Update!

Last weekend we were able to make some progress on the house, but not as much as we were hoping because  Sunday was Easter, which meant one less day to get things done (but one awesome day spent with our families!). We did get the first coat of paint on the kitchen, which is a citrus-y orange color. I am 100% in love with it but the paint is super thin and definitely needs (at least) one more coat. Nathan also cut down a bunch of the trees that were running into the driveway, and laid down our new tile floor in the bathroom, and grouted it (still needs sealed). We also painted the living room, and put a new lighting fixture in the bathroom and kitchen, and bought the new vanity for the bathroom... okay, I guess we made more progress than I thought :) We just didn't take as many pictures this time. I will be sure to take a bunch tomorrow and Sunday. Here are our photos from this weekend!

 new bathroom lighting fixture. From Martha Stewart Living, Seal Harbor Collection at Home Depot

 New floor before grouting. Tiles from Lowes!

 Getting it done! So glad he's willing to paint around the ceiling, I HATE doing it

 Passed out :)

 This is where the fuel for all this work is coming from!

new bathroom vanity, ready to go in as soon as the floor is sealed. Also, you can see the living room color!

So that's where we are right now! Tomorrow night (Nathan works until 4, I work until 8, wahhh) and most of the day Sunday we will be finishing the bathroom and kitchen up! After that, we're ready to move in and start even more work :)

Just the beginning... of renovations!

This weekend was SO busy and flew by. Nathan and I are working so hard to make the new house "ours." A recap of our weekend...

Friday

4:00pm: closing

5:30pm: pick up my grandma and brother to take them to see the house

7:00pm: head to home depot to buy new door knobs, a new mailbox, and paint

8:00pm: take my grandma and brother home, pick up Maverick, head straight back to the house

8:30 pm: begin changing door knobs, put up new mailbox, Nathan ripped out the vanity, mirror, lighting fixture, and toilet from the bathroom

2:00am: finally going home!

Saturday

8:00am: Nathan heading to work (ouch!)

10:00am: I went to work

4:00pm: meet at the house, I picked up Maverick so he could spend the day exploring his new home. I begin painting, Nathan begins ripping the bathroom floor out

6:00pm: Nathan's finished taking out the floor, so he begins painting as well

12:30am: headed home, exhausted!

 

Sunday

12:00pm: sleep in :)

1:00pm: eat at BK, trip to Lowes and Home Depot to get more paint (we didn't buy enough) and checking out bathroom vanities. Found one we love!

2:30pm: arrive at the house, paint some more

4:00pm: Nathan parents arrive to check out the house

5:00pm: Nathan's grandparents arrive to check out the house as well

6:00pm: everyone leaves, Nathan and I head to UDF to use the bathroom since we don't have a toilet :)

6:30pm: my friend Kayla arrives to see the house, and I squeeze some free labor out of her!

8:00pm: Kayla leaves, Nathan and I continue to paint.

10:30pm: we head back to the apartment, exhausted again.

After all this work, the master bedroom and second bedroom are painted, and the bathroom is painted and ready for the new floor, lighting fixture, vanity, mirror, and towel rack! It's also ready to put the toilet back in haha. After that we just have to paint the living room and kitchen, and we're ready to move in! There is so much more to do though... we need new cabinets, counter tops, and appliances in the kitchen, an invisible fence for Mav, landscaping, expanding the driveway in the back, and have lots of decorating to do, among other things... I can't wait! :)

excited to go see his new home!

front view

back view

first thing in the fridge! haha

handy man!

Maverick is a little helper :)

Bathroom before

so glad to get that thing out.

gross! That was behind & under the vanity.

This was hiding behind the mirror. Also, I'm SO glad that lighting fixture is gone.

floor is up

bathroom progress. The paint color turned out so pretty!

2nd bedroom (office) before

hard working woman!

2nd bedroom progress. I need a new photo because the bad lighting here makes it look yellow when it's really a mint green color.

Master bedroom before

master bedroom progress

living room before

kitchen before (with my brother haha)

he's just as exhausted as we were!

Closing Is Tomorrow!

It is currently 2:45am, and I'm sitting awake in the living room on the computer. I am so excited I can't sleep! Nathan and I are closing on the house tomorrow (well, technically today), and we're more than ready! Our closing date was set for March 28, which was YESTERDAY. If I have any advice to offer about buying a house, it is to steer clear of FHA loans. Seriously, they needed a written explanation for every deposit in our account. Ridiculous. We had to provide bank statements from the last three months. No biggie... except that in the last three months we celebrated Christmas, my birthday, and Nathan's birthday, resulting in a much higher than normal rate of cash & check deposits. (hey friends & family members... I'm not complaining. Keep sharing the wealth. *wink*) Not to mention I babysit, and Nathan sells stuff on Craigslist and works on other people's vehicles on the side... It just amounted to a ridiculous number of small deposits once it was added up, which meant I was asking nearly every person who gifted us small amounts of cash for all of those three holidays to write a formal letter explaining just why they gave us money. Everything should have been worked out long before our closing date, but every time we offered an explanation on one thing, they questioned another, so we prepared another explanation, and the cycle continued until yesterday morning when we had finally hit whatever magic number they were looking for (or they got bored with ruining our lives). I can just picture a sixty year old white guy in an overpriced suit glaring at their computer studying our deposits, and deciding that we are clearly lying about every dollar in our account and are instead hard core drug dealers. That has to be a MUCH more reasonable explanation. "There's no way two college students with jobs could possibly attain money in a simple way... No. It just can't be. They are obviously trying to hide something and made large deposits directly after Christmas and their birthdays just to trick me. Boom. Drug dealers. GENIUS! Time to go count my designer suits while fanning myself with $100 bills. Later I might kick a puppy and blog about how only those who can afford heath insurance are worthy of living." note: I highly doubt that is anything close to a real underwriter... but that's about how much I hate them right now.

We get the keys at closing, but are going to wait a few weeks to move in. Our lease doesn't end until May 31st, so we have quite a bit of time. Since we have two months, we're going to go ahead and paint before we move our furniture in, and  renovate the bathroom. Technically we could just pay out our lease so new people could move in to our apartment right away, but the new owner of our apartment complex (which is NKU!) pissed me off by charging us $40 a month pet rent for the last two months, when pets have always been free and they knew we only had four months left on our lease. There's no way I'm going to let them make double rent for two months. (Another tip... do not move to Campus View Apartments in Highland Heights, KY, or any apartments at all owned by NKU which is basically all in Highland Heights since they bought them all. They are also now charging $30 a month for water for a one bedroom apartment, when it used to be included in rent! Ridiculous.)

I am going to take pictures of our apartment now and then when it's empty so I can post before and after photos! It's nothing special but I am proud of our first little home. I'm happy to get away from this apartment complex, but a little sad to leave the actual apartment. We have made some memories here.

Time to make new memories in our new house!

Our Wedding!

Our wedding seems like a logical place to start a blog about our life. I am very happy in my marriage, but I have to say that my wedding was definitely the best day of my life. Just looking at the pictures brings back the best memories! I had a lot of fun picking out the photos to use for this post.

Our wedding took place at 5:30pm at Nathan's grandparents' lake in Alexandria, KY. It was a beautiful sunny day on June 26th, 2010. Everyone always tells me it was a really hot day, and I even see sweat on my face in the photos, but I don't remember the heat! I guess it was just the last thing on my mind. My grandpa walked me down the aisle. My uncle let us borrow his corvette to drive to the ceremony, and I remember as we pulled up I all of a sudden felt like I was going to throw up. I kept repeating "I don't feel good, I really don't feel good" until it was time to walk down the aisle! Then the adrenaline kicked in. My heart was racing for quite a while through the ceremony. Seeing Nathan's face made me feel a little more comfortable. I just couldn't wait to kiss him! :)

Taking photos afterwards was so fun! At first it was a little awkward, but then we got more comfortable in front of the camera. We absolutely loved our photographer, Wendy Burk.



We had our reception at Shimmers in Covington, KY. I remember my grandma went with me to see it the first time and thought it was terrible! It did look a little rough on the inside (not bad, but not what you would expect for a wedding reception) but I knew it would look totally different once all our stuff was in there. We made all the centerpieces ourselves!  Quite a bit of our decor was actually DIY. We shared our first dance as a married couple to "I'll Be" by Edwin McCain. We had so much fun dancing the night away.

I am so lucky to have such a supportive family. They helped me turn my wedding day into everything I wanted it to be. Nathan got everything he wanted too, because his only goal was to end the day married! I am also very thankful to be a part of Nathan's family. This day was the beginning to a very bright future. There are so many exciting things ahead, and I can't wait to see where life takes us. ♥

If anyone is interested, here are a few links to the services we used:

Party Pleasers DJ & Lighting They seriously transformed the venue for our reception with the lighting, and the DJ was very interactive and kept the party going all night!

Wendy Burk Photography I am SO happy with our wedding photos. She did a great job of capturing such important and amazing memories.

Shimmers Ballroom It turned out to be a great venue once it was transformed, and cost considerably less than every other venue we looked at.

Sweetwater Bakehouse Becca from Sweetwater Bakehouse did an amazing job on our cake. It was perfect! Everything we asked for.

Fassler Florist Our flowers were amazing! They had such a huge selection and were able to work with us to make sure we got exactly what we wanted at a price we could afford.

ProArt Music We had a string duo at the wedding to play music during and after the ceremony. They did a great job!

Who, Where, What, When, Why?

For my first blog post, I thought it would be a good idea to give an idea of who we are, and a general snapshot of our life!

Who: My name is Chelsea McIntosh and I'm married to the love of my life, Nathan. We have a cat (Macie) and a dog (Maverick, pit bull mix). They're our only babies for now! I am 20 years old, Nathan is 22. We are college students, and very excited for our future!

Where: We currently live in an apartment in Highland Heights, KY. We just bought a house in Florence, KY and are so anxious to move in and make it ours. We can't wait to close in 37 days! Here's to hoping everything goes smoothly until then.

What: I plan on blogging about our lives in general... school, work, relationships, ups, downs, as well as moving and the renovations on our new house, and whatever comes after that!

When: We were married on June 26th, 2010. We moved in together for the first time on June 1st, 2010 into our current apartment. We have been extremely busy with work and school since then, and still are! We try hard to make time for each other and build our relationship.

Why: The number one reason I am starting this blog is a selfish one. I am doing it for my own documentation of our life, and since technology is definitely here to stay, see it as a kind of "keepsake." I am also doing it to share these wonderful moments with our family and friends, and anyone else who finds us interesting!

Here are some fun pictures of us, as well as our animals!

This is from our first day in our apartment together!

When Maverick was a puppy, July 2010

Maverick and Macie now. Mav got so big!

That is our life in a nutshell! I am excited to write about all of the things we've done so far, as well as the things to come.