NEW things!!!

Hello everyone!  I have so many updates since my last post!  But, I'll only share a couple of them now to keep you in suspense :)  Heehee

Well, first of all let me share with you our totally unexpected new purchase.  About 2 weeks into being cozy new homeowners I decided to make a delicious meal for my husband.  So far, I have nailed the part of adoring wife who has dinner on the table as soon as the husband is home from work.  This time however, things did not go as planned.  

I was making a casserole that I've made many times and after about a half an hour of baking I noticed the oven was not heating up very well and the preheat button was not going off.  We had noticed the night before that our cookie dough dessert took much longer than usual to bake, so I was suspicious that something might be wrong.  Well, I put in my crescent rolls, which usually take about 15 minutes to bake, and 1 HOUR later, they were done enough to eat and the casserole was warm through.

Yup, you got it........broken oven.  Bummer.  So, we called in a repair man and he discovered that the "motherboard" of our electric oven was done, broken, dead, fried, whatever.  The cooktop still worked though.  Ordering a new "motherboard" was going to be mighty expensive so Brandon, my wonderful husband that he is, offered me a choice.  He said I could order this new part and be happy with this oven the rest of my life, or we could go shopping and get a gas stove/oven like I've wanted.  What did I pick?

Duh, shopping.

We headed of to the scratch and dent store first.  What is their first question you may ask?  "Do you have a gas hook-up for your oven?"  My thought:  I don't know woman, go to my house and look!  What I actually say:  "I don't know, I guess I didn't think about that."  So, we ended up driving home only to discover that our entire house is electric with the exception of the furnace.  Ugh.

A dilemma, yes?  Well not really.  Not only do I have a loving husband, I also have a loving daddy with spare copper :)  So, my WONDERFUL dad came over the next day and put a new gas line across our basement as seen below. :)  Then the shopping really began.  We went to many different places, but in the end we got our oven from Sears.  I HATE Sears....but they had the best deal and their appliances are alright....I can't lie.

Dad working hard for us!

The new shiny gas line :)

Hooking it up

 

The old, broken oven :(

 After lots of hard work, and me almost exploding because I'm a dumb blonde....literally.....we have a nice, new oven!!!!!!  And I just made some beautiful pizza rolls in it today using the convection feature.  They were delicious!

Pretty :)

Some late hours for these two :)

BEAUTIFUL

So anyways, that's the end of my oven saga.  Here's a little blip about the new, manly item, before I go on to more feminine things :)

The new edger.  Brandon loves it!  I forgot to get an "after" picture, but the lawn looks WAY better.

Sorry this post is not over yet!  There is one more thing (well things, actually) that Brandon and I put a lot of money and effort into:   New BLINDS

Here is what we saw when we took possession of the house and shut the blinds for the first time:

 Yuck.........

Yuckier.........

So, we took it upon ourselves to gift our new house with lovely new window coverings.  More shopping, yes!  It was a very intricate process and took a lot more time and effort that I expected.  Haha!

 Back to Lowe's we went:

So many choices!

Picking out a style

We look so tired :)  We were there for about 3 hours.

 Because Lowe's took so much longer than expected, I needed to Red Robin to wind down.  Okay, maybe I just wanted it anyways. ;)

Yum, yum, yummy!

 We ended up going back the next day so that we could take some sample books home and make sure that the choices we made were going to look good.

Picking out dining room pattern.

Brandon looking at my final choices.

And then, the order was placed and we received them a couple of weeks later!  We had some trouble putting up our fancy living room blinds so my dad came over to give us an extra pair of eyes.  Of course he got the problem fixed on his first try...go figure. :)

They're finally up!

They are so pretty!  Of course, these pictures don't do them justice.

Putting in our bedroom blinds.

Gorgeous!

New bathroom blinds :)

New natural roman shade in the dining room.

And the other living room windows :)

We are so excited to have all of our blinds up!  They make such a difference in the look of our home.  We are thankful that God has blessed us both with great jobs so that we can afford to do nice things like this.  Well, if you made it this far, thanks for looking!  Next post, I will update you with some Fall/Halloween decor I have put up and some of our yard projects.  Stay tuned!

The Last Few Days

It seems that this last week we have finally fallen into a routine here at the house.  It is finally beginning to really feel like home and not just a house full of boxes.  For the most part the entire main floor is clean and unpacked.  Upstairs is still a bit of a mess but will not take long to clean up once our painter is finished (which will hopefully be this week!).  The basement has a lot of empty boxes and a few full ones still.  We plan on painting the basement floor and walls ourselves in the near future.  Every Saturday I clean the house.  I dust, vacuum, sweep, clean the bathroom and kitchen, do the laundry, etc.  So far I have kept to this routine religiously!  I hope I can keep it up because if I skimp just one weekend, my house may become the dust zone.  My apartment was usually cleaned every other week.....but this is MINE so I must keep it CLEAN.  Hahaha!

We've been making lots of progress this week in different areas.  We went to Lowe's and purchased all new custom blinds for our main floor.  There will be a post on that soon!  I also have my fall and Halloween decorations up already (don't judge!) and I will also follow up on a post with that later.  But today, I will show you some of the other things we did this past week.

First of all, Brandon finally got that darn stump out of the ground!  Now the backyard is so much more open.  Brandon has been doing lots of stuff outside to try and help our yard.  Our yard is VERY bumpy and very patchy with grass.  We bought a whole bunch of different weed sprays, bug sprays, and grass seed this week.  We also plan to purchase top soil to try and even out the yard.  Here he is hard at work:

Yay!  All done!

We also made another trip to Lowe's to buy rakes and shovels and such. :)  They pretty much know us by name there now! 

So many options!

Brandon enjoyed a lot of quality time with the garage this week.  He cleaned it all out from top to bottom on his day off.  Now I can walk in without feeling like I'm walking into a dungeon.  It's so nice.  He spent time putting up all of his new things and getting stuff organized.  It's definitely his space to do what he wants with since I've pretty much claimed the entire house!

We found this in the basement when we tore down the old coal room.......CREEPY!

All of his new stuff :)  Boys can shop too. 

On a different note, my brother finally found a house!!!  He waited on a short sale but it was taking so long that he kept looking and got this cute one.  It's only a couple of minutes away from us.  The house has been totally flipped and he should be able to move in next month!  It's been a lot of fun shopping with him for all the stuff he will need to move out!  Maybe I should start another blog....My brother's house.  Lol just kidding!  Anyways, here is a picture of the front:

Cute, huh?

And finally, last weekend we went to the Lions first game of the season!!!!  We took Brandon's parents as a birthday gift to them.  Here are some pictures from the day:

On our way!

Aren't we adorable?

The players running out

Tony Scheffler coming out!  I like him solely based on his dance moves when he scores touchdowns.

Kevin Smith.  I like him when he's not injured :)

And my man (besides Brandon of course) CALVIN JOHNSON!

One of the plays that didn't turn out so hot for us.

Final Score....we won in the last 30 seconds.

So that was a ton of fun.  Brandon's parents took us out for a nice dinner afterwards and overall it was a great day!  Most of you know that 2 years ago I knew NOTHING about football, but thanks to my husband, I'm now pretty hardcore.  :)

First Projects

Sorry I haven't updated in a while.  We've been busy around here with the house and the new school year starting up for me!  I'm going to be a busy girl this year.....I'm teaching day school and doing night school a couple of times a week.  Also, my principal asked me to be the MEAP coordinator for our school so I'll be super busy making sure all of our freshman get tested and I'm sure I'll be up to my ears in paperwork!  But so far, I have loved all of my new students and I can't wait to see what will happen this year!  

Anyways, reading some of the blogs I follow inspired me to quit being lazy and update you all on our progress.....haha! :)  So here we go.....

Our first big project was to cut down the crabapple tree in our backyard.  It was ugly, dead looking, and not necessary.  Who wants to pick up crabapples?  So Brandon and his brother Neil went to work on that the weekend before Labor day weekend.

The Crabapple tree - before

Another angle

It's almost kind of creepy :)

The future home of firewood.....

 While the boys worked outside, I worked inside.  I made some mean meatloaf burgers and set up inside decor while they worked.  WAAAY more fun :)

This girl knows how to make a burger!  YUM!

Meanwhile, Brandon was making progress on the future home of the firewood.

My lovely cow and pig that welcome you to our home :)

Prepping for amputation.....lol

Project:  Put the magnets on the fridge......super hard.  We collect magnets from places we travel.  You can see some here are from England, France, Niagara Falls, and Bubba Gump's Shrimp Company!

My cute little wire basket I got at an estate sale :)

My pig peeps ;)

I picked up this wonderful rug in Mackinac Island!  It's an indoor/outdoor material so it's super easy to clean!

I may or may not have snuck in an episode or two while the guys were outside.....hehehe

Finally got my rug to fit in the bathroom!  If you put it the other way, you can't open or shut the door!  Super annoying!

 Meanwhile, back at the camp........

Scary!

TIMBER!

What a mess!

Now to clean up......

 Brandon and I spent the next few evenings cleaning up the brush and cutting up the logs.  Below is more proof of my ability (though rarely seen) that I can work outside.

Trying not to cut any of my fingers off

Snip, snip, snip

Rockin' the husband's clothes!

Boom.  Done.  (Well almost)

 So that's about it for the tree.  We still have some small sticks around, but it's cleaned up enough that Brandon was able to mow the lawn again. :)  Now for some more projects that took place inside the house:

First, I needed to organize our hallway closet.  Now when one thinks of a hallway closet, you may think of a place to put guests' coats, or a place for linens, or games.  Well, in our house, it's everything.  This is the only closet in the house (besides our bedroom closet) that is available for storage right now.  The upstairs closets are not finished being painted yet.  So, this closet not only stores extra items, and cleaning supplies, it also stores all of our sweaters and sweatshirts (because they do NOT fit in the bedroom closet) and all of my bathroom stuff that cannot fit in the dinky cupboard under the sink.  So, I had pinterest dreams for this closet that were slightly dashed, but I still think it turned out alright.  :)

Hallway Closet

 The other project that Brandon (thankfully) took care of was downstairs.  We needed to get the duct tape off of our venting and furnace (apparently it's flammable) and seal all of the cracks with a tape made for metal.  I don't remember what it's called, but we can refer to it as very expensive, stinky tape :)

Ah, isn't that nice ;)

 The basement is also home to my laundry area.  Not ideal, but I'm making it work.  :)  My old kitchen rug is now down there.  Eventually we will build shelves down here, but we are going to paint it first.

My "laundry room"

The ceramic owls are going upstairs in the guest room which is starting to come together.  Pictures will come when the painting is finished. :)

 Fall decor will be coming soon!!!!!  And it's football season!  We will be in Detroit tomorrow for the first Lion's Game of the season!

Go Lions!

And finally, my favorite thing to do in the new house, relax on the couch and listen to our beautiful wind chimes.  I love them :)  But I can't relax for long.  We're going shopping for all new blinds and shades tonight!  Ours are all busted.  More to come on that!  Enjoy your sunny day!