The Smiths: And all through the house, not a creature was stirring.....Not even a mouse.

Snuggled up on my couch this afternoon in my new living room, soaking in the scenery. We are finally pretty settled in our new house. It's been almost a month and the place looks clean, and decorated for Christmas and quiet....well, except for the constant banging and nailing and loud hum of heavy duty construction equipment next door. But whatever.

It's so exciting to have things put in their place, organized, clean, tidy. I am obsessed with how much space we have. I still have kitchen cabinets that are empty and I have unpacked all my kitchen boxes. I have a cabinet just for wine, champagne and martini/ cocktail glasses, which seems ridiculous. I am loving having more than 6 cabinets total like we did in our apartment and loving even more the pantry and drawer space in the bathrooms since we had neither in the apartment. I feel so blessed to have this beautiful house but I am also so incredibly proud of Taylor and myself. We busted our butts to pay off all of our debt in our first year of marriage. We worked so hard to build up a good savings account and make our credit fantastic and we worked overtime at both of our jobs to create the opportunity to have this house. I know we have heard alot of people comment "oh that is NOT a starter house." No it isn't, we could have bought a starter house last year but we didn't want that. We wanted to wait and work and get the house we can wanted, the house we will stay in for a long time, build a family in, create memories in and live in. It still doesn't feel real that we live here. We keep saying to each other, "when are the people that really live here coming back from vacation?" it feels like we are house sitting except there are no children or pets to watch. So I'll stop talking now and show pictures of the rooms mostly finished.