Home Sweet Home

As I mentioned in the June post Jeff and I moved into our new home the first weekend in June. We have spent the last month doing some renovations after the fire and now have everything complete minus some boxes left in the guest room! The house is 4 bedrooms with 2 and half bathrooms and is close to 2400 square feet. We have a great fenced in backyard and love the neighborhood pool. We have already spent a good bit of time with one of our neighbors and look forward to getting to know the couple across the street. They are around our age and have the cutest little 2 year old girl and are currently expecting their 2nd. We are hoping for a boy for a playmate for Daniel!

Emma Kate's room

This is our formal dining room which we are turning into an office. The transition is going slower then we had planned because of the fire. But hopefully we will buy office furniture soon and this empty room will turn into my home office! It is right when you enter our front door. When we moved in this room had carpet in it and we switched it out with hardwood.

The kitchen was my least favorite room and was so bad it made us almost walk away from the house. However, we changed out the flooring to hardwood and are in the process of switching out the appliances from white to stainless so it has definitely grown on me since we have done a few upgrades. The only thing we have left to do in here now is get a stainless steel refrigerator which we think we will get as our Christmas present to each other. You know you are old when you Christmas gifts start to include appliances :)

This is a picture of our living room looking in from our kitchen

Here is the other side of our living room. We have decided to only have a TV in the playroom upstairs and so far I have loved it! I don't spend nearly as much wasted time in front of the TV anymore and we have a clear divison between adult and kid space!

We are so thankful to have a "home" again and look forward to making lots of fun memories with our family of 4!

4th of July Weekend = U2 concert!

Jeff is a HUGE U2 fan so we were very excited when we learned they would be Nashville in July. He has seen them live several times but I have never had the chance to go with him. I am not a big music fan but I was very excited about getting to experience the concert with Jeff since he had been like a kid waiting for Christmas as we counted down the days. We bought tickets the same day they went on sale and my man looked forward to that concert for close to 10 months. What we did not know at the time was that I would be 32 weeks pregnant and it would feel like it was 150 degrees outside! Even though I felt HUGE and it was VERY HOT we had such a fun time. We meet some college friends (see above picture) for dinner at Cheesecake Factory before the concert and had so much fun hanging out with them and catching up with everyone. My favorite part of the whole concert was just watching Jeff get so excited every time they would play certain songs and seeing the permanent grin on his face for the 2 hours they played.

The next day we went to hang out with our best friends Dan and Emily King. Emily and I took the kids to the pool while Jeff and Dan hit the lake. I do not have any pictures because we had not bought our new camera yet :( Around 8:00 Emily and I went hunting for the boys because we had not heard from them and was worried they might have had some boat issues. As we were pulling up to the dock the boys were pulling in. Good news was they did not have boat issues they were just having to much fun knee boarding and jumping off cliffs. I told Jeff there were some things in life he did not need to give me full disclosure on and the fact that he was cliff jumping was one of them ;)

The next morning we took our time getting up and packing and then headed back home. It was such a fun long weekend spent hanging out with friends and enjoying the summer.

June

Well it looks like I am still only going to be updating the blog once a month! Despite my best intentions life just gets in the way of me being able to sit down in front of the computer. This month started out with a bang....or should I say boom :)

We moved into our house the first weekend in June. We have been so thankful for God's provision and His perfect timing in bringing us to this house. We LOVE it! It is the perfect house for our growing family. We moved in and had to wait a week before the gas was turned on. We spent the first week taking cold showers and eating out! The gas was turned on on a Thursday but I did not get a chance to cook my first meal until Sunday night. Jeff was at church leading his 9th grade guys small group and I thought I would be a great wife and have dinner on the table for him when he got home. Instead what happened was I had some fire trucks in our driveway waiting for him when he got home!

As I was preheating the oven I started to smell something that just did not seem right. I have never owned a gas stove so I thought it could be normal but called a few people to check just in case. Everyone seemed to think it was fine and more then likely was just the oven cleaner burning off. However, when the oven finished preheating and I opened it to put our food in....flames were coming up from the bottom and the top of the stove was black! I grabbed Emma and my phone and called 911 for the firemen to get here! Thankfully, there was only minor damage which mainly consisted of our stove being completely burnt and a section of our carpet with a black burn hole on it. The worst part was the MESS that was created from what the firemen used to put out the fire. We had dust EVERYWHERE!

I have never been so thankful for homeowners insurance in my life. We had a cleaning company come out that specializes in fire damage and they spent a week at my house cleaning. In the long run it was such a blessing because they pick every single item up and personally clean it. My house or the things in it will never be that clean again! Because of the hole in my carpet insurance also paid for the replacement of it. We decided to take the opportunity to go from carpet to hardwood so we paid the difference and went ahead and got hardwood all throughout our bottom floor. We also got the opportunity to get a new stove so we started the process of changing all the appliance to stainless steel. At this point the only thing we have left to switch out now is our refrigerator. The kitchen fire caused a lot of little inconveniences in our world for around a month but in the long run we got to make changes to the house that we love and would have never done so soon!

This month we also had 2 different sets of friends come visit us from Alabaster. I was still without a stove so we could not cook for them (trust me they were not sad about that :) ) but we had a lot of fun anyway. We went to the pool and just had fun hanging out at the house. At the end of the month Jeff spent close to a week in Florida with NorthPoint Student Ministry hanging out with his small group guys. Emma Kate and I really missed him but was glad he had the chance to go. They took like 1300 students which is something I can not even begin to imagine!

Jeff also received a promotion at work this month! The best part of his new role is he now will work normal hours and NO MORE WEEKENDS! We are super excited to get our weekends back and have already planned 2 different parties with friends at our house in July since Jeff will be here!

Coming soon....July update :)