Our first home on Moseley Drive

I promised pictures of my old house so thought I would share a little history as well.

Years ago (1999) my husband and I were living in an apartment, married for 2 years and ready to buy a house. We looked at a little foreclosure and fell in love with it and the price! It wasn't very pretty to look at then but we saw potential.(My Mother-in-law and I CUT the front yard ourselves while the guys were working on other stuff! We had to hold a push mower down and cut little bits at a time.)

House after grass was cut and we could see the front of the house.

We put hours and hours of work into our first little house. We painted the shutters and front door black, ripped out the bushes and added some landscaping.


The best thing about the house were the hardwood floors which had been refinished the year before we bought the house. There was also a full unfinished basement which my husband and his father finished over time, adding another bathroom and finishing the laundry room.

For years we put many hours of sweat equity into the house. We built a deck, updated the bathroom, added bead board to the living room, did a small kitchen renovation, etc. We have thoroughly enjoyed this little house and I will be a tad bit sad to leave our very first home!
Here it is in 2001

Here is what the house looks like these days...

This is what the kitchen looked like when we bought it...
at the time we just painted the cabinets...
bedrooms, all complete with borders...
bathroom with it's original yellow tile walls, floor and counter top...

Join me over the next week as I take you on a tour of the Moseley Drive house.

~Victoria~

Spring?

In cleaning out to move I found a bag of tulip bulbs that I failed to plant in the fall. I always plant tulips so I was sad that I did not get them planted. Instead Sweet Girl and I stuck them in a Goodwill planter (not really sure it is a planter) and have been watching them poke their heads through the soil. It is so much fun to watch things grow with a 4 year old! We have been planting things in cups and pots inside for the past 3 years and she LOVES to see the seeds (or bulbs) sprout.

Every day she would count how many tulips were poking their heads up and then once one of them was about to bloom she would check it every morning to see if it had opened yet.

We have had one of the coldest, wettest winters I can remember here in Georgia so I was thrilled to see two of my tulips bloom! Although it snowed here again this week, seeing these gives me hope for Spring.

Here they are in one of my favorite rooms of my first home...



~Victoria~
PS After I posted I realized how messy the curtains are at the top! :) Oh well, now you all know I don't lead a perfect life.

What have I been doing?

So glad you asked. :) A week before Christmas my attention was shifted to an exciting new development in my life when our contract was accepted on a house! Yep, that's right, I put curtains in my living room after living in my house without curtains for 10 years and now we are MOVING! :)

So....I have been a little preoccupied to say the least. We closed on the house at the end of Jan and have spent the last month
1) tearing out old carpet
2) patching holes in the walls
3) installing new doors
4) painting every square inch except the basement!
5) painting miles and miles of trim
6) scrubbing existing bathroom floors (not so fun)
7) installing a new island counter top and sink
8) vacuuming wood floors over and over again to remove all dust before carpet went down
9) spray painting light fixtures and fans
9) cleaning and then cleaning some more....

I thought I would share some of our before pictures with you here and then I'll post some "afters" as we go along!

The house overall was in good shape but the flooring did need to be replaced, as well as some fixtures and doors, the island counter top and everything needed to be painted.

(Do all pedestal sinks show the water valves like this??? I've
never had one but it looks funny to me. Also check out the shiny brass
that I am going to have to spray paint.)

• 

Sweet Girl wasn't too excited about moving until I told her we would paint her room PINK! She has been wanting a pink room so this was our chance as her bedroom in the new house is blue. I bought the pink paint (for $15 at Home Depot thanks to the heads up from Ann Nicole at Our Suburban Cottage) and then Sweet Girl and I painted her bedroom. I figured painting her room (no carpet on the floor to mess up) would be a good opportunity to break her into the world of home improvement! :)
This 4 year old did not tire of painting and painted every inch she could reach, including the baseboards!

I'll be back with more pictures, including some of my favorite pictures of the house I am leaving.

~Victoria~

Snow

We both miss you all in blogland and as you can see we haven't been blogging much as of late. Victoria has something exciting going on in her life and and some point in the future she will share some of her new adventure and projects.

Today I will leave you with some pictures that my husband took of the snowfall that we had in Georgia this past weekend. We just don't get blessed with snow very often and certainly not this amount. What some of you have everyday during the winter is a special occurrence here. They close the schools and pull out the 3 snowplows and the news anchors have a great time talking about the "Blizzard of 2010" or something equally funny and all of the stores sell out of bread, milk and rock salt. That is a wonderful part of the snowfall for me. It is fun, funny and just what you do when snow falls in GA.











Our dog, Max, enjoying the snow.



Be back as soon as we can.

Christina

Happy Valentine's Day!

As you can tell, Christina and I have been extremely busy over the past month and a half! Because of this, I thought I would share a couple Valentine highlights from last year.

(Christina's heart from the Target dollar spot in 2009)

Mmmmm look at this heart shaped breakfast she served at her house. Egg in a heart shaped nest of toast and the middle toasted up with butter and cinnamon sugar.

A little "love" sign Sweet Girl and I made

Heart ice cubes made out of raspberry lemonade..,4 year olds LOVE little things like this!

Corner cabinet decorations.

All decorated for Sweet Girl's Valentine's Party

Looking for some homemade Valentine ideas? For little girls and guys there is this darling little Puppy Dog that my 5 year old nephew made last year.

Or this kitty valentine that Sweet Girl and I put together last year...

If you have older kids these Valentine cupcakes that Chloe and Christina made are darling!

Hope that you and your loved ones will find simple ways to celebrate Valentine's Day this year!

~Victoria~

Want a cookie?

Yesterday afternoon I decided to make Sugar Cookie Cutouts with my best gal pal. I hate to admit this, but we were having leftovers for supper and that is why I figured I had the time and energy to make these with her. They are so time consuming and the clean up....flour and dough everywhere, oh and sprinkles because I knocked the full jar of sprinkles onto the floor...
We had the best time! We used a mix that I had gotten on the cheap (or free) due to my obsessive couponing as of late so we took our time with the cutting out part.
The control freak part of me didn't want Sweet Girl to use the turkey or pumpkin cookie cutters because it's not fall. :) I let it go though and we did all sorts of shapes from carrots to frogs, ice cram cones to umbrellas!

After they were cool we iced a couple with a pink lemon glaze. :)

When Daddy called to say he was headed home, Sweet Girl answered the phone "Sweet Cookies Bakery, how may I help you?". Daddy played along and found out quickly that he couldn't afford to shop her bakery as a dozen cookies would cost him "50 dollars".

Hope you find some time this weekend to make some cookies for yourself!

~Victoria~

Before and Afters of 2009

Rhoda over at Southern Hospitality is hosting a Top Projects 2009 linky party today.



Here are a few of the projects that we worked on during 2009.


Victoria had an empty wall in her kitchen that just begged for open shelving which would also give her some much needed storage for her everyday dishes and stemware. Her talented hubby and father-in-law built these for her.



She is loving this place to display her white dishes and other fun finds.

My seventies thrift store find.

Before:




After:



My thrift store lamp.

Before:



After:



Victoria's yard sale cabinet find.

Before:



After:

A compromise between her style and her hubby's love for electronics.



Victoria's scary tree from Goodwill.

Before:



To spectacularly spooky Halloween tree.

After:



Christina's gold plastic chandelier.

Before:




After:



Go over to Rhoda's place and check out all of the links. If you do nothing else, check out her dining room makeover. Knockout gorgeous!

There are some wonderful projects. I even found some that I had missed on blogs that I read regularly.


Christina