wordless(ish) wednesday: we are homeowners!

that, my friends, is the most beautiful picture i could post right now. it is jc holding the keys to our new home! after tons of messed up houses, paperwork, and red tape, we can officially call ourselves homeowners. just in the nick of time too because we need to be out of this house by april 1st. we got the keys on monday and charles has already been tearing out carpet and flooring. i wish i could help more! this is the first time we've moved with the baby so it will definitely be a different experience. i can't wait to share all the renovations and projects we have in store for the new house!

{Linking up with The Paper Mama, a little king and i, and then, she snapped, Live & Love Outloud, 5 Minutes for Mom, jenni from the blog and Baby Baby Lemon. Whew, that's a lot of linking up.}

week in iphone photos

what a week! we had the oscars (that only i was into), a mobile notary came to the house so we could sign some escrow paperwork (no keys yet but hopefully VERY soon!), charles and i headed out with some friends to a king's game, and jc was just his normal, adorable self. couldn't really ask for a better week.











follow me on instagram? my username is melissajenkinslinking up with a good life and life rearranged.

house hunting update!

a couple months back, i mentioned that charles, jc and myself were officially entering the home buying market. and we finally have some real forward momentum to talk about!

so on our last house hunting adventure, at the end of a day where we looked at EIGHT houses, we found a house that charles and i both loved and was in our budget. the house had just been put on the market so there weren't any offers yet. in this market, if you find a house you like that hasn't had some sort of mystery flooding or sink holes in the backyard, you better jump on it. and that is what we did.

we put an offer in and the bank put in a counteroffer. we accepted and the bank signed off on the purchase agreement today! now there are still a couple hurdles that need to be jumped over before this is all official and whatnot but we are so so happy!

now i'm trying REALLY hard to not count my chickens before they hatch, but i can't help but scour pinterest for home decor/renovating ideas. this house has a pretty good shell but all the floors need to be replaced, everything needs to be repainted and it needs a good cleaning. i've already been busy pinning all sorts of ideas for the house. i even got charles to pin a few things! if he wasn't so anti-social media, he'd totally be all about pinterest. here are a few of our pins that we're obsessing over.

Source: google.com via Melissa on Pinterest

i'd love to have something like this set up in the foyer of the house. one of my biggest pet peeves is (which i am totally guilty of doing also) when people enter the house and just throw whatever they have in a pile in the entryway. i'd love to have a cubby/hook for each person in the house.

Source: lumberliquidators.com via Melissa on Pinterest

this is one of charles's pins. we'd love to have this color flooring in the two front rooms of the house and perhaps the kitchen.

Source: outdoorrooms.com via Melissa on Pinterest

the house already has a pergola set up in the backyard and we would DEFINITELY do lights like this hanging above. i love the ambiance it creates.

if you want to see more of our house ambitions, check out my pinterest page. hopefully i'll have more good news on the home buying front to share soon!

a look back at goals i set six months ago

ok, so a few months back i decided to make some "the year is halfway over" resolutions. i thought now would be a good time to reflect on what has come of these goals and add some new ones to the bunch.

here are my previous goals:
1. Make a conscious effort to be healthier. i feel like i can cross this off my list and not feel like a liar. because i DID make a conscious effort for a good period of time during the last few months. if you were a reader a couple months ago, you may have noticed my buff mama monday posts...and that they suddenly and abruptly disappeared. i don't really have a good reason for that. i got sick, didn't go the gym for a while, then when i was ready to go back, i learned that they had closed down. sooooo, i stopped working out. but i did go for a couple months, so i'm counting this as done.

2. Take a graphic design/web design class. i can most assuredly cross this off my list! i took a graphics communication class at the junior college that was bascially an intro to photoshop. i learned a lot, including that graphic design is not something that i will be pursuing further. i'm so happy to have acquired the photoshop skills that i did, but i'm ready to move on.

3. "Finish" JC's room. this definitely did not happen. not too long after i made these goals, we learned that we would have to be moving at some indefinite date. so the idea of decorating a room that we would be packing up soon, lost it's steam. but i do have full intentions of taking this back up once we move into a new house.

4. Learn to sew. my old sewing machine never got fixed, so therefore it stayed bootsy. but, there is a glimmer of hope at the end of this because i got a new sewing machine for christmas!! yes it is still in the box but only because i'm not sure where to set it up for now. again, a problem with living in a house that you won't be living in for much longer. i'm not ready to commit to a space, but once i do, it will be done!

5. Open an Etsy store. so this is a complicated one. i did it, for sure but i am officially closing up shop for now on aquamarine vintage. i thought i had a good combination of vintage goods and hand knit goods. the shop wasn't a complete failure because i did sell everything that i listed, it's just that i didn't list very much. i was unable to set aside enough time to find goods to sell or knit anything to sell. so this is done but i am done with the shop. i do have ideas for a new shop but am not ready to break ground quite yet.

6. Start saving money for a down payment on a house. i'm not going to cross this off because we didn't really make a conscious effort to save anymore than we already had set aside. here we are, six months later and we are REALLY looking at buying a house but don't have much more to show for it. we'll be able to do it, but we just are not going to be able to put more down.

7. And last but definitely not least, plan our wedding. welp, the wedding is not completely planned but is definitely further along. do i still want to throw up when i start planning the wedding for longer than 20 minutes? a little bit. do i still beg charles to let us just elope? sometimes. but we are getting further along. we have a date set, a venue reserved, a photographer hired, and most of our bridal party picked out. so we are getting there.

all in all, i'm pretty happy with what i accomplished. i gave myself the freedom to not feel tied down by my goals. if the goal was no longer important or relevant, i didn't have to beat myself up for not pursuing it or finishing it. i am ready to continue pursuing a couple of these and adding more to the bunch; i'll post about them tomorrow! happy new year everyone!

merry christmas!!!

that is our holiday card that we sent out to our friends and family this year, featuring the infamous crying child on santa's lap. i got so many comments from our friends that they loved the card, it made me so happy!

i hope everyone's christmas was magical and sensational and everything you wanted it to be! we had a great christmas and we all made out like bandits. i've spent most of today running around trying to find places for all of our new stuff. jc got 1008439893 toys but the highlight has got to be this yo gabba gabba mega blocks set that we got him as his "santa present" this year (although when we bought it, it was NOT $99!). i walked in on him giving foofa the BIGGEST hug i've ever seen him give anyone/anything. it melted my heart. he also loved the yo gabba gabba blanket that his great aunt got for him and this awesome fisher-price iphone case that protects my phone so the baby can play with it and reduce the risk of damage to my phone.

but this may have been my best christmas in a very long time, in the presents department that is.




my soon-to-be mother-in-law and father-in-law got me the sewing machine and charles and my sister got me the ipad!! i couldn't believe that i received either of them. i've been coveting the ipad for as long as i can remember but couldn't justify spending the money on myself. i've been trying to learn how to sew for the last year but had a jenky hand-me-down machine that did not work properly. i'm so excited to finally learn!!!

i feel like i have so much to blog about that i'm a little overwhelmed. we had a great time in tahoe and i have tons of pictures to share with you from that trip. we also went on a crazy house hunt when we got back and put in an offer on a house!!!!! of course, it's bank owned so who knows how long it will take to hear back if they accept our offer or not or what kind of red tape we'll have to cut through but at least we a step closer. i'm also thinking about the new year and the changes it will bring. especially the fact that our wedding is only about five months away. eeeeek!

i'm going to spend the rest of the day trying to finally catch up on all of our vacation laundry and fill up our now empty refridgerator. i hope you are all having a nice calm day after the crazyness of christmas!

officially entering the home market

Source: evysinspirations.tumblr.com via Melissa on Pinterest

We are finally taking the plunge people! Charles and I are going to become home owners! Not to the house above unfortunately. Oh my god, that would be all too amazing. But, to a pretty cool house hopefully that we can make all our own.

I'm so excited to start some of the many ideas I have pinned on my Pinterest boards that I have just been putting on the back burner because our stay in this house has always been undetermined. I didn't want to start any big projects without knowing how much longer we were going to be here.

So the market in our area is, I'm sure, very similar to markets across the country right now. It's great because housing prices are low enough that we have a great chance to get into a house. Unfortunately, most of these houses are short sales or foreclosures. I saw on the news the other day that in our county, something like 580 houses are just plain ol' for sale, but like 5,000 houses are short sales/foreclosures. Crazyness!

We've only officially been looking for the past couple weeks but we are so anxious to get into our own place and start a million projects. Charles and I both love our projects. We've only looked at three houses but we are quickly learning that this will not be a walk in the park. So much red tape. So many games. Why does the car/house buying process have to be so difficult? Why can't I just pay the price you are asking and be done with it? So frustrating.

For example, we looked at a house today that is only about fifteen years old but it has not been shown much love over the years. Plus, it's a short sale, so the family who lived there previously was forced out. And you can tell. They did not care that they tore up the wall when they had to move their washer and dryer from the upstairs laundry room.

Charles and I are not afraid of a fixer but we are trying to use an FHA loan and in order to qualify, the house has to pass an eight page inspection. Eight pages. Soooo, there can't be a whole lotta stuff wrong with the house.

So, we'll see how it goes. Wish us luck, hopefully we'll be in new place in less than a few months! Crossing our fingers!