October

“I'm so glad I live in a world where there are Octobers.” 

― L.M. Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables

Isn't that the truth? Fall is my absolute favorite time of year. My only complaint is that the season is so very short. I swear, the leaves turn, are beautiful for about a day, and then that dang wind swoops in and in an instant fall's jewels are littered all over the ground. What then? We're left with ugly barren trees for the entirety of winter. The few trees that cling to their leaves like over-bearing parents are my favorite. My parents' back yard has been incredible this past month. I don't think I've ever appreciated it this much--and I don't even live near to take full advantage of it. The other night had an incredible sunset. And those leaves! Little iphone just can't do nature justice. At least not with me behind the lens. 

Lols took this pic... it's awkward. I was wearing my comfy baggy shirt and tried to make it look like I am pregnant. Instead it just looks like my hands are weird. Oopsie!

We hung out with Austin's co-worker Chris and his wife Heidi over the weekend. We really don't have many couple friends, and it was really fun to hang out with some new people we both liked a lot. No pics of them or their incredibly cute family (3 little boys age 3 and under), but Heidi did make us some delicious fall cider. Look at that caramel!

Here's my baby attempt at fall decor in our living room:

Austin and I carved some pretty sweet pumpkins a couple of weeks ago for FHE. They were so cute. Now they are already rotting--mine especially. I even did the weird bleach thing I found on pinterest to help preserve them. I guess I did it wrong??

Kind of off topic, but we did the pencil test on Sunday at my parents house. And here are my lovely results. Apparently it's a girl, and I will have 6 kids with a set of twins. Haha. We'll see, but honestly, I would be stoked if that were legit. We will find out the actual gender results a week from today! Hooray!

Lastly, Sadies is finally over! Our theme for the dance was Glamorous. With a black, white, and gold color combo. The girls put in so much work, and I think the place looked awesome. I got really crappy pics, but here they are anyway. Also, we MADE those light-up marquee letters.

We had a great turn out, and everything ran pretty smoothly. Can't complain about being home by 11! But I AM glad it's all over. Phew.

We had a photo booth at the dance that was pretty fun. I made Austin come for a minute and take pictures with me. 

And that's that, folks.

Last Days of Summer

Pictures from August. September, and even October.

 How we do Ikea. That's what happens when two babies of the family get married. Older siblings push us BOTH around. Pathetic? Not even!

When pregnant Juje is crying because she misses girlfriends and doesn't know what to do with the weirdo emotions inside her, husband brings home flowers and card. Good idea.

This is teacher Natalie. She's my bestie at work. She teaches all the food classes at Dixie. And I do everything else (Child Development, Adult Roles, Interior Design, Clothing, Fashion Strategies, and Financial Lit. Phew). Sometimes we accidentally show up in the same outfit.

 Lols and Dar Dar took me to a fun steakhouse in Pine Valley while Austin was at a Crossfit thing. They made me line dance...

I'm definitely not into naked belly pics. And barely into belly pics at all. I wasn't even going to post this one, but sister made me. Seriously, that belly is bloat. Because at 16 weeks, I still look the same, but it's a little more legit.

Made 10 lbs of hot wings for our Breaking Bad finale party we hosted for us and Austin's brothers. They ALL got 'et.

A glimpse into my teacher life. Sending babies home to students and grading mounds of papers right before the quarter ends next week. Good times.

We decided to start doing legit FHE. I feel like we did a really good job at our scary cookie house. 

Contact ripped at work. Instead of being 100% blind, I left the good one in and made myself a sticky-note patch. My 4th period LOVED it.

Baby Beecher

Bun in the oven. Coming April 1, 2014. Here's probably the REAL reason I couldn't handle puppy or get anything done in our house. I'm finally in the 2nd trimester now (almost a good 16 weeks), and have started to get my energy back. Those first few months are a doosy. Doosie? Doozy? I couldn't eat, clean, make dinner, or pretty much anything. I barely made it through the day teaching those dang teenagers. So when I got home, I would go straight to my bed. And try not to die. So much for trying to stay active. I was in survival mode. Now I've started walking a few times a week and have begun Tracy Anderson's pregnancy project DVDs. It's so sad to say, but my first attempt kicked my butt. Haha, if you only knew how not-intense it was. That's how much muscle/tone/endurance/fitness I lost. lBetter late than never! So we're pretty excited. And yes, this baby was planned, and yes, it's only been almost a year since marriage, and yes, we couldn't be more happy about it. Meh. I'm done typing now.

Beech House

That time we bought a house...

While interest rates were so low, we decided if we could pull it off, we might as well be paying our own mortgage instead of throwing rent money away each month. We started looking for a small starter home in our price range. We're talking like $110,000 max. Yeah, there's not many liveable houses in that price range, let me tell ya. We found lots of cute fixer-uppers. But there was no way we could get a loan on a home that needed lots of fixing up for our first home. Stupid bank. They don't even KNOW how capable we are! I decided to check out a house on a whim with a realtor, mainly because I was sick of browsing online and just wanted to look at a house in person, even though I was pretty sure it wouldn't be anything I was seriously interested in.

The house was off of Dixie Downs road (yeah, not the greatest reputation). It also was part of a community with an HOA fee, something I wanted to stay away from. It didn't look like anything special from the outside, but when we got a tour, I started to see the possibilities. I was with my mom and sister, and we all surprisingly really liked it. I called Austin and had him drive straight over from work. He liked it too. We made an offer that day. CRAZY! The sellers countered, and we accepted. We felt like we got a pretty good deal. The trick was coming up with the down payment. That was a s-t-r-e-t-c-h. We decided to put the house in my name only so that way we could purchase a home later down the road in Austin's name and keep this one for a rental. Yay for future income property (I'm addicted to HGTV shows)! Since it was in my name, any money from Austin would be considered a "gift" and not accepted as part of the down payment. From my own husband. Yeah.... so annoying. We got it all figured out thanks to the awesome mortgage guy we were working with. We got it all done pretty fast since it was still summer so I pretty much dedicated my life to getting this deal going. The mortgage company basically told us to start packing because after we got the appraisal results, we would be in the end of the week. We were stoked! We told our landlord we would be out by the end of July. That meant we would have about two weeks to go in and paint, scrape some popcorn ceilings, re-do kitchen cabinets, and shampoo the carpets. All before we had to move in. Perfect.

That's when we got some super bad news. Our appraisal came in SO low. Like $18,000 less than our offer. Cool. Us and the sellers both didn't know what to do. We all felt like it was the weirdest fluke. All of the comps in the area were going for way more. Here's where I got really frustrated. I felt like our realtor really let us down. We pretty much did nothing for those last two weeks of July. Things finally worked out when our realtor left town and left us in the hands of her son. He was super on the ball and suggested that we switch mortgage companies so we could get a new appraisal. Why did no one think of this earlier??? I was so bugged. We decided to do that, which meant almost starting over in all the paperwork process. Tick tock. Meanwhile, we were freaking out because our landlord had already filled our spot and we had nowhere to go. Awesome. Luckily our realtor's son asked the home owners if we could move in and rent form them until our deal closed. They agreed and we moved out of our apartment, cleaned it, moved in to our new house all on July 31. Craziest day of our lives. Thanks to mine and Austin's family who also helped us clean and move and clean some more!

The deal finally went through on August 13th. That meant we couldn't start painting or anything until we "owned" the place. And now we've got all our crap in the way. So now, mid-October, nothing has been done. We started scraping ceilings, but that's about it. I finally decided to hire it out and we've got a guy coming on Tuesday to give me a quote (the ceilings have all been painted over, so the popcorn is GLUED to that ceiling). Once that's done, we can finally get everything painted (the previous owners SUCKED at painting. Like it's terrible). So while we're not living out of boxes or anything, I still don't feel like it's my home... But we do love it here. Lots more room. Except my bike got stolen the night we moved in from our fenced back yard. Yeah. I'm still not over it. Stupid hooligans. Anyway, here's pictures of our house before we moved in, and some since. Please, please, please ignore the UGLY paint colors, especially in the master bedroom. Someday we will have this place fixed up to my liking. But we are officially home owners. Way too adult for me.

 

Backyard. Needs some work, but this will be our goal for 2014.

Baster bed and bath. Yeah, that red wall is way worse in person. It has black mixed in... like someone did a murder and smeared it all over. Gross. Plus, the previous homeowners, lets call them PH, decided it was easier to plaster OVER the popcorn ceiling instead of removing it. They did a terrible job. I don't know if we can get it off or will have to sheetrock over it eventually and redo the texture. When I mean they do a bad job, I mean all of the painted rooms have paint on the ceiling (no clean lines whatsoever), paint on the baseboards, and plaster on the walls. Terrible. I'm an excellent amateur painter if I do say so myself, and I just can't handle it.

 Master closet and hallway to 2nd bedroom (this is all upstairs, by the way).

 2nd bedroom, and looking down the stairs into the living room on the right and kitchen on the left.

 

Living room (view from walking in the front door...sorta) plus a curio cabinet we got to add some more storage to the kitchen. Got it for a steal at a used furniture store.

Downstairs goes into a little hallway area with a laundry closet. On the left is our TV room. This room has french doors you can put up to make it into a 4th bedroom. 

 Also, that cabinet is another furniture find that goes in the living room. Me likey. Not sure if it will get painted yet or stay with the dark wook. We'll see.

Left of the laundry closet is this hallway. Straight to the tiny guest bathroom. That door on the right goes to a sweet storage area. There's a door on the left at the end of the hall that goes to the 3rd bedroom which will be our office/craft room for now.

Office room and view into the storage area. It is short in there, but it is under the whole kitchen and living room upstairs, so it's actually quite huge. Right now we've got some shelves in there and it serves as a pantry as well as random storage. Eventually, I think it would be cool to sheetrock off the water heater area and put carpet in and create a sort of play room.

 Day we moved in. Fun times. And closing on our house.

A little update on what the front room currently looks like. Won't have green walls. I know they're not bad, but I have something different in mind. And yup, our dog kennel is STILL in that corner.

 Bedroom is still ghetto looking...

 That time we thought we would scrape all the ceilings ourselves. And when I say "we" I actually mean Austin.

Cool, the guest bath has a shower curtain and a rug now!

 Our closet filled right up... how does that happen? Also, our jetted tub in this bathroom is my favorite thing in the whole world. I am now such a bath soaker. Close the door, turn off the lights, light a few candles, soak in a hot bath, and prop the ipad up and watch me some chick shows. Best therapy in the world. So there's a tiny glimpse into our house. My goal is to have all the painting, ceilings, and decorations done by the time baby comes. Oh yeah, we're having a baby. More on that.