Early Christmas Presents!

Michael surprised me with an early Christmas present - a beautiful ivory pea coat from J.Crew! Since it has been SO cold here, it was perfect timing. I sort of have a coat obsession, so naturally I loved this gift!

J. Crew Wool Harbor Pea Coat

But my REAL Christmas present is being installed today - new granite countertops in our kitchen! I am so excited - I can't wait to get home and see how they turn out. I'll be sure to post pictures :)

On another note, today is my last day of work until January 4th. It's ok to be jealous :) Merry Christmas!

Junior League!

I had my first Junior League meeting last night! It was so fun. I'm really glad my friends, Grace and Susan, wanted to do it! I highly recommend JL to anyone, especially if you are new to a city (like me). It's a great way to meet people and get involved in your community. Looking forward to all the fun things ahead!

Happy Wednesday!

Just wanted to share a few pictures of the cutest baby in the world.

My adorable nephew, Gates!

Just one of the guys...hanging with my brothers and Michael:
I love this little guy!

Updated house pictures!

So we are finally unpacked in our new house! We also had tons of rooms painted over the last week. We even updated the master bathroom some! Without further ado, here are some pictures...

Living Room - we painted the fireplace,mantle, and hearth (it was this horrendous painted red...)

View from the Living Room into the Dining Room. We still need to replace that ugly brass chandelier:
Another view of the newly painted fireplace:

Powder Room - we painted this room a light grey with some hints of green. It used to be this extremely bright sea foam green:

Kitchen - this was painted yellow (NOT my favorite). We painted it a greige (grey + beige):

Another view of the kitchen:

The sun room - this was also painted the yellow:

We removed this massive, outdated ceiling fan from the kitchen ceiling and replaced it with the flush mount light fixture:The hallway to the bedrooms. This was painted BRIGHT red:

And finally...the bathroom! We put in a new vanity, counter tops, and all new fixtures. Eventually we'd like to tile the floors, but that will have to wait.

You can see the before pictures in the post below. Next up on the list are new kitchen counter tops! Hooray! Also, do you like our Christmas decorations? If you can't tell, I LOVE colored lights!

Our new house: Before pictures...

Well, we are FINALLY moved and unpacked in our new home. So far, we absolutely LOVE it. This house is so much larger than our rental home, which is really nice. It's 3 bedrooms and 2 bathrooms. Of course, there are MANY things that I want to do to the house to make it more my style...so here are some before pictures. We have painters coming this week, which I am so excited about, since red and yellow are not my favorite colors inside a home :)

Exterior - we plan on painting all of the red!

Living Room - we will be painting the fireplace white this week:
Dining Room - the horrendous window treatments are now gone and hopefully the chandelier will be gone soon as well:

The front room, which will probably be an office:

Kitchen - yellow will be gone this week!

Sun room - not our furniture...

Bathroom #1 - we love the built-ins:

There are 2 more bedrooms and another bathroom, but I don't have pictures for some reason. Luckily for us, most of the changes we want to make are mostly cosmetic. After we paint, we plan on re-vamping the kitchen a bit. I'll be sure to keep you posted with pictures and updates. Hope everyone had a wonderful Thanksgiving!

What I DON'T want for Christmas...

I absolutely LOVE Christmas. Everything about it! But before I get into the things that I am most excited about, let me share with you a few Christmas items that are just not my style (to put it nicely)...

These creepy Santa dolls. I mean these things are seriously expensive too!

The Chipmunks Christmas music...like nails on a chalkboard:

Creepy Christmas Caroler Dolls:

Yard blow-ups. Seriously? And my least favorite of all...the Christmas Village:
I think this is because I despise clutter so much. I seriously can't stand these! This is just my own humble, personal opinion. Any that you would like to share?

Where I've been...

I'm so sorry to have been such a bad blogger for the past 2 weeks, but Michael and I were busy buying a house!!!


We close on Friday and I can hardly wait to get started with decorating and renovating! The house is a 1920s bungalow about 2 streets over from our current rental house. We love the area and the house has so much potential! The house is in great shape, but needs some cosmetic changes. I'll be sure to update the blog with before and afters, of course. Have a great week!