California

I was lucky enough to be nominated and accepted into a weeklong Pesticide Regulatory Education Program for work. I’ve gotten to travel a lot for my job and was very excited to head to Davis, CA where I spent all of last week!

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The course itself was great and I can’t wait to get back to work and apply what I learned!

My days were full so I didn’t get to do much exploring, but I did manage to make it out a few evenings to check out the areas around the hotel. I met some great people at the course who do the same thing I do, but in different states. Fun fun!

I was expecting it to be low temperatures out there, but figures it was an “unseasonably warm” week according to the locals. So it wasn’t very cool out but it was gorgeous nonetheless!

 

My flights were good. I was really nervous this trip for some reason, but I made it there and back safely. So thanks for the prayers!

My hotel. Close to everything!

Davis is a bike riding city. Let me tell ya! It was such a quaint town. And school at UC Davis was starting back in session on Thursday so the students were everywhere. I may or may not have almost been taken out on a bike my first day walking around.

I was very excited to try Pinkberry. I was also very disappointed. Bleck. Nuberri is where it’s at!

 

 

SO many cute places to eat!

Bike shop.

I know this is super duper unhealthy. But one of my days was particularly long, and I stressed all day over my presentation, so come dinner time I needed some comfort food. Yum-o.

I got to see David and my fur babies throughout the week via Facetime. I love technology.

Heading out to the Farmer’s Market Wednesday evening.

Fresh fruits and veggies galore!

Bees at the Honey booth.

Some of the ladies in our group.

Serious business. I never really knew which one my trash should go into.

They fed us delicious lunches all week.

Such a gorgeous place!

Hola!

Cute sorority house.

I don’t know what this is. Sorority or Fraternity but so different than the Greek houses here.

Heading out for the Rockstar Themed Graduation dinner.

And my way-over-used-that-evening-rocker-symbol.

Mmmmm.

Mountains on the way home.

Check out that gorgeous lake in the back.

I can’t wait to go back to CA…on a vacation!

New House from A to Z!

For a lack of blog material, I’m stealing “Me from A to Z” from my sweet friend Lindsay! However, I want to switch it up to be “New House from A to Z”!


You know, features, things I’m excited about, and random facts about our new home because it’s all I can think about!

Aloof Gray by Sherwin Williams is a color I’m considering for the main living areas. Picking a gray is hard! Although I still love the gray from our last guestroom. So I can always resort to that one!

B is the first letter of our soon to be new street name!

Christmas decorating will be SO fun although I won’t be able to do it this year since we’ll more than likely be closing the weekend before Christmas.

Driveway. I don’t currently have a driveway. I have two parking spots and to have a little more car moving around space will be nice!

Empty closets! Well, this is a maybe. I may end up with a few empty closets which means…I can buy more junk! Haha. Kidding. Sort of.

Fireplace to cozy up to this winter. I’ve always been blessed to have a Fireplace wherever I’ve lived. To me, it completes a house.

Garage. Oh my I can hardly wait to have one again! For a workshop space and for parking!

Hand scraped hardwood floors will make my heart sing! Until I have to clean them constantly anyway!

Icemaker. I haven’t had one in so long. It’s the little things in life people!

Jack O’ Lanterns on the front porch is something I’m so looking forward to!

Kitchen designed by me. This one is rather scary as I strayed from the original plans and created my own thing. I hope it turns out like my “vision”!

Laundry room with some space to move around in!

Master bathroom with two sinks. Oh, the room!

New carpet. No more renter’s carpet! My carpet for being a rental was actually not bad, but do you really want to lay your face on carpet that who knows what has been on it by previous dwellers? Yuck.

Open floor plan goodness. I seriously can’t wait to park it at the island for stuff like painting my nails and get to watch tv at the same time.

Porches. Big beautiful spaces for lots of R&R.

Quality door knobs. Since I’ve lived in my rental, which I love for it being a rental, I’ve had 99 door handle problems. Well close anyway. At this point I think every single knob in my place has not worked or locked me out of somewhere at some time or another over the last year.

Rocking chairs for the front porch. I don’t have them yet, but if anyone wants to buy me two for a house warming gift, I wouldn’t turn them down! :)

Stainless steel appliances. Yummy!

Ten foot tall ceilings which means taller walls for me to hang my junk on!

Upstairs for junk hoarding David’s man room. Somehow I got talked into adding a bonus room above the garage. I think it will be worth it though!

Very excited I am! I couldn’t think of a V word. Sorry.

Water spigot out back! Oh to give the dogs baths without fearing they’ll run away! I currently only have one spigot out front and it’s a pain.

eXtra (okay I cheated on the ‘X’ letter) room for more of my junk!

Yard. A bigger one than my current place anyway. I’m not sure how big it’s going to end up, but as long as it’s bigger than what I’ve got now, I’m good!

Zero reason to complain anymore about not having enough room!

Dog-Shaming

My friend Courtney shared this website with me recently and I’ve gotten a kick out of it! It started with this picture she sent me regarding Moose’s recent trip to the Animal ER – hah!

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Apparently Moosey isn’t the only one!

The site shows (usually) very guilty dogs with funny captions of what they’ve eaten/destroyed/bad habits, etc…it’s quite entertaining!

Here are a few others that made me laugh out loud…thanks for sharing Court!

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And this here handsome dude is Mortimer (Morty for short). He is Courtney’s pup and apparently he did some shameful things recently too! Hilarious!

Of course I couldn’t do a poochie post without some pictures of mine.

 

Rem accompanying us to the storage unit…which we won’t have to use for much longer. Yay!

My Moosey Goosey at the dog park.

Double trouble.

Poor Rem, just minding his own business in the dirty pool and Bam! Attacked! Little sisters are so annoying. This picture makes me laugh out loud, his facial expression cracks me up!

A Juicy House Update! (and a few extra things to note)

But two side notes real fast.

1 – Today, exactly 10 years ago David and I started dating. Crazy, I know. Here’s a picture around my 16th or 17th birthday.

Last year wasn’t fun for us. But like the quote says, “If life was easy, where would all the adventure be?”

And here’s us today, right now, while I type this. In our jammies with all kinds of junk in the background.  

I love you babe! Here’s to many many many more decades together!

2 - I know, I left you hanging on that last post when I said, Up Next: The Gold Rug how to. Well, I might have jumped the gun on that a little bit. You see, I should have given it a trial run before I posted about it. Although I LOVED it when it was first done, this is how it looks now. Only a week or two later.

See the thing about Pinterest is something may look beautiful and you might pin it to your “To DIY” board…but the reality is, some things just aren’t practical.

Word of advice. Don’t spray paint your welcome mat to look like these cute babies because it won’t hold up.

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I guess unless you’re planning to use it as wall art?

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If you’ve sprayed a rug and it held up, do share your secret please!

*****

So, next up, the exciting part! And what is now old news to my friends on Facebook...

We are under contract on a house!!

The teensy bit of information I’m leaving out is that there isn’t a house…yet.

In fact, here’s what our house looks like so far. Isn’t it gorge?

Well, at least it will be. In approximately 4 months when it’s done being built!

Holy meatballs Batman. This girl is excited!!

So how’d we get here?

We’ve been House Hunting heavily for probably going on 8 months now. We’ve had a lot of great places slip through our fingers for one reason or another. We’ve been discouraged, we’ve been sad, we’ve been mad. There’s a lot of emotions involved in house hunting. They don’t usually show that on House Hunters. Those people are always happy.

One of the houses we fell in love with was this brand new picturesque craftsman located in the same area that we bought our first house.

A great area, just farther out than we wanted to be again. However, after so many months of looking, we decided we’d need to compromise on our wish list and we’d start with location. The drive isn’t my favorite thing, but we’re still pretty close to everything not to mention will be living in the same neighborhood as SEVERAL of our close friends. And technically it’s only 7 minutes past the neighborhood that we really wanted to live in. So small fries if you ask me!

Anywho, we absolutely loved the house, but it was a 3/2 and we were really hoping for a 4 bedroom with room to grow. And don’t forget, I have a lot of junk. However, we figured we could make it work and seriously thought about getting it. We spent an evening at the house with our realtor, both sets of parents, my brother, and uncle who was in town, checking out the house. It also happened to be during one of the monsoons we had. Everyone thought the house was pretty, but we all couldn’t help but be concerned with the back yard, which was absolutely FLOODED. I’m not talking marshy, I’m talking let’s invest in a boat cause we’re gonna need it. Thank the good Lord above that the night we went to see it happened to be at that time because we never would have known we were buying a lake house, but it wasn’t really on a lake.

We decided against that house but asked the realtor of that place if the builder would be doing any 4 bedrooms in the neighborhood…

And now we fast forward. We are here today, under contract to build our dream home with the same builder, in the same neighborhood! It’s going to have a lot of the same features of the house up top, but it’ll be larger with a different floor plan.

This house isn’t fully customized or designed by us, but we picked a plan we liked that he had that would work, and tweaked it to our liking. I put a good hurting on the existing kitchen and made some swap-a-roos but I LOVE the end result. I am probably most excited about this area of the house. Oh and the island!

I don’t cook, but I love to eat. Duh. So naturally the kitchen will be my favorite! I am giddy over having an island that I can blog at, eat from, decorate cakes on…you name it.

Somehow David talked me into adding a bonus room above the garage. Which will bring the house to a 4/2 plus a finished bonus room. i.e., we’ll never grow out of it. I truly hope it’s our forever home. Or at least long long long time home. Have I mentioned I loathe moving?

Oh and I’m finally getting dream come true of a rocking chair front porch. And a nice covered back porch for that matter.

If things go as planned, we should be closing a few days before Christmas this year. Merry Christmas to us, we’re buying a house!

Here’s a picture of the front elevation. I am smitten.

Staring at a blueprint of your future house has got to be pretty close to an ultrasound of your unborn child. You see the potential of what the house is gonna be, and you can’t wait for it to be birthed! To hold it, and pet it, and paint it. Okay, things are getting weird.

We really, really loved the color scheme on the previous house, and are planning to go with the same colors. Why make it hard on ourselves picking new ones if it’s already been done? David actually decided he wanted the same exterior colors. I didn’t object because they’re really nice and work well together. But that’s not to say I wouldn’t love something a little sassier! But I’m good at making compromises, which will be happening A LOT between the two of us during this process.

So now that you are up to speed on the latest and greatest, get ready for lots of progress pictures over the next 4 months. When we get close to the end I’ll probably hold off on updates so I can do a BIG REVEAL. And sorry, it’s not gonna happen in 30 minutes, HGTV style.

Have I mentioned I’m so excited?!!!

Sorry to my Pinterest followers. I was up til midnight last night blowing up my boards!

PS, not house related - If you’re the praying type, I could really use some prayers for safe travels for my upcoming flight to California. I’ll be there for work but am having a lot of nervous thoughts as I prepare for a long cross country flight. I like flying, there’s nothing else like it. But that’s not to say I don’t stay nervous the whole time!

Burlap Football Door Hanger

I’ve seen them here there and everywhere in Pinterest land, and I knew I needed to make one. I read over a few tutorials and used this one as a starting point. I just got an idea of what to do and flew by the seat of my pants. This is an easy project and hard to screw up. They’re going for about $40 on Etsy and this one cost me $0 because I had everything on hand. Winning!

Tip: Use chalk (erases easily) to trace your shape and layer two pieces so you only have to cut once. Iron if necessary.

Mine came out to 11”x20”.

I freehanded although you could cut the letters on a cricut/silhouette and trace!

Tip: Put cardboard under the burlap while painting because it will bleed through.

I used regular acrylic paint a a variety of small craft paint brushes. Whatever fit the job at the time!

(Steps 3-5 not pictured, whoops)

Step 3: Hot glue/staple/sew edges together (I hot glued)

Tip: Leave about a 5” gap so you can stuff it with plastic bags!

Step 4: Close opening via step 3.

Step 5: Glue coordinating ribbon and hang!

Tutorial coming next on the gold mat!