Pretty Flowers Everywhere

A flower vendor came to our office building yesterday.
[Kind of random? Yes. But we rolled with it.]
Anyway, roses were wayy on sale.
Believe me when I say: there was a mad dash to the lobby

I snagged two dozen pink and yellow beauties.

Roses are my favorite.

I just couldn't resist!

And now there are gorgeous roses all over our apartment!

Happy Saturday!

It's beginning to look at lot like Christmas

Remember how we have massive 18-foot ceilings in our apartment?
Well when you have ceilings that tall...you need a massive tree, of course!

Or at least that's the logic my sweet husband tried to persuade me with when we were at Home Depot looking for trees a few weekends ago.

It worked.

May I present...our 10-foot tree:

Once we chose a tree, we tried to lift it up in the Home Depot parking lot, just to test out if we'd be able to get it home by ourselves.

And we failed.

10 feet of solid tree is heavy!

So, we called my wonderful brother-in-law, Sawyer, and he helped Taylor get the massive thing into our apartment. I don't even want to think about how we're going to get it down!

I needed to stand on my tip-toes on our highest bar stool to get the star on....but we did it!

It's funny how a ten-foot tree just doesn't look quite as tall as it normally would when you have such high ceilings!

I love our family of Christmas reindeer.
We started off with just the baby one and now have the whole set.
They often move around the kitchen island and end up in different spots.

These pretty glasses are from Taylor's grandparents...they're perfect Christmas decor!

More decorations:

Are our stockings hung on the wall with 3M Adhesive Wall Hooks? Yes. Yes they are.

And we love them.

The first gift under the tree!
I so win.

And the second and third.
Taylor wins for these.

This is probably my favorite of our Christmas "decorations" - it's our gift wrap corner! As I've said before, I love crafts. I love ribbons and bows and wrapping paper too. I love them even more when they're all organized in cute little boxes. :)

Last year I went to Target a few days after Christmas and stocked up on everything gift wrap. I have a hard time buying really fancy wrapping paper at full price - $9 a roll makes me cringe! But at 70% off...you can buy just about everything!

Taylor and I have an ornament tradition and pick out a new one each year.

We have an engagement ornament from 2008 and an "our first Christmas" ornament from 2009.

This was our 2010 ornament (we wrote the year on the bottom of the ornament with a Sharpie):

This year we couldn't choose just one so we have two 2011 ornaments:

Now I just need to figure out how I'm going to attach "2011" on them!

A State of Chaos

So we've been busy. That goes along with moving into a new place. I didn't realize just how crazy the past few weeks had been until I started thinking about this post and couldn't figure out where to start! Here's a little glimpse of our lives recently: 

Pack boxes. 

[And a storage unit full of furniture]

**move**

Unpack boxes.

[In the new apartment]

Put dishes (and everything else) away. 

[In a futile attempt to reduce the mass quantity of boxes taking up every corner of the new place]

Put clothes away.

Put clothes away.

Put clothes away.

[Yes, we I have a lot of clothes (thanks for correcting that husband)]

Pull dishes back out.

[To use for our house-warming party]

Clean the apartment.

[So people don't think we're total slobs]

**party**

Clean the dishes. 

[Then put them away again]

Clean the apartment. Again.

[Because we're really not total total slobs and I can't stand having dirty dishes around]

Pull clothes back out of the closet.

[To pack for our trip]

**trip**

Put clothes away.

[After 3 loads or so of laundry]

Help (awesome) friends move into their own new place.

[Two days after flying back from California]

Did I mention that the timeline for ALL of this is approximately 2.5 weeks?

Yikes.

That makes me tired all over again!

So yes, we moved. Two weeks later we had a rockin housewarming party. Four days after that we went to California for a week. And then, two days after returning to Dallas, we helped our friends move.

We clearly like chaos.

I've got pictures galore from our 7 glorious days in California-land....but they will have to wait for next time (because I really am exhausted all over again just thinking about the past few weeks!). Until then, here's one of my favorite pictures from our trip to tide you over. Ahhh Malibu!

As promised...

Here are some pictures of our new place! It's about time right? So, first up: the large (blue) accent wall in our living room. What do you think? We LOVE it! Isn't the blue such a fun pop (or explosion really) of color?

Here's an angled (and not so tall) view of the living room. Remember that blue pillow I mentioned in my last post that my coworkers got us as a housewarming gift? Doesn't it just go perfectly with the blue wall?

Another "normal height" view of the living room. It's so funny looking at it like this because when you walk in your eyes really do go all the way up to the ceiling!

Taylor surprised me with gorgeous pink roses!

Here's the bathroom - we LOVE having 2 sinks. I hadn't really ever thought it was a big deal to share one with Taylor, but now that I've had the experience of having my very own sink....I'm never going back :) Oh! And total side note, the bamboo in the corner is the same bamboo that we had at our wedding! No joke. We brought back a huge vase of them from the wedding and I've managed to keep these 4 little stalks alive for two years! I definitely do not have a green thumb so you gotta understand this is quite an accomplishment for me!

This is a little view of our bedroom (do you get the feeling we like the color blue???).

View from our balcony:

The next few pictures are of our favorite part of the apartment...the kitchen! We love to cook so having a big enough kitchen for the two of us to comfortably use was as a major factor in our apartment search. We don't normally have so many goodies out - these pictures were taken right before our housewarming party a few weeks ago.

This is the perfect way to balance out a dinner of bread, cheese and cupcakes!

Mmm mmm! Love me some homemade Sprinkles cupcakes!

A few days after the party our flowers were lookin all sorts of crazy but I loved it!

So voila! The apartment :) Our study is still a total work in progress so pictures of that will be coming soonish!

We Moved!

Hopefully now you’ll forgive us for the lack of posts over the last two and a half weeks. Man have we been busy! We moved into our new place one week ago from today with the help of Taylor’s two brothers, Sawyer and Jaxon, and our friend Andy. We never would have been able to do it without them. They rock. Seriously.

The actual moving process went surprisingly well. Taylor and I had spent the two weeks prior packing up our room and getting our storage unit ready for the big day. Do you ever look at all your belongings and wonder how the heck you accumulated so much stuff? We kept thinking that over and over. And over!

Thursday around lunchtime (the day before the move), Taylor and I met at the apartment complex to fill out paperwork and drop off paint for the painters. Yes, we painted an accent wall! Okay well we didn't technically do the painting...but that's only because our apartment has crazy high (18-foot) ceilings in all the rooms and painting a wall that tall just didn't make it on our to do list. But having someone else do it sure did!

We had gone to home depot a few weeks before to choose a color. There were a LOT of choices.

I was leaning towards a beautiful pink color scheme. Wouldn't a huge pink wall just make you happy all the time? Yes. It would. Taylor quickly nixed my idea though, and made me walk away from the pinks. :(

Betcha you're just dying to know which one we went with!

This card was the winner! 

Our accent wall is beautiful Teal Bayou blue!

Thursday afternoon, right before the end of the workday, my coworkers surprised me with a "contrats on the new apartment" basket full of goodies! I was completely blown away! It was totally out of the blue and so sweet of them! They even matched a few items in the basket to our new apartment color theme (we were later shocked and amazed to discover that the pillow has the EXACT color of our new wall in it!). I have the best coworkers :)

Now I have to tell you that my absolute worst fear about moving was that it was going to rain on our moving day and all of our stuff would get wet. All week I'd been obsessively checking the weather and unfortunately, every day the forecast called for rain on Friday (THE day). Not just a light drizzle. No, we were supposed to expect a torrential downpour. Ugh! So Friday morning it was incredibly humid and damp as we all piled into four cars (that were packed to the brim with all of our stuff from the house) to make the drive downtown. The rain held of for about 15 minutes of our drive and then it absolutely poured! It was raining so hard at one point that you could barely see the car in front of you. It was bad. But then, just as we got close to the apartment, it stopped!

We stopped by the office, got our keys, and were able to see the apartment (and our super cool accent wall) for the first time! 

We emptied out the cars and then set off to our storage unit (for the rest of our stuff and all of our furniture). Taylor stopped along the way and picked up a U-Haul trailer which the guys hitched to Taylor's parents Suburban. We got to the storage unit and the guys packed my car full of fragile boxes and then sent me back to the apartment to order lunch (which was totally okay with me...I'm not exactly the most useful person when furniture moving is going on!). 

We stopped to eat lunch and then spent a few hours making trips from the garage (where the trailer was parked) to the apartment. Fortunately the apartment complex has an elevator so we didn't have to haul anything up flights of stairs. 

Once everything was moved in, we said goodbye to our fantastic helpers and Taylor and I set off to return the trailer and pick up the last few items from the storage unit. Our luck majorly ran out at this point because we got to U-Haul just as it was pouring again. My sweet husband had to unhitch the trailer right in the middle of the downpour. The guys at U-Haul got soaked too, but it made me wonder why they didn't have some sort of covered area to return trailers and trucks on days like that! It was still raining when we got to the storage unit, and this time I had to jump out in the rain as well to help load up the last of our stuff. I'd been wearing cute sneakers that were relatively new, so I took them off and moved stuff in my bare feet. Not extremely smart, I know, but my shoes are okay! Needless to say, we were very excited to finally make it back home and change into dry clothes!

Saturday and Sunday were spent unpacking as many boxes as we could and we did a really good job of making the apartment livable. This past week we've been unpacking every night after work but there's still a lot left for this weekend! As soon as the apartment is in a more "finished" state I will share some pictures!