I Am Thankful For... | 2013 Edition

Tomorrow is Thanksgiving so thankfulness and gratitude have been on my mind and heart this week.

This has been an amazing year in many ways, and a very tough year in others. Some really great things happened and some really awful things happened this year. Sometimes I felt overwhelmingly amazing happiness and joy, and others, I simply sobbed out of grief, sadness and despair.

It was a year of ups and downs. A true roller coaster ride.

Through it all though, I know that I am immensely blessed.

Truly, we all are immensely blessed; with simple creature comforts like food, water, clothes and shelter. Things other people wistfully dream of. As well as with greater blessings like health, wealth, freedom, and opportunity.

This year, I'm thankful for:

Matt.

For our marriage, our friendship, and our devotion to making things work, even when life tries to get in the way. I'm thankful for a supportive husband who cheers me on and encourages me to take risks and go for my dreams. I love you.
Remy.

I'm thankful for this 5 pound feisty bundle of joy. Clearly God had a plan when He placed the desire to get a dog on my heart. I was puzzled by the urge since I had never felt the desire to have a dog before in my life. I didn't even know if I really liked dogs. But thankfully, God knew we needed our little Remy girl in our life, and He made it happen. Life has never been more fun.

We love you, Remy!

My family. My parents. Erica and Tony.

I am thankful for the time we get to spend together and for the fun we have when we are together. I'm thankful for the adventures we had this year, like an amazing 4th and 5th of July, and for the adventures that are ahead like our trip to Florida in December.

My in-laws. The California Davis' and the Brainerd Millers.

I'm thankful for Matt's family, who are my family too. For the uniqueness of each family and each sibling. For the opportunities to see and spend time with each.


[We clearly need to take a new photo, Sheila! :)]

My grandparents.

We lost my beloved Grandpa Pettit in July, and I can honestly say life hasn't been the same since. While we are all devastated by his absence and still mourn his loss daily, I am so thankful for the relationship that I was able to form with him and my grandma. Not every granddaughter can say that she knew and loved her grandparents so well, but I can. And I am so grateful.

I'm also thankful for my Grandma Pettit's spirit. Life hasn't been easy in the least since Grandpa died, but Grandma keeps putting one foot in front of the other and living life the best she can every day. She must know how much we all still need her here.

Our house. 

We celebrated one year of home ownership in October. What a ride it's been!

Having a place to call our own, and to fix up just how we'd like to. Landscaping it, and watching the seasons transform the yard and woods. It's been such a blessing to have a home of our own. I am so thankful we were able to buy this house. It truly is HOME to us.

Honestly, that is only the very beginning of my Gratitude List. I could write for days about all of the things I'm thankful for. Things like my business, the freedom to be self-employed, for being gifted with an entrepreneurial spirit, for like-minded friends, and for books. Yes, for books and the authors who write them.

I'm thankful for it all.

Happy Thanksgiving to you and your family. I hope you make your own Gratitude List so you too can see how truly blessed you are.

We are so very lucky.

Our First Home: The After Photos

In the Our First Home series, I've posted about:

The Before Photos

Phase One: ripping up the carpet, and painting

Phase Two: Hardwood floors

Phase Three: new carpet, moving, and tile

Today, I have the After Photos of our first house. 

It's not completely done. Not by any means. Is anything ever totally, completely finished??

But our active renovations are finished, and we are fully settled in and living in our new house. 

And we love it. We feel truly blessed to be living in this; our first home.

Our completed master bedroom.

The fully assembled dresser, and our stocked walk-in closet. Our completed guest bedroom. The completed bathroom, and the hallway with our artwork hung at the end. **Note - our hallway is all painted the same Sea Salt green you see at the end. The reason it looks blue at the outside of the right photo is because of the cool evening light/white balance coming from the living room window. No, I didn't paint a gradient in my hallway. :) My completed office! The living room, dining room and the kitchen. And our gorgeous hardwood floors. The kitchen. The dining room. The living room and then the front entryway.  I will be making a new curtain in a sand/linen type fabric to replace this existing red curtain. It will fit in well with the whole color scheme. There we go! Our completed house! Thanks for taking the ride through the renovation process with me! It's been a wild ride, and a completely rewarding one too. Next up on the to-do list for us? Landscaping!!

Our First Home: Phase Three of Renovations - New Carpet, Moving Stuff, and Tile

Previous posts in the Our First Home series:

The Before Photos
Phase One: ripping up the carpet, and painting
Phase Two: Hardwood floors

The hardwood floors in the living room, kitchen and dining room are now complete! The walls are all painted, and we are ready for carpet and tile.

My dad did a little revamping in our master walk-in closet. He took out the existing shelf on the right side and made two shelves instead, allowing us to hang jeans on the lower rack and shirts on the top. This eliminates wasted space and gives us much more room.
  The day came for us to move out of our apartment so we used the courtesy van from our realtor and with great help from Matt's brother and Matt's friend, moved all our belongings over in one day. A huge thanks to my mom and Matt's mom and sister for helping us pack up our stuff into boxes too! Next, it was time for tile! We chose a slate gray tile with lots of variation in the patterns. It hides dirt and hair like crazy, making it the perfect bathroom tile! Dad, cutting a hole for the toilet. Laying the tile in an offset pattern that Matt thought up. The bathroom sink was really low so my dad made a riser for the bottom to raise it up 4 or 5 inches.   The second tile section: the front entry way.   My dad laid all the tile, but Matt and I did the grout ourselves after watching my mom do a small section. It's fun to see the finished project and know we helped to create it!   Then, it was carpet installation day! We chose a very plush light sand colored carpet and the thickest pad we could afford.  The result is carpet that makes people say "Wow, this is so squishy!" when they walk on it! The dresser and night tables that Matt and I have been using since we lived in Hawaii were pieces that I either found at garage sales or rescued from the side of the road and repainted. Needless to say, they were cheap and weren't the nicest pieces you've ever seen. We decided that it was time to own something that hadn't once had a cockroach living in it, so we started looking around for a decent dresser/night stand set. I found one I liked at Ikea but didn't buy it right away. After looking around town here, I found a set very similar in appearance to the one at Ikea, at our local Menards. Perfect! I made it a requirement that we deliberately follow the directions. Otherwise, it would be next to impossible to assemble this type of furniture! We did it!  The set included a dresser [below] and two matching one-drawer night stands. Next, we started to bring furniture into the house from the piles in the garage.  All my office things here. Sorting through clothing, using the guest room's open space. Finally!  With our bed finally set up, we were able to sleep in our new house for the first time ever. We closed on the house on October 16th, but weren't able to spend the night until the first weekend of November. It was a very long wait, especially when we now OWN a house but can't sleep there!  Thankfully, my parents let us stay in my old room at their house during the renovation process, so we could end our apartment lease and still get a good night's sleep. All that's left is to organize all of our belongings and find new 'homes' for everything. The last post in this series will show the finished product - the current photos of our home now that we've lived here for 5 months! Stay tuned!

Our First Home - Phase Two of Renovations - Hardwood Floors

Previous posts in the Our First Home series:

The Before Photos
Phase One - Ripping up carpet and painting

The house is now painted, and the floors are bare. The hallway and bedrooms are ready for new carpet which will come later, and the front entry way and bathroom are ready for tile.

The living room, dining room and kitchen are ready for hardwood!

We decided on a beautiful natural maple hardwood, which is completely real. It has a lot of color variations of really light to super dark and all shades in between. It's tongue and groove wood so we rented a power stapler to assist us in installing the floor.

Once we brought the wood home, we acclimated it in the area we were going to lay it for several days as we painted the rest of the house.

Then, we opened the boxes and laid out each individual piece of wood so it could acclimate further, and we separated them into light and dark piles so we could choose different colors when assembling the floor later.
The day we began to lay the hardwood, I taught a photography workshop so I wasn't there when they first started to put it down. My mom chose the boards and handed them to the boys, and Matt and my dad installed them. When I arrived several hours into the project, they had accomplished this much. Some of the boards were really long and some were only a foot long. We were very deliberate and careful in making sure we had good seams, and that the pattern was beautiful. The process was very intensive and deliberate. Slow going, but worth it. We had to move out the stove so boards could go underneath it.   It's coming along beautifully now! This is at least a day or two into the project. I liked doing this part. The tongue and groove parts of the boards fit together super tightly so they needed to be tapped into place. I tried that part once and couldn't get it to work out at all. I handed that job on to Matt and my dad, and did this part instead. On the home stretch!! The last full board! All that was left of the floor at this point were a couple really skinny pieces to fill the gaps between the last edge boards and the wall. We had to move the fridge out to put boards underneath it. The boards at the end of each row had to be cut according to the length of space left between the previous board and the wall.  I took a turn with the saw. Can you tell I was really nervous to be running this? I have limited experience with power tools.   ALL DONE!! The wood floors are gorgeous and add a nice element to the house. We love the variation in the color, and the fact that they are fairly light overall so they make the space seem even larger than it is. Next up - phase three of renovations: moving our goods from our apartment into our new garage, having new carpet installed, tiling the entry way and the bathroom, and assembling our new furniture.