Hey, So This Happened...

We moved. Surprise!

 It was a spur of the moment decision that sort of went like this ::

June 14- Jordan and I casually talked about finding a house. We then talked about a town house. Wondered about the price difference and whether it would be worth it to move. 

June 15- Look at the floor plans and price it all out.

June 16- Jordan calls the office and sets up an appointment. We go see the town house.

June 17- We give them our deposit. 

June 20- We sign the lease and they hand us the keys.

June 20-24- Pack and move everything.

So here we are, a little over a week later. It's a mess around here. We did everything so quickly that it's taking a little while to recover. Because it was so last minute we were not able to take any time off from work. We've had full weeks on top of it. 

This is the view as you walk in the front door. 

View from the hallway towards the front of the house.

Down the hallway is the kitchen/dining room/ laundry room. To the left is the closet and to the right is the half bath.

The pictures do not do it justice, this is the largest closet ever.

To the left is the dining area. It is smaller than our last place.

It also houses the pantry.

To the right of the doorway is the kitchen. We were fortunate to move in right after they had replaced all of the appliances.

The laundry is in the kitchen. I'm not a huge fan of that, but I'm all for being able to do our laundry at home.

Out the back is our fenced in "yard". We are able to do whatever we'd like out here.

We also have central air, which is amazing.

Back inside, this is the view from the front door. Door at the top of the stairs is the linen closet.

From the landing you can see Story's room and the bathroom.

Story's room overlooks the front of the house. It is bigger than her last room.

It also has these awesome double closets.

The full bath.

The house is three bedrooms so Jordan was able to keep his office.

The master bedroom is to the immediate left once you reach the top of the stairs. It is a lot smaller than our old bedroom, but is finally the size of a normal room.

Overall we are extremely happy with the move and the new house. We are estatic that we no longer live in an apartment. It's like a step up for us. 

I feel like we are a long way off from being "moved in". Posting will be sparse. I can't find the power strip to get my computer going. But we do have a few of the rooms mostly unpacked. We're getting there.

Updated Living Room / Office {House Tour}

Sorry about the silence for the past week. I'll tell you all about it later :) In the meantime, we're rounding out our updated tour of the house.

One side of the living room was devoted to my office space. It also had our library.

This is the view from the front door. Office to the right and living room to the left.

There you have it! A completed tour. You can check out the rest under "Apartment Tour"

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Updated Dining Room {House Tour}

Back before Story's birthday, ballet recital, and rainbow party, I was a cleaning fool trying to get everything ready for our guests. Our house hadn't been that clean in a long time. It sure was nice while it lasted. I was able to show you the master bedroom tour before all of the family time.

I feel like there were a lot of updates to the dining room that I didn't tell you about. I showed you a little bit of our new-to-us table, and you were able to see a bit in to the dining room when we revealed our "HELLO" wall art. Believe it or not, there have still been more updates since then.

The biggest change being the shelves. I swapped the bottom one out with another wooden one we had floating around. I then painted them the same color as the full bath and spray painted the edges gold.

(terrible photo. but it was the only one I had of the shelves up close)

 

This is the view from the living room looking back towards the full bath and bedrooms.

 

I'm not going to show you the view in to the living room. That's a surprise for a later post! It's pretty amazing.

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Story's Fifth Birthday Party! {Rainbow Party}

As you know, my little lady turned five! She has been on a bit of a rainbow kick lately, and that didn't stop when it came time to pick the theme for her birthday party. Like in years past (1,2,3,4) we let her choose. Not going to lie, I was pretty excited when she mentioned Rainbow. I had seen a lot of neat ideas floating around Pinterest and thought I could make it really interesting. We had the party at Jordan's grandma's house, like last year and on her second birthday. Having used this location before, I knew better than to have it outside. It was a relatively small party, with only five other kids. Which was great, because it let me make the games and party favors just a little bit bigger.

 One of my favorite things was the cloud and rainbow for the dessert table. It was a lot of fun to make. I didn't do a tutorial, but it's pretty simple. I used a lamp shade, one that I found at Goodwill, an old white sheet and some tulle. I started by gluing and taping the sheet in to place. I used Tacky Glue that I found at JoAnn's and packing tape we still had from the move. It took a few days to get it to set and then a few more days for tweaking.

Paper chains. So simple and easy. They added another layer to the decorations. Another fun thing, was making the tissue paper pom poms. No tutorial for these either, but there are a ton of great ones out there.

The food was amazing. We had rainbow fruits and veggies, colored goldfish crackers, meat and cheese platter, and rainbow bread with peanut butter and jelly.

My wonderful father in law made the rainbow bread for the party. I wasn't able to eat it, but everyone said it tasted great. Story was so excited about almost everything being rainbow!

The dessert table was a lot of fun to put together. There was so much candy. We had those kids on a sugar rush, and then sent them home, with more candy ;) The jello-shots were another fun addition. I used six different types of jello. They were layered and them topped with Cool-Whip. They were a huge hit, mostly with the grown-ups.

The cake, now that was an experience. I've never properly iced a cake before. Most of the time I just left them in the pan... Ha, terrible I know. But this year I was determined to do it right. I enlisted the help of Jordan's grandma, who is an expert cake icer. It was so much for working alongside her, getting things ready for the party.

For the drinks we had four different kinds of kool-aid. We kept the plates, cups and utensils simple. The food and drinks were the start of the show.

Each kid received a party favor, after they ate. It was filled with bubbles, silly string, a punch balloons, a lei, glow in the dark bracelet, water gun, and lantern. The boxes were a score at Target.

The birthday girl and a few of her friends. Story's dress was an Etsy find. One that didn't last long. She spilled her drink down it almost instantly and ended up in a random shirt we had. Poor planning on my part.

The dress came with a matching dress to go with her American Girl Doll. She doesn't have one of those, but it did fit perfectly on her Build-A-Bear, Rose.

I don't have a photo of it, but after the kids ate and played with their goody bags we had a golden egg hunt for them.

After that I set up an art table for them to color on. They had markers and glitter glue. They ended up just smearing the glue all over the place and it sort of turned into a sticky mess.

Then it was time for cake. Story was a little disappointed at first when she saw it was just a white cake. She thought for sure it would be a colorful cake. Little did she know...

!!!! YES!!!! I attempted the rainbow cake! And it turned out beautifully! I used a white cake mix and added food coloring to six different bowls. They were then put into round cake pans. (now you know why I needed so much help with the icing :) ) I wasn't able to eat this either, but everyone said it was delicious.

Then it was time for the pinata. Or pianta, as Story likes to call it. It was so cute listening to the kids try and pronounce it. We had to rush the pinata a bit because it started to rain.

We finished the party with more candy and presents. I think it was a hit. Katelyn told Story it was the best birthday party she had ever been to. Kid approved :)

I had so much fun putting this party together. But boy, did it take forever! I'm glad it's done :) The timing was the hardest. We had to cram two really big events into the same weekend. Next year I'm going to space it out better. I plan on using some of the decorations in Story's room. So that will be fun.

**photos c/o Nancy Pike**

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