Our Beautiful Dining Room

Our first anniversary was in October and we were trying to decide on our anniversary present and I know that the traditional first year anniversary gift is paper. Well, instead of paper we bought a dining room table, kind of the same thing, right? Both are from trees, so does that work as a justification? 

Being the bargain hunter I am, I watched the prices fluctuate until they finally reached our price point which luckily was Columbus day weekend and also the weekend of our first anniversary. And a table isn't complete without chargers, napkins, and napkin rings. 

Our beautiful hurricane centerpiece is courtesy of an early Christmas present from my Mom.

We are heading to California tomorrow to spend Christmas with my Mom. I'm also recruiting her to help make drapes for the house. Pictures to come!

Merry Christmas everyone!!

Time to Catch Up

It’s amazing how busy you can get and not even really know it! But we’re back and it is time to catch up! I’m going to try to recap our lives as of late so it may seem a little random but here goes…

We got a new washer and dryer…woot woot! We did tons of price comparison shopping and research. We probably did TOO much research. It seems washers and dryers these days only last 3-5 years, this conclusion prompted us to by an extended warranty. Normally I’m against the extended warranty because I feel like I’m being taken and for the most part I probably am, but I’m just going to look at this one as an insurance policy – it will help me sleep better! Anyway, we decided on the Frigidaire Affinity. I really wanted this crazy Samsung set but I didn’t want to pay double the price so Frigidaire it is. We’ve had it for about 3 weeks and so far I’m really happy with it. It has some nice bells and whistles, wash cycles with options like steam, sanitize, and delicate. The best part – I can finish ALL our laundry in about 3 hours. The old washer and dryer took me one to two days to finish laundry! For Christmas this year I got a washer and Brett got a dryer. Let’s hear it for grown up Christmas presents! Hey at least they are prettier than the last ones...

Thanksgiving was great! We have so much to be thankful for and it was nice to take a day to really remember how blessed we are. My brother and his wife came to town for a week and stayed with us a few nights. We did all the touristy stuff, ate terribly, and even made a trip to Audubon Zoo. We even had perfect Thanksgiving Day weather high 70’s low 80’s, it was absolutely beautiful!

To follow Thanksgiving a friend and I went shopping on Black Friday, I knocked out all my Christmas shopping by noon. It was awesome! Brett even did a little Black Friday shopping of his own via Lowes.com. My mom had given us a gift card a little while ago and Brett figured it was a great time to stock up on tools and so now we are now the proud owners of a new saw, drill, and battery pack for the drill…

To top off our Thanksgiving weekend and get into the Christmas spirit we decorated our Christmas Tree! Isn’t it beautiful?! I obsessed about the color scheme for roughly 20 minutes in Target while Brett patiently strolled up and down the Christmas aisles. I FINALLY decided to go with a red and gold. This year's tree is SO much better than the sad little Charlie Brown tree I picked out last year!

I continued to spread holiday cheer by sending out our Christmas cards (before December 1st).  I LOVE our Christmas card! A good friend of ours was gracious enough to offer to take some family pictures of us and they turned out AMAZING!

Since my shopping is done, presents are wrapped, and Christmas cards have been sent the only thing left to do is to enjoy the rest of the Holiday Season...and blog!

One room done, a few to go!

I've been feeling very accomplished this week. We finally finished decorating one room in our house and I have to say I think it looks pretty darn good! Honestly, it's been 90% done for some time but it took me about a month to finally hang up the pictures in the living room. 

So without further ado, here is our living room!

We already had the furniture, thanks to some hand me downs and the rug really pulled it all together. Brett has always loved the green velvet sofas, I was skeptical but they actually are pretty cool. I mean really, who has olive green velvet sofas?? And the rug, well it was a steal - to say we got a deal on it, is an understatement. It had been a special order item that was returned. When I first saw it I thought it was cool but I wasn't really sold. I mean I really liked it but I was definitely on the fence about "needing" it. Thank goodness for my amazing husband that told me just to buy it. I think he was trying to avoid what I call a non-buyer's remorse moment - you know when you see something you like and then you sit on it for too long...yeah that's non-buyer's remorse. And since we've already had a few of those moments he decided to preemptive move was needed.  

Here's a closer look at the rug, it's very different but it has a pretty cool color scheme!

 

Here was my previous non-buyer's remorse moment, an another awesome area rug. I fell in love with this one the minute I saw it but since it was a little out of my price range, I decided to stalk it on potterybarn.com until it went on sale. My plan failed, the rug sold out online before it went on sale. I was definitely bummed! Poor Brett had to hear about it for days! Then with a little luck our local store still had one in stock and thanks to a no sales tax weekend and 10% off coupon from Pottery Barn, I got my rug!

You'll notice Shelby has made the rug her personal toy and bone repository. I lost the battle of wills about this being a dog free rug. Yeah, who was I kidding with that idea?!

In other random news we finally got a flag pole for the front of the house. For some reason having a flag pole on the front of the house is one of Brett's favorite ideas. He even went to the trouble of finding this very fitting and festive flag for Halloween...

Because Every Great Porch Needs Adirondacks

Our house has an amazing porch! No seriously, the porch was probably the selling point. The rest of the house was like the free gift with purchase. The porch came with an awesome swing too! The swing is seriously so relaxing, well as long as it's not unbearable hot! We had talked about getting some more furniture for the porch but it wasn't really top on the priority list. You see I have this crazy prioritized (and overly ambitious) list of home improvements/furniture purchases however we never seem to be able to stick to this list and thus we now have Adirondack chairs.

My husband has always been a fan of Adirondack chairs and from time to time we priced them out, but again it wasn't on the top of the priority list. I'm always up for a bargain so when I was shopping at World Market one Saturday morning and Adirondacks chairs were 50% off, they rose to the top of the priority list! We MAY have gotten carried away with our purchase but they were 50% off! We bought four chairs, two stools, and two baby chairs. My husband couldn't resist the two baby adirondack chairs, they are prefect size for our two fabulous nieces! Aren't they adorable?!

Getting the chairs home were quite the ordeal, fitting six boxes in a sedan was a challenge and the rain only added to the fun! Once we got them home assembly was pretty quick, of course I took the supervisory role as Brett put all the chairs together!

Shelby helped supervise as well!

Great price and only a couple hours of assembly and voila! Our porch is complete, onto the next project/purchase!