin is. The city asked which size trash can we wanted and how much they cost a month, so I went with the smallest thinking it would be enough because how much trash can two people generate in a week, right?! A shocking amount! Our recycle bin is actually bigger...and it was free! So we have become the recycling family. Chance goes to toss something in the trash and from across the room I'm like "WAITTTTT that looks like it can go in the recycle!"

Monday, October 20, 2014

I'll take it!

So now that we have a home and a place to store things, I am jumping all over items that friends no longer want. For example, this massive piece of granite that has a sink attached...I plan on doing something really cool with it but haven't decided what just yet.

In the meantime this granite that weighs a ton is camping out in our garage.

The number of times I have accidentally kicked it, stumped my toe, or bumped my shin into it: 4 and counting...


Or all this travertine and slate tile....no idea what to do with it, guess it's time to start Pinteresting!

Stay tuned for projects to come :)

Sunday, October 19, 2014

We are officially homeowners!

Chance and I woke up this morning with a little pep in our step..we couldn't believe after all the waiting that today was the day we would get the keys to our house. The hour drive to Fort Worth felt like a three hour drive we were so excited!

Once we got to our house we did the final walk through and everything looked great...well most everything. The master closet door was a little messed up and the doorbell wasn't working, but all things they could fix before we got back from closing.

We headed over to closing and apparently there was some miscommunication between the lender and our closing agency so we were pushed back a few hours. This definitely put a kink in my timeline for the day. I had everything working out perfectly...to the minute! We would now just barely make it to the U-Haul place right before they closed. Time to just drive around and kill time...not to mention waste gas! They were finally ready for us so we headed back up there.

Closing wasn't such a bad experience everyone makes it out to be. Maybe Chance and I just write incredibly fast, but we were only there for an hour and had there not been so much chit chatting I bet we could have been done in 45 minutes.

Chance and I after we finished closing:

So now that we were finished we were ready to receive our keys....at least that's what we thought was going to happen, that's how it happens in the movies! You go to closing and when you're done you get the keys on the spot...yeah not so much. We were then told that we could go pick up the keys from our sales guy who has an office in the model home in the neighborhood. Now we really aren't making it to the U-Haul place before it closes...but we were still super excited, so here we are in the car headed to the model home for our keys.

So we drove all the way across town back to the house and were so excited, as soon as we walked in I had a huge smile on my face, my hands laid out and ready to receive those keys! Yeah....not so fast...the funds had to be cleared on everyone's ends, so Chance and I sat in the model home living room starring at each other...excitement and energy level went from about a 10 to a 2. We decided to walk over to our house to check it out since the doorbell man was there and we knew it would be unlocked. All we did all day was sit around and wait for people! Now we really weren't going to make it to U-Haul before they closed, so I called my little brother and he ran up there and grabbed the truck for us. Thanks Nate :)

Once funds cleared we finally received our keys. We zoomed out of the neighborhood and flew back to Rockwall....and by fly I mean we actually rolled because we were now in 5 o'clock traffic...oh joy! On the drive home I looked over at Chance and I said "Sure hope these keys work! ha" We were so determined to get to Rockwall before traffic started that we didn't even bother to go by our house to test them...but they had a tag on them that had our address and the doorbell guy had just handed them back to the sales guy so we felt kind of ok about them working, but secretly deep down I was freaking out.

We finally made it back to Rockwall, hung out for a bit, ate dinner, enjoyed the last few minutes being at my parents house, and then started packing the U-Haul. We ended up having SO MUCH STUFF that we filled the biggest U-Haul you could rent (made for a 4 bedroom house) and my car and it took us a really long time. It's now about 9:30pm and we start the 70 mile journey to the town we will now call home, Fort Worth.

We make it to Fort Worth in a little over an hour, Chance was driving the U-Haul way too fast! ;)
Pull up to the house, put the keys in the door...and the keys don't work...haha just kidding! They totally worked, we walked in and just looked around and couldn't believe it was ours.

A few pics, that I actually had taken the next morning:




Time to start the unpacking process...wow we have a ton of stuff! I seriously couldn't believe it. Good thing we came here instead of going to our storage unit because there is no way anything else would fit in the truck. (Keep in mind we didn't stack things on top of some of the furniture, so we didn't really fill every space to the U-Haul.)


Nate had come with us to help, and good thing he did because we would've been working all night! We finished, went in, all showered, relaxed and crashed. What a day!

The next morning the AT&T U-verse guy showed up and was ready to install the internet and TV. He asked where our TVs were so he could test everything out....and Chance and I just looked at each other and started laughing. We realized all of our TVs are in storage, which we hadn't gone to yet. Of course!

Chance and I had been talking about possibly buying a new TV for the living room and moving the living room TV into our room, and our room TV to the guest room. Well Chance jumped all over this opportunity and ran out to buy a new TV...now that that situation was solved, it was time to move to the next...why wasn't our doorbell working still?! We had some guys in the house working on that and after a few hours they finally fixed it. In the midst of finding the doorbell problem they had to break some of the bricks around the doorbell, so then we had a bricker come over and fix that problem.

Chance returned with the TV and breakfast....oh thank goodness!

Our new TV: it looks like a baby but it's BIG!

The AT&T guy was still working on getting everything set up so the guys headed out to Denton to our storage unit to grab "a few things"...or so they thought. Over the past year and a half that we have had that unit I have been doing nothing but shopping, shopping and more shopping! I would sneak it to Denton every now and then and put it in storage. I wish I would've been there to see the look on Chance's face! I'm sure it was priceless. Thank goodness they took an empty truck because guess what....they filled it to the rim yet again! So 4 hours later the guys arrived back in Fort Worth...what did they do, play around in Denton? Geez guys! We seriously had so much stuff it took them about 2 hours to fill the U-Haul. By the time they arrived back we had thirty minutes to unload what took them 2 hours to load, and get the U-Haul returned by 5pm before getting charged with another day. So we frantically unloaded everything into the garage, slammed the doors shut, jumped in the cars and headed to the U-Haul location...oh but of course it's 4:30, prime traffic time! We sat at a red light, for I kid you not, 10 minutes, just starring at the U-Haul place, just not able to get close enough to turn into it.

We finally made it...a few minutes late...and returned it without getting any extra late charges. Thanks U-Haul guys!

Chance jumped in my car with Nate and I and we headed back to Rockwall to drop Nate off and pick up Rylee. We have moved with Rylee in the house once before and it's not something we ever want to do again, so we thought it would be best to leave her at my parents on moving night.

After a 2 hour drive we were back in Rockwall. My mom cooked us dinner and we hung out and watched a little football, and then headed back home. 11:30pm we are back at home...exhausted from the past 2 days that we didn't even touch a box in the garage. I did manage to put some sample paint colors on the wall to test.



Friday morning:
We woke up very refreshed and ready to tackle the day. We had taken off work from Wednesday-Friday so we had plenty of time to focus on unpacking. We decided we would start with paint, because we figured it would take the longest and we couldn't really hang anything until the paint was up. I still remember our first trip to Home Depot. It's actually the first business you come to when you pull out of our neighborhood. We walked in...not knowing much about home improvement, other than he did Habitat for Humanity style work every summer and I watch a ton of HGTV. So we bought our paint...asked the Home Depot employee about rollers and took his advide on buying the "smooth" rollers.

Just a little painting tip - If you have a thick, deep wall texture, invest in a more expensive thicker fuller roller because we didn't, we bought the "smooth" roller since the paint guy at Home Depot suggested it...O.M.G. we rolled and rolled and rolled and rolled for literally the ENTIRE day and only finished a third of the social areas. I figured we would focus a whole day on painting and just knock it all out...yeah NOT! Not to mention we are painting grey over white so you have to roll over the area like 17 times to get all the white specs covered.

The first room we started in was the study...at this point we were still excited, had the music going, windows open...it was FUN! And of course Rylee is supervising.



6 hours later Stacey, Mandy and the boys all came over. At this point painting wasn't much fun anymore, but it had to get done so Chance and I continued painting while Mandy and Stacey were bringing boxes in and organizing all of our new accessories in one of the extra bedrooms. We finally called it a night after we couldn't pick the rollers up anymore.

The home warming basket my sisters brought us, the best starters you could imagine! And after hours of painting, we dug right into the wine!


My sisters collected all our throw pillows and called me into the room to have an intervention...I don't know what they are talking about...this is not too many pillows, because it's impossible to have too many throw pillows...what do you think?! ;)



Saturday morning: Mandy, Stacey and the boys headed out early so Jax could make his soccer game and Chance's parents came in town. I was so glad we had two more helpers to help paint because...as sad as this is to say, Chance and I were sore! And Chance had to run to work for a few hours so it would've been me painting all by myself, and let's be real, I would've gotten bored and ADD would've kicked in and I would've been in the extra bedroom playing with all our new stuff. So they helped keep me motivated.

It was such a nice day so Rylee took a break from supervising the painting and needed to go get a tan on her new patio.

We literally painted an entire day again! And guess what, even with the three of us we only got another third completed. I couldn't believe how long it was taking...it just didn't seem right. Again, we used the "smooth" roller the paint guy at HD (that's what I call it since we go there so much now) suggested. Update: Mycah came over for a girls night and we painted...but this time we used a much thicker roller, and were able to finish the last third in a matter of minutes!

Chance got back from work and he and his dad turned their attention to decking the attic with extra wood my dad had left over from the outdoor kitchen project. Thanks so much dad, you literally doubled our storage area. The attic is now decked the entire size of our garage!

His mom and I focused on the inside and she helped me unpack and organize the kitchen. Because our stuff had been in storage for so long I wanted to wash EVERYTHING! I couldn't risk not knowing if any dirty little creature had used the restroom or walked across a plate or something. So in total we ran 14 loads of laundry and ran the dishwasher 19 times. WOW! Again...we have too much stuff!

During the afternoon, Lowe's had delivered our fridge...which BTW I'm obsessed with. Loving the French Doors so much! They also delivered our washer....we ordered a dryer as well but that location ended up not having one so it was scheduled to deliver the next day from another location.



His mom had brought over a few meals, which was so sweet and exactly what you need when you move into a new home, because we hadn't gone to the grocery store yet and at that point I was already sick of eating fast food.

They stayed the night and headed out early the next morning because his mom wasn't feeling well.

Sunday afternoon:
My parents showed up and we were so excited to show them around since the last time they were there the house was in the framing stages. The dryer arrived so we were able to show them all of our new appliances. My mom and I headed to the grocery store because we figured we would be gone a while...geez that first grocery store trip is expensive!

We came back and all ate a late lunch and then they headed out. It had been 5 whole days that we were in our house and we probably unpacked a total of 3 boxes. We were not ready to go back to work and needed another week off to work on unpacking. But unfortunately, that didn't happen and Monday morning came too soon.