Our Home

The time has finally come! I'm not sure if anyone was actually waiting on the edge of their seats for me to post this but I can tell you it's been on my mind for a while. I waited until we had furniture and then until our new duvet arrived and then the house was a mess from some crafting projects I'd done (I think I mentioned we had three pregnant ladies in our family-- one out of three has had her baby! I was busy sewing away for them.) I put off cleaning my house for too long. I don't so much love the cleaning part but I really love that accomplished feeling at the end when I look around and see what I've done. Plus, I really just feel happier in a clean environment. Anyway, let the tour begin!

Here is our house (we're renting right now, we aren't in the process of owning it). This doesn't look like your average townhouse but that's what it is. We have about four of these complexes where we live and there are four homes in each one, kind of like a square cut into quarters rather than side by side.

You can see it a little in the picture above but here is our patio, situated to the left our house.

I know Bryan would want me to show this picture of our garden. He's very proud of it. It's grown a lot since we started it. You can't see all of it but we planted the zucchini, green onions, green beans and lettuce from seed. Those are mostly flourishing. We bought Thai basil and Thai chili pepper starter plants at the farmer's market. The peppers are slowly growing but the basil flowered. On the bright side, the flowers are purple and I think they are kind of pretty! We also bought some thyme, cilantro and rosemary from a garden store. I think the cilantro is starting to die a little but the others are doing great. I have a little oregano that was handed out at church one Sunday and last but not least, a lady in the Relief Society gave me four tomato starters! They are growing like crazy but we haven't had any tomatoes yet. Oh yeah, we also tried some flowers from seed. They mostly didn't work except for a few sprouts.

I bought this wreath from Target (we live three minutes away from Target... this might not be safe for me). It seemed like a good summer/spring wreath and I really like it. I like wreaths with a holly a lot and, if I'd taken the picture a little closer you'd see that's what the white part is.

Callie decided she wanted to be present in this post, so here she is welcoming you to our home. She is a very personable cat. She really likes to be around us and will often come snuggle in our laps unbidden. She is usually at the door when we get home but doesn't really try to get outside. She's an indoor cat but we took her outside the other day so she could see what the world was like and she was surprisingly timid about it. Anyway, end tangent.

Here is our main room. We weren't sure if our TV would fit in that hole but it was the perfect size. I don't know what we'd have otherwise done.

Here is our desk area and hallway leading to the downstairs bathroom, storage closet and washer/dryer (as I typed that I realized I had some laundry to change. Oops! Can I just tell you how much I love having my own washer/dryer?!)

Anyway, here is said downstairs bathroom with all the bathroom stuff we initially got when we got married.  Minus the cat litter, which I'm glad we haven't been carrying around until now. I really need to get her a bigger litter box.

Hey look! We now own a couch! Actually, we own all our furniture minus the large appliances! Since we have moved here I put together a large bookshelf, decorative shelf (see to your left in the picture with our TV), computer desk, and two nightstands. Bryan put together the table and chairs from IKEA. The both of us put together our dresser. Whew! It was a lot of work but gone are the days where we used an inflatable couch and bed or lived in a pre-furnished apartment. We're like real adults or something. Scary!

The aforementioned table and chairs. I'm really glad we didn't get a larger one. This one has a leaf in it with a neat way of storing it. We can make it bigger when we move into a bigger space.

Fairly new appliances in the kitchen. The only one I hate is the dishwasher, which has two motors that are dying and a tiny little place for utensils. What were they thinking?

My mom and dad helped us move here to Boise so they got to see the home but not all put together. One thing my mom said was, "Oh, that raised bar is nice. It'll hide all the dishes that need to be done from people who come over." Haha! Sometimes its true though. I can't be a perfect homemaker 100% of the time, I guess. I mostly try to keep it looking like this since for the sake of my sanity.

Mostly I took this picture to tell you I'm going upstairs now and so you can see the picture I've hung, though now that I see it... I don't think it can really be seen. It's one of our engagement pictures with a Family Proclamation over it on velum. Mom made it for us (and all my sisters) for Christmas.

Here is our guest/storage room. My parents didn't love the thought of sleeping on an air mattress when they came to visit so the bought this bed for a really good deal from a local retailer. It's pretty nice to have a legitimate guest bedroom. We've actually already had a lot of visitors so we've made good use of it. Lucky for us we already had all the bedding too... I'll get to that more in a couple of pictures. Anyway, this is also the kind of the room we put things in to keep them out of the way, like our vacuum. Oh! We even bought our own vacuum and it's pretty great! I haven't had a vacuum with such great suction since I lived at home. It's glorious.

I know its pretty silly but I was pretty excited to get stuff for another bathroom! I really liked this shower curtain and hand towel that matches the pattern. We went with a sea-green type of blue and grey.

The hand towel, as mentioned. Bryan would probably say, "No one wants to see a picture of our toilet, let alone two of our toilets." Oh, well.

Ta da! Our bedroom. As I mentioned, we already had all the bedding for our queen sized guest bed because it was the bedding we had previously use. Bryan's mom gave us a king sized bed she had and we love it. We each have all the room we need. I love being able to sprawl out.

This was the last thing I was waiting for-- we had been using the bedding that was on the bed when we took it but I kind of wanted to personalize everything in our room. I love the contrast of the dark blue over white with grey as a neutral. Also, there is our dresser. We were strangely overjoyed to have nightstands and love pulling the chains on our individual lamps at night. Silly, I know, but simple pleasures!

Then, because I'm cool now and have a smart phone, I decided to do a little video tour. Sorry if you get nauseous from me moving around. I just thought it'd be cool to kind of move through it and see some things in more detail. I decided not to speak in it because I thought I'd sound awkward. Callie decided to make a couple of cute guest appearances. Enjoy!