third time's the charm

we got the best news ever while vacationing last week: we finally sold our house!

as stressful as it was to own a house we weren't living in, it had become our safety net to the place and people we love. i felt that as long as we had our house in logan, we might move back. now that it's not ours (and will be used as a rental property, sad), i've been nostalgic about all the things that did and didn't happen in our very first home.

it was the place where i learned how to cook and enjoy it. it's the place where i found yard work to be a little more enjoyable than ever before and learned firsthand how difficult it is to keep the grass green. we learned what it's like to have caring, friendly, wonderful neighbors. we put up christmas lights. we painted. we planted. we raised a puppy with only minimal damage to the floor. i held piano recitals and hosted a wedding shower. we cleaned out a flooded basement, twice. our weekends weren't complete without a trip to home depot. our house was small and it was old, but we took a lot of pride in the place we called home.

we never hosted that neighborhood BBQ we talked about. we never tore off the wheat wallpaper in the laundry room. we never replaced the awful linoleum floor or the stair coco tore up. and of course we had big plans for the second bedroom that didn't quite pan out.

i am relieved beyond words that we sold it--yay for only one monthly rent payment! i'm excited to start house hunting for something that we plan to stay in for a LONG time. but i'm also a little bit sad that the logan chapter of our life is closed. logan was so good to us.

we need a little christmas!

have you ever really listened to that song? i had never paid much attention to the lyrics but it's one of my favorites this season. anyway, here's a little glimpse at christmas around our house:

1. classic green+red tree. i found the huge ornaments at tai pan and love them. so do my piano students; hopefully the ornaments survive getting pulled off the tree every week
2. i know this nativity freaks some people out because there are no faces, but i love the simplicity of it
3. my grandpa used to paint a new santa claus every year that represented the santa from different countries. i have about 11 different ones, and this one is my favorite
4. be merry!

1. cami mentioned the theme at her house seems to be glitter. that's the same with mine. i love having a little bling :)
2. we don't have a mantle but this shelf seems to work well. i made the stockings and wreath made last year.
3. candy canes purchased in jackson hole
4. this is my favorite picture; my neighbor painted it for me and gave it to us for our wedding. i will always treasure it.

there you have it. stop by cami's blog to see her adorable vintage christmas decorations and her other blogging friends who have shared links. i've already got a list of things i want to make for next year!

this old house

our time lately has been consumed with three things:

1) watching season 1 of 24.
2) finishing the patio.
3) painting the bedroom and bedroom door.

first priority was finishing 24. we probably should have waited to start the season until we had the other important projects done, because once you start, you can't stop. but we didn't, so in between painting, rearranging, pouring cement, and moving rock, we had to find time (24 hours worth!) to finish what we started. the first season was excellent, although i must say that the show has come a long way since season 1. i'm glad we've finished it because now we can go to bed at a decent hour and i won't have nightmares anymore. although much to mike's dismay, jack bauer is usually there to save me in my nightmares....

we started the patio project last summer and quickly burnt ourselves out. our soil here is so rocky that we (and by we, i mean mike) had to pick axe every scoop of dirt we wanted to remove. ugh. it didn't help that we started this project in july, the hottest month of the year, so we got pretty tired of it and never finished last year. the area we poured started looking very much like this overgrown mess of weeds-
but with a little man labor- (thank you dustin and karl!)
tada!
the cement is ready and waiting for a patio set and pots of flowers. now if we can just find a cute/cheap patio set.

and our final project, before and after:
we only painted two walls so that it's not too dark, but i'm really happy with how it turned out. amazing what a little paint and new pillows will do for a room! we were apprehensive to paint the door, but thankfully it looks brand new and cost half as much as buying a new door. before being white, the door was a washed out grainy brown color, straight from the 80s.

so a few projects are now checked off the never-ending list of things we want to do around the house. soon to come, a new and lovely garden planted where roses infested with trees and morning glory once grew, chalk paint in the kitchen, and wallpaper removal/new paint in the laundry room.

you know it's spring in utah when...

you decorate for easteryou bring out the spring potpourri

you buy fresh fruityou crack the windows open and smile at the grass peaking through the snow and then you shovel two feet of snow off the driveway and play in it with the puppy.

all in the same week.

once there was a snowman

When I came outside from teaching piano today, our little nieghbors had built these snowmen on our porch. At least someone is enjoying this awful weather.

flooded

My little sister and her friend Rachael are the invaders this week because they are here for EFY. They go to EFY during the day and hang out with us at night. I was warned before they came that Rachael takes long showers. Seems irrelevant, but this is important.

I woke up this morning at 5:00 am and heard water running. I assumed that Kennedy and Rach had stayed up late and one of them decided to shower. Not all that unusual for these two ladies. I tried to go back to sleep but laid awake for what felt like hours thinking, wow, Rachael really does take long showers. I looked at my alarm clock again and it was 5:45. I needed to blow my nose so I walked out of the bedroom the opposite way because I assumed someone was in the shower. The carpet by the door was wet. I opened the door that leads to our laundry room to find water shooting everywhere. It seemed like it was coming from the ceiling and when I stepped in, my foot was buried in water. Of course I panicked and woke Mike up. (good to know that he will come running if ever I wake him up while he's asleep) Apparently the water hose that connects to the washer had burst. We had at least 5 inches of water in the laundry room. After we had cleaned that room out, we could still hear water dripping and walked downstairs to find another 4 inches of water flooded in the basement. The water had probably been going for 3 or 4 hours.

There's a door between our kitchen and laundry room that I never close but for some reason I closed it last night. I usually keep my purse (and ipod) on the washer so I can find it when I'm leaving for work. I normally keep the vacuum in the laundry room but I had been vacuuming on Saturday so I left it in our living room. I'm so glad that I did all these little things that I don't normally do because nothing important got ruined from all the water. (except for the girls' treats and mike's phone, but hopefully it dries out and works when we get home)

It could have been so much worse than it was. It was the cold water hose that burst. If the hot water had burst we would have burned our legs and feet trying to get it out. The water stayed in two rooms of our house, didn't ruin any carpet, and it was relatively easy to get the water out of the laundry room. We bought a wet-vac and made about 100 trips up and down the stairs with buckets in our hands to get the water out of the basement. (my workout's done for the day!) There are fans blowing in the basement and upstairs and our basement is now cleaner than it's ever been.

I'm so glad that Mike made light of the situation. We woke up stressed and ornery (who isn't with such a rude awakening?), but as we spent the morning together on a mission to find a wet-vac and kept mopping and cleaning things up, he made me laugh and forget why I was worried in the first place. He handles having a crazy emotional wife so well :)

planted with a whole lot of faith that i can keep these flowers alive

The Couch Catastrophe

Meet our small door frame--extremely small door frame. Mike and I got new couches this weekend which we are very excited about since we've been using my parents couches from when they got married, and well, they look as old as they are. So we brought home our new couches and they wouldn't fit through our door frame. We pushed and pushed and pushed but there was NO way to get them in. The couches weren't even close to fitting through the door frame.

Luckily, our sweet neighbor came and helped us cause Mike and I were getting a little frusterated that we'd just bought new couches that wouldn't fit through the door. So we got creative, and had to take out our window to get the couches in.

And here they are. We're glad they made it inside.