Lazy but fun day!

I had a good day of catching up on my dvr'd shows from last week, the problem now is that as I watch them, I also had the episode from this week. So I can watch last weeks show and then I don't even have to wait for the next week, 'cause i have it right there!! I also went and got a new video game (Lego Harry Potter 1-4) I'm a fan of all the Lego video games and so far i like this one too.

I also finished another sewing project today! There are no pictures again, because it didn't really go well with being photographed. I once had a pair of capris that I LOVED and wore them everywhere. I think that everyone had a pair of them a few years ago, they were the ones that looked like they were just jeans rolled up a bit. Well recently mine got a HUGE hole in them, in a not good spot (hence no photos of the 'before') but i decided to transform some jeans that i had into an identical set.

SO i just turned up the legs of the jeans 6 inches, and hand sewed them around the edge so that they were capris. Not too exciting, and again no pictures which makes it not too exciting for you guys, 'cause you don't even get to wear them or anything, like me!!

Ok that was my whole day, i know I'm really exciting.

Julia

First project down!!

So something that has been bugging me for a while has been my curtains, and when i started thinking of things that i could do with my new sewing skills they immediately!! So in our living room we have long brown silk curtains and when we moved to our new place we added a valance to the top on a second curtain rod to add length to the top so they would cover the vertical blinds on our door to the back that we never use (and don't really want to) See Picture:



well of course there wasn't a kind of curtains at target that would reach the whole way across, so we bought 3 panels for the long curtains and the valence and hoped that the extra fullness would hide the split in between. Well usually it did, but occasionally the crack would show, which is my pet peeve!!! and since my machine was already loaded with brown thread from my lessons (we used contrasting thread so i could figure it out) I decided to just sew the panels together so that they would blend a lot better! though I did have some issues with my machine, a quick google search for 'sewing machine troubleshooting' helped out a LOT!!

Ashley over at Make it, Love it would be proud of my first real project, though she would have made them from scratch, and I didn't do so well at taking photos of every step like she does!! I'm going to try to be better next time!

I have to go and get to the grocery store (forgot something yesterday!! I hate when i do that!!) so I can make dinner for Amber and Derek when they get here tonight for their visit!!

Julia

Inspired!

So now that I am armed with my new sewing powers, I'm looking for cute/easy projects to spend some time on. (pretty much I'm not too great at sewing yet, but the best way to get good is to practice. Most of what I made this week at the beach look like a left handed monkey made them - things that i made include 1 'pillow' that doesn't match anything in my house and so will not get stuffed (though if you are in a need for an orange/goldish pillow let me know and I'll finish it!) and 2 simple drawstring bags with ribbon drawstrings) I have a goal to do a t-shirt quilt this summer before I start work in September, we'll see if I can do it and it not look too bad!! I was looking online at some stuff and found a great new blog!!!

My friend Abbey has it on her blog reel, but I have just discovered it! It's called Make it and Love it. The author Ashley is really creative and a good sewer/decorator. She makes kids clothes all the time and has an etsy shop if you want to buy some of her stuff, but posts tutorials for most of her crafts on her blog!! she recently added a 'make a cake' post a week that is guest authored by a woman named Britney who teaches you how to decorate cakes!!! I'm trying one of her cakes for fourth of july since we have some friends coming into town (don't peak buh, just get ready for a awesome surprise!!! )

And I have spent ALL day (after grocery shopping) looking through the archives, which is what i do when i find a new blog, and loving all her pretty crafts! I hope I can have time/motivation to get some of these things done, we'll see what happens!

check it out ya'll, especially you crafty people 'cause i know you'll love it!

Julia

Great week at the beach!

We had such a good time at the beach, I couldn't post at all!! We stayed at an awesome house/ set of houses on Saint Simon's Island. Our family has 17 people in it, so we're all about trying to find a place to house us all. These two houses were right next to each other and there was a pool! Audie and I are not big fans of the beach, because of all the sand and waves and stuff, but i love a pool!!

While there we also spent an afternoon at Epworth by the Sea and brushed up on our Methodist history. we shopped some, ate a lot of good food, and enjoyed hanging out with our family. We got to see some good friends a few times too! Also while we were there my mom gave me sewing lessons. I can now make a drawstring bag!! I know big accomplishment right? Well basically what happened was that I inherited a sewing machine from my grandma, and I knew how to sew straight lines ( as in I have done it before, and know how to push the foot peddle. But my mom had to teach me how to thread the machine, wind the bobbin, and she gave me some good pointers on some things, like how ironing helps a ton!!! I have a few projects that i want to do now, especially a t-shirt quilt, so if you have any pointers or ideas, let me know!!

after we drove back today we ate mexican food and are now catching up on some Dvr'd shows from this past week!

Ok i hope you have had a great week too, I'm really excited about seeing our good friends, amber and derek this week (twice!!) they are coming to stay with us on their way to and from DC to look at apartments!

julia

pictures of the new place!

Ok I finally got the pictures taken and uploaded of our new place, now with furniture and stuff everywhere!!! hope you enjoy looking through all of them!!

The entry way (not a big change here but a new key holder and mat for the floor)


The view of the kitchen from the entry way, again not big changes here except that we have our stuff on and in the cabinets, in and apartment there is little to no design decisions that we can make!


The view of the kitchen from the dining room, basically we put up some curtains and that's about it! notice that we have these open shelves/bins for our pantry because we don't have any other place to put that stuff.


The dining room, with our table and chairs we got off craigslist a few years ago. It opens out to seat 8 people, so it's nice that we have some extra room for it to expand. We also have some wedding photos on the wall with a big platter in a plate hanger.


The living room: on this side you can see our new dresser that Audie put together and some great pictures and a lovely painting that i love!! I got it at an art auction for charity in college and i love that it works so well with our living room! We will be getting a sewing machine table this week while we're at the beach (my mom's bringing it to me) and that will go either between the dining table and the dresser or on that back wall under the mirror. I also love the curtains taking up the whole wall basically! Of course my grandma's green sofa is awesome!


The other side of the living room. I love that through using a few bookshelves and the table that the TV is on it looks a little like a built in.


The downstairs half bathroom, we kind of have a nautical/beach theme in here, and the blue matches the dining room and kitchen. I put the faux tulips in the pitcher because it wouldn't fit in any of our cabinets or the dresser!! and i love my new picture holder that Abbey sent me!!


Now we made our way upstairs, and we have our bedroom! I love our bedroom colors, it's light but not to pale, and we recently got the darker blue sheets to add a little bit more variety!


This is the other view of the bedroom and you can see our curtains, and my dresser. Audie does have a dresser too, and we have double closets that are huge, but that's not too interesting to make it to the picture!


This is our bathroom it's tiny but hasn't been too bad in all honesty. we can't both really be in the bathroom at the same time, but we don't need to be in there at the same time most of the time. It will be interesting when we get to the time when we are both getting ready for work at the same time.


the shower side of the bathroom:


The Laundry area upstairs, I really like having the laundry right near the bedroom, It's so easy to get the laundry in and out and put away, rather than letting it pile up in the hamper and stay there forever before it gets hung up and away. Also since there is not really a linen closet in the whole apartment we stored our extra linens and towels up on the shelf in big baskets that we already had!


The guest bath room: with our new stuff in it!! We had a hard time finding stuff that we liked but that went together and was cheap enough. we settled on this because it matched the stuff in the guest room / office, but i was worried that the room itself didn't really mesh well together, but as we were packing i found this painting (again from the art auction! ) that i had that coordinated perfectly! It's a painting of the main building on campus of the college i went to. The painting was actually done by the president at the time that i was there, Stuart Gulley! It was a great purchase at the auction, and i'm glad it finally made it to the wall!


This is the storage solution that i got for these shelves, it makes the clutter go away, which is awesome!!!


The guest room and office. Audie's art table gives him a place to work and draw, and the futon gives us a place to put our guests up for the visit!


The other side of the office is wall to wall bookshelves! After 7 years of school through college and seminary I have way too many books!! Audie also has a ton comic books and other stuff that he has collected.



Thanks for looking through the whole house! I'm loving our new area and how much more space we have in the new place! I do sometimes wish we had the money and ability to buy a house and paint and all that but it's not too bad living in the apartment for now!

Hope you enjoy, we're off to the beach for a week, and hopefully i'll be able to post some while we're there. But if not hope you guys are having a good week too!!

Julia

I'm running out of ways to say I've been doing nothing!

i tried to title this blog several ways, but all of them I have used before, that's not a good sign! My life is probably pretty boring i guess, but for those few who care to read what we've been up to I'll let you know!

I've officially finished unpacking! I got all the pictures on the wall, which was really the last thing that i had left to do. Audie still has to get the office all settled, but hopefully tomorrow I'll have some photos for you!! Mostly he just has to put stuff in the closet so that it's not in the middle of the floor anymore!

I heard back from the manager from our old apartment. He looked over the photos from our place and the other information and decided that the charges were a bit excessive. While he's not giving it all back to us, he is sending us 60 dollars back! Which is good enough in my book. He was willing to see it from our perspective of how ridiculous it was to charge us 150 dollars to clean the apartments. I told him he needed to tell the folks of our old apartment to do the same.

We're still gearing up to go to the beach this weekend. We went to the store to get a few things, and wound up coming home with a ton of stuff!! isn't that how it always works??

today the exterminator came and i went and tried out the workout room of our new complex. pretty nice in my opinion. i'm hoping to get in the habit of using it for stress relief in once i start work.

In other news I'm loving my kindle!! I got it for graduation if you remember, and i got a cover and book light this week so i can read after audie goes to bed. I downloaded two anthologies of the classics, so i have 100 classic books to read! I started with 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea and it was pretty good! I have never read it or seen the movie so i had no idea what to expect and it caught my attention and made me want to keep sitting down to it. there are some moments that were a bit boring, but it was nice to read a book that is such a classic and now i can say that I enjoyed it too! yesterday I started The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, it is also really good!! each chapter is a separate story of an adventure which makes it easy to sit down and read an adventure and then come back for another one. I'm almost done with it already! I'm not sure what is next but I'll keep you updated. But i really love reading on the kindle itself, it doesn't have a back light so it doesn't strain your eyes and it is really easy to use and you can download books in seconds! I love to read, and this makes it really easy to have a ton of books at your fingertips no matter where you are! I'm really excited to try it out at the beach to see if you can use it outside easily as well.

Ok there's the update, not much going on around here, except how very not busy we have been.

-Julia

Update!

So I finally spoke with an assistant manager at our old apartment complex. Unfortunately it was not an easy conversation and she wasn't very helpful. I was just really frustrated because apparently they feel like what i would call normal wear and tear they feel like it is damage to the apartment. She said that the apartment wasn't clean enough, like the drip pans on the stove weren't clean (whose are is my question?) and the area around the sink was dirty, as well as there was mildew in the bathroom upstairs (all of this was pretty much like this when we moved in but we didn't list it on our initial inspection when we moved in so she is counting it as damage. AND all these little things cost 150 dollars??? i don't think so! Even if you consider this stuff damage and not normal wear and tear (which they can't count against our security deposit according to state law) it wouldn't cost them 150 dollars to fix those few small things, and if they did pay someone to fix them we shouldn't be charged for anything more than for them to clean the 'damages'.

I have in the last few days been stewing about this whole thing, and looked up the state law as well as my options for appealing all this. I also made a call to the Corporate office in Virginia to ask them about it, but they said i should talk to the regional manager. He was out of the office this morning, and of course i left him a NICE message asking him to call me back! (really it was!) After he got back in the office i talked with him late this afternoon and he was much more courteous than the assistant manager at our complex! He's going to look over the material and photos from the office and see what he thinks and will be getting back to me later this week! So overall i'm much happier with him just even listening to what i had to say, the other person didn't even seem to care that i was upset about all this stuff!!

Ok so we're hoping that we could hear back a decision sometime this week, and now that i feel like some of my concerns about our management folks at the old place was helpful so i'm not sure that if we don't get a refund i'll probably not pursue it any further because i'm not that worried about the money.

In other news, there is no other news!! We enjoyed our weekend of doing very little, we went to Bj's wholesale store to get some stuff and target for some new curtains (pictures to come soon!) We're going to the beach this week and i want to have pictures to show my family of the new place, and you get to see them too!! The only thing we really have left is to hang pictures on the walls! That's not a big deal though, so hopefully we can do some of that tonight/ this week while getting ready for the beach!!

ttfn,

Julia

Great night

I'm so excited about the weekend being here!! the last three weekends we have had tons going on and this weekend we're doing NOTHING!!! Audie does have to work tomorrow until 2 but that's all, which is awesome! We will probably also make a trip to Target for some extra things for the new apartment, but that's it.

Tonight we had some great friends of ours, James and Sarah (hi!), over for dinner. They are settling into their new lives in NC, and we love having them so close, unfortunately we don't see them as often as we would love to! They just came over for dinner and then watched an episode of west wing, but even more we just got caught up on what's going on since we had seen them last.

Well that's about all that is going on around here, We did get a letter from our old apartment and they kept some of our security deposit to clean the apartment, which bothers me a bit, so I'm going to call and see if we can get some more of the rest of it back! i just don't think that they should charge against my security deposit in order to clean the apartment, if they had to fix a hole in the wall or something that's one thing, and they charged us 150 bucks!! is that unreasonable to anyone else?? Have you ever had to call and get some deposit money back? Any tips??

Ugh, I'm going to just call and see what they can do, and if they don't give anything back, then i guess there isn't much that we can do and we'll just deal with it, but dang if i'm not going to at least try and get it back!!

Wish me good luck, i hope i get someone reasonable on the phone tomorrow AM!!

Julia

New driver

Today Audie was off today because he is working on Saturday. So much for a weekend of nothing. However when Audie works on Saturdays its just from 9 until 2 so it's not as bad as him working all day during the week. So we went and did some stuff that had to be done.

The biggest thing was we went to the driver's license office to get our licenses. Audie got an NC license about 2 years ago (after being stopped with an expired one from GA) so he just had to switch to our new address. But NC makes you take the driving test if you have never had a NC license before. So i had to take the test, and it was really hard!!! it was a computerized test, so each question you answered it showed you if you got it correct or not before it asked you the next question. in the beginning it told you that you would have to answer 25 questions, and you could get five wrong and still pass. It was the most stressful thing i have done in a long time. I spent about an hour last night looking over the material, but i decided that if i didn't pass then i would study harder and come back. But thank goodness i did pass, though i was sweating bullets when i had five questions to go and could only miss one!!! But thankfully i passed because i don't think i could have gone back. It also wasn't a long trip out there, especially since we were both able to get stuff done, we were there only about an hour. Though we did go to the DMV in a smaller town about 15 minutes away rather than going to the big one in Raleigh, hoping that it would be faster, and i think it was.

Then we went shopping and I got a baby gift for my sister and we got a printer cord for our printer, i think ours got lost in the move or put in to the yard sale/donate pile.

Well i know that isn't a hugely exciting day around here, but at least we did something! Hope you had a productive day.

Julia

whata weekend!!

we had such a great weekend in Charlotte with our friends Danny and Amber! After audie got off work we drove to Durham and went to their house. We ate dinner at Cracker Barrell, yummy, carb city!! So good, then we were on the road to Charlotte, about a 2.5 hour car ride, so we were there around 11. We stayed at an amazing hotel!! A friend of Amber's was a former employee of this company so we got a friends/family discount and got this amazing hotel for cheaper than less nice ones around. I was really impressed which probably points out that i'm a total hick that hasn't ever stayed in a 4 star hotel before. It was just super nice, we got turn down service, a minibar (super expensive, so we didn't partake of that), robes and a great view of the downtown area. We loved staying there and loved the great deal we got.

Saturday morning Danny and Audie walked down for the comic convention and Amber and I slept in a bit more. Danny and Amber's room actually had worn out towels in it (a maid or someone accidentally left the cleaning towels rather than the clean towels) so they got a coupon for a free breakfast for two in the hotel restaurant. The boys went to get bagels at another local place, but we got a great breakfast buffet, so YUMMY!! (best part it was like a 18 dollar meal each, but we got it free!) Then we set out for IKEA!!! I was SO excited!!! I had never been and wasn't really looking for anything in a real way, but just wanted to look at everything and experience the store!

It was so much fun!! We went through the show room part first, and looked at all the set up rooms and ways that the furniture can be customized and used together to make the rooms and stuff! SO GREAT!! It was really neat to see the 'complete' ikea look. but really my style is just way more traditional than the majority of the furniture. Even though i didn't want most of it in my house it was still an awesome thing to behold, and i love it all so much!! i found a sofa, some chairs, closet customization stuff, and an amazing kitchen that i want in my future house, but wound up not buying anything. But we looked all around upstairs, broke for lunch and then went through the downstairs marketplace where you can fill up your bag/buggy! Overall i think we were there for like 4 hours!

After that we went back to the hotel and flipped through the ikea catalogs we picked up when we were going out the door and just lazed around, the boys came back and we all took some naps and showered after our long shopping/walking/conventioning days. We then saw a good friend of mine from High School, Jessica and her husband who just moved to Charlotte. It was so good to see an old friend and get to meet her hubby. We went to dinner and walked around downtown and wound up at a lounge type place and had some drinks and just visited and hung out. we wound up closing down the place around 11 and went back to the hotel lobby to sit and visit some more.

This morning we came on back to durham after sleeping in. we made it all the way back to durham without stopping for lunch because we had such late breakfasts, so we went for Mellow Mushroom for lunch and have gotten back to Raleigh all safe and sound.

This week is going to be a lot quieter and chill, because we don't have a ton going on, we're going to just be hopefully unpacking and settling in more, it seems crazy that we have that much more to get put up, but we still do have a lot of work to do. I think that this weekend we might go and get our new driver's licenses, let's hope that i don't fail the driving test or something!!

alrighty, that's about all for now!

julia

200th

Wow, 200th post!! Woo hoo!!

I wish i could tell you that this was going to be a really amazing post (as if any of mine actually are!!!) Our house has quieted down a bunch since this weekend and last being crazy with moving and yard sales! Monday Audie had to work but he got off early because things were really slow. He came home around lunchtime and we went and ate together and then went to grocery shop. We're loving the new area that we live in, it's much less congested than the area where we were in Durham. There are a ton of places to eat/shop which is really nice! The Food Lion in our new area is so much nicer than the other one we were shopping in.

We also went and checked out BJ's Wholesale store. We have really enjoyed shopping at Sam's in Durham, just for like TP and stuff. But the Sam's in raleigh is in a really congested area in raleigh, and the BJ's is a lot closer so we went and got a membership, and It was really awesome because they gave us a whole bunch of coupons, and you can use manufacturer's coupons too! Jessica would be so proud!! So we got some stuff we had been needing and some good deals that were awesome with the coupons!

the rest of this week we've been doing hardly anything except for unpacking and working on getting stuff done around here. Our bedroom and the bathrooms are finally settled, and the kitchen has been done for a while, but we're still working on the living/dining room and office.

This weekend we won't be working though, we're going on a trip!! Audie found a comic convention that he wanted to go to and our friends Danny and Amber were interested in going too so we're all heading out for the weekend. The boys are actually going to the convention, and Amber and I are going to spend the whole day at IKEA!!! I'm pretty excited about just looking all day, because there isn't much that i need, but i'm really excited to get to go. We're all driving together to Charlotte and spending the weekend in an awesome hotel that we got a great deal on!!

Ok I'll certainly give you guys an update after the weekend and see how things went! but you all have a fabulous weekend!!

Julia