5 Years…Wow

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Yesterday Tom and I celebrated our 5 year anniversary…it’s amazing how time flies. I feel like we have done so much in 5 years and have grown so much in 5 years. 

We have lived in 4 different houses
Gone to Hawaii, Mexico, California, Honduras and many fun camping trips
We bought our first house 🙂 
Had an amazing daughter 🙂
And have learned so much about each other!

We have gone from teenagers, to adults, to a family! Love you babe and I’m so excited to see what the next 5 years will bring us!

New Shelf!

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So another project has been finished at our house! Like i said in an earlier post I asked Tom to build me a shelf above my kitchen sink for my birthday. I love how it turned out and it really changes the feel of my kitchen. My grandma gave me a Home Depot gift card so I got a new light for the kitchen as well.
Here is a before shot
and here is what it looks like now!!!

In reality we would love to gut the whole kitchen and start over but that’s not a reality for a long time.  So for now I’m really enjoying my new shelf! I feel like it ties everything together and the new light really brightens up the kitchen and makes it feel bigger! Thanks babe for the awesome b-day gift!!
Another thing we need to tackle…the awful tile!!

Chinese Ramen Salad

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This is my favorite salad, it’s one of my mom’s recipes that I grew up with…yum yum, I love to bring to potlucks or to make it for BBQ’s or large groups of people. It’s so easy to make and everyone always loves it! I just made it for our 4th of July BBQ so I thought I’d post it in case anyone wanted to recipe.


Ingredients

1 head Napa cabbage, shredded

6 stalks green onion, sliced

2 cups cold, cooked chicken, sliced thinly (optional)

1 cup toasted slivered almonds

½ cup toasted & salted sunflower seeds

¼ cup toasted sesame seeds

2 packages Top Ramen noodles, Oriental flavor

 

Mix cabbage, green onion & chicken in large bowl.  Put Ramen noodles in a Ziploc bag and break up with a rolling-pin. Pour Ramen noodles into skillet on medium-low heat and toast with nuts, and seeds until just golden. Set aside until the salad is ready to be served.

 

 Salad Dressing

1/3 cup Chinese Seasoned Rice Vinegar

½ tsp. salt

½ tsp. pepper

¼ cup sugar

2 Top Ramen seasoning packets from Oriental flavor Ramen

10 drops of sesame oil, or to taste

1 cup salad oil

Mix together the first 5 ingredients in a jar or container with a lid.  Shake well and set stand to dissolve the sugar and seasonings.  When dissolved, add the oils.  Do not mix the dressing with the salad until just before eating.  Enjoy!

Garden & “Flower Bed” Progress

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A little background on the house…when we moved in the house had been unoccupied for around 7 months so the yard was a little overgrown. Whenever there is a nice weekend we are working in the yard and plugging away at it…often it feels like we haven’t done much so I have found that it’s nice to take pictures along the way. It’s a great reminder of where you came from and I feel like it helps me to keep going!

Today we continued to work on the “flower beds” under the tree..I don’t know if they are really supposed to be flower beds but i’m not sure what else they would be. The problem with the location of the flower beds is that we really can’t plant anything in them. They get so many pine needles from the trees and not a lot of light so we have decided not to plant anything there. The main thing that will grow there are weeds!!

Here is what it looked like last summer

Last summer we hired our friend Matt from church who helped us get it to this stage

But a lot of it grew back. One of my co-workers mentioned putting down newspaper, then mulch would help with the weeds. So today we finished weeding (AGAIN!!) the bases of the trees, after we were done weeding we sprayed some Round Up, then we laid down newspaper, weed barrier cloth, then a thick layer of much!! I know it’ a lot of layers but are trying really hard to keep those suckers away!!

So here is what it looks like today…it will be interesting to see if it works!

Now onto the garden. When we moved in we had talked about having a garden. Last year we didn’t have time to prep the area so we did a garden in pots. I highly recommend it if you live in a condo or a house with a small yard grow some herbs or a few veggies! It was great and Taylin really enjoyed helping me harvest our crop.

We knew we wanted to have our garden in a specific corner of our back yard but it was going to be a lot of work to get it ready. When we were first doing yard work Tom decided to make a pile of all the yard waste that we would “take to the dump later” well that didn’t happen for quite some time and the pile grew back into the grass and started sprouting new things.

Its ok now because Tom built me two awesome planters and has helped me tear out all the grass to get the area ready for our garden. Today was fun because we were able to get some of our wood chips down around the boxes today. It’s starting to feel like it’s all coming together!

This year I’m growing lettuce, zucchini’s, strawberries, cantaloupe,  pumpkins, green onions, basil, cilantro, and cucumbers. We will see how everything does this year…hopefully better then last year!


We are almost done with the garden a couple more things we still need to do is dig out the rest of the grass 😦 and build a small fence around it… still the progress is great and super encouraging!!

Hmm…my priorities are changing!

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I want to start out by saying I know I’m not old but it’s funny to see how my priorities have changed over the years…last night my step mom emailed me and asked me what I wanted to for birthday. Here is the list I gave her:

It’s just funny to see how my priorities have changed so much. It’s not that I don’t still like going shopping for new clothes or getting a pedicure it’s just so fun right now to work on our house! I’m having so much fun turning our house into what we want it to be!! Here is a sneak peek of what I wanted for my birthday from Tom.

Yes it’s a board, some trim, and some Liquid Nails…I asked him to build me a shelf above my kitchen sink!! Hopefully it will add a nice little touch to our very old Kitchen! More pictures to come once the shelf is completed…Tom also got me a ceiling fan for our bedroom!!  Life is so exciting these day!! Here is a picture I found online of a similar shelf to give you an idea of what my shelf will hopefully look like (but scaled down a bit more to match our current kitchen).

Jumpin On The Bed!

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Tonight while I was cooking dinner Tay started walking down the hall and said, “Mom, I’m going to play in your room.” I said, “What are you going to to do in my room??” and in a very matter of fact voice she said “jump on your bed”

So she jumped

And jumped

Then the dog joined her…and I kicked her (the dog) off!!

What a hard life my two-year old lives sometimes…I love watching the little things in life that bring her so much joy!!

Then she decided to pretend she was asleep but I think she was tired from all the jumping…

she is such a sweetie and bring so much joy to our house!

 

Master Bedroom Dresser

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So I have been on the hunt for new dresser for our master bedroom for awhile…probably like 2-3 months. The one we had was an Ikea one we got 5 years ago when we got married. At the time we bought two but when we moved into this house we could really only fit one in our master bedroom. Our house was built in the 50’s so our “master” is extremely small to say the least!! Here is a before picture of our dresser situation…not good (notice the towel covering our wireless router…the lights on it are really bright at night!!)

So back to the hunt…I’ve been looking for a solid wood six drawer dresser for around 2-3 months on Craigslist – I was hoping for free but was willing to spend up to $20. So here is the beauty I found online and it was FREE!!

I knew when we were picking it up that Tom was a little unsure of how this project would turn out but hey it’s free right.

So the first thing I did was wipe everything down and vacuum out the drawers. I took all the drawers out and took all the hardware off. Then I wiped down everything with Klean-Strip Liquid Sander De-Glosser.

I let it set for about 10 minutes then I applied the primer.

Now onto the paint – I just used some paint I had in our shed so it’s the same gray color that’s in my kitchen. Here it is after 1 coat

The dresser came with all the original hardware which was in great shape but I didn’t like the color (brass…yuck) so I spray painted them as well. The paint I used is Rust-Oleum which I love because it doesn’t smell horrible and the smell dissipates really fast! The color was heirloom white…my new love!!

I put two coats of paint on everything and then let it dry for a full day before I put it back together. Once put together I opened all the drawers a little and let it sit outside for another day. I also did a clear coat on the top of the dresser to help make it more durable.

Here is the finished dresser

I love how it turned out and the best thing about the project is my total out of pocket expenses = $0!! I already had all the paint and supplies needed for this project. And the best part was Tom seeing the finished product…he loves it!!

Here it is in our bedroom (sorry for the not so great picture – Tom is gone and has the nice camera this weekend!)

The wireless router is now located in the box – a huge improvement from the towel!

Quick 10 Min. Makeover

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Last night I did a quick 10 min makeover on our patio fire pit. The fire pit had started to rust from being outside so I decided to spray paint it. We had some black high heat paint left over from another project and it worked like a charm!

Before

The spray paint I used

After

I gave it two coats of paint and it just gave it a clean finish and all the rust is hidden!

Our Back Patio

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Like I showed in the previous post our back needed a lot of work and we were up for the challenge! We pulled all the old pavers up and cleaned them, then we “leveled” the area. I use the term very loosely because we could have done a much better job!!

BeforeAnother before

We had to get lots of sand

Tom hauled the sand from the truck to the patio area

I had the fun job of scraping moss off the old patio pavers.

For a little while it looked like this

We had a patio but no furniture

Last spring I graduated from college. My mom tried for a long time to get tickets to the Oprah show but when she wasn’t able to get tickets she asked what I wanted. I decided patio furniture was what I wanted. I wanted a gift that my husband could enjoy as well. I never would have finished school if it wasn’t for him so I wanted it to be something we could both enjoy. My mom gave us an “allowance” to pick out what we wanted. We decided to go with a simple set from Wal-Mart so we could get a fire pit and umbrella as well.

Here is what our patio looks like now

We have a beautiful Lilac tree right off the patio that smells so wonderful this time of the year but it’s in the worst place possible!

Our back patio isn’t perfect but it’s very relaxing and a great way to enjoy the back yard. We are so blessed with this house and we truly enjoy all the work that goes into it!

This weekend…

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This weekend was crazy busy but I still had a little time to do some yard work and powerwash our gutters and back patio. Once we are done I will post some pictures but here is a peak into what the back patio used to look like.

This was what it looked like when we moved in (the house had been vacant for 6 months)

This was last summer – we took apart the old patio – washed and reused the pavers.

 Stay tuned for updated pictures today or tomorrow!