Mantel

I've mentioned before that we recently moved and this house has something I've never had before, a fireplace with a mantel.  I feel like I just became a real blogger and now I have to show my seasonal mantel decorations.  You probably can't actually expect to see many seasonal changes since I'm not a big decorator.

We've been here for a month now and so far the only thing on my mantel was an orange bucket that holds Catie's pirate gold while it's not being played with.  I wanted something up there but couldn't bear to spend much money.  While I was in Utah we stopped in at the Tai Pan Trading Company.  That place is awesome and full of really reasonably priced home decor items.  There were lots of things that I wanted but I was responsible and only bought one thing, a carved bird.

I decided to find a cute print to go with it.  Now the frame isn't awesome and the easel is really special but until I get a better frame it'll do.

I figured I'd change out the print for different seasons.  I found this print at eighteen25 and you can download it in a bunch of different colours.

So it's not much but it's better than it was before and it's a start.

Possession

One of the things that Brad and I love most about our new house is that it has a dishwasher.  It's something I haven't had since I lived at home and we're really enjoying not having to do all our dishes by hand.

There is a little something about this dishwasher though that's a little odd.  On multiple occasions (and we're not talking about 1 or 2 here) Brad or I will turn to the other and say, "Did you start the dishwasher?"  We'll have suddenly noticed that it's running though neither of us have started it and there isn't any soap in it.

Our dishwasher spontaneously starts and we're constantly going over and shutting it off.
L

Entertaining

Today I got to use one of the features on our oven, the delayed start.

Catie was blessed today so family came to visit and we were providing lunch after church. We wanted it to be ready right when we got home so we put the potatoes in the oven before we left, set the timer and off we went.

I made sure we practiced multiple times because I've heard so many stories of the oven not turning on, luckily this wasn't a problem we encountered. The house smelled so yummy when we came home and we had piping hot potatoes... yay for fancy ovens!
L

Nesting

As a wedding gift we were given a bench.

At the time we were still in our tiny, tiny apartment with no space for a bench and honestly from the description of this bench I thought it sounded like it would be awful and sort of cheap so we took our time arranging the pickup of the bench. In fact we took so much time arranging that one day it was dropped off at Brad's parents house where we discovered that it's actually a really beautiful bench. We still had no room so we left the bench at his parents temporarily.

When we moved to our last apartment we had room so we brought the bench and put it at the end of our bed where it looked really nice. This whole time though this beautiful bench had only been primed in white, no actual painting had happened. I really wanted to paint it brown but we just didn't ever get around to it.

Well we have all this free time before Brad starts school and before Catie comes and the bench looked a bit rough from the move so this week we finally took the time to paint. It looks awesome and I'm excited about it. For now the cubbys are empty but I plan on getting some nice baskets to fill the space. Here's what it looks like at the end of our bed, so pretty!

L

DIY

It's been so nice to be in our house and to actually be able to do some of the projects I've been wanting to do. The first started on Wednesday. I've been wanting to recover our kitchen chairs for years and it was finally the right time.

I got this awesome red fabric and with some help from my Mom, some awesome stapling from Brad and the removal of a ridiculous amount of existing staples we now have what look like brand new chairs. The red looks so great in our new house and I found some throw pillos to match in the living room. You can see a before and after picture below but the picture really doesn't do the grossness of the fabric justice. It was all stained and dirty so the red is a nice change.

In the new house we have a ledge in the kitchen that would be perfect for bar stools and Mom just happened to have some lying around so we covered those in the same awesome red. Look how great they are under the cupboard.

We also did a bunch of painting on a bench that goes in our bedroom, it's going to look awesome when done.

Our next project, the babies room started today, pictures to follow but our new crib is beautiful.

L

The Move

A few words on the move this past weekend…

1. Kudos to our 1:00 crew that were so efficient they made our 6:00 crew unnecessary and we were able to leave Calgary 4 hours earlier than planned.
   
2. Never have I seen a move go that quickly. My two brothers, my Mom, Dad and Brad unloaded our truck in 20 minutes. Those boys were moving mattresses on their own and doing everything so quickly that the Denise and Jenny just stood aside before they were run over (there will be much more for you to do on the 17th, we can stay inside the new house and move boxes to the proper rooms)


3. You would think I'd learned the lesson in the last move… my flour and sugar buckets can't just have the lids put on them, they need to be taped. Last move it was the flour that tipped over and spilled, this move it was the sugar. It's a good thing we'd thought to bring a broom.


4. Our U-Haul experience was entirely satisfactory and we'll be happy to use them again.


5. As we packed up in Calgary Brad did an awesome job of fitting things in Tetris style until we realized we didn't actually need that much room. Apparently we should have tied things down (don't worry, nothing broke).

Hoping to Settle

In our married life Brad and I have been pretty blessed, we really haven't had a lot of trials or difficulties (knock on wood). Our finances are well organized, we've both been well employed. We're healthy, have a great relationship and have been really happy except in one aspect… we seem to have difficulty with housing.

There was the first apartment where there was confusion about whether it was ours or not and then the whole heat debacle. We lucked out and found a lovely new place where we've been since January and we've enjoyed it a lot.

Then there was our Lethbridge house. We had everything lined up months in advance only to have it all fall apart a couple days ago. We were pretty stressed out about it as we have no time to go look at new places and we were supposed to move our things in a week.

One thing about me, I hate looking for apartments, I think it's a long, tedious and frustrating process and my previous landlord history has made me nervous to speak to them at all so I'm lucky I was blessed with a husband who takes care of that for us. I just make sure I'm real supportive and we're both happy. We were a little picky about this Lethbridge house. I really wanted 3 bedrooms, a dishwasher and I was not living on the West side, so when Brad sent me an email and photos of a house on the West I wasn't interested at all, until I looked at the first picture when I thought, "I'm in trouble". This house is beautiful, I'm not sure how you could turn it down. It's less than two years old, meets all our criteria (except the location) and is only slightly out of our price range (we can make it work). The move will not be as smooth as it will now involve a storage unit for a month but at least we know where we'll end up eventually.

Click on the photo below for more photos of our soon to be home.

Lethbridge House

Here's hoping the location sacrifice is worth it because I'm excited to have such a beautiful house.
L

Home Sweet Home

We found a place to live! And somehow it ended up requiring nothing but patience, it sort of just fell in our lap.

Let me tell you about this house… First of all it's an actual house, not an apartment or a four-plex (which I would have been okay with, I love our current four-plex). It has three bedrooms which means Brad can have an office to study in. We'll have our own laundry, we won't even have to share with the basement. It has a dishwasher! and Air conditioning! You're probably thinking what we were, What houses have air conditioning in Lethbridge? Ours does! It's a reasonable price and in exactly the location we wanted to be in, it just couldn't be more perfect.

We have yet to sign a lease so we're sort of trying to keep our excitement down but by verbal agreement it's ours and we're thrilled.

Now we just need to organize the move…
L