Walls.

Good Morning! Please dont hate me for lack of blogging we have had so much going on around here! There have been some great changes since I last wrote... one of which would be our wall! Yes, I know you have seen all the walls in the house but this fancy one is for our outside! 

After an intense day of trenching down through years of roots, they poured the cement deep down in the ground and hauled in all the block needed. 

It honestly was put together very quickly! 

Ah, here she is.

I want it to be known that this is My Husband's Wall. I like it now that its here but it was not something on the top of my "dream house" list. Ha! 

We also got to celebrate our garage door being installed! 

Cuuute!

I could bore you with a ton of pictures going up and down but I wont :) this time at least! I've never heard such a quiet garage door before in my life! This thing is amazing! On the button to open it it tells you the time and temp! These things are so fancy these days haha! 

Its time for us to get ready for our driveway! 

We picked out some really lovely pavers called Deep Sea they have hints of blue and grays but are a beautiful charcoal color! We are still going back and forth on if we should do some stone accents around the front door or to keep it like it is now. Thoughts? 

Our beautiful base boards, crown moulding, and door trim are all installed through out the house! 

The inside has all been painted as well! How exciting! 

Everyday that we go and visit the house I have to take a look at my beautiful bathroom, I just cant help but be super excited about it each and every time! The crown in here is stunning as well! 

We are getting ready for the tile to go in now, we had a meeting with our tile guy yesterday and we were even there when our tile was delivered! I'll update a little bit later tonight with those photos and some of the driveway! 

Oh yea... this baby... going in my master bath! 

I wish I could have these all over the house but sadly this is not a home that has a maid to clean every shiny thing.  :( 

I also have to still pick out some more light fixtures for the rest of the house and watching The Great Gatsby before doing this is not a good idea. Side note: I will be collecting charms and pieces of old or broken chandeliers so I can make a whole dress out of them. I've got quite a few already but probably only enough to cover my lady bits. 

I also picked out and priced a dining room table ((from Pottery Barn)) well... lets just say that I am now allowed to get a table from the local Architectural Salvage because they are more than HALF their price!  

Dear Pottery Barn, I love you but I am as the kids say these days 'Ballin' on a Budget' and I'm going to need you to bring your prices down a few thousand. 

This is how my conversation with The Hubs went about how I want our house to look:

Me: So I want a mixture of new and old!

Him: Right.

Me: So we can pick a few things up from the Salvage and work them into our decor.

Him: Yea, so you want to buy new things that just look old?

Me: No, I want new things and old things. Mixed. 

Him:<makes a scrunchie face> New shit that looks old. Got it. 

*facepalm*

You should have this conversation with your husband or wife before you walk into an Ethan Allen store because thats just overpriced new old looking stuff and thats the prices they will think of when you tell them this. Haha.

I'll try to post more later with some updated pictures of our driveway and any tile work thats done! 

Long summer nights...even longer blog posts.

I can only thank my lucky stars that we are only months away from being in the new house! Thankfully my neighbors quickly got rid of the extremely small cage of roosters and chickens they had stashed in their back yard... but this was only after a few 5:30 am roosterings to wake us up. I can now say I hate living downtown. It is just not for me.

I know I am complaining but with this heat and putting in some good hours at work I am officially exhausted. To my family and friends who are reading this: No, there is not a baby on the way. I am just tired... but I cant say that it hasn't crossed my mind that if I was preggers I would totally get out of moving haha :) Nope just a lack of baths and not being able to drop the A/C to just above freezing my sleep has been all out of whack!

Things are getting done on the homefront though! They finished our drywall! The house is so silent now! No outside noise, no road noise, nothing! Its wonderful. I think that I will start to bring a blow up mattress and just sleep in here.... sure there isn't any a/c but at least I wont have to worry about fire trucks and roosters :) 

Also helping to eliminate any noise would be our new fence! 

This is what our backyard used to look like.... (yes we took Remmington James out to the house, but I am hoping that he wont remember... but he did take his first poop there) 

This is as the back part was going up, at that point we were still missing the last section of the fence.

Just to give you an idea of big this fence really is I am 5'3 (awkward photo only because I felt like I was in a police line up when I looked up) This fence is huge! Its all being custom built since we wanted it to be 8 feet tall. Its a beautiful cyprus, board on board construction! OOOHHHHH!!!! Privacy! I cant wait!!!! We also cant see the houses or our own house from the post office anymore because of this glorious fence. I am so happy! Yes, making it taller cost us a few more pennies (ha) but its going to be worth it! 

Thanks Gabriel! 

They also sprayed all the texture on the walls! The whole house was blue inside from the protective plastic over the windows and doors... yes, I know the quality of my photo is bad but its on average 96 degrees at 6:00pm here in Florida and this house was SWELTERING! 

We started on round 2 of paint samples, sadly we will not be going with a blue color or any color that might resemble blue. Our neighbor who lives in a little shack house has blue paint, I will not match my neighbors. We also eliminated the top color since that is too close to one of our other neighbors. Grey is going to be our jam! I know, I love that color but you can offset grey with almost any color! Green plants will look nice with it and maybe some blue for the water feature near the front door! See! Its not going to be totally monotoned! 

We also received our first and second orders from Overstock.com! I am usually not a fan of buying things online when I havent been able to even see them.... but they have a great return policy! 

My first order was a couple of these guys! They are for the master bathroom! They are so sparkly and so... me! Ha on a serious note I did read the reviews before hand and knew I needed to put each and every strand of crystals on this fixture but I guess I just wasn't prepared for how long it would really take. For now I just did one. Only 7 more to go! woohoo! :/ I know I will probably regret buying these the day I finally have to clean them but for now I am in love! 

Our second purchase was this light! I was going to go with something with a little more funk to it for the foyer area but The Hubs really loved how this went along nicely with the front door! The assembly on this was a cake walk compared to the last set of lights! The coloring is beautiful and we are both really happy with the way this came! 

While we are on the subject of spending money... We bought our couches! Yay! We headed up to Ashley furniture and Ikea (about an hour away, get with the times furniture stores its just too far to drive!) 

We walked in and headed straight to our couch we showed everyone previously sat down and relaxed.... then we decided to just take another look around. Confession: I secretly hate furniture sales people! If they would just say hello and then back off it wouldn't be such a big deal! This woman that we worked with this time walked up behind us as we were walking somewhere else and said "Uh I'm trying to greet you!" Never in all my years of customer service have I ever given or gotten a greeting like that. At that point I decided to let The Hubs handle the talking. ((shaking my head)) after we got her out of our hair (if you walk really fast they will think you aren't there to spend money and will leave you alone) we found another set of couches we really liked! 

Yay! look at the nail head accents! Thankfully it passed all tests including the Tony test! (The Tony test is when my Brother-in-law comes over to the house can he lay down comfortably? Yes, my 6'11 brother can lay down in comfort! side note I'm not sure hes that tall but hes pretty damn tall) So The Hubs found the angry sales lady and told her we wanted the couches. She started the paperwork for us and then ran back over to show us the "features" by this time we had spent a good 20 min looking over everything on the couch, frame, cushions, zippers, you name it we looked it over so we knew the "features" maybe she did this because she was feeling bad that she had written us off so soon, who knows but we all just nodded while I tuned her out and looked on at other displays. We payed, took our paperwork, and left. We may or may not have picked up the pace of our walking on the way out haha just incase she wanted to show us more "features"! 

We then headed to Ikea, where we picked up our sink and base for one of the guest bathrooms. The clean lines and big drawers were a huge plus for this set since we dont have a linen closet in that bathroom. 

Here are the boys going into man mode to haul our stash to the register! The box that my husband is carrying is about 5 feet long we originally had this laying sideways on the cart but we started to get some funny looks from other customers who were about to have their ankles pulled out from under them as we passed. haha! They look silly only because 1. We didn't spend hours in Ikea and 2. We chugged Red Bulls before we even went inside! All in all it was a great day of shopping! I always have a blast with these two though and I am lucky enough to get to work with both of them everyday! 

Okay I'm sure I have made your eyes hurt by now from all the reading you have done so I will leave today posting :) More pictures to come later! 

TS Andrea

I cant think of a better time to make a blog entry, while we sit here in the middle of our first named storm of the 2013 Hurricane season! Welcome to our lovely state Andrea! I'll give everyone a quick weather update:

We are on day 3 of rain, rain, and well more rain. The real storm rains started last night around 6 and havent stopped since. My littlest of the 3 dogs as much as he loves drinking water he refuses to go outside in the rain. We have been in a tornado warning for the past 40 min. No big deal all part of living in paradise! My garden box is holding up great so far just saved my corn crop from drowning this morning but thats my fault for not making sure it was able to drain.

A lot has happened since I last updated. I'm finally over my sick, we have a roof, we have interior walls, trimmed up our trees, and we have windows! I had to wait a bit to update since our windows came in a little early and we werent quite ready to install them so they were sitting in the bathroom. 

Here they are! Sitting pretty waiting for install day!

I'll get into the windows here in a second but lets first talk about walls!

Welcome to my closet! After almost my whole life of sharing a closet I thought that I would reward myself with this little gift. Years and years of near death fights with my two sisters over who is wearing each others clothing or what went missing and who was the last one to see it and even some times where you would find a picture on Myspace with one of them wearing something that you never gave them permission to have in the first place, I now have a place for my clothes to relax :) Mind you the closet raid still happens every now and again but now its more civil and less like a battle to the death.  

From where I am standing to where my small camera case is on the floor is the length of it. Not quite a Beverly Hills closet but still something any woman would be excited to have! Bless my husbands heart his closet isnt as big but its still bigger than what we are sharing now in the rental. 

Moving on to my next favorite place in the house....

My pantry. 

This was just put in 2 days ago so I swear I didnt change my clothes! (yes thats another orb) This is a true preppers pantry. No I dont extreme coupon and I'm not really a prepper but I do like to have everything I would ever need to whip of a batch of cupcakes at the drop of a hat! Cooking is serious business for me. This also can turn into an office if we decide our home office needs to be an extra bedroom. You are looking in from where the double ovens will be. The door is on the side so you can enter easily from the garage. My little noodle arms need the shortest distance for grocery carrying. This is where I will hopefully write a cookbook or two. I have a few in the works now but one is just for my sister and it will contain most but not all of my kitchen secrets. 

Got The Hubs to pose for a picture of our office! That great big window in there is going to be wonderful while I paint or just glue sparkly things on to non sparkly things. We have the option to add a closet to it right now and call the house a 4 bedroom but its not on the top of our list right now. The 2 guest bedrooms are enough, I know all my family up north will be down here soon enough I need one room to hide out in :) I kid I kid I cant wait to have you all come stay with us! 

This is the Kitchen/ Dining/ Living room space I didnt take a new photo from this area yet but the first bathroom and guest bedroom have been framed up along with the laundry room. We made a change for a pocket door in the laundry room which cost us a little bit but I think its going to be much better than closing myself off in that room. I have big plans for the paint colors in that room, it will be one of our darkest colored rooms in the whole house. 

This beautiful archway is looking into our bedroom from the hallway. You can see both doorways for the closets. We had back to back closets in the last house and it was crappy when I would spend some OCD time re-arranging my closet and The Hubs would be trying to talk to me it was like I was in my own little world. Now that we share a closet for some reason we tend to match. Yuck that makes us "that couple" so hopefully that fixes that issue too. Maybe I should stop buying him bright colors to wear. :/ 

When our land was cleared up the first time they didnt clean up our back trees very well. We had some iffy branches that hung over the roof and on the side yard we had a few branches that were actually on the roof. We asked our friend who has done some work for us before to come out and clean them up. He gave us a really great deal on it and it opened up the back yard. We now have about 6 years till we need to trim them again. Our neighbors have a few trees that are iffy as well so we sent him over there to talk to them and they will end up cutting a few down. 

This is The Hubs in action telling me how I should frame up a photo. Haha 

Here she is with the windows in and the roof complete! We are going to have a few of them replaced. According to PGT sometimes their impact windows have some distortion in the glass... and while a little bit might be normal our bathroom and dining room windows have too much to fall into that category and they are sending over new ones. In some places its kinda like looking through a magnifying glass from a far distance. :( The windows themselves are made up of a double pane of glass with gas in between them, it helps to really block out any outside noise and helps when it comes time to get homeowners insurance! I wont lie to you... we had a bit of a panic when we saw the distortion in the windows that eventually made us call Todd to see what we could do about it. 

The front door should be in this month so fingers crossed that it has no issues! We also will have our stucco done by the first week of July which means we need to pick our paint color! eek! We have a few colors in mind but we have to see the stone that is going on the front of the house first and play off of that. 

We also got our first quote on flooring. We got it at regular price and not at contractors price and surprisingly we didnt go over budget on it! The wood tile that we are going to do slowly is showing up in more and more places so we have some time before we need to lock in what we actually want. 

Still going back and forth on the cabinets. We have heard back from yet another cabinet company and she didnt even make a design just flat out told us that she wasnt going to be able to get us within our budget. How sweet. She did call today, possibly because we got our quote for our flooring from them as well to let us know that she is actually making a design for us. I feel like a little salt was poured into my cabinet wound so we probably wont go with them unless it actually is do-able. I'm tired of wasting my time with cabinet people. Last week we dropped off our floor plans to another cabinet design center and she said she would have something for us by the end of the day.... its now thursday and we have not seen one email. We called her yesterday and she said she was working on it "sporadically". I could seriously get more done by banging my head against the wall than what these people are doing. Obviously making money for your company is not a top priority for you. 

<angry eye roll> 

I think we have made some positive advances to more of what we want for our light fixtures. 

This cool guy here is going to go over our dining table. 

3 of these over the kitchen island.

Garage hallway light. Better than the standard builders light that may or may not resemble a boob. 

This little baby is hopefully going over my bathtub. The Hubs has a fear of it dropping it into the bath and stabbing him. I am also working on him to replace his want for a fan in the bedroom for a chandelier. 

My dreams would be a little bit sweeter if I had this glorious fixture in the middle of our room. 

This magic carpet is my dream rug for the living room. Since we are going to have the dark grey couches I wanted something thats really going to liven things up a bit. I hope they still have the larger size when we go to order it. 

Found this decorator hack website. Seriously I think the whole time I looked on this site my mouth was hanging open! Sure I know how to hang a picture but this place tells you everything. I mean everything. If you dont believe me then check it out for yourself. As I was trying to show The Hubs I think I literally blew his mind. He then told me it was too much and I needed to stop showing him. It's like one stop shopping on how to correctly decorate a room. I died. 

Click here to blow your mind

Well gotta go the winds are picking back up and I want to head home!