Happy December

Happy December! I can’t believe it’s already almost halfway through December and 2017 is almost over! This year has absolutely flown by!

I’m not really sure if I’m going to do a traditional year in review this year.  If I do, I’ll post it on January 1st, but let me just say, that while this year hasn’t had a lot of milestones, per se, I feel like I’ve accomplished a lot. 

Darryl and I have worked pretty hard to get more work done on our house.  When it comes to manual labor, it’s mainly him, and he’s pretty awesome at tackling things.  I help more with the brainstorming and planning parts of things, and I do a lot of designing how our rooms are set up/decorated. 

You’d think that this long after buying the house (we’re at a year and 8 months already!) we’d have everything just so, but that’s soooooo not the case. Most of the big furniture stays pretty stationary, but we tinker with moving other stuff around all the time. I think I’ve rearranged my half of our home office 3 times this year. I think I’ve FINALLY (literally, today) got it the way it’s going to stay.  The only room that really needs work now is our spare bedroom.  It’s usable but also is kind of our catch all room for things until we get around to find permanent places for them.  Out of sight, out of mind!

I’ve worked pretty hard this year to cut down on our money spent eating out. I’ve really worked on meal planning for the pay period and making sure we get everything for those meals and whatever household or pet items we need on one big shopping trip after we get paid, so we’re at the store less and therefore less likely to buy a bunch of little things that we don’t really need. 

I made it one of my goals for 2017 to cook more and try to save money by cooking at home, and I try to focus on simple things that don’t have a ton of ingredients (less money spent and more likely to be eaten by Darryl, who is the absolute pickiest eater I’ve ever met!).  I’ve started using my crockpot a little more, and I actually ended up using ALL of them (I went from having one to having 3 when I asked for another one at Christmas last year, then we won a tiny one at Darryl’s family reunion a few months ago) during Forest Festival this year.  

All in all, the meal planning and limited shopping trips plan has seemed to work pretty well.  I know after we go to the store that I have enough food to cook for us for two weeks (I just freeze whatever won’t keep in the fridge for that long). We don’t always follow the meal plan exactly, but the stuff is there whether we make it in the right order or not, and if we don’t use it all, it’s less we have to buy next time!

So, yeah...to some, this stuff might not seem like much, but honestly, it’s been kind of huge for us. We were wasting so much money ordering in or going out to eat, and doing it this way, we split our shopping total down the middle, he pays for half and I pay for half, and we usually don’t pay more than around $65 each (and that would be on a big trip when we need more stuff than usual!). Do that twice a month and compare the numbers to what we spend on restaurants and it’s a big deal, especially on a limited budget. 

I’m thinking of writing a bit more about it later, because my whole method is slightly more complex and could probably be fodder for its own post!

How has everyone else been doing with their 2017 goals?

The (Hopefully Last) Big Move!

Hey all!

I promised to write again soon, and I am now about to start fulfilling that promise.

Remember how I said there would be some new and exciting news?  Well...my boyfriend and I bought a house!  It's definitely a bit of a fixer-upper, but we both love it.  We closed on April 18th, and started preparing the main rooms the next day so that we could begin moving in ASAP.  We painted the living room, and cleaned the house from top to bottom.

The first coat of the green made me question EVERYTHING about this paint...but the second coat transformed it, and we ended up absolutely loving it, especially when paired with the yellow I picked out....so much so, that we decided to do the spare room with the leftover we had of these two colors!

A quick picture I snapped before they started moving the living room furniture in.

Plus the furniture and some more chaos.

See? The green worked out really well.  (I don't think Darryl realized I was going to take this, lol)

After that, we started moving things in from Darryl's apartment.  I wanted the living room, kitchen, and bathroom to be finished first so that we could kind of have a command central.  We lived out of the spare bedroom for a couple of weeks while Darryl and his best friend, Justin, installed floating floors in the upstairs (the upstairs consists of two rooms - one sort of leads on to the next, so we're using both of them as the master bedroom area).  I also painted upstairs, and the finished product looks like a completely different space than it did when we started.  It is absolutely freaking amazing.  (Stray piece of information: Every wall in this picture that isn't white, we painted.  The only wall in the house that didn't start out white was a brown wall in the living room - that's the green wall behind the couch now.)

I forgot to take a lot of better before pictures until things were already well under way, but I did have this and a couple of others!  This is upstairs in the one half of the bedroom.

Annnd, almost after!

The other half of the bedroom, while it was in progress.

We got this flooring from Lowe's.  It's called "Tavern Oak".

I'm in love with my kitchen.  I'll post pictures of it plus our stuff later, but right now I have boxes all over the place from where I moved more of my stuff in last weekend.

Once that was completed, we moved our bedroom stuff upstairs and started working on the spare room, then after that, the office.  I had the painting completed in both rooms long before the floors were completed (again, floating floors), but honestly, the guys really had the hard part.  The house was built in 1938, and it seems like there isn't a completely straight wall anywhere in the house, as they found out while trying to get the ends of boards to match up exactly.....I don't think it ever happened precisely the way they wanted it to. lol

One corner of the spare bedroom, post-painting.

The office, in progress.

Almost all of our stuff is in now (some of mine is still in a friend's garage, but we're slowly moving it in as we get other stuff out of the way).  It's really starting to come together!  Darryl put a bunch of his photos up a couple weeks ago, and as soon as I dig out the box mine are all in, they will join them!

Leo and Sawyer and Felix (you all haven't been introduced to him yet, but he's Darryl's hamster, lol) are all here and right at home.  Leo is ornery as usual, but he's much better behaved and happier now that he's back with me full time.  (My apartment situation over the last year didn't really work out well at all, and I ended up pretty much just in and out to take care of Leo and Sawyer and clean anything that needed done on a regular basis, and that was about it - not an ideal situation at all, and I hated leaving them there, but I had nowhere else to take them - where I was staying didn't allow them.  So now we're all back together, and it's so much better!!)  Everyone has adjusted incredibly well to the new place.  Leo is still nervous of new people when they come in, and his go-to is to jump behind the couch and stay there until the new people leave, but he's slowly beginning to come out quicker and quicker, if he even hides at all.

It's been an amazing experience so far, and I can't wait to see what happens next!