Our New House!

For the past 8 months we have been living in a small, two bedroom, 950 square foot apartment. Which wasn't terrible...

No. I take that back. It was. Terrible.

I don't mean to sound ungrateful or too good for an apartment, we have lived in apartments almost all of our married years together. So we are definitely not above apartment living. But at times it was very depressing and hard.

It was hard not having a yard so the girls could run out and play.

It was hard telling the girls that half their toys and books were in storage because there was no room for them in our apartment.

It was hard always telling the girls they couldn't run or jump or yell or even laugh too loud (many of you know what that is like) because we had neighbors below us, and next to us that would hear us.

It was hard not being able to wash a load of clothes if I needed to, or run the dish washer past 10pm at night so we could have dishes in the morning for breakfast.

It was hard not having all my kitchen stuff and dishes because there were only 3 cabinets to store them in.

It was hard, at times.

It felt like a prison....at times.

In fact, last week we went back to the apartment to clean and get a few more things out after moving into our new home and jokingly told the girls we were moving back to the apartment. You probably can't even guess what the girls did?!

Madisen and Avery started to bawl! They literally bawled their eyes out! Tears coming down their faces and all. Then we told them we were joking.

Mean joke to play on a 3 and 6 year old, huh?

It was obviously a prison to them as well.

8 long months we served out our sentence there. :)

It may not seem like it, but I would always try and count my blessings through it all. Especially at times when I would hear the horrible stories of people losing their homes to fires, tornadoes in the south (which is even closer to home to us, than before) or the earthquake in Japan. It's so easy to count your blessings when things like that occur and you realize what's most important, your family. And on those days, I would count the apartment twice.

We also CHOOSE to live in an apartment. We didn't have to, but we knew it was for the best. Because in order for us to get out of debt as fast as possible we had to live as frugally as possible for those 8 months. We got all our debts paid off, except for our student loans which will take another 3-4 years. So for the short (and seemingly long) time we were living in that apartment, "prison", I will be forever grateful we did, as it feels TEN times better being out of credit card debt.

We moved into a beautiful 3 bedroom, 2,200 square foot home last Saturday and what a difference it has made in our children's moods and also Ryan and I. We are loving our new home and plan to live here for 3-4 years. (I should clarify...we did not buy this home, we are just renting it, but it is new to us!)

So here it is folks: Pictures of our home.

We gave our new house a mini face lift this last weekend. We cleaned up the yard and trimmed all the bushes and trees and it looks so much better. 

This is our favorite room of the house...

 decorating still in progress...

 This is the front door entry way. I found this bench at Good will and painted it brown and also bought flowers and sticks at the $1 store and made the plant sitting next to the bench. I painted the mirror a dark brown color to match the bench.

 cost me $8 to make this, I really liked how it turned out.

 we put all our shoes in the bench.

This next room is actually the "dining room" but we turned it into a play room instead. The girls love it!

The master bedroom we painted before we moved in. It was a dark forest green with stenciling of leaves all along the top wall, so we painted the room a brownish color to match all the decorations.

This is the master bathroom, has two sinks and two walk-in  closets for him and her! We are going to put in new counter tops eventually. 

The kids/guest bathroom

 The kitchen...

The office/craft room

Sorry these pictures are jumping around a little bit....here is the backyard. A shed out back.

The girls' room. Emily waking up from her nap.

Another fun craft project I did after moving in was, I have wanted a fake tree for a long time, but if you buy one new they are like $70-$150!!  Well I found this nasty tree at a yard sale for $5. At first I thought, ewww, why did I just buy this nasty tree? I just threw away 5 bucks! But the more I thought about it, I thought I could fix it up. The tree was in sad shape. It even smelled funny.  I scrapped off all the old bark and I bought textured paint and painted the bark a nice brown color. After it dried, I scraped some of it back off so it showed a variety of colors and textures. Then I spray painted the basket part, dark brown. I fixed the tree ,so it wouldn't lean over as much by stuffing objects inside the holes. I took out all the old moss and replaced it with new green moss. And then lastly, cleaned the leaves-one by one and sprayed Fe-breeze all over it. 

 Gross huh?

Now what once was a sad, depressed tree.... Is FULL of life! All for under 15 dollars!

 Much better!

We are so grateful for this home and we know Heavenly Father answered our prayers. This home is in a great neighborhood and school district for our girls. After much sacrifice comes great blessings! And we feel so blessed to have this home for our family.