Fall and Halloween Decor!

Happy October!

The HALLOWEEN month! Yay!

Now don't get too excited here people, I'm still young so I don't have much when it comes to my second favorite holiday, but I get excited about what I have. :)

My stuff has been up for a while, but now that it's October I feel I can safely post about it. :)  Haha!  Before I show you some pictures, just an update about what we've been up to.  Brandon has been practically living outdoors when he's not at work.  He has been working on our lumpy lawn.  We rented a power raker to dig up all of the dead stuff, raked it into piles and bagged it. (I did help with a little bit of that)  Then, we bought a bunch of topsoil and he has been diligently spreading that around our yard trying to fill in holes.  He is also planting grass seed since a lot of it is gone :(  I for one would HATE being outdoors this much and doing all of this work, but I think Brandon really enjoys it. 

I have been INSIDE (where I like to think I belong) getting pretty much the last few boxes unpacked, cleaning (it's never-ending) and enjoying my brand new PIANO!!!!!!!  OK, not new, but new to me....and I LOVE it!  Wanna see a picture?  Ok, here you go:

Ahhh, so nice

 Anyways, gorgeous hug?  :)  I'm pretty in love.  Well, enough ogling of the piano.  Here are some pictures of what Brandon has been up to:

Here is my creepy stalker picture of Brandon spraying the house with bug killer stuff :)

His new look is "shirtless"

Here is the handy dandy power raker we rented.

If you can tell, it dug up a lot of dead stuff....but it's kinda hard to see here.

This is what my yard currently looks like.  The left is done, the right is not.

 Another project popped up outside for Brandon this week.  The pole holding up our gate door rotted or something (I can't remember exactly what Brandon said) so Brandon had to fix that too.

Drilling in the new beam

See the new beam on the left there....such a handy man :)

The old pole.

 I'm so grateful that my husband is willing to tackle all of these projects.  He's such a great guy. :)

NOW, onto Fall and Halloween as promised.  I do have a Halloween wreath that I am in the process of making that I will have to show you later, but here is what I have up now:

Most importantly, my toilet decor...lol  This is a "fake" candle that my mother-in-law gave us last year.  Totally fun!  Note the bride and groom skeletons :)

This is one of my favorite items.  My wreath.  I actually bought this wreath in the spring to be my "summer" wreath (I like wreaths if you can't tell).  My husband took me on a special shopping trip to Holland to pick out a "summer" wreath (yes I'm spoiled), but all summer long I kept staring at it and thinking "This is a fall wreath".  So, here it is.  Up on our back door looking awesome-ly fallish! :)

Now, my pumpkins are pretty awesome too :)  Gotta give them some love as well!

And, the beloved Pottery Barn spider.  My husband's choice, but he is pretty awesome.

Here is my "fall' bouquet that Brandon and I made together last year :)

And finally my husband had a potluck at work, so even though it was still late September, I had to go with the Halloween theme and make "Halloween Parfaits"

Halfway done....

He had to help a little too.  Note the time of night.

Taadaa!  Totally fun!

Happy FALL :)

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.  :)