Working Weekend

Happy Easter!  He is Risen!  We had a great day celebrating Christ's resurrection with family.  Jenn was in town and came with us to church this morning.  We love our church and it was neat to celebrate our first Easter back in Houston with a church family that means so much to us.  Then, we went to lunch at Momma Hance's house.  She cooked a yummy meal and even did an Easter egg hunt with fun prizes.  After that, we went over to my parents house for dinner.  Dad his his all-famous steaks and baked beans.  It was delicious!  We are full and TIRED!

This weekend, we were pretty ambitious with the house projects.  We decided to tackle the flower beds in our front yard on Friday.  JW had off of work for Good Friday, and I only worked a half-day, so we had big plans.  Thursday evening after work we went to the garden center to stock up on all the plants we wanted to use.  I had done a lot of research and knew what we wanted.  It barely fit in our two cars, but we made it home with everything.  We went over to Momma Hance's Thursday night too to pick up some of her yard equipment to borrow.

Here are our before pictures.

 The beds were in bad shape.  Mostly hard clay, so they needed to be tilled up, cleaned out, and re-shaped.  JW looks good behind a tiller doesn't he? :)

Then, we had to move the bad dirt, add in some good soil, till again, and smooth it out to start planting.  Jenn came over in the afternoon and was a great help! 

We ended up covered in dirt, sweat, and black mulch, but it was well worth it.  We are very happy with the finished product.  It added so much to the front of our house.  We picked hardy stuff that will mature and grow fuller over the years.  It was neat to do all this work and know we were adding value to our own home.   Here's the finished product!

Saturday morning, bright and EARLY, we had a garage sale!  We had half of a garage full of things we needed to get rid of and family contributed as well.  We listed it on Craig's List Friday afternoon and put out a few signs.  People were in our driveway by 7:15 a.m. Saturday morning before we even had everything out.  It was a successful day, and we ended up making enough to cover the cost of our yard work, so it was worth it!  Our bodies are feeling pretty beat, but it sure was a productive weekend!

Where did March go?

Hi faithful blog readers... if you exist anymore.  It's been over a month since my last post!  I hate that, but we've been staying pretty busy.  So, here's my attempt to capture what's been going on.

We moved!  At the end of February, we were so blessed to have the help of friends and family to move us a few blocks down the street to our new house.  Moving is A LOT of work! I didn't do a great job getting a picture of our whole crew, but here are a few.

Jenn came down to help us on the first weekend we had the house.  Adam let us borrow his truck and we made a big dent in getting stuff taken down to the new house.  She was a huge help!

JW and Dakota making a trip.  

We had some great friends and parents help us make the big move the following weekend, and by the end of Saturday, February 25th we had everything in!

I mentioned how much we didn't like the indoor-looking palm tree plants that were planted in the front and back beds, so our moms pulled them right up and put them on the curb.  Love it! :)

Joey's dad came over the next weekend and helped us install cabinet hardware, add towel bars and toilet paper holders in the bathrooms, install smoke detectors, outdoor light fixtures, and hang curtains and things on the walls.  He was a huge help and we learned a lot from working with him.  He's moved a bunch of times so had a lot of helpful tips.

One weekend in March, I baked some small loaves of banana bread and we took them around to meet our new neighbors.  We have enjoyed getting to know them so far!

Since moving in, we've had some issues preventing us from doing laundry...  

 We had to have an electrician come out to install a new outlet for our dryer to be hooked up.  We realized when we tried to hook it up for the first time that there was only a gas dryer hookup and not a large enough outlet for an electric dryer.  That got fixed finally last week, but we've since discovered that there is something wrong with the drain that discharges the dirty water from the washing machine.  Our garage flooded this weekend when we tried to use it. I haven't been particularly thankful our washer and dryer were in the garage until this happened.  Oh home ownership!  We did a few loads of underwear and other necessities at my parents' over a week ago, and our fingers are crossed that the plumber coming tomorrow can get us up and running  pronto!

We did some fun stuff in the month of March too that was unrelated to the house or moving. 

We celebrated my dad's birthday with family dinner and a mini bundt cake tower for dessert.

Taylor came in town for a weekend from Lubbock.  It was fun to hang out with him and to go watch part of Hunter's baseball tournament together.

 Our Harley girl turned 3!

We took Hunter and a friend on a tour of Minute Maid park as a gift we gave him for his birthday.  They were cute and we had fun spending the morning with them.

We saw Tim McGraw at the rodeo with some sweet new friends from church.  The Houston Livestock Show & Rodeo is a pretty big deal and a lot of fun.  We grew up going every year, but hadn't been in years.  It was a blast!  

 JW also started playing in a men's baseball league with Adam.  They had a scrimmage a couple of weeks ago that Nana and Papa came to watch with me.  I hadn't watched JW play since high school.  I still have a crush on my man in his baseball pants.  It will be fun to go to games this spring.

We sure haven't sat still much over the last month since we moved, but we are loving our new home and are so thankful.  There are a lot of projects, but we've come to learn that home ownership involves a lot of work to get settled but is very rewarding.  Here's to hoping I can do a better job updating more consistently in April!  Thanks for sticking around!