Making This Place Our Home: Living Room

I keep meaning to write posts about some of the fun things we've done to decorate our house, but then the house gets messy and I don't want to take pictures of a messy house and then I get busy with work or crafts or reading and I don't make time to blog. So I'm taking advantage of a slow afternoon to finally write another blog post.

We have a very large wall in our living room, and I knew from the moment we moved in that I wanted to create a collage wall. We did one with our wedding and engagement photos when we first moved in (sorry, no pictures). We just eyeballed the setup, and it was nice. But then we started realizing that our pictures were kind of old, especially since we had gotten updated professional family photos. So we decided it was time to update the pictures and set up a new collage.

I looked around online and found a pretty cool way of setting up a collage without ending up with a million nail holes in your wall. We got a couple rolls of cheap wrapping paper, then traced and cut out all the frames and the items we wanted to put up. We also made sure to mark where the nail would need to go. Then we taped the paper frames on the wall and could move them as often as we needed to.

Tracing and cutting out the paper was pretty annoying, but in the end, I think it was worth it. It was so much better than having to take down frames to move them over an inch. It also helped us visualize it better so we could tell just how many pictures we could get on the wall.

I really like what we ended up with. I love having some of our vacation photos up along with our professional photos. I also always love having Andrew's photography up. I think the picture of Diagon Alley is my favorite.

Sorry it's not the greatest picture; if there's no glare from the window, there's a glare from the lamp. I did my best.

Another project we did for the living room before we even moved in was the bookshelves. Andrew and I have two of the tall bookshelves from Walmart with the super flimsy nearly cardboard backing. We had each had our bookshelves for years, since before we got married, and they had been through multiple moves. And sadly, the backing just didn't survive the move to the house.

Instead of buying new bookshelves, we decided to try and fix them ourselves. We went to Home Depot and bought the big sheets of bead board. The nice thing about Home Depot is that they will cut the pieces down for you; we just had to make sure we had the correct measurements. If I'm remembering correctly, they didn't even charge us for all the cuts. And if they did, it usually runs about $.25 per cut after your first.

We then picked out a fun, sea green that we both liked and that we have since used throughout our house. (Such as on the letters on the collage wall.) We painted the bead board, let it dry, and then tacked the boards into place on the backs of the bookshelves. And I love the way it looks.

Not only does this spice up our bookshelves a bit, but the bead board also acts as a really good, sturdy frame for the shelves. They're no longer wobbly, and we don't have to worry about pushing a book too forcefully on the shelf and ripping the backing. Now our only issue is bowing shelves. We're planning on buying some new IKEA bookshelves in the near future (because they're wider and taller and would hold so much more stuff), and we like the look of these bookshelves so much that we're thinking of doing the same thing to our brand-new shelves and then just relocating our old ones instead of getting rid of them.

We have also added some fun items for display. I love all the typewriters and vintage cameras, and I especially love the roll-top desk that my Grandpa Newman made. I'm so happy that I ended up with it and that it fits so well.

There are still some things I want to add to the living room (mostly just a real piano instead of a digital—one day), but I love this cozy little room and how well things fit.

That One Time When We Bought a House

Nothing makes you feel like an adult like buying a house. I think it has something to do with the thousands of dollars that are no longer in our savings account. It's such a huge decision, and there are so many variables and so many things to think about. And every aspect of the decision is stressful. You have to find a good realtor. And then you have to find a good lender. And then you have to find the house itself, taking into consideration the style, the age, the neighborhood, the yard, the condition, and about a thousand other things. A lot goes into buying a house, and understandably so. This is the place we're going to live for the next ten years or so. We're going to bring kids into this place, man.

But I digress. This story isn't just the story of finding the house that we want to spend a good chunk of our lives in. This is also a perfect example of how when God says, "Do this thing!", you end up doing that thing, even if you didn't think you were ready to do that thing quite yet.

As of about the beginning of April, Andrew and I were thinking about buying a house. In a year. It just felt like it was the right next step for us in our lives. We had had a whole discussion about how we felt a strong prompting that we needed to get into a house (all at IKEA, while looking at [and drooling over] their awesome kitchens). The lease for our apartment was ending on May 31, so we figured that we would sign for another year contract and save up some more money and do a really thorough job of looking at houses and finding what we really wanted. It felt like such a good plan that we even went to the office to re-sign our contract, but we were told that they would write up the contract and deliver it to us. So we figured that was fine and went on our way.

But because we were thinking seriously about it, we wanted to get some of the process started: Find a realtor, get preapproved, etc. As we got into that process, we realized that there might be a benefit to buying a little earlier. So we talked to our apartment office again and discovered that we had the option to sign a six-month contract instead, which was great to hear. We thought that might be a better timeline for us so that if we found a house earlier than expected, we wouldn't be stuck with an entire year-long contract along with our mortgage.

We continued looking into things more, and I started getting a little anxious. Mostly about that six-month timeline. I wanted to make sure that we wouldn't have to buy out a contract or pay rent and a mortgage. To make matters worse, we only had until April 15 to sign a contract to get a lower rate on our rent. I hated that we had to decide so soon what our timeline would be. We then went into the office again to find out if we could sign a contract up until our current lease expired, even if we had to pay a higher rate. At this point, it had been a couple of weeks since we were told that the office would deliver our contract, and it still hadn't happened. We ended up talking to the same girl who promised to get that done, and she immediately recognized us and felt all sorts of bad for being a slacker. She then promised that we could sign for the lower rate up until May 31. I felt much better about this because it gave us some breathing room in making a decision.

Our next step was to meet with a realtor. We met with Shauna, who came highly recommended. She came over to our apartment and got an idea of what we were looking for and what we could afford. Then she asked us about the lease at our apartment. When we told her that our contract was up on May 31 and that we were trying to decide how soon we wanted to buy, she told us to buy now. Interest rates are still really low, and they are projected to go up by the end of the year. She also said that spring is when all the houses go on the market, which creates good competition for buyers. Shauna said she could get us into a house by mid-June.

The whole time Shauna was talking, I just felt like we needed to follow her advice. I felt so good about working with her and about buying a house now instead of waiting. Once she left, Andrew told me that he felt the same way. So we decided that we were going to start looking.

We met with Shauna on Monday, and that Thursday, we started the hunt. We looked at quite a few houses that we absolutely did not like. There was one that we liked, but we didn't love it, and there were a lot of things that needed to be fixed. We had gotten a good idea that day of what houses looked like at what we thought was in our price range, and they weren't fantastic. So we went home and took a really hard look at what we could afford, and we upped our price a little bit. On Saturday, we spent four hours looking at nine houses, and we found a couple that we really liked. But in the end, we decided not to put an offer on either of them.

So the next Monday, we went and looked at more houses. The first one we looked at was cute, but the backyard needed to be completely redone. It didn't even have sod; just a bunch of weeds and a wooden fence that was falling down. The next couple were definite no-gos. Then we pulled up to this adorable little blue rambler in West Jordan. It was at the end of a cul-de-sac, and the front yard was beautiful. We walked in, and everything just felt right. We loved the paint choices. The kitchen wasn't super up to date, but it was nice and well cared for. And the backyard was AMAZING. It was so big, and the landscaping was so perfect we thought the owners had to be professionals. Everything about the house felt good. The basement was finished, and finished nicely. It had a formal living room upstairs and a family room downstairs. It had a pretty big laundry room. It even had a room for cold storage. It was obvious to everyone that this was the best house we had looked at so far.

I know that I loved it. Andrew did too, but it was at the very top of our price range, and that made him a little nervous. But Shauna talked to the seller's agent and told us there was some wiggle room on the price, so we decided to put in an offer. Which was nerve-racking, but so exciting. And then the next morning, I got a call from Shauna telling me that our offer was accepted with no issues.

So after three days of shopping, we found our house. We had met with our realtor a mere week before we signed our offer. It was insane. And everything from that point on went insanely smoothly. No major issues came up in the inspection. There were absolutely no hiccups in processing our loan. The sellers had no problems on their side, either. We could have closed a week earlier than we did because of how easy everything was. It's still so surreal to me that we own a house, but I could not be more excited about it. I can't wait to be done with moving and to make this place our home.

Who Are You? A Topic for Each Week of the Year {Week 5: Childhood Home}

Week 1: Birth
Week 2: School
Week 3: Hobbies
Week 4: Birthdays

5. What were your childhood home and neighborhood like?

I really loved where I grew up. I grew up in Magna, as I'm sure I've mentioned before, and I spent the first 18 years of my life in the same house. I shared a room with my sister until my oldest brother went on his mission, which is when Chelly took over his room and I got my own room. Then when Chelly went to college, I moved downstairs to her room. There was one major reason why everyone wanted that room: it was huge. For a bedroom, at least. It served as our family room for years until my parents put an addition on the house and added a much bigger family room, which was much needed. I remember my mom jumping on the couch in the old family room when John Stockton hit the three-pointer that sent the Jazz to the Finals for the first time. There wasn't anywhere else for her to go.

The major reason that room wasn't the greatest was because it didn't have a door. We would hang a sheet up sometimes, and for a while in high school I had door beads hanging there. The other bad part was the spiders and the bugs. The room was in the basement, and only about half the basement was finished. The unfinished part was the creepy part that was filled with storage. And spiders. Spiders that would usually make their way into my room. I have no idea how many spiders I killed down there.

The main quirk about our house, I think, was that we only had one bathroom on the main floor. Six people had to share that bathroom, and it got interesting at times. In order to free up space, Chelly and I would get ready in our rooms instead of standing at the sink in the bathroom. My parents didn't put a second bathroom in until the summer before I moved to college, so none of us really got to take advantage of that.

My neighborhood was a fun neighborhood. Growing up, I had so many friends on my street, and we would spend the summers playing around together. There were the Colemans, the Barretts, the Barnetts, the Lemmons, and the Robertses. Each of those families had at least one child around my age that I palled around with. Then there were the other families in the neighborhood that weren't on our street, such as the Behrmanns and the Ledbetters. We would all get together and ride our bikes or play softball on the stretch of lawn between the Lemmons' house and the Barnetts' house.

One of my favorite memories from our neighborhood growing up had to do with the Barnetts. Clifton was one of my very best friends growing up, and I would play at his house all the time. In fact, the one time I broke a bone, it was while jumping on his trampoline. (I did a front handspring and bent all the fingers on my right hand back enough that I broke one finger and sprained another.) I would play Super Nintendo at his house all the time. Corinne and Jennings were like my second set of parents. In fact, my family's emergency evacuation plan was to meet on their lawn. Every summer evening, Corinne would sit on her front porch while Clifton played outside with his friends. Inevitably, other parents would come out and talk to Corinne, and there was a definite feeling of camaraderie in our neighborhood because of that. We'd all be out until it got dark and then go home for the evenings.

I would also spend a lot of time at the Colemans' house, mostly to play in their backyard because it was so big. And they had a cool swing set/playhouse that Andrew and I loved to climb all over. Though I think the coolest thing about their backyard was the old rickety wooden playhouse that a previous owner had built into the wood fence. Sometimes I wonder if we should have been playing on it at all; it probably wasn't the safest thing in the world. If I remember right, it didn't even have a ladder, so we'd have to figure out other ways to climb in. Andrew and I would make up adventure stories and act them out in his backyard. I always got really sad when Paul or Penny would stick their head out the window to call Andrew in for dinner.

When I think about those things, it reminds me of what a great environment I had growing up. I had lots of friends to play with as a kid, and we were always roaming and creating our own adventures. Our neighborhood was relatively safe, which allowed us to explore all of it.

L to R: My cousin Dustin, my brother Matt, and my Dad. The portion of the house on the left with the garage is the addition. The brick portion is the original house. But mostly I just thought this picture was fantastic in so many ways and I wanted to share it.

Four and a Half Days and Counting

Well, this is it. The last week that Andrew and I will live in Utah County. And while Utah County has been incredibly good to me over the past eight or so years, I cannot wait to get out. I've wanted to move back to Salt Lake ever since I graduated, and I am beyond thrilled that it's finally worked out.

I am also out-of-my-head excited that I only have four and a half days left of this nasty commute! Only nine more one-way trips. I can do this.

And on Saturday, the move will be complete. Sure, we still have to pack and then load and then unload and then unpack and then set everything back up and then decorate, but I'm choosing to look on the positive side. And once it's done, it'll be done and we won't be moving for at least a year. Which is probably the best part of all.

Our First Apartment

It seems that married couples always have stories about their first apartments, so I thought I would try to document mine and Andrew's first home. I was going to take some updated pictures, but then I looked at the ones Andrew posted on Facebook when he first moved in and realized that not much has changed since then.

There is definitely more stuff on the countertops and we have some more shelving (these pictures were taken prior to unwrapping all our wedding gifts, after all), but it's nothing special. That's what happens when you find out you're moving so soon after moving in. We haven't bothered to put much up on the walls or do much in the way of decorating because it's already starting to look like this again:

Things I will miss about this apartment:

• The giant master bath
• The half bedroom turned mini library
• Playing with our landlord's dog on occasion

Things I will not miss about this apartment:

• The abundance of noise that emanates from upstairs (we can hear everything)
• Living in a basement (I need more natural light!)
• The ridiculous misuse of so much space
• The weird shelving in our closet
• The near-complete absence of kitchen storage and counter space
• The abysmal commute to work

That isn't to say that this apartment is a bad apartment. The family that lives upstairs is super nice, and Holly and Blair have been awesome to work with. But there are always going to be things we don't like about a place. And the fact that I seriously cannot wait to move has more to do with my commute than with with the apartment itself.

And speaking of moving, Andrew and I have found a place in Midvale that will hopefully be awesome for us. We move in a mere three and a half weeks, and like I said, I cannot wait. Here are the things I'm looking forward to:

• A 10-minute (at most) commute for both Andrew and me (hallelujah!)
• A two-car garage
• No upstairs or downstairs neighbors (and possibly only one next-door neighbor)
• Vaulted ceilings
• A balcony
• Lots of windows to let in lots of light
• Walk-in closet without the weird shelving
• Kitchen counter space
• Full utility room for our washer and dryer to sit side by side
• Two on-site pools
• On-site fitness facility

I could probably keep listing things, but I'll refrain. I can't tell you how excited we both are to live so much closer to work and to actually settle down someplace for a while. I'm not looking forward to the packing and cleaning and sweating that inevitably comes with moving so much stuff (it's amazing how much crap we have), but it'll all be worth it in the end.

Everything All At Once

One month ago today, Andrew and I got married. I moved into our apartment in Pleasant Grove and out of Carriage Cove. You'd think those would be big enough changes to tide us over for the moment, but no. I've come to the realization in my life that we are tested by nothing happening or by everything happening all at the same time. The latter is the case in my life right now, but all the things that are happening are good things, so I can't complain too much.

The latest big change is that I got a new job. A new pretty amazing job. On paper, at least. I'll reserve complete judgement until I actually start. I will be working for a company called Health Catalyst, which is an IT consulting company in the healthcare industry. They actually recruited me because of my experience at KLAS. Who knew that working in the healthcare industry would be my road to opportunity? In the course of recruiting me, Health Catalyst actually created a new position for me, which is pretty cool. I will be managing their RFP process, which is technical to explain, especially since I don't know exactly what I'll be doing yet. I'm not sure that the company knows either. Regardless, it's an exciting position and a move up in the workplace. I think it will be great for me and Andrew.

But I think what I am most excited about is the fact that this job is in Salt Lake City. And since Andrew works in Midvale, it only makes sense for us to move out of Utah County. Keeping a 30–40 minute commute when we could have a 5–10 commute seems foolish. We'll be spending a fortune on gas the next couple of months until our current contract ends in June. I can't wait to move. I've wanted to move to Salt Lake for a long time now, and the circumstances are finally right.

It's amazing to me how everything works out. I tried for years to get a job in Salt Lake and move out of Provo, but it never worked. Then I tried simply to get out of student housing, and that didn't work either. Then I married Andrew, which got me out of Carriage Cove. Then we happened to get an apartment on a contract of six months. Then I get a job in Salt Lake that requires us to move, and I only have to commute for two months. The Lord truly knows what he's doing. And no matter how many times I think He doesn't, He proves me wrong time and again.

So life is crazy right now, but it is also very, very good.