Stuff We've Made for Our New House!

Greg and I have been over here gettin' our craft on for our new house. It has been crazy amounts of fun to build and make things for a place that is our very own. I even feel like I am more inclined to bake things totally from scratch than I was before because my kitchen is no longer itty bitty. And I have a CRAFT ROOM where my sewing machine is always set up, so I sew a little more often as well. I don't know why pulling out the sewing machine and putting it on the table was always such a deterrent to sewing before. I think I'm probably just lazy. 

But anyway, I finally made this little plastic bag holder thing. I don't know about anyone else, but underneath my sink has always been a Moist Abyss of Plastic Bags. Where Walmart Goes to Die, if you will. Well, not anymore! Used a cute flour sack kitchen towel and hung this up in my (overflowing) pantry! Now I just pull one out whenever I want. 

Greg has been very productive in our handy dandy new garage. Having a garage is all levels of awesome, I might add. Greg got a Kreg Jig for his birthday (at least I think that's what it's called. I dunno, something like that). So now he can make cute little pocket holes and build furniture left and right! This little bench was his first project and I think it is darling. If you ever need to find me and Greg on a Saturday, there's a good chance we will be at the neighborhood Lowe's, weeping and wailing and gnashing our teeth as we dig through the piles of lumber like a couple of crazy people looking for the best and straightest boards. Brynn just stares at us like, whatever parents. 

Greg and I also got crafty and made this little hanging plant holder thingie. 

I love it! Sometimes Pinterest is a wonderful thing. I just wanted something cute to put above our bed, and I love the look of green growing things all in a row. We fixed mason jars and hose clamps on this board and it is perfect! I even love the way the hose clamps look...kind of industrial-ly. Chic and rustic-ish. Obviously I have no idea what I'm talking about, but I do just really like this a lot. I didn't even buy anything to put in the mason jars, I just use clippings from my boxwood bushes. 

I also made these curtains! Total cosh: $3. Not kidding. I used a pack of towels from Ikea, and I didn't even use all the towels.

I was going to take a bunch of picture showing how I did it, but that is just exhausting and so it didn't happen. And come on, no one wants to read my amateur sewing musings. Basically I just cut up the towels and pieced them back together to make it cute. 

At first I didn't like how it turned out. I wanted them to be more full. But the longer I have them I think they are kind of perfect. Just simple. 

You will notice in the above picture that my kitchen is a TOTAL WRECK right now. I mean, I'm not super prompt on the dishes but even I have some standards. Well, the kitchen is a mess because today Brynn and I canned salsa! 

Canning is scary for me because I just feel like I am running around my kitchen burning my hands in hot water and spilling ingredients and re-reading the directions off the Ball website. I have no clue what I'm doing. Therefore, I proudly refer to the product above as "Botulism Salsa." Fingers crossed I don't kill my family. I figure the more I do it the easier it will be? That's gotta happen eventually right? 

So we still have some furniture to make to fit the nooks and crannies of our new house, but it is really starting to come along. We had our first mini house crisis last night and I must say we came out of it extremely proud of ourselves. After we put Brynn to bed we realized the carpet in the hallway was damp...and just getting wetter. At first I thought Brynn had an accident on the sly but then we were like WHERE IS ALL THIS FLUID COMING FROM AND HOW COME IT WON'T GO AWAY. We started investigating our AC, which was leaking onto the foundation. After poking around and saying things like "Uh, I dunno, should we screw off that little plate thingie there?" to each other we figured out that our condensate pipe was backed up. Exactly how did anyone survive as a homeowner before the internet? It is a mystery to me. 

Long story short, Greg ran to Lowe's and got a wet/dry vac and bright and early this morning we sucked out all the algae that had clogged the hose. We were like, YAY US!!! Apparently random algae is something that happens in Florida because of the crazy humidity. How are we supposed to know that? I'm from The Surface of the Sun, Arizona, for crying out loud. Anyway, we didn't have to call a repair person and now we own a shop vac! So win/win. 

It is a lot of fun to experience these new things with my family. Adulting for our new house is pretty rewarding. 

So We Bought a House

When we moved to Florida for the first time (technically we've moved to Florida three times), we didn't think we would be here long. It was for a co-opt and we were just excited to explore and go on adventures and experience something different. I mean, Utah is cool and whatever but FLORIDA IS FLORIDA.

You get the picture.

Since then, we've been really on the fence about what we wanted to do for Greg's graduate school. Education is so important to us and he's always wanted to do an MBA, and he even considered doing a Ph.D. in managerial accounting as well. So I guess we always tentatively planned on going back to school full-time either next year or the year after. And you know, we were okay with being all poor again and doing apartment living for another 1048 years.

But this past spring we've had to reevaluate some things. Greg likes his job and his company and THEY STILL DO PENSIONS, WHAT? Also J and J will help pay for a master's degree if he works while he's doing it. And, it just so happens we live very close to one of the best part time MBA programs in the country, which is the University of Florida in Gainesville.

And, guess what? We have embryos here. (Like a lot of them. Funny story...PCOS women who do IVF have tons of eggs and therefore lots of embryos, they're just not very healthy). We've been struggling (again) with the 'build our family' thing and it was super stressful to feel like we were on a time crunch or we had to move our frozen children across the country or we had to be okay with not having kids through the two years of an MBA or whatever. It was all just stupid.

So one night we were talking and one of us said maybe we needed to just stay here in Florida for school and quit being on the move for awhile. And for the first time in a long time, we had some peace. It felt right.

Well, if you are going to stay somewhere, it is super annoying to rent. So after a couple of weeks of looking we put in an offer on an adorable little house, negotiated a little bit (AHHHHH), and we've found ourselves in a great little neighborhood just having a blast putting our first home together. We didn't even need to leave the ward.

Excuse the mess. Brynn's been playing and I'm too lazy to clean it up. That's the best excuse I have. But look at my cute fireplace. 

Backyard! Yay! 

With all the moving and a few pieces of new furniture and stuff, Brynn's been very helpful. She loves to play with Daddy's tools. Here she is repairing(?) her crib. 

Kitchen! This was when the other people were living here. It looks different now because we painted over the lime green wall. I could go take a picture of it, but again, I'm very lazy. 

Speaking of painting, choosing paint colors is literally the hardest thing I've ever done in my entire life. This is me trying to paint our bedroom a buttery yellow. (Isn't the wainscoting fun?) I'm not sure we ended up with the right color but eventually you just get sick of painting. For the record, we went with Cornstalk lightened by 10% and then with some white paint dumped in. It was a very organized process, not a desperate late-night thing the day before we moved at all. 

The rest of the house is gray. We painted the ENTIRE house before we moved in, with some help of our dear friends the Leishmans who now own our souls. Doesn't the gray look truly horrible on top of this pink? Funny story, Brynn's bedroom was two-toned hot pink, and the paint had sparkles in it. I mean, I didn't even know you could buy paint like that but now I know. 

I'm sure we'll be sharing some more pictures soon, because we've really been having so much fun making this house our own. Greg's already been building some furniture in our garage (!) and I've been blowing all sorts of money at Hobby Lobby. I'm going with farmhouse decor which I think just means going rustic and putting cotton stems all over the place?? Who knows. All we know is that we love our little yellow farmhouse in Jacksonville. 

It's good to be home.