Meet J – she is one of my awesome bosses at Blue World. She may just kill (or fire) me for posting this picture because she thinks she looks like a dork – but I think its a cute shot! Yay for fun jobs and bosses and fun events! Hopefully there will be more in the near future and I’ll get a shot up here of EJ sometime soon…

Hope everyone is having a Happy Thursday! Can’t wait for the weekend – housework is in order woo-hoo. Oh, and tonight is the first night staying in the new house! HORRAY!

Yay! Never did I imagine I’d be excited about saying “House work” but there is something thrilling when you can say it about something you own!

We didn’t have a traditional 4th of July. In fact, we didn’t BBQ, grill, or see family. We spent our entire day (10 AM – 7PM) doing yard work, cleaning, unpacking/organizing cupboards, etc. When it finally started to get dark we decided to go home and shower b/c we don’t have power (we’re getting rewired) or water (don’t get me started on the H2O) at the new house yet. After we ate and showered we decided we’d go down to the Lenox fireworks. We showed up about 15 min. before they started and we some of the first people out of there – it was perfect!  Here are some pictures…

Beginning of Day 1

hubs hard at work!

End of Day 1

beginning bushes

workin hard - note the AWESOME sock-over-jean look... no critters crawl up my leg!

End of day 1

Happy Birthday, America! woo-hoo freedom!

Home Sweet Home

Its official… Click on the pic to see pictures of OUR new house!

We were packing up all our stuff tonight and J just pulled a hercules hook out of the wall, stopped, looked at me, and said, ” You know who promoted these, right?” who else but Billy Mays.

These things are the bomb.com. You have GOT to try them.  These little hooks really might be everything Billy promised and more! If you haven’t tried them yet, and you’ve got something sitting around waiting to be hung – go grab some (i get them at target) and give ‘em a try. They are super easy to use and hold up the heaviest of shelves. I promise, they won’t disappoint!

So 2 days from now we will own our FIRST house! yay

Anyway, I’ve already been cooking up some ideas for how to decorate our place… and I’ve got one ready to share. Its not anything huge… but its our eating nook in the kitchen – and I need some help!

Here is what it looks like now:

blank slate

And here is a start of what I want it to look like:

cute red ticking stripe updates

I’m going to add a new light fixture, make cafe lenth curtains, and recover our pub height chairs with some red ticking stripe fabric to add some continuity to the whole thing. Who doesn’t love a chair/kitchen that screams “Happy 4th”, “Merry Christmas”, “Smooches” on Feb 14, and “GO HUSKERS” all year long?

Anyway, heres where I need your help – i haven’t found anything I can 1)afford and 2)love to put on that big blank wall you see. The only idea I’ve had so far is getting a red or black plate rack and filling it with some of our seasonal plates… Something a little like this:

Any other ideas out there??? I could really use a hand…

I feel like every blog lately I begin with how I’ve been such a terrible blogger… which is TOTALLY true. I think I’m going to start blog slacker annon. Real life has just been going full-speed lately and when I do have a moment – I’ve been out searching websites for the new stuff we’re going to need for this next phase in life or pouring over awesomely inspirational blogs out there so I’ll be ready to go when July 1st hits. 

Thankfully this process has gone very smoothly. We are slated to close on July 1st at 3pm… So any of you who have done this before – send happy, unstressful thoughts my way, please! We’re going to be doing A LOT of work – unfortunately it looks like the first few big projects aren’t going to be cosmetic and more of things you can’t see… however, it will make our house safe and prevent damage down the road! 

CLICK HERE for preview pics… I can’t post the slideshow here b/c it is picasa (lame.).

Have y’all seen the new pennies? I had NO clue they were coming out, but the other day we got one back from Target. I googled to find an image and then I found out they are releasing 4 new designs. All of them are commemorating Lincoln’s life. Here’s the one we got:

I guess its good (and kind of nerdy) that things like this make me slightly excited!

In other news, our due diligence period ends tomorrow and we are going thru with our contract – so soon I’ll be able to post a pic of our NEW (to us) house with an Under contract! sign out front. Friends and family, get your work clothes together – we’re going to need some help!

You’ll have to excuse my laughing… while I went to review my May Goals I realized that I totally and completely had tunnel vision this month and sucked at completing the things in my everyday life that cause me stress (storage closet, office, etc). Oh well. There were 2 goals I achieved in May – Enjoying my birthday month and planning a trip back to NE! Everything else was an epic fail.

In fact this just may have been one of the best birthday month’s ever. I’ve got SO much to catch y’all (anybody out there even still reading? I’ve been SUCH a bad blogger) up on. We decided we’d START our home search this month – EXCITING! – because we’ve seen friends take a long time to find the perfect house and we weren’t sure about getting approved for a loan etc.

So we met with our realtor, the awesome Michael Bunch, on a Tuesday afternoon. The next Tues he took us out to view a couple of homes. We’ve got some good stories (as in funny, not we loved the houses) from that first day of looking.

exhibit A - gold leaf wall AND ceiling paper... Who doesn't want to stare at their reflection from all angles at all times?

We went into 5 houses. Only 2 of them were remotely normal – 2 of them had hideous issues – and the other one just was weird. Anyway, we were really discouraged and down. We’d driven by some and just decided we didn’t need to waste time going in and the ones we did go in were nothing to rave about. So, we were thinking this was going to be a long process. Ha! LOVE the irony.

Wednesday I was driving home from work about 5:30 and Michael called. There was a house he had wanted to get us into and the lock was finally fixed. He really wanted to get us in asap. We were excited to get into this one since it was RIGHT around the corner from our apartment which is EXACTLY where we’ve wanted to live. Often we’d said we’d just like to turn our apt into a house… So, I run home and grab Jeff. We showed up and loved the house from the outside (although everything is WAY overgrown and needs to be removed – yesterday!). Its a cute 4 sided brick ranch with 3 beds 2 full baths and a half bath on the main. When M let us in, it smelled old – its an estate and has been sitting empty for awhile so as soon as we get some air moving and get it cleaned, i think the smell will fade quickly. It has hardwood floors throughout, except for the kitchen. It also has an UNFINISHED daylight walk-out basement but they have already put in a half-bath! There is a screened in porch and a decent sized yard for our four-legged baby.

We put in an offer first thing Friday AM and heard back Saturday (my birthday!) that they had accepted our offer! We are scheduled to close on July 1 assuming that the inspection all goes well!  Husband automatically wins the award for the birthday present that cannot be topped (any time soon, at least!). He even wrapped a little house for me to open when we did presents!

our house!

We see a lot of potential and have already picked out a few walls to knock down, some stuff to rip up, and things to replace. It will be an adventure for sure – but we’re VERY excited! We’ll post pics as soon as we can get back in to take them!

This will be taking up a LOT of my time for the next little while, but hopefully it will give me some good material for my blog and some goals I will be motivated to achieve!

Since April went pretty well, I’m sticking with blogging out monthly goals – (hold on to your pants, I know its SO exciting)! Here they are for the month of May:

1. Implement the CASH budget and try to live within Dave Ramsay’s recommended percentages for each category.
2. Successfully make our trip to Cancun for Kelly’s wedding and avoid swine flu… *fingers crossed*
3. Blog more than once twice a week
4. Plan a trip to Nebraska to visit the fam
5. Don’t miss more than 5 days of situps/pushups
6. Organize files in the office… it’s a disaster!
7. Find/make cute throw pillows for the living room
8. Achieve a BMI of 22.5
9. Purge/re-org the storage closet
10. Enjoy my BIRTHDAY… Month!

As soon as I get all my pictures loaded from last week I’ll be back to share about my corner cabinet, our first Braves game of the year, Matt and Danielle’s wedding, bowling with college friends, and more! Stay tuned…

Time to review those April Goals… I can honestly say that while we/I have not met every goal on this list, I did keep most of these things at the forefront of my mind and it actually helped me focus on the things I do want to accomplish! So – look for the monthy goals and updates from J & K

1. Do push-up/sit-up routine every.single.day. Alright, this one didn’t get accomplished – we both got a lotta lazy last week
2. Do cardio at least 2 times a week – I actually did accomplish this goal – GO ME!
3. Achieve a BMI of 22.5 by the end of the month … still working on this
4. Drink 3 Nalgenes of water every day Jeff and Liz told me this was too much water (ok, I’m not a water drinker so I have no clue) but I didn’t meet this goal. I don’t like water – I’m stickin with DC & Starbucks… sorry peeps
5. Take vitamin daily – nope, not even close
6. Win the basketball league championship game next week The game was delayed until last night, but we WON by 1 pt… I’ll post a pic of the 6 who showed up and the trophy!
7. Learn enough about Photoshop processing to make my own photos prettier However, I am learning more and more at Blue World
8. Scan ALL old photos that are under our bed onto the new Mac Book Pro
9. Finish corner cabinet project (someone’s trash is my treasure) It looks pretty good for a first refinishing project! I’ll post on this soon…
10. Purge items in guest room and make it more relaxing (just in time for Tim to visit) and Tim comes tonight!
11. Save 55% of what we make this month. (Ugh, kinda hurts to type that… but it will feel so good if we actually can!) — I still need to do the math – but we were close!
12. Get our taxes done by the 5th. They were done by the 15th at midnight, ’nuff said
13. Combine our bank accounts – yes, this should have been done a year and 3 months ago but I’ve been lazy and we haven’t… Um, this is sorta done – I’m added to J’s acct but we still haven’t closed out mine or switched my direct deposit…