One Year

A year ago I woke up a married woman, it's crazy to think it's already been a year! I woke up and thought about the previous day, our wedding day. Every was perfect, even better than I could have ever imagined!

Today I woke up and thought about our wedding day, our friends, our families, and all the big events that have unfolded over the past year. We celebrated our first Thanksgiving and Christmas as newlyweds, my brother got married (woot woot!), we bought a house, moved in and started renovating said house. Obviously, that's the drastically simplified version, there were so many other moments and events, highs and lows but overall definitely the best year of my life. People always tell you that the first year is marriage the toughest and I never really understood why. I guess it's probably one of those things that you just don't understand until you've been there, but let me say it was tougher than I expected. Having said that, I wouldn't change a minute of it. I've learned so much about Brett, myself, and us as a couple. Sure, we will probably still argue of stupid stuff but I know that at the end of day I know I'm the luckiest girl in the world.

Here's to one year of wedded bliss and many more to come!

October 9, 2010

Honeymooning!

Our first Christmas

Cruising on the Disney Dream

Austin and Aubrey's wedding!

Nich & Sarah's wedding!

Wine and Cheese tasting for Ashley's Birthday

My first Auburn game - Auburn won in dramatic fashion!

Rolling Toomer's Corner!

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...

One Lazy Weekend

Last weekend started off slow. We took Shelby for a walk, I made a list of errands to run, washed windows, and Brett's only "big" project was to hang pictures inside the house and/or install outside motion sensor lights. I figured we'd divide and conquer the chores and have a nice relaxing afternoon.

After I got back from the grocery store Brett tells me he now owns a ladder. My response is the following string of questions: What happened? Did you go buy one? Did you break the one Wes let you borrow? Did Wes tell you to keep the ladder? Well you can imagine my confusion when the answer to all those questions is no! Brett being the resourceful/lucky individual he is actually found the ladder under our house. He then tells me, "You're really going to like this ladder it's an antique!" Not sure "antique" is really the key term one should use in describing a ladder. But he was right, the ladder looks surprisingly sturdy! 

After I admired Brett's newest toy, I headed inside to unpack groceries. About an hour later I head outside to find this...

Brett has decided to dig out the tree root that is under the driveway and thus forcing the corner of the driveway to be raised about 4.5 inches. I still really don't know why he decided to take this project on but nonetheless it has begun. I think it all really started with curiosity and then he just couldn't stop digging! The theory was dig out all the tree root and gravity would take care of the rest and we would have a level driveway. Brett spent all Saturday and Sunday afternoon digging out the tree root. The neighbors came over multiple times to check the progress and were pretty impressed with his dedication.

I feel like the pictures speak for themselves.

You can see a little progress is made, a very small piece of the root is missing

I TRIED to help, in a sundress and all! I get points for style, right?

More progress, this is hour 3 of operation - Level Driveway

I think he really just wanted to play in the mud all day...

I had to walk with this mess to the hardware store to buy a shovel....Yes I know we are home owners we should already own a shovel.

Shelby offering her assistance

4.5 hours into the project

Now THAT'S progress!

Shelby was very intrigued by all this bark that just kept appearing 

We don't even need to buy firewood!

No joke, that's one piece of bark that we/Brett pulled out from under the driveway!

Everyone notice that car jack in the lower right of this picture...no idea what Brett was planning to do with it!  Anyway, moving on...the next few pictures made me a little nervous mostly because I expected the driveway to slowly start sinking and leveling itself out. Thank god that didn't happen, Brett managed to dig out enough of the tree root that he was able to stick his entire arm under our driveway...

The driveway has now settled about 2 inches and has about another 2.5 to go in order to be truly "level" but it definitely looks better! We decided to speed up the settling process by using a hose and a pressure nozzle to force some of the dirt under the driveway to loosen up and level itself.

We estimated it would cost about $7,000 to jackhammer and haul away the old driveway and pour concrete for a new driveway. This project's grand total so far is $37.18; $27.18 for the shovel and $10 for the pressure nozzle (plus Brett's labor, but he says he loves this stuff so we won't consider that a cost!) Not bad for a lazy weekend, right?

Forget the Clorox, Get the Sledgehammer!

To say our bathrooms are outdated, is a serious understatement. When my brother in law first saw this bathroom his exact words were - forget the clorox, get the sledgehammer. This bathroom is straight out of the 50's, white tile with a blue tile border - tile, tile and more tile! Which to me means - scrubbing, scrubbing and more scrubbing! Judging by the condition of the tile when we started I'll assume it hadn't been cleaned in quite some time. The bathroom also has a really odd layout...as you can see from  some of the pictures.

The before...

Remind anyone of a dorm shower?

The plan was to take the bathroom down to the studs, change the layout of the bathroom, and completely update the bathroom. Well, some of our New Orleans friends convinced us to give the vintage look of the bathroom a chance. I caved and said we'd give the bathroom a facelift and then if I still hated the bathroom we would demo it. So the scrubbing commenced, we used a combination of comet, bar keepers friend (this stuff it awesome, cleans and polishes everything!!) and very abrasive sponges.

Bar Keepers Friend removed these paint and rust stains, this stuff is seriously awesome.

I'll be honest, I was dreading the scrubbing this bathroom. So much so that I was willing to demo the bathroom before cleaning it, crazy right? Well I was pleasantly surprised when it only took a a few hours. I had my doubts but once we were done scrubbing the tile the bathroom looked SO much better. Pictures really don't do it justice, I swear!  

So shinny and clean!

With the tile nice and clean we decided to tone down the color of the bathroom by just painting the walls white. The verdict is still out on if the walls will stay white or if we'll paint them a very pale blue or like a blue frost color. 

This is how you spend your Friday night's when you're doing home renovations...

And here are the white walls. So much better, right?

With clean tile and newly painted walls it was finally time to accessorize! We originally wanted to go with a seersucker theme for the bathroom but we couldn't really find a seer sucker shower curtain we liked (and that was affordable!) We finally ended up at pottery barn kids torn between a Very Hungry Caterpillar shower curtain or a blue patchwork shower curtain. I REALLY wanted the Very Hungry Caterpillar one but when the woman asked me how old my kids were I decided maybe I needed to go with the less child-like shower curtain. 

We still have some pictures to hang up but it really is amazing what a little elbow grease and paint can do!

The after...

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!