Making The House Our Own

Those dedicated readers who check our blog every waking moment (maybe it makes us feel better to pretend they exist ;) ) were probably wondering why we haven't made our post for this last week yet.  Well, the answer is pretty simple.  We have had a busy couple of weeks as we worked on moving our things from the apartment to the house.  Since we took 2 weeks to get this posted, we're each going to make a blog post.

Elissa's parents came down to help us out and with their help we were able to get a lot done around the house.  I'm going to talk about a few of the highlights.

We didn't really love the valances that were left in the main room, but Elissa managed to find a great fabric to re-upholster them with.

All it took was a little help from Elissa's mom and a staple gun (and lots of staples).  We think the blue looks a lot better for the color scheme we want in our house.

The other new and exciting thing I want to talk about is our couch/love seat combo.  We visited a place called Austin Couch Potatoes Furniture.  They had lots of great couches for reasonable prices and we found one we think will look good AND be comfortable.  We decided that we should do something to try to tie some of our colors together, and Elissa wanted a project, so we decided to make some throw pillows.  So far Elissa has made 2 very nice pillows with some more to come (sorry about the bad pictures, my phone doesn't do well with the lighting in that room):

Well, we'll be sure to give you all a picture tour of the house when we get everything set up and put away.  Hope everyone had a good Thanksgiving!

Keeping Busy

This week has been a busy one for us! Some of this busy-ness is self inflicted to keep us from stressing and getting antsy about our closing tomorrow. Some of it was not intentional at all on our parts but it kept us busy!

Early in the week we decided that we wanted to make mini apple pies. If you read our blog regularly, you'll already be familiar with our love of mini pies. (see Pumpkin Pie and Apple Pies)  But, what else are you to do when there are 5 kinds of apples are on sale for .50 a pound? This time, we decided to do dutch apple instead of the lattice top. If you look at the link for apple pies, you'll see how handy Daniel was was lattice tops, but we wanted to do something a little different this time. (We are working on making our food pictures better because we talk about food so much.)

If you didn't already know, Daniel had a fender bender down town over the weekend. This has solidified his desire to never drive downtown. Everybody was okay, but cars needed to be fixed up. Daniel got a citation from the police officer, but the other guy got taken away in hand cuffs (on unrelated charges.) Monday we had to find someone to fix up our car. He told us that is should take about 3 days to fix up.

Since we only have one car, we decided to get a rental for the three days. We got a little Nissan Versa.  As the lady led us out to the car, she mentioned that she thought it was pretty new. In this case pretty new was actually brand new. We decided to take a picture because it might be the newest car we'll ever drive. (and for all of you who read our blog!)

Other things that kept us busy this week: packing, Daniel was busy making his work project a reality, eat tasty pie, enjoying driving our rental car, doing a last walk through, and filling some nail holes. Just keeping busy! Hopefully everything goes well tomorrow at closing!

REALLY Late Blog Post

Sorry all of you who diligently stake out my blog at 7:00pm on Thursday nights! This week has been a little crazy, and I just didn't get around to posting in our blog! So I'll give you the rundown about what happened for the week up until about this last Thursday (So we have stuff to put in our blog this next Thursday!) It was actually a pretty quiet week leading up to the weekend, but we did go out to eat. While we were there we saw some crazy birds that were eating sweet and low packets! We finally got a chance to use our new fancy camera phones to take pictures of the action so we could post that along with the story.

This was one of the birds as you can see there are the sweet 'n' low packets are in the back ground. They pulled them off of the tables. It was hard to get them in the act of eating sweet 'n' low. 

But, if you look really closely at this one, you can see that the bird is right there. I think that is incriminating evidence! We were with someone who joked that it doesn't make sense because it isn't real sugar and it is supposed to be no calorie. What benefit is there to be birds? Who knows, but we all eat candy...

Speaking of candy, we did not have any trick or treaters again this year. We don't super love Halloween here anyway, so it wasn't really a moment to mourn over or anything. Next year we'll have  to find out if our house is in a neighborhood with trick or treaters or not! 

New Phones and Fajitias!

This week Daniel and I finally got to try out our new phones from Republic Wireless. They are trying to make a new kind of phone service where you use wifi around you (like at work or at home) to make phone calls which off sets the cost of using cellular minutes for the company. They are a new start up company, and we decided that it would be worth a shot to see how it goes. Especially since the first 30 days have a guarantee to test out the service and see if it is for you.

We are currently a quarter of the way through our thirty day trial. There are some things that we like and some thing that we don't like. It is fun to finally have new phones, and it could come at a better time because both of our phones have kind of had it. (Daniel's t-mobile phone won't hang up sometimes, and mine has a screen that sometimes just whites out so I can't see anything. ) We'll let you all know when we decide. If anyone is interested in joining Republic Wireless, we would be more than happy to tell you about our experiences so far so you can make an informed decision.

 I can tell you that as far as I can tell these cameras are probably superior to any digital camera that we have in the house.That isn't saying much because both of our cameras are kind of getting old.  But,  hopefully this means that we will take more pictures for our blog because we'll have a decent camera with us!

This week we all decided to make fajitas because peppers were on sale. We decided to go all out and get 4 different colors!  Usually, we only get one or two colors because the orange and yellow so expensive. Fortunately, they were all under eighty cents this week.. The adventure helped solidify  Daniel's that the colors do make a difference.

He also got to test out the cameras on our phones after I made I "plated" up my dinner. Pretty fancy!

New Phones

We had two exciting things happen this week:  We're still buying our house (our appraisal came through for our lender), and we got our new phones (which I'll talk about in a bit)!

We got homeowners insurance figured out.  Elissa spent a lot of time researching plans and service and we finally settled on a plan that seems right for us.  She also spent a lot of time looking at different electric plans, and as it turns out, we get a discounted price because of our insurance company, so that was awesome.

Our phones are exciting.  We've mentioned doing beta with Republic Wireless before -- they finally got through their line to us.  We get a 30-day trial period with their Motorola Defy XT phone, which in my understanding is pretty middle-of-the line but reliable.  We've played around with them a little today and they look promising, and if/when we decide we're keeping them, we'll make sure we tell everyone our new phone numbers.  Or, if you send one of us a message, we'll tell you our number there (maybe I'm paranoid but don't like posting things like that on a blog).  Elissa says she's not very good at typing on her phone, so it might take a while to get a response.


Today Elissa made strawberry jam and muffins (but unfortunately the muffins didn't require jam).  The muffins were really good, but since they didn't need jam, I haven't had an excuse to sample her jam yet.  Maybe I'll have toast for breakfast...just to try it.  In any case, homemade jam is always tasty.

Hope you enjoyed our post!

Life Has So Many Details

Another week has passed and we barely noticed it.  This last week we've been working out a lot of the details about our (future) house:

First, Elissa did a whole bunch of research into what plan we should use for electricity (for those who aren't familiar with the concept, some parts of Austin -- and I'm sure other places -- have what they call deregulated utilities, which basically means that a bunch of companies are "competing" for your business; this sounds good until you realize that in general you're paying more for the utilities than other people).  We haven't figure out which option to go with yet, but she's narrowed the choices down a lot.

We also had a home inspection on Monday.  The sellers had some potential buyers back out after having an inspection done, so the sellers had decided to fix just about everything that had shown up in that inspection, so ours turned out pretty well.  There are some things that need repair (some garage door issues, the roof needs a little attention, some broken seals on windows) so we're asking for some money at closing to fix those things up.

I guess really the first thing Elissa did was start looking at insurance.  We've picked an insurance company and just got a bunch of paperwork in the mail to get everything started with them.  Side note -- I don't know how anyone manages their money or any major decisions without Elissa ;) .

Aside from the house, we didn't do a whole lot.  Friday night we picked up Elissa's (resized) ring from the jeweler, so she can wear it again.  It was doubly exciting because obviously they cleaned it all up so it was just as shiny as ever.  After that we headed to volleyball.  Elissa played volleyball with us this last week (she volunteered to play because we would have had to forfeit if she didn't) and we had a lot of fun.  The other team didn't show up but there were supposed to be 2 games going on at the same time and there was only one other team there, so we played them for fun and both got a 'win' on our schedules.

Being (a little) Brave

So, we know you have all been waiting in suspense to hear about our newest house escapades, and we are happy to say that we have a signed contract on the house we really liked! I'm glad we were brave enough to actually do some negotiating to get a price on this house so that we could  actually afford. Hopefully things go well in the inspection on Monday. We have already seen an inspection that was done on the house in July, so hopefully there aren't any huge surprises.  Here is a bonus picture so you know how cool the house is on the inside.

As you might know, I found this cute pattern online for a new temple bag earlier this summer. (http://sewfabulouslypink.blogspot.com/2012/02/temple-garment-bag-tutorial.html)
I finally got up the courage and bought fabric and to get started. I'll admit, I started in the clearance and remnants section at JoAnn's to help me make my decision because I really had no idea what kinds of fabric I wanted. Plus, I didn't want to pay twice as much money for bad fabric!  I ended up getting a really good deal on the white fabric because it was in the remnant pile AND the bolt it came from was 50% off too. (For all of you who don't know, you get 50% of fabrics current price when it is in the remnant pile.) This meant I got the fabric for 25% of the original price! It happened to be meant for "home decor" but I used it anyway because I thought it would be cute. Then, I found the gingham fabric in the clearance section for between $4-$6.

So, this week after running through a whole spool of thread and having to get a new one yesterday, I finally got my project finished! It hangs out at about 6 feet tall and folds up (ending up about a quarter of the size) I will admit, it is much cuter in person because it was dark outside once I wanted to take pictures. I teased Daniel that I need to find a couple to invite to drive down to the temple with just so someone can see how cool my bag is. Daniel assured me that that was a good idea except for the prideful showing off thing. As usual, he was right. Though they aren't excellent, these pictures should give you an idea of how cute this bag is! (So I don't sound TOO proud, the bag certainly isn't perfect, but I'm glad that it at least turned out usable and cute.)