Dinning room lighting

It has been a while, a very long while. We haven't done much to the house recently but we are about to embark on a few things so hopefully I will have more updates than just the 2 I am going to post about today. I promise to try harder!

Our dinning room is on the back of our house with a sliding glass door. It faces west. It gets real hot while the sun is setting aka dinner time most nights. I have wanted to put a ceiling fan in there for a while so we finally did it!

This is what the fixture looked like before. I like this fixture so we moved it to the entry way.

And this is the after. Mike had to get a little creative putting it up as the fan bracket didn't line up the way it should. But he is handy and figured it out =]
It matches the one in the living room but only has 3 lights instead of 4. It is keeping the dinning room nice and cool now!

It's been a while

I know it has been forever but we haven't done a home project in a while either. I finally found some fabric napkins to make curtains out of, my mom taught me this secret. I love the way they turned out, a little vintage and match the colors of the kitchen perfect!

Before:
After:

Project:: Organizing

I love my kitchen. We have a loverly pantry right next to the fridge but it is hard to store too much there because the cupboards are deep and once you fill it up you can't see what you have in the back. Solution: Slidey basket thingies. We found them at Home Depot for only $20 each. Super easy to install....seriously I put them in while Mike fixed the toilet. I plan on putting them on all the shelves in this cupboard.

Here is the cupboard before:

Here is the after. The baskets hold a lot more than I expected. They also give the cupboard some nice division which makes them so much easier to organize.

Close up:

I have stored my jewelery in a dresser drawer for a while now. I never wear any of it because I never remember I have something to match until I am already out the door or I can't get it untangled from the mess in the drawer. Solution: cork tiles in my closet. I have a very nice walk in closet all to myself so I took advantage of the wall behind the door of my closet and put up cork tiles. They were less than $6 at Target and I bought a $1 pack of push pins. So for less than $10 I have easy access to all my jewelery and I freed up a dresser drawer.

I attached some ribbon to the center tile with hot glue to hang earrings. I felt pretty genius.

Houston we have grass!

Tuesday morning Mike told me he saw grass. It had only been a little over a week since we seeded. I couldn't wait to get home and check it out. He was correct. We have a lot of patches all over. Never thought I would be so excited to see grass grow but that is part of home ownership, you get excited about things you never thought you would.

Project: Backyard

When Mike and I bought our house the only problem we had with the house was the backyard or lack there of. The backyard was more dirt and weeds than flowers and grass. We had not planned on landscaping the backyard for a while but once winter came with rain weeds 3 feet tall spouted in the yard. We spent a Saturday morning hacking the weeds down and spraying weed killer. We realized the weeds would eventually grow back if we didn't landscape or do something! So we decided to get the yard together and we could not be happier with the results so far.

This was the view from our patio door after we hacked down the weeds. Lovely.

There were 3 big concrete stumps in the ground that supported the deck that was in the back yard before the previous owners took it out and then did nothing, thanks!

We hired a landscaper to come remove the concrete things, till and level the yard. The yard was very lumpy and had potholes all over.
No more concrete stumps!

This is the yard after the landscapers were done, nice and flat.

Oh and our new tree. It is a fern pine. We wanted an evergreen tree because we have enough leaves in the front yard cover a small island, no joke.

My dad was awesome enough to come help us move sprinklers and put new heads on the current sprinklers....my dad rocks!
Dad also hooked us up with a concrete guy for the patio. He did the patio in just 2 days and did a great job.
Now that we had concrete we needed a table for BBQs since we bought a BBQ a couple weeks before.

Last step was the easiest: seeding the lawn. We thought about sod but the money we could save quickly changed my mind.

The fun stuff!

We have finally gotten to the stage of buying fun things for the house. We sold our "apartment" dinning table to a co-worker of mine about a month ago. The empty dinning room was a sad sight. I have had my eye on a table from JC Penny(of course) since before Christmas. I decided it was time since we were eating all meals at our coffee table, no good.

I ended up getting half price delivery and they even put it together, I am sure Mike was happy about that. It includes a leaf but we don't need it all the time. I found a table nearly just like this in the Pottery Barn catalog but could not bring myself to pay the PB price, insane! The table looks better in my house than expected.

We spent a Saturday afternoon not long ago looking for bar stools. In conclusion the tall ones are pricey and of course we needed tall ones. We could not find any we liked that a store also had 2 of...we could only find them in pairs??!?! I came home and poked around on the internet and found these at Target for 32 bucks! Killer deal. They fit in nicely with the rest of the dinning/living room area.

This is my favorite thing in my whole house: the picture wall. I always loved the picture wall in my grandma's house and knew I would have to have one. We have been collecting different blacks frames for a while. I picked some of my favorite pictures and had them printed in black and white. It is looking great. I want to add a few more but for now it looks awesome!

Here are some of my favorites. Some are blurry but you get the idea.

This one is my favorite, baby Mike and his beautiful momI took this one during our trip to GA with Mike's Family. It is Mike, his brother Joey and Mike's dad Bob walking down the little fishing pier at like 6 am

My grandpa and I
My mama and me. In this picture she is wearing her original wedding ring which had the diamond that is currently in my wedding ring.Brand new baby Mike and his dad.

Noah and grandpa (my dad). Grandpa was showing him how his new Kawasaki quad works. Of course it was a gift for Noah's first birthday from Grandpa.

1 year anniversary

A year ago today I became Mrs. Bailey. By far the happiest day of my life to date. My first year as a wife flew by but was really exciting. We got married in March, bought a house is October, and welcomed a new member to our family, Sadie the cat.

Here are a couple of my favorite pictures from our big day!

This is us cutting our cake. Everyone loved the cake and with good reason. It was awesome. Our baker, Stephanie from Gimme Some Sugar, made us a 6 inch cake for our anniversary instead of having to eat some gross year old frozen cake. Mike wanted cinnamon and it was a good choice. Very tasty!