Saturday, May 31, 2008

House Pictures

I told you that I would post pictures of the house as soon as I got some.

Today Jeremy & I were able to stop at the house today to look through it with his parents and brother.

From the pictures you will notice that there is still allot to be cleaned out. The house is still pretty packed with stuff, so hopefully it won't be long before they get everything cleaned out. So please disregard the clutter in the pictures.

Entry: The front door from the top of the stairs

Kitchen & Dining Room: To the Right, once you come up stairs. There is a door out to the front of the porch.

Kitchen: The "cozy" kitchen. You have a lot of cupboard space and the most important... a dishwasher!

Front Yard & Drive of the property, from the dining room window.

Front of the house: As you can see, the trees are sort of overtaking the front of the house. They will probably go away. The garage is in the downstairs/basement/lower level. There is a door out the dining room from the upstairs.

Yard & Pasture: Well this will be the pasture, but right now there are beans in the pasture. The owners leased out the field and pasture to a farmer. Hopefully we can get this worked out so that after the beans come off, we will be able to get it seeded with grass.

Computer Room & Sun Room: This is from the hallway, but the dark room is a computer room, there is a built in desk on the right side of the room. Just past the computer room is the Sun Room.Sun Room: The sun room is pretty nice area to just sit in and look out the back yard. The horses will be back there for awhile, until we can get our pasture reseeded.

Family Room: This is downstairs/ground level (this is going to be the most confusing part of this home, is the downstairs considered a basement or what do you call it. Anyway, the room is huge and has a "self" all the way around the room. The wall is actually built out further, making this shelf.

Family Room: Same thing, just a different angle, the room is at the bottom of the steps when you come down.

Storage/Utility Room: Isn't it lovely - just a typical storage area. There is a bedroom just off of this room. However, that is something that could maybe be switch around so that whoever has that room doesn't have to go through the lovely storage room every time they go to bed. This room is just to the right at the bottom of the stairs. There is also a wood burning stove down here.


After walking through the house, with a more observing eye, we have noticed the little things that we will need to do to the house, like shampooing the carpet (big time), painting the walls & removing some wallpaper (I wish wallpaper would have never been invented), doing some major weeding (you can tell that the owners were having a hard time with the upkeep), and eventually removing some trees and overgrowth. The house is pretty good, it just needs a little "face lift".

These are just a few pictures to help everyone get a little "taste" of what our house looks like. We are keeping the ball rolling with the bank and we have an inspection scheduled for Monday, so hopefully everything will go as planned.

It will be nice to make this house our home. I think that once we can get things all cleaned up and in order, then we can focus on the details. It will be nice to have a home to call our own. Of course, it will just be my home until our wedding. But at least we will have a place to call ours.

Have a great weekend!
~Rachel

Wednesday, May 28, 2008

A lot has happened lately...

Sorry that I'm not updating as often as I did at first. It just seems like there have been a lot of things going on, not necessarily wedding related. I did look at my "Wedding Planning Checklist" and I am not behind on anything, so that is a plus. Even thought I feel like I haven't done much work for the wedding, I just tell myself that it was because I got allot of it figured out the first couple of months of our engagement.

I have had a few people ask me about how the church situation went. Sorry I forgot to mention that the last time. What we determined was that our wedding was going to be at St. Paul's United Church of Christ in New Bremen. The church is large enough that we will be able to fit all of our guests in, without having to "squeeze" everyone in. Plus with the gas prices looking the way they are, if people have to drive a little distance for our wedding, they will be driving to the same general area, since our reception is in Minster. That will be allot nicer that having people drive a distance to Celina and then to Minster and then back home, so hopefully everyone can appreciate that a little.

Lately I have been working on the invitations for the wedding. Jeremy & I have decided to not use RSVP cards, he says that allot of people won't send them back, so we are just going to go with a panel card as our invitation. As a graphic designer, people have high expectations from you, hopefully everyone will see the time and thought that has gone into everything that I am doing for the wedding. Below is a monogram that I designed, this will most likely be used throughout the wedding. I thought that it was very adorable. You see, having the initials J and R, you have to be careful how you design with them, otherwise it looks like Jr. and that isn't what we're going for here.

I also ordered our unity candle a while back. It took forever to arrive, in fact, I had to call the company and talk to someone before they even sent it out. I don't think I would deal with their company again, but at least I got our candle. It is very simple, yet very elegant. Here are some of the sample pictures from the internet. Ours is the Ivory candle with the name Rachel & Jeremy engraved on the token.



My wonderful friend and bridesmaid Amy was able to pick up the glass votives that I need to begin working on the hanging votive holders for the birch branch centerpieces. I should be able to get those from her this weekend and hopefully will be able to begin working on those within the next week or so. Making the wire hangers will be the most time consuming part of the centerpieces. After I get all of those done, I will just have to arrange the branches in the vases and then they should be all ready to go for the wedding. Unless we add any extra details later on. I guess we'll all have to wait and see about that.

I talked to the lady about decorating the hall. I think that what I might do is rent some of the stuff from her and then between the bridesmaids and family, we should be able to get the hall decorated. I think that everything will come together beautifully.

My grandma's friend is going to work on the bouquets for me. That will be a huge help for me, so that tasks is pretty well taken care of already. I do have to begin working on the "isle runner" candle stake arrangements. Awhile back I had picked up some wrought iron garden candle stakes that I am going to put into a painted terra-cotta pot to use in place of an isle runner. I am not exactly sure what I will put in the flower pots to "decorate" them, maybe some flowers and probably a ribbon hanging on the candle stake, something like that.

I feel pretty comfortable with how the wedding planning is going. To be totally honest with you, I'm not nervous or worried that things won't get done. I know that there are some other people that are worried for me, they say that I'm stressing them out with how "carefree" I seem to be, I guess that isn't a bad thing. I will keep you posted if I start freaking out that things won't get done in time.

In the middle of July my other wonderful friend & bridesmaid, Julie, will be taking our engagement pictures. I am really excited for that. I think that we are going to some pretty awesome locations to take pictures, so I can't wait for that. If you haven't already figured this out, I am really into photography. I don't look at pictures just as a picture, I look at pictures as a piece of art. I love to see things that are different and really capture the emotion. I really trust Julie doing our pictures, she can see where I'm coming from when I tell her what I like about pictures. I think that she will do a great job and it helps having a friend as a photographer b/c you aren't as limited on where you take pictures at. I think that we are actually going to head to Dayton to get some pictures. I know that they will be amazing. Thanks Julie!

I also think that Jeremy & I have figured out what we want to do for our Honeymoon. We are planning on going out west and traveling around to different sites. We talked about taking a train out west, but I don't know if there are any that don't leave on the same day as our wedding. If we can't take a train out there, then we will probably fly out there and either rent a car or see about catching a train out there. I think that a train would be an awesome way to see some of the beauty of the west. Sometime Jeremy & I are going to set down and figure out all the different places we want to visit and then talk with our travel agent to see what she can help us figure out.

So the BIG NEWS...

As of 3:30 on Tuesday May 27th, Jeremy & I have become "homeowners"...
...well we still have the paper work and everything to do before it is official, but the sellers accepted our offer yesterday. That's pretty exciting for us, freaky, but exciting.
The property has 13+ acres with a 3 bedroom, 2 bath, 2 car garage home; there is also a horse barn, pasture and approx. 2 acre field and approx. 6 acres of woods. I am super excited about this place. Our First Home! I think I could see us living there for the rest of our lives. The house is on State Route 66, just south of Newport, in Houston. It isn't the first town that we would have picked to live in, but the location is great for us to get to work. Plus it sits way back off of 66, so it is kind of peaceful back there. The house has a sun room off the back of the house that you can sit in and just enjoy the scenery. I am so excited! Once I get some pictures of the house, I will be sure to post them. I just pray that the inspection turns out okay and that the closing goes well, those are the only things keeping us from officially owning the home. So just keep us in your prayers that everything will go well for us. It is much appreciated!

So for now, I think that is all the rambling that I have to do. I will be sure to keep you posted on anything new and hopefully I will be a little better about updating more often.

Only 4 months & 3 weeks until the wedding. Time will go super fast.

Talk to you soon
~Rachel

Tuesday, May 6, 2008

It's Been Awhile... Sorry!

Sorry, I know it has been a little while since I have posted anything on here. I sort of took a break from “wedding planning” since I had gotten a lot of stuff done at first.

I also wanted to let you know, in case you are wondering where some of the old posts have gone. If you go to the very bottom of this page, you will see a link for Older Posts that will bring you to the posts that are missing.

Jeremy & I stopped at the Minster KofC hall last month to check it out, it happened to be decorated for a wedding, which was really neat to see. I loved the way they had it decorated. They used white paper lanterns and hung them from the ceiling above the dance floor and head table area. The hall has a wire hanging from the ceiling, and they just hung all the lanterns from that. It was really neat they way they decorated. So Jeremy and I talked about it and have decided that we will go ahead and decorate the ceiling that same way. I think that I might do most all of the decorating myself. I haven’t decided 100% yet, but we still have time to figure that one out. And we are also going to string lights on the inside of the wire to add some additional “flare” to the ceiling.
Here is a picture of what I am going for:

This is also very similar, except all of the paper lanterns will be white. There will be different sizes hung at different lengths:

One other thing that Jeremy & I are trying to figure out is where to take our honeymoon. We want to do something that will provide us with allot of attractions to see. We don’t want to go and just sit on some beach; we really want to do something different and entertaining. We had always thought about going to Alaska, but in October it is too cold to go there. It is hurricane season in October, so that also limits us a little. We both would like to go somewhere that we don’t have to worry about a communication barrier, we would hate to be in a situation where we would get lost of need to talk with someone and have problems communicating. We have been talking about Ireland, but that is at the high end of our “budget” but we know that we would defiantly get our moneys worth there. But we aren’t sure. We haven’t really thought of too many other places. One place we had thought about, Merida (in Mexico), would be in an area that we would have to be worried of hurricanes. And as many hurricanes as we have been having lately, I don’t know that we should try to chance it. So we are sort of lost as to where we should go on our honeymoon. If anyone has suggestions, leave a comment or let one of us know.

For now we will just continue thinking of a honeymoon destination.

Hopefully it won’t be long and I will have more pictures to post of actual decorations for our wedding.

Have a Great week and enjoy the lovely weather. I know I am!
~Rachel