After April showers.

I had my first bridal shower over the weekend and was given quite a bit of fun stuff for the house! I am thrilled to say that all of my thank you cards are written and most of the things are unpacked just waiting to be used (and a few have already been put to use, like the dish scrubber...)! 

The lighting in our living room at night leaves much to be desired (which should change sometime!) but I wanted to show you a little bit of what things are looking like now. Pardon the low quality iPhone pictures...

Our living room has furniture once again! Isaiah finished painting last weekend and my mom and I vacuumed tons of dust out of the furniture and put it back where it goes for now. :)

We still have some paint to scrape off the window, but the after is SO much better than this before...

Our dining room finally looks like a dining room. :) The desk in the corner should have a new look one of these days, and that will hopefully be the home of our piano, a buffet (which we're still on the lookout for) and who knows what else. :)

Since we painted the outside of our front door, and the living room walls, the inside looked pretty sloppy being a nasty off-yellow. We chose Elephant Gray by Valspar. We have it chosen for another project that should be done within a month or two. :)

(See, I told you the lighting was bad!)

Before:

After:

There is SO much change since we bought the house just two months ago! I'm pretty impressed with us being two amateurs with two (beyond) full time jobs and planning a wedding, not to mention taking care of other house stuff that's not so fun. We'll share more on that later!

Shut the (red) Front Door!

a.k.a. the post that we tell you why we haven't been updating a ton...

So this home improvement stuff is fun, but when both of us work full time, and we have to fund every project we do (while we're planning a wedding, a marriage, and a million other time consuming and expensive things), things don't always look SUPER glamorous in the blog format. So this post will be more like I'm spitting out all the things I remember from the past two and a half weeks (yikes!).

Two weekends ago, I moved out of my apartment, and all of my stuff moved into the house with Isaiah, and I moved into my (future) in law's house. Since things have been moved, Isaiah is living in the new house with all of my stuff. :) It's starting to look like a fixer-upper turned bachelor pad with lots of unpacked boxes and chick stuff here and there.

The bathroom is at a stage of partial completion (meaning that the shower helps you get clean and the toilet flushes). More on that in the near future also. :)

(and yes, that shower curtain was already mine)

The main update I have tonight is paint!!! We scheduled a painting party with our small group about a month ago, so we had to pick out some paint colors and get lots of prep done! Some of our close couple friends came over yesterday with brushes, rollers, paint trays, and a song in their hearts.

This is what painting after sunset looks like. Our house doesn't have any light fixtures in the living room. :/

Lots and LOTS of sanding and prepwork went into the living room and hallways. We removed the old crown molding (that wasn't even touching the ceiling) and we (Isaiah) had to remove some liquid nails from the wall, and patch holes where the molding was. The trim was covered in more than one thick coat of lacquer and that all had to be removed also. Our Friday night consisted of sanding, sanding, and way more sanding (and sweeping walls). We took our dust-covered selves and went to Lowe's to get paint and supplies for Saturday. :) 

After several paint samples (eight to be exact), we decided on Valspar's Filtered Shade for the living room. :) We are thrilled with our choice. It makes the house feel so much cleaner, new, and fresh!

[Valspar Filtered Shade]

Progress!!! That yellow really stood out once we used a cool, clean color!

This is also the "basically finished" product. After this picture was taken, Isaiah touched up a few spots and painted the baseboards white. We used the same color for the trim that we used for the fireplace (Valspar's Lilac Muse). 

I will *fingers crossed* be able to take some more final pictures tomorrow with sunlight lighting up the room. The white trim makes EVERYTHING look more fantastic! 

While we were at Lowe's picking out paint, I reached for a paint chip of a FABULOUS fiery red (after seeing a room I LOVED over at apartmenttherapy.com) and I asked Isaiah if we could use it for a certain project (more on that later too!) and he replied "Sure! Let's just get a gallon and paint the front door too!" So... a gallon of this beauty came home with us too! :)

(front door before, complete with weird, crusty tape stuff. and that door handle was our very first home-related purchase!)

Tada!!!!! :)

So now, we're the New Kids on the Block (our WiFi name!) in the corner house with the red door. :) 

Until next time, I'll just be sitting on the plasticy stuff admiring the beautiful walls and trim. ;)

P.S. Our yard is huge and we met the neighbors, but more on that later!