The updating process

We bought our house for many reasons, but the wall colors were not one of those reasons. We have made strides toward improving said wall colors but seriously we have to paint the ENTIRE house and its taking awhile. Today I primed the dining room and entry in an effort to move forward on removing some of the crazy house colors. Here are pictures of the dining room (please note the partially painted ceiling) and entry when the previous owner stilled lived here.

Its amazing what even a little primer can do to improve a room (and ceiling)!

Another room in progress is the half bath - here is a before and current.

And just for funsies here are a few other before and afters.

The hallway - before is one of four shades of pink in the house. After - a soft white.

The toilet room in the master bath - before a lovely pink wallpaper. After - light gray paint.

Making it our own, one Saturday at a time.

Yesterday was hot. And, in the midst of that terrible heat, we decided to mulch and finish putting stones around the beds in the front of the house. Afterward we made a deal that we would not do any more large outside landscaping projects until it cools down (likely November). Despite being a dirty, hot mess of a couple after yesterday's work, we are happy with how the front yard has turned out. We have a few more things we want to do eventually but here are some before and after photos for you!

Before

After

We tore out the ivy bed in March, then Chip installed the stone for the large bed. Yesterday we put all the other stone around the beds, and filled all of them with mulch. We will probably add a bench to the large bed and maybe some potted plants - the tree roots are so close to the top of the ground that we can't do much with that space. We also plan to sod once it gets cooler.

90 years old

My grandfather turned 90 yesterday. It is difficult to describe how important he is to me but here are some of my favorite things about him. He doesn't eat chicken because as a child he watched his mother kill and de-feather too many for dinner. He loves to eat cornbread mixed in milk for dinner (who doesn't??). He is frank but still gentle. He gives the best hugs. He went to University of Houston and is SOOOO excited that Chip and I are down in Houston. When I was deciding on a major, he asked me if I had considered engineering. He loves Chip and besides me, Chip is the only other person who refers to him as Pally (we add a -lly to the end of Pa). I love listening to Pa talk about his family and its so interesting in fact that there is a documentary about some of them!

I was incredibly lucky to grow up in the same city as my maternal grandparents and they both mean the absolute world to me.

One month!!

Its been one month since we got married! :)

Getting settled

One of the best things about moving to Houston is settling into a home. We both have lived in so many places over the past 7 years so to finally have a home together is truly a treasure. Of course, getting settled into our home takes time (and money)! But we have accomplished quite a bit over the past few weeks. We found homes for most of our wedding presents, started putting up art (including two parallel shelves on a huge wall in the den), put up curtains in our bedroom, and devised tentative plans for some bigger projects including our half bathroom. And now that we've really made some great headway on the house, I have to get back to the dissertation (bleh). Breaks from dissertation will be used to paint all the mismatched trim and doors in the house - for whatever reason, the bottom trim in every room is white, while the doors and top trim are an awful off-white.

And we are still cooking of course. We use epicurious.com frequently and made a great pork dish recently. See it here. I added sides of Mexican rice, recipe from Rick Bayless, and chili rellanos.

We also tried a quick week-day meal from RealSimple that was great too - we added a yellow zucchini from a local farm to the couscous salad and it turned out quite well.

Next on the to-bake list

I (Liz) have been out of town for a few days but look forward to heading home tomorrow. And then finding some time to bake this yummy looking cake. One of our neighbors looked after the house while we were getting married and I think this will make a nice thank you!

We are food lovers

This may be a little known fact to some but others know that we love some food and we both love cooking. We have what I will call "specialties" in cooking. For example, of all types of cooking, I love baking best while Chip seems to prefer using knives (in whatever cooking way possible) and cooking meat (grilling, etc). He really wants a smoker but we're holding off for now on that one. Well we received an awesome surprise when the mailman dropped off all of the 14 days of held mail the day after Memorial Day. Some of our most fabulous friends, Betsy & Jose, sent us a wedding day present. I know, it was super thoughtful and amazing. And what was it? It was Frank Stitt's Southern Table: Recipes and Gracious Traditions from Highlands Bar and Grill.

The short story is Betsy and Jose live in Birmingham, which surprisingly has a fabulous restaurant scene. During one visit, they took me to one of Frank Stitt's restaurants and I had a fancy hamburger with a fried egg on top (yum). And thus the amazing book which I quickly read from cover to cover. I don't think I mentioned that I love cookbooks, especially ones with stories and pictures. So anyways, the point is that we tackled a number of recipes out of the book this weekend: fried green tomatoes, skirt steak with watermelon and red onion relish, and lattice-topped blackberry cobbler with blackberries from a local farm. And they were all amazing. We can't wait to try more. Much thanks to Betsy and Jose for the awesome book!

Blackberry cobbler and the skirt steak and fried green tomatoes.
(forgot to take a picture of the relish)

Busy weekend

Well we (really Liz) decided that the garage needed organizing. See below for the explanation of why this was necessary.





Thanks to some help from Ikea and Lowes, we got to cleaning and organizing, despite the ridiculous heat, humidity, and mosquitoes. This will likely not be the last time I mention any of those three Texas terrors. On a side note - we use mosquito spray b/c the buggers are so bad but they still find ways to get around it. For example, yesterday I found one in the lining of my shorts - awesome. Back to garage organizing. Here are the after pictures. We still have to get one of those giant toolbox things for Chip's tools that remain in the dining room but those things are a tad bit pricey. So tools will stay in the dining room for now. But here is the almost finished product and thanks to Chip's hard work and some help from Liz, it looks great!

Just getting started

Our first post just to get this thing going. We (mostly Liz) will be using the blog to update our friends and family on our crazy adventures down here in Texas. We are currently in the process of organizing and putting everything away. This weekend has a to-do list like no other. Possible projects for the weekend: organize garage so that all the tools in the dining room can be moved out, organize closets, yard work, etc. So who knows what we'll actually do but we know it will be interesting.