Back to School

Pin It I'm all over Pinterest for good ideas for my classroom. I stumbled across a really neat idea for using a Facebook style worksheet to get to know your students. The catch was it wasn't editable, which I need for my kids' language levels and backgrounds... so I created my own and wanted to share it with you. Feel free to edit and use it in your classroom!

Here is a Microsoft Word version of the document and here is a Google Docs version of the document. Update: The converted version sucked... just click File:Download on the MSW version and it should work fine! Hopefully the formatting works on your computer, if not you may need to do some adjusting.

Pinterest Project - Door Hanger

Pin It Back again! Summer has flown by already - hopefully July slows down. One of the Pinterest projects for this summer was making a door hanger for our front door at our new house! Our front door is in our enclosed porch so we don't have worry about the elements on our pretty new hanger - so I got to be a little more free in our decor choices. Here is a link to the original idea (in case you'd rather just buy one!).

Total Project Cost: $25 (I was at my parents so I had to buy everything new)

• Letters: 3 @ $3 each
• Flowers: 2 for $5
• Pearls: $2
• Paint: 3 @ .60 each
• Brushes: $5

Here is my how-to:

First I laid out all of my supplies to decide how I wanted it to look. I thought about making it a typical monogram, but it was going to be hard to put it together, so I settled on this instead.

I painted the all of the letters grey, but not on the edges.

After it dried I used painter's tape and painted the opposite letter to create the striped effect. After this was finished I put the contrasting color on the edges.
I wanted to use a hot glue gun to put it all together, but all my mom couldn't find it so I settled for gorilla glue. Again I used painter's tape to hold all the pieces together while the glue dried.
Once that was dried I put on the embellishments with more gorilla glue.
Add some string to hang it by (again with gorilla glue - working with limited supplies!) and voila! You have it!

My mom already wants me to make her one for Christmas! Maybe I've started something! :) I'd love to find the big letters like the Pinterest inspiration had though for next time - but I do like the contrasting 3D vibe of mine. These are the primary colors I want to work with in our house. What do you think?
Happy crafting!

Creeping Around

Pin It Zach and I have always said we are so glad the house we are buying is vacant because we just can't stop driving by and checking it out a couple times every day. We are totally creepers. To increase my evidence, this past Monday we went to visit some friends of my sister's. They happen to have a really cute retro house that I kind of fell in love with. Before we left I took some pictures of the things I love... they may or may not have wanted me to leave!

Zach & I can't decide what to do with the trim in our house - I thought this was a nice compromise - White on the outside but the window stays natural wood. Looks classy and fresh.

Doing our kitchen is without a doubt one of the most exciting parts of the home-makeover for me! I loved their kitchen. I'm all about the simple cabinets with white (or maybe a grey) color. Just really sweet. I also love their coffee nook. What a great idea! A shortened counter with plug-ins for tea and coffee. Genius!

And pallet furniture. Could you get much better? I also love their design - eclectic but maintaining a retro feel. A perfect place to sit and chat.

Thanks D&C for letting me creep and gush! What do you think about all these ideas?

Happy Father's Day!

Pin It I was blessed with having such a great father and amazing grandfathers. Today is a day with much to be thankful for! I'm also so lucky that my nieces have such wonderful fathers - my brother and brother-in-law are amazing! To celebrate we spent the day at my parent's and went fishing as a family. So fun! Here are a few of my favorite pictures from the day.

My sister and I caught a fish!

My brother and niece

My dad, brother, and his daughter - two great fathers!

My husband and niece - he'll be a great dad someday :)

Happy Father's day to all the dads! We are so lucky to have you in our lives!

Inspiration

Pin It Check out my compilation of fabrics. What do you think? Which ones do I keep and which do I lose? I'm thinking of "theming" these throughout the house to create a coherent feel without being matchy-matchy. Think of the following: front porch, kitchen, window treatments, throw pillows, rugs, and throw blankets.

P.S. The tan background is because that it approximately what color my existing bedding and couches are.

Idyllic

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Small town Iowa is sometimes just too perfect!

Juicy Details

Pin It Okay so here is all the house information I'm CERTAIN you've been dying to know about. The house is a 1920 Foursquare with some Craftsman features that badly needs to be landscaped. Here is the current outside.

I took a bajillion pictures that I hope will be the eventual "before" pictures. I had planned on giving a "home tour" here... but I've had enough house for the day. I'll leave you with one of the many little things about the house that makes me smile - the door handles. ALL the handles are like this, gorgeous and authentic. Until next time...

Yay for pretty things!

Obsession

Pin It Yep - I'm obsessed. The sheer idea of redoing things makes me feel like Pinterest is my best friend (maybe it is?). Anyways I had to share my pins... check it out!

Big News!

Pin It No dad, we aren't having a baby! But we are doing something pretty exciting... buying a house! We've run the numbers about a 1000 times and have finally jumped into making an offer on a home! (We'll give more details further in the post.)

We got a great deal on a loan from the USDA (read: perfect for a couple living on 1 modest teacher income). This is great because we need a project to work on together... something other than choosing our next movie on Netflix. We are also pretty certain living in a house will be about the same cost as apartment living plus we'll hopefully recoup some of that money.

So here are the juicy details I know you've been waiting for. The house is currently listed at $25,100 less than the appraised value because it has been on the market a year and is an estate sale. Sweet, right? Well, we happen to be looking at the top of our budget even with that schnazzy discount, so we offered $16,900 less than the listing price. That is a full $42,000 under appraisal value. Yep, that's right, we low-balled 'em stayed comfortably in budget. We also wrote a "seller love letter" saying how much we loved the house and how we could imagine ourselves and our future children (that's right dad, but focus on future). Then we waited...

We waited a full and agonizing 2 hours. They countered us... at only $1,500 more than we asked. HOLY COW! We obviously accepted and locked in the deal at $40,500 less than the appraised value. That number is huge, especially in this community where real estate is relatively inexpensive already. And the real estate agent told us our love letter to the seller was very effective. Yep - I'm that good.

We still have a slew of inspections and loan things to go through, but right now we are riding high on the fact that we are going to be homeowners on July 6! We've been told that the mixture of excitement and terror is completely normal - we hope so!

Can you see the terror in our eyes? The terrifying dreams of houses falling apart and negative balances in checking accounts? The excitement of learning new skills together and building something lasting?

I'll give details on the house itself in a later post - for now... YAY!

Workouts and Recipes

Pin It This was a busy - but amazing weekend! And it was one of those weekends that was busy - but busy because I decided to make it busy.

Our weekend started off with a 5k. The course was literally right outside our apartment and was for cancer awareness. I've had shin splints all week, so the time wasn't so great, but we had fun running together. This was Zach's first 5k and we was surprised at how many people were there! About 400 people ran.

Then we went to the apple orchard in Fort Dodge. It was super cute and we had a lot of fun. We bought a bushel of apples... which turned out to be a lot more than we expected!

This was after I had already taken out about 12... it's a huge box!

One of my favorite foods is applesauce so I decided to make homemade apple sauce. It was a pain to find a recipe so I thought I'd post how I did it on here.

First I peeled a bunch of apples (probably the most time consuming part!)

I sliced them with my corer and threw away the cores.

Just a pic of all the sliced apples

Then I put them in my stock pot with a half cup of water and let them cook down. Once they got tender I mashed them with my potato masher.

Finally I canned them!

I decided to follow the apple theme for desert today too! I made apple pumpkin cobbler. It was awesome... but this picture doesn't look that tasty - promise it was!

Then for lunch today I decided to make a chicken. Zach and I had heard that this was a good way to save money and tasty too!

 We ate some for lunch, froze the extra meat, and then I let the broth stew all day to can some chicken stock.Ta-dah!

 

Super productive weekend! YAY! And there is enough pictures to last you for a thousand years. Woo!

First Grown-up Weekend!

Pin It I started school on Thursday! It was all new teacher information... I'm so on info overload, it was actually exhausting! I still don't have my books yet to start lesson planning, so this was my last (really actually honestly) free weekend for the rest of the semester. We decided to have some fun!

On Saturday we drove to Sioux City, which has a nice mall and some civilization (yay!). It's about an hour drive and it was nice to spend some time with my hubby. We drove there to see the movie "The Help". I read the book last summer and loved it - so obviously I couldn't wait for the movie to come to our three theater movie palace in town!

The movie was good...

but the book is wayyyy better!


Zach has also been on a juice fast (he saw the documentary Fat, Sick, and Nearly Dead). So we went to Wal-mart and bought a juicer then ran to Fareway and bought a TON of fruits and veggies! He was hungry for pizza the other night so I made him this juice: tomato, spinach, and celery! Yum?

I'm sure the wine glass made it fancier! Well, his plan was to do the fast for 10 days, but he just made me mac and cheese for dinner and dug in himself... I think he's done - just in time for the Iowa State Fair cuisine. I'm not sure only juice is really that healthy anyway!

Back to school tomorrow!

Fancy and Shiny

Pin It Today was our first day here that we really did nothing on the apartment! Four of Zach's high school friends came to visit and I spent most of the day cooking. It really was a lot of fun and I know the guys had fun at the local waterpark - apparently they have slides and diving boards (emphasis added by the 22 year old men) ha! :) So today I'll post a picture of a project that was recently completed.

Two projects in one picture - more for your reading!

I  messed up by not taking a before picture. The only picture I have of the apartment was when I first saw it and took pictures on my phone to send to Zach - needless to say, they're poor quality! Anyway, if you look hard you can get an idea of what it looked like before (with the previous tenants' stuff).

As I mentioned before, we painted - so that definitely helps change it up. I really wanted to jazz up the accent wall, but didn't want to spend a ton of money on it (think wall decals, wallpaper, etc). I made a wall stamp from a wood block and foam, but that failed. So as a last ditch effort I tried to make a stencil. I went on Google images (strict filters on! lol) and searched for stencil patterns. I printed off one I liked, taped it onto a left over piece of contact paper, and cut it out with an exacto knife. Peeled it off, stuck it to the wall and painted. We really like it!

As you may have noticed, that light fixture is really painfully outdated! A light wood, white metal, gold chain, and frosted white shades just aren't our style. I picked up a can of spray paint (Zach painted!), ditched the shades and bought new light bulbs. I think Zach did a great job on it, but you can judge for yourself! (We still don't have pictures hung up, so forgive that... maybe by tomorrow!)

Pretty proud of our very low cost projects!

Stencil Cost:
Left over paint: basically free
Left over contact paper: basically free

Light Fixture Cost:
Spray Paint: $3.42
Light Bulbs: $2.12 for a pack of 6

Definitely fits a teacher's budget! :)

Paint Stained

Pin It I started a blog to update everyone on life! We're further away, we're starting new chapters (job & school), I'm bad at updating people, and I'd like to remember this time in our lives, so I thought this might be easiest. I also feel like I'm annoying on Facebook, so at least this way I can post what I want and you only have to read it if you want to!

For those of you who don't know, we just moved across the state! We are in a nice apartment that doesn't care if we paint or update, which makes us feel like we actually have a home. We also have a garage with this new place, so Zach is happy that he has a place to store things. And we have a dishwasher which makes us both happy!

We moved in on August 1 and spent Tuesday-Friday painting... we're finally done! It was definitely a lot more work than we thought it would be, but we are really happy with the results... and tired and paint stained.

(The bedroom color is actually a bit darker)

My parents came up to visit this weekend and to deliver two couches to us (much cheaper than a moving truck). They were an awesome deal and they look really nice (the couches, not my parents, although they look nice too)! Much better than sitting on the floor all week or any other couches we could've afforded on our budget - think sketchy-basement-Craigslist-style budget. Plus they match and we don't have to use slip covers... pretty new territory for us :)

 We  just need to hang up pictures and finish putting away our (read: my) clothes and we'll be ready! My grandparents are coming up on Tuesday, so our goal is to be all done by then! Planning to post some of our projects we've been working on soon!