Merry Days

 This was a fun quick little Christmas craft that helped get me into the Christmas spirit :) My sister was so sweet and gave me the vinyl which says: "Merry Days and Silent Nights". I wanted to put it on some sort of plaque and remembered I had this shelf from IKEA. I bought it for $1 in the as is section last year! I had it hanging in our old laundry room but apparently it was too heavy since it fell out of the wall. Ooops! So we moved it with us to our new house and it's been sitting in the garage. After I put the vinyl on it, I decided to put something on the side. I like to use what I have laying around, so I used some brown wrapping paper and some lace. Then I tied tulle around it.

 I was excited to put it up on our entertainment center which Tony made!

 Isn't it awesome!?! He only had the four legs to work with and made everything else from scratch. The cupboards are a cute bead-board, someday I'll have a good camera to show detail :)

Mudroom Makeover

 

Look what Tony's first project was on our house! He was so sweet and transformed our mudroom into a much more usable space! It's the best Christmas present ever!!! Now we have the perfect place to hang our coats right when we walk in the door. 

(before picture)

Here's a few pictures of the progress.

I love the bead-board and the cute hooks! 

He even redid the cute bench to make it match :)

It makes me happy every time I see it!

Exciting Changes

I can't believe how long it's been since I have blogged! We've had a lot of exciting new changes since then. The biggest news is that we sold our cute little old house in Syracuse!!! YAY!!! The whole process of selling it and buying a new house was quite a miracle and the Lord truly blessed us with so many tender mercies along the way! I am so grateful for his guided hand :)

We did do a few final projects before we left our Syracuse home. This was definitely the biggest! We added a second bathroom in our laundry room! 

It was pretty crazy (and scary) seeing Tony take a jack hammer to the floor :) We didn't think we were going to be able to add this bathroom without using a sump pump. Luckily we found the sewer connection when we started digging! YAY!!! We were never so happy to see a 4 inch pipe! It was like striking gold! Some how we finished this bathroom in a week and moved soon after :)

I had hoped to blog about our new house back in June, but my computer actually died and would not connect to the internet. Anywho, this is the house we chose to build :) We loved the red brick on our last house and decided we also wanted it on our new house. So the front exterior is red brick with brown and cream color hardy board, with white trim.

Although I love two-story houses, we decided to go with a rambler. It just seemed more practical and functional for our family. The picture above shows the potential of our future basement :) For now we are enjoying the nice open storage space and Max loves having a place to ride his scooter :)

Here is our main level floorplan. The one thing we did end up changing during the building process was the kitchen island. I loved how it was curved (as it's shown in this plan) but when they actually started building it and had the holes for the plumbing, we realized there was only about 7 feet for our dining room and walkway to get to the sliding door. We love to have people over for dinner and we knew our family would be getting bigger soon so we decided to change the island to create more space. Now it runs parallel with the fridge and oven. Here's a few pictures of the building process :)

 It's was so fun to see each new step on the house but we really loved when it was finished :)

 We are so thankful to be here and have lots of space to learn and grow together as a family. We truly have been so blessed!