Paint

What a fun week it has been!  No plans in addition to the norm, so some of my time was spent dreaming about the new house, and visiting my absolute favorite store in Springfield! 

Like I have said before, the flow of my house is extremely important.  I hate walking into houses, and the paint colors in certain rooms just slap you in the face.  I want my house to be bright, colorful, and creative, without being offensive.  I settled on the color scheme I am about to share a couple of weeks ago, but I keep second guessing myself, as it is a little cooler and more neutral than I think I  want.  However, the husband loves it, and I am learning more and more that this kind of neutral can be a very good thing because it is still interesting.  Also, I was thinking that if my house was mostly neutral with colorful accessories, I can customize each room for seasons and parties, which is oh-so-important!!!  haha!  Another perk of the colors I chose for the walls and the accessories are very cohesive and the accessory colors can be mixed and matched in any room and still look great!  How's that for flow and function!?
And now I present....THE COLORS!!!  (the pictures I took were way off, so I found these color swatches online.  They do not seem perfectly accurate either, but you'll get the point.)

Valspar's Jekyll Grand Dining Sea Mist.  My swatch seems lighter than this version.  This color will be in the living room.  If you remember from the previous post, the living room has a stone fireplace and a wood ceiling.  I'm thinking a creamy/mustard yellow and an off white for the accents in this room.

Olympic's Classic Khaki.  this color will be for the entry, halls, master bedroom and bath, hall bathroom, and most of the basement bedrooms.  It is a soft khaki...your typical neutral paint color.  It's similar to what we have in our current house, and it works with the decor that we already have.  I wanted to go with a gray color, but 1.  I'm a chicken, and 2.  We can't redecorate every room in our house.  Yes, our bedrooms will probably look exactly the same in the next house:)

Valspar's Granite Dust.  All these colors look so dark!!!  This color is much much lighter and will be in the formal dining room:)  Wes is talking about adding wainscoting!  How exciting!!!

 

Valspar's Stone Manor.  I was afraid to go this dark in any room because my goal is light and airy.  However, this is for the kitchen and laundry room where there are huge windows, white cabinets, and lots of light things to break up the space!

So, there you have it!  The main floor, minus the nursery.  (No, we are not pregnant, but the room is just so perfect for a future nursery that I can't call it anything else!)  The khaki and gray colors will also be in the basement, with the addition of a subtle, not striking medium blue.

These colors, on my computer are much darker than they look on my swatches.  I hope they look better in the rooms.  Here is an example of a room with the granite dust paint in it...

I think it looks lighter.

As far as accessory colors go, I'd like to incorporate orange, green, yellow and teal.  I'd also like to have several elements of glass, silver metals, nature-y things, and white ceramics in the house....

mmmmm...Isn't it lovely!!

Can't wait to get my hands dirty!!!!

:)

Long Time No Write

When I started this blog, I thought I had time in my life to keep up with it and keep the world updated on the happenings of my life. We just came off of an absolutely ridiculous, extended summer (super fun!) and I thought things were winding down. They did wind down for a couple of weeks, but I can assure you…my life is wound up once again! The last couple of weeks have been fabulously insane! I need some rest; therefore, I am dubbing this day, lazy/leisure cleaning, bible reading, recommendation letter writing, blog day! Most things can be done from the comfort of my bed! Yay!
“What has happened since I last wrote?” you ask. A WHOLE LOT!!! So much that I can’t update on everything, like I would like to (you know…with details and instructions…etc…) but I’ll hit the highlights…that I remember!

The most exciting new news is that WES AND I BOUGHT A HOUSE!!! No, we weren’t really in the market or in need of a house for ourselves, and we would be fine where we are at for several years, BUT we have a great desire to have ridiculous amounts of guests at our house (including the whole high school Sunday school class at Seminole at ONE TIME!). We always keep our eyes on the local real estate listings, and we are always discussing the houses we could potentially flip, rent, build, or whatever…just because it’s interesting and fun. When we came across the house we are in the process of buying, we fell in love. We prayed a ton about it, because when upgrading to a larger house, we wanted to keep ourselves in check and make sure we were still chasing God instead of the American dream. We feel God granted us peace about the decision, and also allowed several things to happen that we believe were just Him confirming this path for us! The night we got the news that they accepted our first offer (and offered to pay closing costs…weird!) Wes and I were completely humbled. I cried. Lol. It’s hard to reason why God would want to bless us in this way because we are so undeserving. We are thankful and will strive to use the house to bring Him glory in all ways that we can! And, as Libby says, this is a perfect example of how we live in God’s economy, not the worlds’.

I seriously didn't take a picture of the front of the house...so here's the living room:)

With that being said, my time following that decision was filled with lots of decluttering/staging /fixing of our current house, as well as choosing finishes for the new house so we can make a budget and priority list of what we can and can’t do in the new house. Because I am so anal about my entire house flowing together and looking cohesive, choosing paint colors alone was a very time consuming task. One of the biggest debates was whether or not to paint the kitchen cabinets, or just darken them with a tinted polyurethane. This was such a huge issue, I had to ask many for advice, including my entire BSF discussion group. Thanks for all of the input, ladies!!

Imagine....dark wood floors, cream cabinets, granite, and new stainless appliances!  Oh...and through that back door is the laundry room...Shawn thinks it's my favorite room in the house...she might be right!

In the end, we chose white. I think I really chose white in my head before the decision, but we have to keep wood floors (refinished, of course) in the kitchen, and I refuse that much wood in one room of my house! Thank goodness, because I really wanted to paint the cabinets in the laundry room, and for the house to be cohesive, the kitchen and the laundry room have to have similar finishes! Haha! Within the next several months, there will be tons of before and after pictures to share, I’m sure! How exciting!

This week had many non-house focused events! Here’s a list of a few of my favorite things that happened!

Monday, I got to go ugly sweater shopping with the Denny twins…whom I love!

Tuesday, I babysat for Tiffany’s MOPS leaders kids. It was interesting. There are about 5 kids who are 3 and under. They like to take each other’s toys. When that happens, no matter what the outcome was, I was left with a screaming child. I was fine with it, but I wondered if the parents below were worried to hear all of the screaming and crying (every kid had their own time in the limelight). Haha! They are cuties though. If anyone has any advice to help reduce this toy-taking business, do share! I have no children or experience with this, and I am scheduled to watch them every other week!

Wednesday-BSF, bible study party, and youth:)

Thursday- Party planning/shopping, lots of cleaning

Friday- Food/Shower prep, Slumber party prep, made cute cake! My SBU friends also came over for a slumber party! It was so good to have them all together and visit. We stayed up until 3-something just chatting and drinking sparkling grape juice. It was fabulous! I love them and hope we can do it more often before some leave the area :(!

I totally stole this picture from Brook's facebook!  I knew I could count on her to have a pic of the group!  These are the lovely ladies who graced me with their presence and helped me a ton:)

 Saturday- I was soooo blessed to have the girls help me a TON with the shower. God knows my needs…I would have been SOOOOOOO stressed and pressed for time without them! The shower went great! Not to brag, but it was really cute! After a little bit of clean-up (not all…still working on putting my house back together) Shawn, Eric, Wes, and I went to Marshfield to see Shawn and Eric’s future house! It was adorable! Perfect for them, with elegant archways and lots of big pretty windows! I can’t wait to see what they do to the place! It’s super fun that my sis and I are in the same process of buying houses at the same time! I love that in the evenings we can share all of our house ideas, and we both get to put them into action very soon!

Everything in this picture is cute as a button:)  Can't wait to meet baby Preslie!  Though I will miss rubbing Missy's tummy!  (I'm sure she won't!  ha!)

Sunday- was a complete blur…even after lots of coffee and an attempted nap. I was beat! I do remember having a nice conversation with the lovely Melissa Starrett, and going to dinner with Davit, our favorite Georgian.

And, that's about all I can think of, though I know there was a lot more that happened!  Thanks for reading the random!  I had fun writing it!
Have an excellent day!

This week...

This past week was fabulously fun!  I got to be creative!
This weeks activities included:
1.  Landscaping-  Wes and I started landscaping last Saturday.  We are not done yet, as you can see in the pictures, but it is a great start, and I'm excited to actually see some progress.  This past spring we decided we hated our landscaping, so we chopped it all down...and never got around to replacing it, until this week.

 

This was our yard before...

 

This is our new landscaping.  As you can see, I still have some planting to do.  One of this weeks projects:)

  The side of our house also got a bit of TLC.  This was more of a dramatic change, but I'm slightly more embarrassed of the "before" pic!  ha!  Pretty sure this has irises in the spring, and I bought a lot of tulip bulbs to plant this week!  Yay!

I made invitations for my cousin, Missy's shower.  I wanted to do something that matched her nursery theme.  Thanks to my mother-in-law, Libby, these didn't cost a thing!  Yay for her stash of office supplies!  I accidentally mis-spelled her last name in my first round of invites!  dope!  I was sooo bummed; I nearly cried.  Luckily, Missy's nice and said I could send them to the people who didn't share her last name and probably wouldn't notice...unless they read my blog...:)  I'm not going to lie, I'm kinda proud that I made this in Microsoft Word with a very limited selection of clip art! :)

batman cake

I got to make a cake and cupcakes for my adorable nephew's 3rd birthday party.  I was pretty pleased with them.  The one thing I was disappointed with was the fact that the dark blue icing colored the yellow color flow on the cupcakes overnight.  You live, you learn!

This is Zane meeting Batman for the first time:)  What a lucky little boy!

 The costume my husband is wearing was also one of this week's projects.  Some of the stuff was bought at the store and altered, and other parts of the costume I made.  I'm not going to lie, I'm kind of a fan of semi-homemade costumes.  Below is a picture of another thrown together costume...

Spartan Costumes for an SNL themed birthday party

Wes also had to wear women's clothing for this costume.  I'm such a nice wife for 1.  making him wear the costumes, and 2. for announcing it to the world.  He's such a good sport though:)  Love him!!!

The party was awesome.  Complete with party favors and batman masks for everyone!  In fact, it was so great that when it was all over Zane said, "I want to have another birthday party!!!"  

Look at how happy the little guy is!  Cute and shy as we sing happy birthday to him:)

My other PRECIOUS nephews with Batman.  Little Brandt seems to like Batman:)  Jaxon was a bit afraid at first...but loved it.  He kept saying, "Hi man," as he waved and followed batman around.  So cute!  He also loved my cupcakes!  whoo!  Sweet success!  And, don't you just love their batman shirts!?  Tiffany said it was just an image off of Google image and an iron on transfer!  Genius!

 

He's pretty much my superhero too:)

*melt*  This picture makes my day.  Do you see the mutual love? :)  They were having so much fun! We are so blessed:)

This coming week's calendar is not quite as packed, but I'm sure I'll come up with something!  My plans are to work on the house, which might just mean cleaning it and keeping it that way...like I DIDN'T do last week:)

...or maybe I'll try to take over the world:)

Hope yours is grrrreat!

And so begins another great year...

There is this new approach to health called holistic health. It claims that in order to be healthy the areas of physical, emotional, spiritual, social and environmental need to be addressed and cared for. I’m not going to lie, I don’t really believe this is new news, as the bible addresses all of those issues! I would, however, reorder them and rank the spiritual realm as most important. I want my blog to be an adventure of the ins and outs of my days as I learn new things in all areas of my life (sweet life skills!!!), and as I strive to become a better wife, friend, daughter, sister, servant, etc. For me, and I believe for everyone, when it really comes down to it, growing in my relationship with Christ is the most important thing I can do for all of my relationships as well as for myself.

The one sure way to grow in relationship with God is to get into His word. Now, I haven’t always been the best at this. Actually, I’m still not even close to good at it! I have been a Christian for a long time, and reading my bible daily has always been my biggest struggle. However, I have found accountability to be a huge blessing. This is why I PRAISE THE LORD that BSF started today!!!

If you have not heard of Bible Study Fellowship (BSF), it is an international program that teaches the bible in depth. I believe it takes 8 years to do all of the studies! Each week consists of reading the bible and answering questions daily, going to a discussion group and lecture over what you read, and reading notes (commentary). Yes, it is intense, and sometimes it may feel repetitive, but Wes and I (and the whole Stewart family would agree with me, I’m sure), feel it is the best tool for personal study we’ve found to truly understand the bible and imprint the words and stories in our hearts and minds. I’m not going to say it is always fun. I was in a funk at the beginning of last year and remember several times where I didn’t want to go at all…and sometimes I didn’t even enjoy it. However, looking back at the year, I see how God brought me back to Him through my desire to uphold my reputation as responsible in my eyes as well as in others’. (What a terrible reason to study the bible!! Thank God He knows how to reach us, though! Ha!)

This year we are studying Isaiah! How exciting to study the man whose very name means Jehovah saves/God is salvation! Our lecture leader said the message of Isaiah was something like this (summarized): There is only hopelessness in human endeavors that promote significance through earthly pleasures and significance and totally neglect God. The only remedy is to trust in God and his redemption. I’m greatly looking forward to it!

Now that you’ve read my plug for BSF, if you’re interested in Springfield there is are two meetings for women (Wednesday at 9:10 am, Mondays at 6:45pm) and one for men (Monday at 6:50). They run for the duration of the school year, the summers are off. If you are not in this area, it is an international ministry, so check to see if there is one near you!  You can't just show up, though!  There are introduction classes once a month.  If you are interested, contact me or a leader in your area:)

Thanks for reading!

Have a stupendous day!!!

HI!

Hi!

So, this is my first post:) I don’t know what to say, other than I’m really excited to get this whole blog thing started, and you have to start somewhere! It is my hope that this blog is not only a way that family and friends can see what’s actually going on in my life, but also a tool that I can use to remember the fun details that are so easily forgotten with time. It has been a few years since I’ve really had to express myself through writing, so you’ll have to bear with me!

One warning I might add: I have tons of hobbies, and interests and am always learning new things. Because of that, I have a feeling this blog is going to be quite random! Just like my life!

That is all! Have a BLESSED day!!