wishing

Homeownership brought me something that I hadn't quite expected.
A lengthy (and pricey) wishlist.

Now that we're in the house and can see it coming together little by little,
I've got big plans for this place.

We have told ourselves that we'll be here for 5 to 7 years,
and I think it is going to take that long before we get the house just the way we want it.

This canvas would be so perfect for the wall between my cupboards and pantry door.

And this bench would be great for the empty wall by the garage door.

I'd love this rug in my kitchen. I'm thinking of doing the walls a light blue and using red accents.

I'm also looking for a cute bench and bookshelf to put in the hall upstairs. I want to make a little snuggle/reading corner up there.

We should be getting new light fixtures this weekend (hooray!), and we'll finish up painting soon, too. My next project is finding or making curtains. Then we'd like to put tile in the kitchen and bathrooms, refinish the kitchen cupboards, and put a real lawn in next spring.

So much to do, but so fun, too! I never knew how fulfilling it would be to create a beautiful space for our little family.

this week

I just wanted to show everyone what we've been up to this week.

Becca: unpacking (will it ever end?), trying to ignore the yappy poodles next door, and growing and growing.

Nicholas: slowing down a little. There's becoming less and less room for him to cartwheel in. But he never goes too long without not-so-gently reminding me that he's inside.

Kent: working, picking up boxes for me, installing ceiling fans, helping ward members move, and painting the nursery!

I can't wait to get all of the nursery put together and everything organized and ready for Nicholas. There's still a lot of work left to do before he gets here!

And we're still loving our house! (Just not the neighbor's dogs.) It feels SO good to have a home.

birthday

Kent turned 24 on Saturday!

The day started off with a spectacularly patriotic birthday breakfast of red, white, and blue waffles and homemade blackberry syrup.
I'm pretty proud of my blackberry syrup, since I invented the recipe myself.
But apparently I'm not proud enough to take a picture of it. Sorry.

After breakfast, Kent began the assembly of his long-awaited birthday present:
his very own barbecue grill.
We purchased it on Friday, but I wouldn't let him use it until Saturday. I'm a horribly mean wife, I know.
He had to pick out the appropriate grilling tools to go with it. Home Depot has a set of burger flipper/tongs/giant fork that "a man can be proud of."To help with the grill assembly Kent also got a cordless power drill!
It's unfortunate that he couldn't have opened that early, since we spent four hours changing the hinges of our refrigerator door the day before.
But maybe that's what made this present all the more meaningful.
Just look at that smile!
(And try not to look at the yucky light fixtures we haven't replaced yet. They're on "The To-Do List With No End.")

After a dinner of bacon-wrapped steaks, homemade french fries, and sparkling green jello, we had Dallin and Cindy and Mark over to help us eat ice-cream cake and play games.

After dark the two of us got in the car and drove back and forth on the 1604 to watch the fireworks at Six Flags. Kent always gets fireworks, just for his birthday!


Happy Birthday, Kent! You are the kindest, silliest, most wonderful husband!

giving thanks

I have a lot of things to be thankful for right now.
To name just a few:
1. Our house. We LOVE it.
2. Having internet again!
3. Good friends.

Before we moved in on Thursday, we wanted to get the initial cleaning and painting done for our home.

I've been a little (or more than a little) anxious about it because Kent works all day and I'm no longer able to do much work.

Kent keeps telling me that I'm working on a much more important job, but it's still really frustrating to me to not be able to do all that I want to for our house.

But that's where our great friends come in.

Dallin and Cindy and Mark and Anita were at our house for probably 8 hours a day last weekend. Their babies played together on the floor, the guys took down the nasty curtains and taped rooms and painted, and the girls helped me scrub the cupboards and unpack the kitchen stuff and clean the showers.

Dallin even dug through the garbage the previous owners left behind to find me a few "like-new" garbage cans to use in the house!

Then they came back on Thursday to help us move in. It was so nice!

I have a lot more posts to do, but for now here's a glimpse of our new wall color (and poor little Jayden asleep on the floor while his parents helped us into the late hours of the night).
Stay tuned for exciting posts about Kent's birthday, setting up our house, poodles, and more!

ninety-seven cents

We bought a house yesterday.
It all seems pretty surreal.
The weirdest part was driving into the garage for the first time. I think that's because you never drive into the garage when you are visiting someone else's house.

Yep, this house is ours.
Kent carried me (and our baby) across the threshold.

I have a crepe myrtle tree in the backyard. I gave it plenty of water yesterday because it was starting to wilt a little.
There was something unbelievably fulfilling about watering my own tree with my own hose in my own backyard.

At the title company yesterday we signed all of our papers (overwhelming!) and then we went to Wells Fargo to get a cashier's check for our down payment. The biggest check we'd EVER seen.
We returned to the title company and gave them the check.

The lady looked at the check and then she said,
"I'm sorry, I can't give you your house keys. You're ninety-seven cents short."

So we went to the car, dug through our spare change and my purse, and returned to the desk with a handful of quarters, dimes, nickels, and pennies. To purchase our home with.
In the perspective of the $122,000 we just paid (and borrowed) for a house, that $0.97 seemed really, really funny.

So I took a picture.

The moral of the story is:
Always keep spare change in your car. You never know when you'll need it to buy a house.

for posterity

Our final walk-through of our house is today at 5. We sign our life away to finalize everything tomorrow at noon.

We have 11 paint cans sitting here next to our front door.

Our new fridge comes on Saturday.

Our washer and dryer come on Monday.

And I'm at the point where I'm realizing that we're about to purchase our very own very first home.

So I thought I'd dedicate this post to all the "fun" experiences we've had living in apartments, particularly this apartment. Not to complain (I'm too excited about the new house to complain about this apartment), but to record them for posterity's sake.

Let us begin.

• We lived here to save money--and we were happy to learn that our first month here was free. Sometimes that thought has been all that's kept me here.
• Cockroaches. Absolutely yuck!
• We've had the maintenance guys here literally every week. And every time we ask for them to come we have to go in the next day to ask again.
• The last time they came they left the bathroom fan hanging from the ceiling. It's still dangling.
• We can hang pictures just by pressing them up against the walls. The paint is super sticky.
• Although I cannot figure out where they're coming from (and I've tried!), we have a fruit fly infestation.
• Who needs TV when you can watch real life cops settle real life disputes right outside your window?
• We're learning Korean (or maybe Chinese) by listening to the couple next door yell at each other.
• "Screaming boy." Is there a hotline you can call to report someone to the Super Nanny show?
• And of course, the Great AC Flood of '09.

We've learned a lot of "life lessons" from our time in apartments. We now know to ask if there's a specific move-in time, to make sure your mail forwarding is working, to never try to keep the AC set at lower than 70 degrees, to walk softly if you live above someone else, and hopefully, we've learned how to laugh at the little things.

And starting tomorrow, we're homeowners.

keeping cool

San Antonio is hot. Really hot.
During May I was thinking that maybe I had just remembered it from last summer as being worse than it had been. May was quite tolerable, sometimes even nice.
But then June came. And I remembered.

It's hot in San Antonio.

Luckily, we've found a few ways to keep cool:

Going "toobing" down the Comal River. We went on Saturday morning (you HAVE to go early before the crowds come with their beer coolers).
Truthfully, toobing the Comal river is my favorite thing about living in this place. Kent probably got tired of me saying how much fun I think the river is.
But when something makes me so happy, I just can't keep it inside. On Saturday night we went to Dallin and Cindy's to "roast marshmallows and eat ice cream." When they called to ask if we'd bring a bag of ice, I almost didn't even dare to hope that meant they were making homemade ice cream.
They were! And we ate it!
And then, they even gave us their old ice cream machine! Oh joy! So of course, our Family Home Evening activity on Monday was making homemade strawberry ice cream. Right here in our dining room.

The recipe I found online was from the early 1900's, and it directed that you heat the strawberries and sugar until boiling, then "remove from the fire and let cool."

Kent was a little bit anxious about us messing up the recipe--I don't always exactly follow recipes, but it turned out absolutely delicious, even without boiling over the fire.

family

We took family pictures when Kent and I were in Logan in April. I just got them, and I love how they turned out! We wanted to get them done because the next time we are there Josh will be in Michigan on his mission.

And we took family pictures in California when we were there, too, because Mason is now in Montana! I think it will be fun in a few years to look at these pictures and tell little Nicholas that he's there in the pictures, too.