Our New Home

Well we are officially moved in and settled at our new apartment and we love it here! I cleaned house for your tour this time, so it will look much nicer than the last time you saw where we lived. It's not a dream home, but that's the great part about being young newlyweds...low standards! :)

A few notes about our new place. 1) Since we're planning to be here short-term, the manager told us the best way to get our deposit back is to not hang anything on the walls. Apparently, he's really anal about holes in the wall, so we are allowed to hang one clock and one key holder, and nothing else. Therefore, the walls are bare and we don't have a lot of decorations. 2) We were able to use the church office building for storage, so we put a LOT of our stuff in storage to free up space around here. Therefore, we mostly have the basics out and not a lot else.

So...those are my disclaimers. My home will  never be featured in a magazine and I'm totally ok with that. We are really happy in this new apt and actually feel like we'd be happy staying here for a while. So here are the pictures:

Looking up at the apts from our parking lot, ours is up the stairs and to the left.

Welcome to our home!

Looking in from the front door to the kitchen with the living room on the right.

Not too surprisingly, the living room is the first room you come to when you walk into the apt.

Yes, that is a fake fireplace under the TV.  I have never lived anywhere that had one, but I'm kind of hoping we're still here when the weather gets cold enough to try it out.

Next to the living room is the kitchen, which is my very favorite room. It's so big! It's actually bigger than the kitchens in a lot of houses I've seen, so I'm quite excited our little apartment has such a large kitchen. 

Of course, since I haven't had a dishwasher for the past 2 years, I'm quite excited to have one now!

The dining room is really just a small part of the kitchen, but it works great for our little dining room table. 

We're also excited to have a balcony here, which is accessible through the door you see in the picture above. My picture-taking skills are definitely lacking, as you can tell in this next picture, but at least you get the idea. The door on the balcony is to a tiny storage closet, where we keep our bicycles.

The weekend of the 4th, we bought a grill for Kory and some flowers for me. 

My flourishing strawberry plant...which you will see in just a little bit is no more.

From back inside the kitchen,  you head down the hall to find the rest of the apt and one fat cat laying in the floor. That's Kabie...who is quite large these days.

The first door on the right is our little pantry. It's a tiny one, but since we didn't have one at all in our last apt, we're happy to have it!

Across the hall from the pantry is the water heater closet. Nothing exciting, but this is what you get on the Premium Tour :)

The full bath is the next door on your right down the hallway between the pantry and the washer/dryer.  The cats' litter box lives here in this bathroom also.  I REALLY hate litter boxes, but this one actually hides the smell pretty well as long as it's cleaned frequently.

I am not sure if it helps, but hopefully the pictures from all different angles help you get a better idea of what the room really looks like. 



Next to the full bathroom is the washer and dryer. I know I sound like a broken record...but since we had to use a community laundry room before, we're REALLY excited about this!

At the end of the hall is the guest room. Kory will primarily be using the room for this:

His PlayStation2 is in this room...and yes, it's totally necessary for it to have a separate TV from the Xbox 360, which is in the living room. 

This will be where our guests get to stay when they come visit us, but the rest of the time this bed will serve as a bouch. What, you've never heard that word? It's because we made it up. We've decided to try to make this into a bed/couch by putting a ton of pillows on it and using it as a place to play video games/read/chill. Here's what we've got so far:

It's still a work in progress, but here's the rest of the room.

Finally, here's the Master Bedroom.

My nightstand is clearly much shorter thank Kory's as it makes my normal-sized lamp look miniature!

And some other angles so you can see what the rest of the room looks like.

The doors you see are the bathroom (left) and closet (right).

Our bedroom has a walk-in closet that I adore. Most of our winter clothing is in storage, so we actually have some open space in here, which is nice. 

We have a 1/2 bath connected to our bedroom, and it's been really convenient so I can get ready in the mornings in the other bathroom without waking Kory up...since he gets to sleep in later than me. Lame.

And a couple pictures of our cats, just for fun:

Kabie was rolling around on the ground on the balcony.

Mr. Sir has taken to laying in my strawberry plant anytime he's out on the balcony. If he wasn't so stinking cute, he would get in trouble..but I'm a sucker for his purring and he gets away with most anything he wants.

So there ya have it, our new home :) We'd love for you to come visit and see it all in person very soon!

Ch-Ch-Ch-Changes

Change is a great word to describe my life right now. Marriage itself brings a lot of big changes: living together, sharing money, different last name, etc. However, we have quite a few more changes happening in the next couple weeks.

Kory just accepted a new job with a different church. The great part is that the job is in Roseburg, Oregon...which is the city I already work in! That is wonderful news because I can keep my current job AND I don't have to commute anymore. It wasn't terrible-about 25 minutes-but I will be very happy to be able to run home for lunch or to live in a town with a movie theater and Sonic! We are moving to the big city, y'all. From a town of 3,000 to one with 22,000. That is a big deal, mainly because it puts us half an hour closer to Chili's :)

Kory will be the high school youth minister at Redeemer's Fellowship and we are both SO excited about it! I will have to post about the incredible way God brought this opportunity into our lives soon. It is awesome to see how He's been working. The plan is to start that job after the wedding and honeymoon.

So we got Kory's stuff all moved into my apartment yesterday and he is staying with a friend for the month of May to save a month of paying rent. This means we get to move again right when we get back from the honeymoon. We have got a lot of my apt packed up now also so we need to start looking at housing options in Roseburg pretty soon.

Redeemer's is a church of 1,000 people and we currently worship in a church of 130 people...so that will be an adjustment. All of these changes are positive, though, and we're very excited about all of it! It's just sometimes a lot to take all at once.

However, I'm so thankful I don't have to quit my job and look for another one. That makes a huge difference in lowering my stress level. In fact, I really don't feel too stressed out by all of this...I just feel excited and ready for it to all start happening!

The next few weeks are pretty crazy for us. Last Monday night (May 2), we met with the youth ministry volunteers and let them know about this new job and made plans for Kory's transition. Then, Kory was preaching Sunday morning (May 8) and announced it to the church body, so it's officially "out" and we can tell everyone we're moving now. This Wednesday (May 11), we'll talk to the youth group kids about it, so I'm sure that will be kind of hard. We have two more Sundays to attend church at Tri City and then we'll be gone for the wedding. When we return from the honeymoon (June 5), Kory will have one week off and then start his job at Redeemer's and we'll make the move to Roseburg.

We got Kory completely moved out of his apartment because I wanted to come home from the honeymoon to a clean apartment where we were all moved in and settled...silly me. I should have known it wouldn't be that easy! However, God is dumping blessing after blessing on us, so we will not complain. We will just be excited about the changes that are coming our way! :)

Cats and Home

Mr. Sir has been extra playful lately. It's so much fun to come home and have him waiting right in front of the door for me! Kory was at my apt the other day when I got off work and he said that when I got out of my car and locked the doors, (when I use the clicker, it honks the horn as the doors lock) Mr. Sir heard the horn and jumped up and went to the front door to sit. Precious! :)

Sir has also apparently decided he is a dog now. He wants to play fetch ALL the time, he loves having his belly scratched and will roll over so you can scratch it and just the other day I promise he was wagging his tail as he waited for me to throw his fetch toy.

He and Kabie still wrestle and fight all the time, but thankfully it's playful now and isn't mean/aggressive like it used to be. There used to be hissing and clawing, but now it just looks like a brother and sister wrestling/pouncing and having a good time. Unfortunately, this means a LOT of cat hair left on my carpet. It does force me to vacuum more often though, so I guess that's a positive thing.

We're in the process of moving Kory's stuff into my apt right now...and have been for the past couple months. It's been great that we've been able to do it a little at a time, since he's only a few apt's away from me. The problem is that we each filled up our 2 bedroom apartments, and now we're trying to combine into just one. We've each been getting rid of a TON of stuff...but it's not enough yet. Of course, it doesn't help that every day we're getting more wedding presents, which is GREAT, but that is just more stuff to try to fit in our limited space. Kory's apartment is our storage shed right now. His living room is full of all the stuff we're getting rid of and most of it will be donated to our youth group rummage sale next month.

I think we should be able to raise a good amount of money for the youth group because we had two of almost everything and now we've got a nicer, newer version of most things so we are getting rid of 2 dining room tables, 2 coffee tables, 1 entertainment center, 1 desk, 3 side-tables, 4 dining room chairs, 1 microwave, 2 toasters and a billion clothes and other small items. We've considered having our own garage sale, but ultimately we decided the money isn't worth the work. Plus, if the youth group doesn't have money for events, we'd end up donating anyhow, so it all works out the same.

The plan is to be completely moved into my apt (and out of Kory's) by the time we leave for the wedding, so we'll come back home to one, clean apartment. Oh, I can't wait to only pay rent for one place! That will be so great!!

50 More Things!

So the next 50 things went a little slower than the first 50. I continued to go through my apartment regularly to find stuff to get rid of and I would find a few things at a time that I wanted to send away for good.

This is a bath towel on a folding table--blogger refuses to let me turn this photo so it isn't sideways.

I am now up to 104 items! It may seem silly to you to take pictures and count everything instead of just getting rid of it all, but it's kind of become a game for me and I enjoy it much more this way.

My plan is to do this one more time before the end of the year and I hope to get up to 150 total items by 2011!

Get Rid of 50 Things

I took Trey Morgan's "Get Rid of 50 Things" challenge and I am getting rid of 50 things this week! To be honest, this wasn't really too difficult. I did a quick sweep of my apartment and grabbed things I haven't used in the past year and I had probably 35 items right there. Next, I grabbed clothes that were too small, had holes or I just didn't really like. I found lots of little things that I didn't even remember I had, so there were easy to add to the pile. To be honest, I don't feel like this was really much of a sacrifice. I am not sad to get rid of any of these "things" because I didn't use them anyway. Some of these were gifts and I appreciated them at the time, but I don't want to hold onto "stuff" just because someone else gave it to me.

Here are the piles that quickly added up to 50:

Since this was so easy for me, I am planning to do another purge and get rid of 50 more things before Christmas. I'll be combining households with Kory in a few months and this seems like a perfect time to simplify and get rid of some of the stuff that so easily fills up our homes. I don't see a huge difference in my apt, but it feels good to get rid of this stuff. It's even a little addicting so I want to go ahead and start on my next 50 now!

Weekend

It's not even summer and Kory is gone all the time leaving me here alone :( Hopefully we can hang out next weekend!

My apartment is getting out of control dirty/gross. I HAVE to clean it this weekend! I'm obviously not being productive on the computer tonight so hopefully tomorrow I can get a lot done.

Death by Smoke

I really love the smell of our bathroom at work. Yes, I realize that is an odd statement but whatever the air freshener thing is in there, it smells so great. Sometimes, I go wash my hands just so I can enjoy the smell. My apartment, on the other hand, ALWAYS smells like smoke. I hate it so much! It is overwhelming right when you walk in the front door. Supposedly, no one smokes in the apartments but I don’t believe it. Either way, people are always smoking right outside my front door and the smell gets inside. I currently have 4 candles, 1 Glade plug-in and 3 diffusers in my apartment to try and help with the smell. My lungs are probably turning black every day as I inhale so much second-hand smoke. Ugh.

Fans of The Office will understand this next statement. The party planning committee has formed a clique and I need to be one of them! They are pretty exclusive. Obviously, I need to get some dirt on one of them so I can blackmail them and take over control of the committee.

Why is it that airports have such tiny bathroom stalls? It is almost guaranteed that people will have a suitcase to bring in the stall with them. I hate having to maneuver the suitcase around the door and squeeze in around it.

Somehow I started receiving Teen Vogue in the mail. It is clearly being sent to the wrong address, and I assume it is the previous tenant. I notified the magazine but they keep sending them. I think it’s pretty funny so, of course, I read it each month. I am so not a Vogue girl. There is usually maybe one item in the entire magazine that I don’t think is horrid. I am just not fashionable enough for that magazine.

New Bed

Blogger is being annoying and not letting me do things the way I want, so I have to put these pictures in a different post. I still need to buy bedding, but this will do for now. The creatures you see on my bed are my bed-buddies, Nemo and Guinness. I sleep with both of them at night, which is a habit I picked up in college. Don't judge me! :) I can start putting curtains up and actually working on my bedroom now that I'll actually get to sleep in here.