Precious Little Turquoise House!!

If y'all haven't noticed, I've been a bit M.I.A. from the blogosphere the last couple of weeks. And it's been quite refreshing. I mean, planning a wedding and moving into a new house takes a lot of time and energy.... and yes, I did just say moving into a new house!! Jeff and I finally found a perfect little rental house for the first year of our marriage, and so I'm here today very quickly to share that with y'all, at the request of my dear friend, Angie :)

Our house is a cute little 2/1, with a front porch, and a side deck, and a non-working, cute little fireplace. It was built sometime in the early 1900's, although we don't actually know when. The owner claims that it was even a speakeasy at some point during the Prohibition Era! How crazy awesome is that?! And get ready to be shocked, because it's a very bright color. But it's just so ME, and I actually love it! I don't think I would ever choose to paint my house this color if I owned it, but I actually really like it the way it is right now, and can totally handle it for our rental house.

It has two front doors, because it was originally built to be a duplex.

And now for some photos of the inside. Keep in mind we took these the day we first went to go check it out, so it's basically completely empty, with the exception of the tools and supplies of the property manager, who was still doing some touch-up work on it...

Living room, with "other" bedroom behind it. (This will be craft room/office/twins' room when they visit)

Other corner of the living room, with my car through the window :)

Through that doorway is "our" bedroom, and the doorway behind that leads to the closet & bathroom.

Our bedroom, closet/hallway thing, and bathroom in the back.

Other side of our bedroom.

Our closet.

Laundry room/mud room that is next to the bathroom, & behind the "other" bedroom.

View from the laundry room, through the "other" bedroom,  to the living room.

This is (most likely) the original window hardware from the early 1900's!

Cute little (non-working) fireplace - can't wait to decorate this all cute for fall with pumpkins and stuff!

Panoramic of living room and half of kitchen. Oh, and I love those built-in bookcases!!

We got Jeff all moved in this past weekend, well for the most part anyways, and then I'll be moving in after we get married! (Which is now just 31 days away! Holy stinking moly!) Things are still crazy and all over the place, and nowhere near finished, but it's so cute and I love it, and we're having fun so far. Can't wait 'til I get to leave here too! :)

Thanks to my Uncle Keith for letting us borrow his big ole' truck to bring everything in!

(Sorry for the crappy, nighttime iPhone quality of the next few pictures....)

There's no pantry, so Jeff put a back on one of my bookshelves, and we turned it into a pantry!

Hand-me-down table and chairs that we're going to fix up. Probably going to have multi-colored chairs!

Little bookshelf pantry :) We might eventually put curtains on the front to keep it neat.

Panoramic view of the kitchen.

In a few months, I'll of course share another post with updated pictures once we start getting more settled! I can't wait to add cute little touches all over the place, and really make it our own! For now though, we're still working on basics like a couch and getting internet. But at least we finally have our own place! The bright turquoise color is actually pretty awesome, and the inside is super cute as well. I love older houses, and this one has plenty of charm and character.

So glad we found this cute little place of ours!

Much Love,
Halie

Planes, Grains & Automobiles

Monday morning - we meet again.... and this is a seriously exhausted Monday morning at that. This weekend was so crazy busy, I got very little sleep, and I could have definitely used an extra day just to recover from it. So let's just head straight into our normal recap, shall we?

FRIDAY
Jeff's parents took us and the boys to see the new Disney movie, "Planes," and it was really, really cute. Good job Disney for making another heartwarming movie that brings a tear or two to my eyes... But really, it's a great little movie and we all enjoyed it :) After the movie, we got the rest of the boys' stuff packed in the car and ready to go for the next morning.

SATURDAY
Got up bright and early for our drive up to north Georgia to meet their mom. We grabbed breakfast from Chick-fil-A, and then hit the road. A couple potty stops and five hours later, we ate lunch, and said our goodbyes to those super sweet little boys. We are so thankful we got to spend six full weeks with them this summer, and we just had so much fun with them!

We then made our way over to Atlanta, to visit Jeff's best friend/best man. We went to a cookout at one of his friends' house, and had lots of fun. All of his friends were really nice and welcoming, and didn't make it awkward for us even though we knew no one! After a delicious dinner (grilled chicken and sausage made by an awesome guy from Australia) and some homemade ice cream, we all played Cards Against Humanity. It was my first time playing, and I loved it! I want it for myself now of course. There were 12 or 13 of us playing, and I actually won with five black cards! Holla!

SUNDAY
Woke up bright and early again to head home from Atlanta. We splurged again and got Dunkin Donuts for breakfast, and it was oh so yummy. We took a different route home from ATL than we normally do, and we loved it! It was so gorgeous. We saw so many fields of crops and things, and it was actually really interesting. (We ended up Googling how corn and peanuts are harvested, and we learned something new while we drove...)

A couple of potty stops, some gorgeous back roads of Georgia and about four and a half hours later, we made it to my Grandparents house for a big family lunch! We celebrated my Aunt and my Papa who both have August birthdays. I later worked on addressing the envelopes for our wedding invitations, then we had our first pre-marital counseling session. We stopped by Publix to grab a bit of groceries and pick up a Redbox (since we had a code for a free night!), and then spent some time just resting at Jeff's house...while I addressed some more envelopes.

Super busy, and super fun. We had a great weekend, but we are definitely both exhausted. I skipped my run this morning so that I could sleep until 7 am, rather than 6 am, and just that one hour wasn't quite enough. I'll run tomorrow morning though, so I can start week 6 of 5K training! Tonight and tomorrow we will be busy working to get our invitations stuffed and ready to go, so that we can get them sent out by no later than Friday! Ahhh, so exciting! They turned out great, and I can't wait to show them to you in a couple of weeks, once they've been sent and seen :)

Hope you lovely ladies are having a good Monday so far. I'm looking forward to working on wedding stuff tonight, and making what Jeff has named "Adult Bagel Bites" for dinner! I'll try to make them kind of healthy-ish, and count the calories, but they're just gonna be so yummy!

Much Love,
Halie

Plane Tickets for the Honeymoon Have Been Purchased

So for a very abbreviated story real quick - I was cut off BIG TIME in traffic this morning on my way to work, and it infuriated me. I was yelling and laying on my horn like crazy, and my heart was racing. My mama (who was directly in front of me in her car), saw it happen and she said was so livid she wanted to get his tag number and call the police to report his aggressive driving. Suffice it to say, that wasn't the loveliest way to start off my day.....

But in much more pleasant and exciting news, I really just wanted to stop in here for a bit and say how freaking EXCITED I am, because Jeff and I got our honeymoon booked last night!!!!! Thanks to his very generous parents and their time-share-owner-points-stuff through Sheraton hotels, we will be spending seven nights at the Westin Lagunamar Resort in Cancun, Mexico!!!!

We also got a jump on it and booked our plane tickets last night, and found a pretty awesome deal through Priceline.com. Thanks for negotiating those prices for us, Mr. Priceline Dude. We appreciate that! So now, Plane Tickets for the Honeymoon Have Been Purchased, and the reservations at the resort have been made! And clearly I'm pretty pumped about that! Just to make you drool a little bit, here's some photos from their website of where we'll be staying :)

You guys, I'm so excited about this I can hardly even stand it! We're only 58 days away from wedding day, but that feels like so long in respect to boarding that plane to Cancun! Holy crap, we're going on our honeymoon to Cancun! Seriously, I might explode with excitement and happiness. Be prepared to clean up bits of confetti and glitter and sunshine rays, because I'm sure that's all that's inside me right now with all this excitement :)

Much Love,
Halie

Projects for the Wedding Update

Two weeks ago, I posted a list of all the projects that need to be done for the wedding. This morning, I opened up that post hoping I was able to cross a thing or two off the list, and kinda had a freak out when I realized that not one of those things had been done yet. Yikes! Now, that doesn't mean I haven't done anything, but it does mean I haven't done any actual projects.

But that's because the twins are still here, and it's not like a have a ton of free time when there are twin seven-year-old boys running around. So next week, my life is becoming wedding project central. For serious. And I'm super excited about it actually! There are so many fun projects and crafts that I want to do, and I can't wait to finally get started on them.

First up on the agenda though, will be getting our invitations out. As of yesterday, we're exactly two months away from the big day, and so those babies gotta go out in the mail pretty ASAP here! I ordered envelopes last night from an awesome site called envelopemall.com. I got 200 envelopes for just $40.50, including the shipping! And they should be here before Friday. Awesome. Once they're here, I will immediately start addressing them, even though the invites themselves won't be in quite yet.

And speaking of the invitations, I am so stinking psyched about them!! My blog-friend-turned-real-life-friend Angie did an amazing job designing them for us, and I just love them so so much! We're sending them to print through VistaPrint, and I can't wait to see how they turn out in-real-printed-life.

Some things I have actually accomplished are:
- Met with florist and went over flowers and set up and all that jazz
- Ordered invitation envelopes
- Researched my bridal jewelry, and where I can find it for a decent price
- Ordered wedding day shoes!
- Bought some stuff at Hobby Lobby for our cake topper craft
- Ordered the bicycle basket to use for cards on our gift table (gonna cute it up a bit too)
- Figured out our wedding favors
- I feel like there was at least one or two other things for this list, but now I can't remember them....

So things are happening, but obviously (based on the post from a couple weeks ago), there's still a whole lot more to do. But I'm not feeling crazy or overwhelmed with it all, I'm just excited to finally get started. This summer has been super busy having the boys here for six full weeks, and it's made wedding planning during that time very tricky. Now I should have plenty more time to get down to business, and really get moving on some things! I can't wait actually, I'm just so excited to get moving on plans and projects!

Wish me luck as I go into crazy-wedding-planning-mode over the next two months, and feel free to offer up more of you helpful tips and tricks and suggestions and all that, because I'm open to anything!

Much Love,
Halie

Posing for Engagement Pictures

So now that our save-the-dates have officially gone out to (almost) everyone - we're still having issues with the Outlook.com account we created - I can finally share our amazing engagement photos! We only ended up using two of the photos for our cards, but I still didn't want to let the cat out of the bag too early, then have none of our family and friends be excited or surprised if they had seen them already on the ole' bloggy-blog. But now the time has finally come!!

We took these way back in April, in St. Augustine, Florida. We were oh-so-very blessed and fortunate, because Jeff's Uncle Phil is actually a professional photographer! So he very happily agreed to shoot our engagement session for us in St. Augustine, especially since he lives in Jacksonville! Even though it rained on our entire shoot, basically the whole day, Phil did such an excellent job capturing so many beautiful pictures!

Get ready for pictures galore - "This is the event you've all been waiting for......and away we go!" That last part is a movie quote, and if anyone can guess it, I'll send you some Julep fingernail polish ;) Anyone?

This is one from our save-the-date, that Jeff Photoshopped the "5" in, since our original date was the 12th.

This one is definitely my favorite! There's just so many things about it I love.

This is the second one we used on our save-the-dates.  And this is my Mama's favorite one :)

We chose to do the photos in St. Augustine for a couple of reasons:

1. It was close and convenient to Phil and Tammy, without making them drive three hours to Tally. 
2. I went to school there, at Flagler College, so the small town was my home for four years during college, and I loved it so very much. 
3. It was the very first trip Jeff and I ever went on together, way back in 2011, to attend his Grandpa's funeral (in Jacksonville actually, but we also spent time in St. Augustine that weekend as well.)
4. We've gone back together multiple times since then to visit all my old friends who still live there, and Jeff has come to love the city too!

And for all those reasons, St. Augustine is a special place not only for me, but for us as a couple. And it really meant a lot to be able to have our engagement photos taken there as well, in this gorgeous little town that we both now love so much! All of these were taken in the following locations: historic downtown, the Castillo de San Marcos fort, the Spanish Mission, and Flagler College.

I am so so happy and pleased with the way the pictures turned out. I mean, you can't even tell that we were being rained on during the majority of these. For real - we were standing in the rain for at least half of the pictures above, and they still look amazing! Huge props to Uncle Phil (and his lovely assistant/wife/Aunt Tammy) for all they did for us that day, and the beautiful photos they created for us! If you're in the Jax area, check him out here.

Glad I'm finally getting around to sharing these with y'all, and thanks for being patient and waiting for the past three months! I promise not to take so long sharing our wedding pictures in a couple of months! :)

Much Love,
Halie