Dresser Fun

When Mike and I moved into our new apartment in June, I was dying to get a new dresser for our bedroom. The one we had only had 6 tiny drawers and one drawer could maybe hold 2-3 pairs of pants. I'm not saying I have a ton of clothes, but that dresser just wasn't cutting it. I was looking on KSL and found an old looking dresser for $40 that I thought would look so fabulous if it had some new paint on it. I went to Lowes, grabbed a quart of primer and a quart of paint and that started a series of dresser re-finishes due to the fact that I enjoyed myself THAT much. :)

Now the lighting in my apartment is horrible so these pictures don't look that fabulous.

New Dresser for our bedroom. I loved the hardware so I just spray painted it brown. It reminds me a pretzels.

Since I already had the blue paint, I decided to paint the dresser (the one I was telling you about from earier) that doesn't fit anything in it. After that, I slapped an add on KSL and a family bought it from us to put in their little boy's room.

 This puppy sits at the end of our hall way. I was planning on selling it, but now, I'm a little more in love with this cream delight than I should be. The pictures don't look that great, but in real life... ahhhh.

Can you tell I'm really loving blue right now? This dresser was a piece of junk. I found it on KSL, and went to Nibley to check it out. I saw that it was not in good condition and that it was cheaply made, but what did I do? I bought it for $40 (way too overpriced) anyway because I felt completely obligated to buy it from this woman who probably didn't care if I did or not. Yeah, I'm weird like that. This one got a lot of love and after a tube of wood filler, some serious sanding and a $3 discounted quart of paint, she looked much better than when I found her. This dresser is off to the Banta's house where Trey and Jack can enjoy it.

This has been so fun for me to do on the weekends and has given me a little bit of a creative outlet. It has been nice to get a few hours to think about whatever I want and listen to whatever I want instead of work and other things that normally give me anxiety :) 

I just spotted a rocker for $10 that I'm hoping to make my next little project. It would be fun to reupholster and paint. Here's hoping it hasn't already sold.   

If anyone is in the need of a dresser/night-stand/table, you name it, re-model, you just let me know!

Peaches

Yesterday, I spent the day with my mom and Brooke canning peaches.

 I love canning with my sisters and my mom. I love getting to talk and having our little system of getting it done. We've been canning since we were little so we know how to get into the canning groove :) I'm sad Annie and Chelsie couldn't be there too.

Canning makes me excited that fall is almost here, but it also means that winter is close... which I'm not so excited about.

The gear 

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Yum! 

Lake Powell

In August it was, once again, the annual Merrell Lake Powell trip. It was fun, relaxing, wonderful, delicious, you name it.

This year Trent and Erin and their kids were able to come with us which was SO fun. I have missed them and it was nice to get to catch up with them.

Here are a lot of pictures!

Can you tell why it's my favorite place in the world?

There was a huge rainstorm while we were there and a flash flood came ripping through right next to our house boat. I have never seen that happen. Pretty cool!

Smores. Yum!

My cute parents

Crazy Mr. Jack

Trent, Erin and Ben- On our way to a hike in West Canyon

West Canyon- We went through a slot canyon where we were pretty much walking/wading in cold water the whole time. At the end we were up to our necks in it (so cold!) and we could climb through the canyon with feet on both sides of the canyon walls. Very fun.

 Love him!

Moved

The new owners closed on our house this week and we're officially back in beautiful Logan as of.. 2 weeks ago. We wanted to move before summer semester started for Mike and I'm so glad we did! We had a lot of help with the move and everything went very smoothly. It was very bitter sweet to move, but now, I'm so happy we did it.

Our Elders Quorum came on Saturday morning at 9:30 and they got everything onto the trailers amazingly fast. We were so thankful! I think we had 6 guys from the elders quorum, Mikes dad and two of Mikes brothers. With all of that help, we were in Logan unloading by noon.

 The aftermath in our new apartment

A week after we moved out, this wonderful lady and my sister Brooke came to the house to help me clean it for the new owners. I loved chatting with them as we cleaned. It was a delight.

She's the best!

Our sad empty house... :(

I was really bummed when I left after cleaning. I knew it was the last time I would ever be in that house. Kind of bitter sweet. We made a lot of good memories there and put a lot of work into that house. We also met some amazing people and I'm going to miss them all.

I'm excited to see what's going to happen in this next chapter. The last one was a pretty good one. :)

Eclipse

A couple of weeks ago, the big eclipse came upon us. Mr. Berry really wanted to see it and found out how to look at it without staring into the sun. He got a mirror and a piece of aluminum foil and cut a square out of the foil and angled the reflection onto our car door. We both though it was going to be stupid, but it actually worked really well.

You can see the moon kind of coming in over his left shoulder. We sat there for a long time just looking at the car. What weirdies :)

                                

 I just love this boy. He is the best and I couldn't ask for anyone better!

It was a fabulous evening laying on the lawn, eating popcorn and staring at our 97' Camry in all of its glory. I'm sure the neighbors thought we were a tad weird since clearly, none of them knew about the eclipse. Good times!

Boxes, Boxes

Those boxes you see are full of some of our belongings because... we sold our house!! We got an offer on it after only 2 weeks on the market and we are so excited! We feel so blessed because everything has worked out so smoothly for us. We know that selling a home so quickly in this economy is rare which makes us feel ever more blessed and grateful.

We found an apartment in Logan a couple of weeks ago that we really liked and the managers told us they would hold onto it for us until we knew for sure that the house was sold. That in itself was a blessing because trying to find an apartment last minute would've been stressful (at least for me).

We have been packing fools at our house :) 26 boxes packed and counting. It's amazing how much stuff we have accumulated!

House Update

Warning, lots of pictures! This post is more for my benefit that anyone else's. I LOVE before and after pictures and it makes me happy when I can see pictures right next to each other to see the difference.

Mike and I have been working on different rooms every weekend, for the past couple of months and we've been able to get a lot done.

A couple of weeks ago, the family came over to help us till up and rake the front yard to get it ready for sod and after lots of rain storms and a delay on the sod delivery, we were finally able to get the sod laid tonight. It looks so great! I'm in love with it.

Before

Before

After

Here are a few more things we worked on.

The main bathroom on our house was very gross looking. I could scrub and scrub the floor, but no matter what it would still look dirty and gross. The caulking on the baseboards was gray with specs of black and it just looked awful.

Mike and my brother in-law Chad spent a couple of hours laying down new flooring and putting new baseboards on. It doesn't look like a brand spanking new bathroom, but now it looks clean and livable. It was a definite improvement from what we had before.

Gross flooring from before

Happy flooring after (that looks and feels CLEAN!!)

We have also painted 2 of our bedrooms. One of the rooms we did was the master bedroom. When we moved into our house, we found that someone had peed on the carpet in the master bedroom and it smelled AWFUL. We tore out the carpet and found that there was more carpet beneath (the industrial kind they have in schools) that was glued to the floor. I was able to borrow a carpet cleaner from my mom and everything came right out. A few weeks ago, we painted and put in new carpet.

Before

After (with new carpet)

2nd bedroom

Before

After

Now we just need to fix up the master bathroom and finish the bedroom and the basement and then this baby is going to get put on the market. Yep, you read that right! We have decided to sell our home. Mike has chosen a different career path which no longer means we need to live in Brigham City for his job. We will hopefully be heading back over the mountain to live in Logan again. Since both of us drive together to Logan every day anyway we figured it only made sense to make the move and to simplify our lives a little bit. We feel like it's the right thing to do. Some of you may thing we are total idiots, but this has been such a great experience for both of us. We've gotten to know the most amazing people in our ward, we've learned a lot of new skills that will come in handy in the future, and we've been able to learn a lot about ourselves and what we want for our future. We initially followed what we knew to be right and now we are following that feeling again :) We just hope that our house will sell fast and that we will be able to make a good profit off of it. We're hopeful and excited for this next little chapter.

Who do I love?

~THIS GUY~

We had a combined etiquette dinner last week with the Young Men and Young Women and it was "Best Dressed". Mike broke out his zoot suit (cane not included in the picture) and went in style. You can't tell, but the jacket almost goes to his knees. Too bad he didn't have his kilt because that could have been out on the table as an option as well. I love this boy A LOT and I love that he could care less what other people think of him much to his wifes' dismay :)

Chubby

For quite some time, I have needed my wisdom teeth out and I had avoided this fact like the plague for the last 3 years until I started to feel a lot of pressure on all of my teeth. I decided in December it was probably time to take the plunge and get this done.

Last weekend Mike dropped me off at the oral surgeons office and left to go to class and my mom was going to show up while I was in getting them pulled. It was amazing because I looked at the clock as they were hooking me up to the IV's to put me out and it was 9:15. When I woke up I looked at the clock and it was 9:45. The man was incredibly fast! They took me into the recovery room and I sat and texted things to my mom since my mouth was chuck full of gauze and I felt pretty coherent. I was worried before the surgery that I would be like this guy... (hilarious)

I did profess my love for Mike to my mom on my way home though. I told her I loved him SO much and I guess I was pretty emotional about it. I also said he was SO nice to me. She said I was a very sweet girl on drugs. :)

The whole weekend I was nice and plump

The pain from the surgery was not so bad for the first couple of days and I was sure I would be back to work on Monday, but on Monday/Tuesday, I started to feel worse and worse and a lot of pressure was building up in the left side of my jaw. It went from my ear all the way to my nose. It was SO painful. On Thursday I had to leave work early because the pain was so bad it was making me nauseous. No matter what I took for the pain, it wouldn't help. I finally got an appointment to see my doctor Friday and found out I had an infection. That experience was.. pleasant as he jammed a tube down in my gum (blinding PAIN!) haha, to suck some stuff out. I couldn't tell at the time because I was trying to keep myself from crying/swearing, but it relieved a lot of pressure.

That night, I was able to eat chicken (glorious!!) and now Mike is eating actual meals, instead of ham sandwiches and frozen pizza, because I can actually get up off the couch to make something. Miracles happen people :)