It's been a long time since I've been so caught up in a book that I just couldn't put it down. I grew up loving to read... My mom tells me I learned to read when I was 4 and never stopped. If you had walked into my family's house on a cold winters evening you would've most likely seen me sitting in our old rocking chair under a blanket with a book in my lap. Or if you had happened into our backyard on a lazy summer day I was probably floating in the pool trying to turn the pages of my book without getting it wet!

My love for reading was rivaled only by soccer when I was in high school. My closet was overflowing with books. But when I began college I quickly became overloaded with homework and projects. Any time I would try to pick up a book for pleasure my conscience haunted me, telling me I should spend my time studying if my nose was going to be in a book. That started 5 years ago...(I can't believe it's been that long!) and ever since its been hard for me to pick up a book and read just to enjoy reading. No book seemed to keep my attention and I always found something more productive that I could be doing. That is until I bought Redeeming Love.

I finished it today on the drive up to the mountains, where Mark and I are staying the weekend. I cried as the main character finally understood the relentless love of our God. I cried as I thought of all of the times God had pursued me with the same everlasting love. The same grace and forgiveness offered over and over no matter how many times I rejected it.

Through out the book the other main character...who represented the prophet Hosea... Demonstrated and offered the love and forgiveness to others that God grants us. And it convicted me of how little I freely give that to those around me. I have a tendency to determine who is worthy of redemption and who should continue to wear their scarlet letter. How humbled and grateful I am to be loved by a God who is good even when there is no good in me. Who desires to be in relationship with me despite all of my failures. And who sacrificed His own Son so I could come in to His presence clean and my sins forgotten.

This book has very mature elements in it and would not be appropriate for a young audience, but for mature adults I highly recommend it!

Happy October!!! It is officially FALL and I'm officially getting sucked into all things that feel, look and taste like fall! I have plans to make fall wreaths this Wednesday with my sister, Mark and I are taking a long weekend up in the mountains with his family to go apple picking starting this Friday, and this past weekend I added some twine to a couple of plain vases I had sitting around the house...

Okay... I guess twine doesn't necessarily mean fall. It's always cute no matter what season you use it in, but since it is fall outside, my twin vases are falling under the fall craft category today.

I wrote a short post here that talked about cheap and easy wall decor using scrapbook paper and cheap frames. The idea of course was inspired by Pinterest.... You can find it here at this post. I did mine a little differently then shown there, but the same general idea. I thought I'd put up a picture to show you how I hung my wall art.

Time to switch gears for a couple of seconds... I'm going to go from home decorating to recipe sharing. And this probably won't happen often because I am by no means an expert cook. (not that I'm an expert home decorator either but....I digress...)

Mark and I got this lovely crock pot from my Aunt and Uncle for a wedding present. This was a little bit of a struggle when I wanted to register for one because Mark is not a big fan of crock pot meals...but my mom cooked some delicious meals in the crock pot for us growing up so I insisted we add it to our registry! He agreed after I promised to learn to cook delicious meals in it.

My first attempt = disaster. Chicken and rice casserole that turned out to look like baby food and Mark was not impressed. He was gracious enough not to rub the fact that he doesn't like crock pot meals in my face though.

Only a couple of weeks after that, we were over at Mark's parent's house and his mom made a crock pot macaroni that we loved! I decided to give it a try myself because Mark LOVES macaroni and cheese so I figured it HAD to better than my chicken and rice dish that failed.

I gathered all of the ingredients:

Step 1: Grease bottom and sides of crock pot with butter

5 dollar frames + .99 a piece for scrap book paper = cheap wall decor for my dining room!

When we first bought our house I immediately knew I wanted to paint our kitchen cabinets white. I am pretty HUGELY fond of white cabinets in kitchens. And definitely NOT a fan of dark wood cabinets. This is what we had when we first moved in...

Dark. Out dated. Dirty. Gloomy.

But the question was... how would we go about transforming these dark gloomy cabinets into the bright cheery white cabinets I've always wanted? We basically had two options - sand them all down, choose our own white paint and make sure we Kilz the dickens out of these things before painting OR use the highly acclaimed Rustoleum method. The whole thing with Rustoleum is that everything you need is sold in one kit and you use a "de-glosser" solution to strip the old stain off of the wood instead of having to sand down the wood. It is supposed to be less work and less mess. I did a little research and it seemed like it would be the best choice. Lucky for us a lady from our church had just used the Rustoleum to do her and her mother's kitchen cabinets and loved the way they turned out, so that helped persuade us to use the kit. The only thing I was worried about was that they didn't exactly have a WHITE white color if we followed all of the steps. You see there is this second to last step called the "decorative glaze" that gives the cabinets a wood grain look. Its not that I don't like that look, its just that I wanted a white washed look and if I applied the glaze, then by the examples on the companies website, my white would turn into a cream sort of color. Not what I wanted. But I was assured that we could just skip that step and keep the white washed look so we decided that would be our plan.

So Step 1: We made a diagram sketch of our cabinets and numbered the doors, laying them out on our little paint station in order so we would be able to put them back in the right spot. We ended up buying new hinges for all of the cabinets so we just tossed the old ones. We kept all of the door handles.
Step 2: We got our de-glosser solution and used the scrubbing pads that the kit provided to scrub down all of the doors and the cabinet frames. This was actually a lot more work than I anticipated. It's supposed to be easier than sanding, but I found it just as labor intensive. The ONLY thing that made this better than sanding was that there was less mess. We did have to dry/wipe down everything, but it wasn't as bad as trying to vacuum up dust.
Step 3: Apply the "Bond Coat". This is the color part. We chose to go with Pure White. I mean, you can't get any more white than Pure White right? They say this part is only supposed to take 2 coats. We definitely had to put at least 3 coats, even 4 coats on some of the doors, but luckily we had plenty of paint in the can from the kit.

These are our cabinet frames after the first coat. I was starting to get excited!!! The kit doesn't come with enough paint to pain the INSIDE of the cabinets but we ended up using some white paint that we had had for our trim to put a couple of coats on the inside for a cleaner look when you open the cabinets.

After we felt that our cabinets were white enough, no streaking or dark wood peaking through in places, we came to Step 4. This was the decorative glaze part that we decided to skip. So on to...

Our cabinets drying in the garage after the protective top coat had been applied. We used saw horses and 2x4's, plus a few cardboard boxes to create our paint station.

After the top coat dried it was time to hang up our newly restored kitchen cabinets!!!

Bright. Updated. Clean. Cheery.

I pinned this idea on Pinterest  a few weeks ago because for as long as I've lived, in my parents house and now in my own house, we've had plastic bags stuffed full of more plastics bags, tied up and then stuffed in to more plastic bags! And then eventually we collect so many we just throw the bags away and start all over them. So when I saw this on pinterest I thought I would give it a try.

My new work schedule started today which means I now have every Tuesday until 3pm to do whatever I want/need to! So today I decided to work on our flower beds a little more... Because it was free :)

We already cleaned out the bed from all the weeds and our one lariape plant that was already there finally had room to breath and it got huge in only a couple if weeks. So today I took out a few more shrubs that we didn't want and split up the plant into 4 quarters to fill out the flower bed. Hard work but I loved being home almost all day to get it done. :) ready to buy some fall flowers to plant this weekend!

P.s. see our cute gnome? Yea that's my husband's. He says he loves gnomes but I'm pretty sure it's just because he knows I sort of kind of don't. Buuuut he is kind of cute there :)

Okay, so I know in my last post I told you how I was all gung ho about finishing the guest bedroom with my new DIY wall decor pieces and all, but you see... the funny thing about projects like that is that they cost money. Money for a bed spread, a bedside table, a bookshelf, etc. etc. So seeing as we didn't have any extra money this weekend to put into our guest bedroom, we decided to do some house projects that only cost time and a little LOT of effort. : )

Enter first picture of the front of our house:

We've been doing house projects on and off pretty much since our wedding... well pretty much since we bought the house last November. Our latest major projects have been our kitchen (we painted our cabinets and walls, I'll post pictures of that soon!) and our back bedrooms.

We have three bedrooms... The Master, The Guest Bedroom and The Music Room. We tried painting our music room and it turned out awful... I'm almost too embarrassed to show it! Maybe when we finally get around to re-painting it I'll have the courage to post it. Our Master bedroom hasn't even been touched. Weird right? Seeing as that is where WE are sleeping it would seem to make sense to finish that room first, but I guess we've been putting it off because in the midst of our crazy unfinished projects its nice to have a room that isn't in the middle of a makeover, ya know? Anyways, my latest area of focus has been on our Guest Bedroom. We painted it the same day we did our kitchen, with the help of my family, and ever since I've been dying to complete it! We were able to get a cute twin bed from Mark's parents that Mark used when he was little so we painted it white and it looks adorable with the white chair rail! But the room still isn't finished...

I'm thinking the things needed to make this room complete is a small bedside table, maybe a dresser/bookshelf?, and of course some wall decor.

I was at the beach this past Saturday with Mark's family where we went to dinner at a small seafood restaurant with a charming gift shop. I saw these in the store and immediately knew how I wanted to decorate that back bedroom.

The only problem was that these pretty babies were about $20 -30 bucks a piece... tempting but not gonna do it.

So instead I decided to try and make something similar myself. Only I would make the back white to pop against the blue/teal walls and the lettering the same color as the walls.

First I just want to start this post by saying in no way did I want my last post to sound like I am not enjoying being married! I love everything about it! Its just that there are challenges along the way, ones that I didn't have before I was married, that I am having to figure out and grow from.

Take yesterday for example...

It was Sunday, "Family Day"... Or at least thats how it was in my parents household. So naturally yesterday I wanted to have lunch with my parents and siblings and spend the day over at their house. My sister and her husband were planning on having lunch over there so to me it sounded like the perfect family afternoon. Not so much to Mark. According to my hard working husband, we had too many things to get done around the house (since we spent all day Saturday at the beach) before he went back to work on Monday. (I have today off!) In that moment that he rejected my plans to go to my parents (the second time I proposed my plan, because sometimes its worth a shot to ask again) I sat there contemplating how I was going to respond. I was disappointed and slightly upset, I didn't see the harm in spending a day doing nothing but enjoying the company of my family. But God also reminded me in that moment that when I said those vows, even long before that really, I had promised to obey Mark and submit to him...even in the little things. So I conceded... I didn't say anything else about going to my parents. I will admit for the first hour or two I had a small attitude and only talked to him when I was spoken to (am I sounding like a spoiled child yet?) but as the day went on God continued to chip away at my stubborness and by the end of the day I was grateful that my husband had insisted on staying home to finish tasks that we had been unable to do the day before.

I was able to clean out my refrigerator, cut coupons, go grocery shopping (saving $45 from those coupons!), finish the laundry, help Mark put up the new blinds we had purchased with the last of our wedding money and even go to the craft store so I could create some wall decor for our back bedroom that we're currently painting/decorating/ trying to completely finish to make it suitable for a guest room! **Pictures to come on the next post!** Mark was able to sort through items from his parents house that had been sitting in our front room and find appropriate storage for them and he was also able to burn boxes that had been taking over our garage for weeks. On top of what we accomplished we were able to save a lot of gas by not making the 30 min trip to my parents and back.

It was a good reminder to me to be obedient to my husband in all the little things. Hopefully next time I'll be able to start off the day with the right attitude and not take all day to realize my husband was right. Because now that I accomplished all of those tasks yesterday I am free to enjoy a relaxing day at the beach with my mom and sisters on my day off! Had I not listened to my husband yesterday I would be missing out on this opportunity!

Virginia Beach, here I come!

I almost want to delete this blog and start over...

I love for things to be perfect, and lets face it, my first attempt at blogging didn't turn out so well. Months before my wedding I would take pictures of things thinking "I'm going to put this on my blog!" but never made the time to sit down and actually put it up. The pictures accumulated until I didn't know what I should put up first and in the midst of planning last minute wedding details, well, sitting down to write on a blog just wasn't on the top of my priority list.

Over 5 months have past since I last posted on this blog! In that time I married the man of my dreams...my very best friend. He's laying beside me now as I right this. As we've settled into our routines I'm learning even more of what its going to take to become that ideal wife in Proverbs, and I confess, I fall awfully short of the mark. Before I actually got married I had visions in my head of what our daily routine would look like. It included a perfectly clean house, dinner that would make the Iron Chef look bad, grocery shopping with coupons that would save me hundreds of dollars, and weekends filled making all of my pinterest dreams come true! Unfortunately thats been far from the truth! With each day I'm learning just how much work it's going to take to live up to that standard... not the perfect one I made for myself, but the one thats laid out in the bible. And while I thought my days of blogging were officially over long ago, I've been finding myself thinking more and more about how I want to write down these lessons I've been learning.

So, here I am... trying out this blogging thing again. My initial idea of what my blog would be when I started didn't turn out exactly the way I wanted it too, but neither did my first few months of being a house wife! So instead of deleting and starting over, I'm going to grow from here... just as I'm hoping to grow as a wife. I'll let my previous posts serve as a reminder in the days to come that it takes takes time, practice and lots of mistakes before you start getting things right.