Housewarming Party

Happy Friday friends!  The first weekend in June, we hosted a Housewarming Party at our new house.  It was great motivation to get projects done, and it was a lot of fun to have the opportunity to celebrate our first home with so many friends and family.  We each invited our co-workers as well as friends and the whole family. We had a full house, and it was wonderful to get to use the house to host people we love just as we envisioned when we bought it. 

Because who doesn't love details, here is the spread!

Mom came over early (with perfect mirrors that were a last-minute find for our bathroom in tow as I shared in the last post) to help make a few little flower arrangements and put the finishing touches on things.  Fresh flowers just make my heart happy!  For the record, JW thought we were ridiculous for doing flowers, but they add so much, don't they?

I love to look back at party menus for inspiration, so here's what we served:

Drinks- Peach Tea, Red Sangria, White Wine, Beer, and Water

Food- Guacamole, Salsa, Fruit, Artichoke Dip, Texas Caviar, and Baked Crescent Roll Brie with Blackberry Preserves

Dessert- Southern Chess Squares, Brownies, and Lemon Crinkle Cookies

Of course, I put some recipes at the end of the post for you!

We had such a great time.  It feels good that our house is feeling like home and we have been able to use it to entertain and make memories with friends and family.  Here are some of those recipes I promised.  Enjoy!

Texas Caviar

Ingredients:

•  2 (15.8 ounce) cans black-eyed peas, drained
•  1 (14.5 ounce) can petite diced tomatoes, drained
•  1 (15 ounce) can of chickpeas, drained
•  1 (16 ounce) bag frozen corn, thawed
•  2 fresh medium jalapenos, stemmed, seeded and minced
•  1 small red onion, diced
•  1 green bell pepper, diced
•  1 red bell pepper, diced
•  1/4 cup chopped fresh cilantro
•  6 tablespoons red wine vinegar
•  6 tablespoons olive oil
•  1/2 teaspoon salt
•  1/2 teaspoon ground black pepper
•  1/2 teaspoon garlic powder
•  1 teaspoon dried oregano
•  1 1/2 teaspoons ground cumin

Directions:
Mix all ingredients in a medium bowl; cover and refrigerate 2 hours or up to 2 days.  Taste and adjust seasoning if needed before serving.

Baked Crescent Roll Brie with Blackberry Preserves

Ingredients:

• 1 can crescent rolls
• 1/2 - 3/4 cup blackberry preserves (or any other preserves you'd prefer)
• chopped pecans or walnuts (optional)
• 8 oz. block of brie cheese

Directions:
Unroll the crescent rolls all in one piece on a baking sheet.  Press together the perforations to form one piece of dough with no breaks or tears.  Place block of brie in the center.  Spread the preserves on top of brie so that it runs over the sides and sprinkle with either pecans or walnuts.  Fold the edges of the crescent roll up over the top so that the brie is covered.  Pinch together the dough to seal.  Place in the oven at 350 degrees and bake for 15-20  minutes until the crescent roll shell is golden brown.  Serve warm with crackers.

Mom's Famous Artichoke Dip

This is a recipe my mom started making several years ago.  It's always a raving success and people always want the recipe.  I think almost every woman in our family has it in her repertoire now.

Ingredients:

•  8 oz. can artichoke hearts, chopped
• 2 jalapeno peppers, seeded and diced
• 2 garlic cloves, minced
• 1 cup grated Parmesan cheese
• 1/2 cup sour cream
• 1/2 cup mayonnaise
• 8 oz. block of cream cheese, softened

Directions:
Combine all ingredients in a medium bowl and then spread in a shallow ceramic dish.  Bake at 350 degrees for 45 minutes, until browned around the edges.  We always serve warm with Wheat Thins.

Southern Chess Squares

Ingredients:

• 1 box yellow cake mix
• 1 cup chopped pecans (optional)
• 3 eggs
• 8 oz cream cheese, softened
• 1/2 cup (1 stick) butter, melted
• 4 cups (1 lb) powdered sugar

Directions:
Preheat oven to 300 degrees and spray a 9×13 dish with cooking spray.  Mix cake mix, melted butter, pecans, and one egg to a soft dough.  Press into the bottom of the pan.  Mix powdered sugar, softened cream cheese and remaining two eggs until smooth, about 1-2 minutes.  Pour on top of crust.  Bake at 300 for 40-50 minutes until top is golden brown.

Home Improvement- inside edition

For Memorial Day, my office closed Monday and Tuesday of last week.  I went ahead and took off Wednesday through Friday so that I could really focus on knocking out some of the projects around the house I wanted to get to before our party on Saturday.

First up... some drapes in our living room that were too short.  I bought these new drapes after the curtain rod had been hung according to the length of other drapes.  Instead of moving the rod, I decided I would sew a fabric trim onto the bottom.  My mom was free on Tuesday so she offered to come over and take me to one of the fabric/trim stores she goes to.  We found the perfect fabric for the curtains and trim we wanted to use on a bench (more on that later).

Curtains that were too short

When we picked out the fabric, I didn't fully think through what a challenge it would be to sew it.  It was sheer with a striped texture to it and it easily frayed.  My sewing was a little rusty, so I pulled out my sewing book and was reminded how to do a french seam.  I practiced on a scrap piece of material and got everything measured out and cut just perfectly.  It took me a full day to sew the fabric on four curtain panels.  I was pretty grumpy by the end of it, but am sure I'd be quicker next time!  I did enjoy getting to spread out upstairs and put my craft room to use for the first time. :)

The finished product

Living Room complete with new curtains, pillows, rug, and chairs

So, I mentioned my mom came over to help me shop and get trim for a bench.  I've had this bench at my dining room table since my sophomore year in college. It's made it through five moves and over seven years, but the tassel trim on the bottom looked a little rough so we had ripped it off.  It then hung off the ground too far and needed a new trim on it.  My mom had pre-shopped for trim, so we picked the sample we liked best and went to purchase it when we got fabric for the curtains.

Sewing it on was the challenging part.... Oh how I wish there would have been another person home to video this!  My mom pinned in onto the bench while I fired up the sewing machine and got rid of the cobwebs (both on the machine and in my head related to working it). 

Dakota of course wanted to help and was in her face most of the time since she was on the floor.  Mom was a trooper.  

I don't know if you can get the full effect of this setup from the pictures, but since the part we were sewing the trim onto was attached to the bench we had to get creative.  I put the sewing machine on a chair and sewed with my knee on the pedal instead of my foot while my mom held/slid/maneuvered the bench.  It was quite interesting and challenging positioning for both of us.  I whined and mom cheered us on.  I'm glad she was there to push us on this one.  I don't think I would have done it otherwise.  It looks great though, so I'm glad we did!

The finished product

It looks like it was made that way all along doesn't it?

Another one of our projects since moving in was mirrors for all the bathrooms.  I've shared with you before that none of the bathrooms had mirrors, towel bars/hand towel holders, toilet paper holders, or cabinet pulls/knobs.  We got most of that purchased and installed when JW's dad came over to help awhile ago.  We got a few of the mirrors picked out and hung too, except for the mirrors in our master bath.  Wow, have those been a challenge!  The space there is very tight and quite an unusually sized space apparently.  We've spent a lot of hours shopping for the right mirror and have just been functioning without one for the whole time we've been in the house. 

Until... about 3 hours before the party, on her way to our house early to help me arrange flowers, my mom stopped in a Tuesday Morning and found the perfect mirrors!  She bought them, loaded them up, and she and JW got them hung less than an hour before our housewarming party started.  Love it! :)  Go mom!

Master Bath

Upstairs Bath

Downstairs Guest Bath

Our house is really feeling like home.  We've gotten a lot of the bigger and more immediate projects on our list checked  off, and it feels really good!  I told JW that we need to have a party every quarter so that we have the motivation to knock some things out and get the house in tip-top shape.  We feel so blessed that we get to call this house our home.

Rained Out

So I guess I'm in a blogging slump.  It's once again been a LONG time since my last post.  We've been working on the house most spare moments we get, but more on that later... 

My first March for Babies in Houston was at the end of April, during the weekend Houston got a monsoon amount of heavy rain!  Yep, you've probably guessed where this is going.  We had to cancel March for Babies, for the first time that anyone can remember.  We usually walk rain or shine.  It was a major bummer, but still a lot of fun being a part of the largest walk in the nation.

We started loading on Thursday and Friday.  Katie and I were in charge of this process which included moving around 24 foot trucks into our loading zone and parallel parking them.  This was a new experience for me, but left me feeling quite accomplished! 

Saturday we were out at the University of Houston all day setting up the walk site for Sunday. 

 

 

 

Everything was going great until about 3:00 in the afternoon when the rain started.  We suited up in ponchos and kept going.  Only the rain did too...  It started coming down pretty hard and the flooding started.  We had gotten quite a bit done though, so headed to Home Depot to get industrial squeegees and tarps to use for the next day.  People were pulled over to avoid high water, cars were turned the wrong way on the highway.  It was bad.

 

 

 

About midnight on Saturday night we got reports from the Houston and University police departments that the flooding had caused the bayou to crest and parts of our walk route were under water.  The weather report predicted more raining throughout the night and early morning and it was determined that bringing 40,000 walkers to campus in these conditions was unsafe and the walk was called.  We then spent half the night in contacting sponsors, vendors, and teams to let them know of the cancellation.  Being this tired and delerious made for some good memories sitting around in PJ's in Veronica's hotel room with cake for dessert (which we agreed the next moring we ate too much of).  We got about an hour of sleep before getting back out to the walk site at 5 a.m. to begin the process of breaking down and making sure stragglers that didn't receive the news were made aware of the cancellation.

This is what our picnic site where huge tents had been set up the day before looked like when we arrived.  Though the rain had stopped by about 8 a.m., we were immediately more confident in our decision to cancel.  With the damage to tents and the wind still blowing, it would have been a very unsafe environment for our walkers. 

It was a grueling day to break down a walk we didn't even get to have with hardly any sleep.  After a year of preparation, it was heartbreaking to not get to experience the excitement of walk day, especially the year of March of Dimes' 75th anniversary.  I think it is more work to cancel a walk then it actually would have been to have one.  We have a great staff team though and made it through together with quite a few memories.  We are looking forward to making 2014 bigger and better, and definitely praying for no rain! :)

 

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!

Big News!

We have some big news.... We're buying a house!!!  A lot of you probably know this by now, but I still  want to write about the last few weeks so we can remember this process.  The Lord has been so faithful to direct and provide for us every step of the way.  I love being able to look back at times when the Lord's provision has been so apparent.  It is comforting to look at life and know that He has provided before, and He will do it again.  This is one of those seasons I know we will look back on and be reminded of God's faithfulness.

This all happened really fast.  We met the man who owns the house we're renting over the Christmas holiday for the first time.  We had communicated by email as he's on a work assignment in Brazil, but had never met in person.  While he was over, we started talking about the upcoming months and his plans.  Our lease will expire at the end of May, and he wasn't sure if he'd be returning to Houston and need his house back or not.  He mentioned he would let us know in the next few months.

So, we decided to start looking at the housing market so we'd be prepared if we needed to move again.  After crunching some numbers, we decided we'd prefer to go ahead and buy a house rather than lease again.  We started doing some research online thinking we'd be ready to buy in the next few months.

Well, a few days into our "research" we found a house listed online that was down the street from the one we're in now.  It had been totally renovated, was in an area we clearly like, and was in our price range.  We got in our car at 9:00 that night and drove down the street to see it.  It had just come on the market.  There wasn't even a sign in the yard.

I called the listing agent on my way to work the next morning, Wednesday, January 9.  They told me that the house already had three offers on it.  I asked if it was too late for us to see and and put an offer in.  They said as long as they had our offer by the end of the day, they'd consider it.  So, we called the realtor we'd worked with last summer when we were looking for our rental.  She was leaving town the next day, but was available to show us the house that afternoon.

We met her after lunch and really loved the house.  Every surface had been redone... new dark hardwood floors, granite counters, stainless steel appliances with tags still on them, beautiful tile, bronze hardware and fixtures; all the colors and finishes we would have chosen if we had been renovating the house ourselves.  I was still pretty skeptical at this point that we could get everything we needed to in order so fast.  JW was pretty convinced we weren't going to find something this perfect again and that we needed to move on it.  So, we talked to our parents, who were all unanimously supportive and encouraging, worked with our realtor and a loan officer who rushed our approval for financing, and put in an aggressive offer about 10:00 that night.  We gave it all up to the Lord, praying that only if this was His will that our offer would be accepted.

We got a call before 9 a.m. on Thursday saying that the sellers had accepted our offer.  Our realtors were on their way out of town.  But, we worked with them long-distance and met with our loan officer, who may be our favorite person in this whole process, and signed the contract Friday afternoon.  By Saturday we were under contract!  Wow. Scary, but exciting!

We had the house inspected the following week, where of course we learned all kinds of things about our 1959 house.  That was overwhelming.  We prioritized the repairs we wanted done and sent our request to the seller.  They agreed to our list, and now we are only 10 days away from our closing!

We'll do a final walk through to inspect the repairs that were made next week.  We are also still working on researching and choosing home insurance and a home warranty and negotiating our way out of our current lease.  But, we're almost there and can hardly wait!

This whole process has been a roller-coaster and a whirlwind.  Sometimes I still can't believe we are doing this.  It has been emotional and draining, but we feel so blessed.  JW and I have learned (and are still learning) to work as a team and to be diligent in challenging things to make sure we continue to make the best decisions possible.  We are also learning to trust.  To trust that God is sovereign and faithful, and that He's got it all under control.

Home ownership, here we come!  Let the adventures begin. :) 

July 4th Weekend

I have only blogged once in the month of July, and it's almost over.  I am definitely behind...  This month has flown by!  I am getting more into the swing of things at work and JW has been consumed with studying for the bar exam.  It is this week!  He drove up to Waco on Monday, and the test started on Tuesday.  He is comfortable with the portions he took Tuesday and today, but prayers please for one last day tomorrow.  Thursday is the day full of essays and the most challenging day.  Please pray for perseverance and wisdom for Joey to finish strong.  We can't wait for this week to be over!  It will be nice to have the bar exam behind us! 

So, I"m going to have to take you back to July 4th to get caught up.  My office was closed that week Wednesday through Friday, so I had a nice long weekend.  We have gotten mostly settled on the inside of our house, but the outside of our house needed a little love.  We had coupons to a home improvement store and a local nursery was having a 70% off sale, so JW came shopping with me for some gardening tools, soil, and plants.  The flower beds I re-did had not had plants in them for awhile, so they needed a lot of work.  I wish I would have taken before pictures, but didn't think about it, so you only get to see the finished product.

Here's the front bed under our big tree.  It makes me happy every time I drive up to see a little bit of color in front of our house.  I am hoping mexican heather and yellow and pink black-eyed susans will grow and spread out a little to fill up that flower bed.

We have two beds against the house on either side of our deck in the back.  They are in the shade all day, so we wanted mainly ground cover there.  Here's how they turned out.  It's hard to keep the dogs out of these, so hopefully they will do okay.

These are my favorite.  I had two matching pots that I spray painted black to go on the back deck.  I planted a fox tail fern, white diamond flowers, and potato ivy in each one.  I really enjoy looking at them since you can see our deck from the living room through the large windows we have.

The container I used to have for this stand rusted out, so I got a new plastic one and painted it black as well.  It has more white diamond flowers, potato ivy, and pentas that add a bright pop of color.  This one has really filled out since I first took this picture and looks great.

Working on the yard took a good day and a half and was a lot of work, but I am really glad we did it.  It looks great and just the few small things we did make a big difference.

Wednesday for the 4th, we went over to my parents' house during the day for grilling and swimming.  Late in the afternoon it threatened to rain, so we headed back to our house to feed the dogs and shower.  Then, we headed over to Momma Hance's house for her annual 4th of July party.

JW, me, Momma Hance, Nana, and Poppa

My parents and Hunter came over too.  We ate lots of all-American food, played Pictionary, and watched the fireworks by the pool.  It was a great day spending time with family, and was easy since we live in the same city now.