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Tuesday, November 27, 2012

home sweet home

Kellie, this one is for you dear. :)

The yard needs a little TLC, but we love the curb appeal!
We moved! A month ago. I am slightly behind on life as you can tell. Sweet Kellie has been kindly bugging me to get pictures of the house up, so here they are! So, this may be quite a boring post for anyone else reading.
Here is a small, very condensed version of the last 5 months. Ben and I started to get the bug to buy a house about a year ago. With him graduating and us knowing that we a) love it in Maricopa, AZ and b) will need to be living here for a number of years to come due to Ben's job and his student loan payback program, we decided that when our lease was up, we definitely wanted a home of our own. It was time to settle in and get comfy around here. No more moving every year for us! Yay! It was early May when our home went on the market for a matter of minutes before our amazing realtor, not only because we're related, called us up and told us about it. We weren't even pre-qualified yet but it was a short sale and we loved the curb appeal and the price. Luckily, there were some strings pulled and we were able to do a quick walk through to see what we could of the house. There honestly was not a lot to see though because it was completely full of junk from the previous renters. We decided that morning to put on offer in. Luckily the offer was accepted the next day. Jump forward 5.5 months and we close on the house just hours before the contract was to expire. Talk about stressful! Since we didn't know if the short sale would actually go through, we did not have any boxes packed. The day we closed, we started throwing boxes together, cleaning our old house, painting our new walls, and moved it all in. It took us 4 days. We were amazing. It really helped babysitting help from friends and neighbors.
Anyway, we feel so blessed to be in this house. We absolutely love everything about it. It is the perfect home for a growing family. Well, not growing right now. But, we hope to grow our family sometime in the future! Now for the pictures.
Standing at the front door. You can see the desk with a little Macee playing at it. What a good mama I am to put her on a swivel chair all alone. One day we'll fill up some of this massive room with some formal couches. Love the shutters all all the windows.

Sorry for the terrible lighting. It looked better on my camera. Standing in the hallway that you'll notice on the bottom left of the above picture. Looking into our living room/kitchen and out to the huge backyard.

Much better lighting. You can see the hallway and front door there. Obviously looking into the kitchen. The beautiful table there...we just refinished it and love it. I'm standing at an archway that leads into a small hallway that splits into Macee's room and the master bedroom. There's a symmetrical hallway on the other side of the cabinet on your right that splits into spoiled Macee's playroom, a guest bedroom, the laundry room and garage door. There is a big bathroom that joins the two hallways. Make sense?

Most favorite part of my laundry room. The sink!! And counter. And tons of cabinets.

The master bedroom. I'm standing at the entrance into our bathroom with a huge tub and walk in closet. We love those!

Saturday, November 24, 2012

happy halloween!

Ward Halloween photo shoot
I am so behind on this blog. It's been a combination of not being on top of life and being so busy lately that's done it! With Macee getting older, I can completely understand the need to be a stay at home mom. Just keeping up with her would be enough, but adding the house work and my job at the hospital on top of it is overwhelming to say the least. I will jump back...a month?!...to Halloween. I seriously don't know where to time goes. Macee was the cutest stinking pig on the street! Holy cow. I can't even believe it. We had a lot of fun going to a ward Halloween party where she got to show off her costume to all of her friends. And show it off she did! She made sure that everyone saw her, waited until they told me how cute she was, then acted shy like she didn't know what to say back. She totally knew what she was doing. We closed on our new home the on October 30 (I'll blog about that later), so Halloween was pretty small around our house. We took Macee out to trick-or-treat just a few doors to show her how it's done. She definitely had more fun eating the chocolate and running through the yards and up and down the sidewalks. She'll get it next year. This year was just practice to make sure she'll be good at it. :) Ben and I had a blast just watching her and seeing her excitement with all the other kids around.
See, loving the chocolate more than the trick-or-treating
At least Ben tried to be festive with his orange shirt. I was too focused on the house to remember how to be festive.