Murray

Murray, or Mur-Monster as she's affectionately known, is our crazy mutt. I picked her out from the Kent County Animal Shelter when Ted and I had only been dating for about a month. I had been thinking about getting a dog for a few months, since I was living alone and missed having a dog to come home to. 

How could I resist that poor little innocent puppy? I signed all the paperwork and she had to stay an extra couple days so they could spay and microchip her. I picked her up on a Friday after work so I would have all weekend to spend with her. Ted was excited to have a dog to play with again since his parent's moved away with his family dog Baylee.

So how did Murray get her name? I had been looking at another male dog that was adopted when I came back for a second look. My middle name is Marie and my dad used to always call me Murray for a nickname. We used to watch Mad About You when I was a kid and they had a dog with that name too. So when I found a female dog instead of a male, I decided she was a Murray anyway and the name stuck. 

Look at that little monster face. She's probably scheming what she can chew up next. Oh yeah, Mur's a chewer all right. We've lost a couple remote controls, shoes, our living room rug, countless dog toys, catalogs, and she's even gnawed on a few windowsills. I leave a snowbrush in the backseat of my car just to give her something to do on car rides. Because she freaks out in the car too. She's a little demon in disguise. 

That would be one rug, one catalog and one pillow down for the count.

Yeah, we know your tricks Murray. 

One thing I was very happy about was the fact that I was allowed to bring her to work with me. She was only six months old at the time and still had a couple accidents at home once in a while. We tried crate training her, but the little houdini kept escaping and making a mess, so we gave up on that. Luckily, my office was full of dog lovers, so Mur stayed in my office with a baby gate if I needed to keep her contained. I could let her out whenever she needed to go, and I could take her for a walk on my lunch break. 

She's telling me she needs more water in this one.

After about six months of her going to work with me everyday, I quit my old job and got a new one where I wouldn't be able to bring her with me anymore. She was old enough by then that she was fine staying home all day, and I'm able to go home for my lunch break now to let her out. We found out she has some pretty bad food allergies, so after a switch to hypo-allergenic (EXPENSIVE) dog food, she's doing wonderfully. 

Little monster knows she's not allowed on the bed, but couldn't care less if she gets caught.

Ted saw this picture of Buddy, my parent's dog and called it his "Glamour Shot." Haha. Buddy can't help it he's a pretty boy. I took this picture when we first got him back in 2007.

When we got our engagement pictures taken, we brought Murray along because she's part of our little family. She was really jealous of Buddy's picture, so now they're even lol. 

Murray might be terrible to walk on a leash, chew up umpteen rolls of toilet paper and terrorize the squirrel population in our neighborhood, but for some reason we love her anyway. She is very affectionate, playful and sweet natured otherwise, so apparently that's enough to make up for her craziness. Let's just say we watch a lot of Dog Whisperer.

My First House

August 18th, 2009 I became a first time home owner. I was 23 at the time, had been living at home saving money for a few years and when the first time home buyer tax credit came out, I knew I had to go for it. I had an idea of where I wanted to live, so I started my search online. There are some really great real estate websites out there. I had three favorites that I bookmarked and checked frequently.

This one is probably my favorite. They seem to have all the features I like all in one place.

Next up, a local site that focuses on Grand Rapids, MI area real estate www.grar.com

Finally, www.zillow.com (very similar to trulia)

Another tool I couldn't do without was the street view function from google maps. I was able to pull up the addresses from google and "drive" down the street to get a feeling of the neighborhood. While a house might look decent online, using this search would allow me to see if the house next door looked like a meth lab or if there were run down apartments across the street. Bing maps has a great birds eye view feature on their map system that I also loved. That one allows you to see the backyards and an aerial view of the neighborhood. Using a combo of the two, I was able to really narrow down the list of houses I wanted to see in person. 

Next up, I found a realtor. I got a referral from my best friend Ashley, who used him when she and her husband bought a house a couple years prior. He was able to refer me to a good mortgage broker, and between the two of them, I had a great experience. 

Well...as great as dealing with a foreclosure can be I guess. Because in the end that's what I ended up choosing. We visited a total of four houses and I just got a good feeling about this one.

(this was actually taken after we put in new windows, but you get the idea)

I loved the friendly feeling of the neighborhood, the tree lined street, and the house was a complete dump, but had definite potential. It had no plumbing, a bathroom missing a ceiling and a long list of other problems, but my dad said we could handle it, so I put in an offer.

And a counter offer, and another counter offer. And finally the bank accepted. Getting my mortgage approved on the other hand was a whole other issue. Because of the ridiculous amount of problems with the house, the appraisal came in lower than the selling price of the house. I actually even had to scrape and paint the old wood siding, caulk the window glazing, and put up a drop ceiling in the half bath to get the mortgage approved at all. Even though we were planning to rip out all of that crap and replace it anyway! Long story short, I  wound up having to put more money on the down payment than I was planning, to drop the total I would need put on the mortgage. Because I was going to get the tax credit back, it all wound up being ok, but it was a huge pain in the rear and took a couple months to make it all happen. 

Moral of the story is foreclosures can be a great deal if you're willing to put up with a lot of red tape and aren't on a major time schedule. If it weren't for my mortgage broker and realtor helping me out I think I would have gone crazy. I would gladly recommend them if you're planning a move any time soon. 

Wedding Planning 101

I only had slightly less than 6 months to plan my wedding. Some people thought we were crazy, but I actually liked having that extra pressure. It forced me to make decisions and not falter back and forth on things too much. That said, it was difficult at first for me to narrow down a direction I wanted to go with our scheme because I found so many amazing things online and in magazines that I wanted to incorporate. 

If I had a million dollars I would have hired a wedding planner/coordinator. Planning everything ourselves on such a short time frame while working full time was definitely no small feat. We were fortunate that Ted had a month off before the wedding and starting residency, and I put him to work! He was extremely helpful in making phone calls, sending emails and tracking things down like our reception location and corresponding with our pastor, DJ, photographer, etc.

First things first - use The Knot  for everything. We used the guest list, budget tracker, checklist, and wedding website features and would have been much more stressed without them. Especially the checklist. They give you this massive list broken up by the months to go until your wedding date. Each month there are tasks to be completed like "hire a DJ", "choose color scheme", "send first deposit in for reception", etc. They get even more specific toward the end like "have final dress fitting" and "book wedding night hotel room." 

One of my favorite features was the idea image gallery. You can search by flowers, cakes, decorations, invitations, fashion, etc. to see hundreds of thousands of inspiration photos. I also really liked that you could search by color and then save your favorites to a folder. 

These were some of the ideas that I ended up actually using as a basis for our own designs. I spent a lot of time looking through these galleries because everything was so pretty.

Besides The Knot, I was hooked on several wedding blogs that had ridiculously amazing ideas. First up is Style Me Pretty which has a flood of real life weddings posted every day. I would literally check it like three times a day and drool over the photography and the extravagance. Some people have waaaaaaaaaaaay bigger budgets than we did! But it's fun to look at anyway.


Another one I loved was Grey Likes Weddings, which shows real weddings, engagement photo ideas, and lots and lots of cool products, giveaways, and fun ideas for cakes, flowers, etc. If I would have had a fall wedding, I love this pic below!

So many cool ideas here. Besides these two, I stalked photographer's blogs as well - especially local ones. It was cool to see familiar buildings and places transformed into wedding wonderlands. Here are a few links to some of my favorites.

Kristen Holly Studios

Harrison Studio

Kristen Taylor Photography

There are so many more resources out there it can get kind of mind boggling. I have a foot tall stack of magazines in my basement too, which I looked through hundreds of times. Wedding design and Interior design kind of go hand in hand in certain ways, so the whole process was so much fun for me. After the big day was over, I kind of went through a little withdrawal for a while! But the bright side is now I have more time for craft and house projects again. Oh yeah, and my hubby :)

Wishlist

I always have a running wishlist of house items and clothes, books, etc. that I put off buying until I see a really good sale or have a birthday gift card to spend or something. Right now there are a few things I would love to buy if I could justify a shopping spree. 

 First up is this rug from West Elm. I love the subtle dot pattern and it seems pretty durable. This would go in my living room to replace the one that got chewed up when our dog Murray was a puppy (Murray is a whole other story!!). 

 Next up are these boots. I have dreams about these boots lol. They are Frye Melissa's and sooo expensive and I never EVER spend this kind of money on myself for clothes or shoes, but my thought is that they would last forever, therefore my cost per wear would be super reasonable right? I do have a pretty decent sized credit from Amazon right now because of selling my old iPhone back, but even so they would still be crazytown expensive. Sigh.

I have wanted a digital SLR camera for several years now and have always had too many other priorities that got in the way. I've had a few Canon point and shoot cameras in the past and have been very impressed by the photo quality. This is at the top of my Christmas list for next year - we're still paying for our wedding/honeymoon this year, so there's not a lot of extra to go around at this point.

Ted and I have a trip to Chicago planned for next month (for my birthday weekend!). I've been to Chicago at least once a year for the past several years, but usually always for work. I can't wait to go as a tourist and do whatever I want to do. Including shopping! I have a couple other City Walks box sets that have been a fun way to explore new cities. I have one for Seattle and one for Vancouver currently and would love to own the whole set someday. What you do is pick a card from the box for the area you want to explore and they map out a route for you to walk that includes fun stops and points of interest along the way. We found a really great restaurant and chocolate factory in Seattle this way on our last trip.

One last thing - I own several other books from Sunset publishing and they are all wonderful. I have the one on color, design, kitchens and bathrooms so far, and this is the newest one in the series. I used to subscribe to Sunset magazine when I found a great deal on Amazon, but they have a lot more on travel and cooking in the mag than they do on interiors, so I let it go.

So there you have a small sampling from my current wishlist. If I break down and buy anything, I'll post my reviews. Happy Thursday - I'm DVR'ing The Office tonight. Still on the fence about this season though...not as funny as it used to be, but not terrible.

Pinterest and other obsessions

I finally joined Pinterest a couple months ago. I'm HOOKED. I've always been a sucker for design magazines, and Pinterest is like a free magazine that I can look at whenever I want to. I also love being able to search by a specific category or "Fireplaces" for example. I've also had fun with the fashion and craft idea boards and know I'm only scratching the surface of what's really out there. 

The fact that I can tag things I find on my own is really great too. I used to copy and paste idea pictures into a word document, but then forget where they came from if I needed to reference them. Here are a few pictures I've found recently that I love.

  You can find ideas for practically anything on this site. Gardening, cooking, art, photography, you name it. So much fun, but a warning is that it's soooo addictive!

Something else I've been loving lately is thenest.com
I used their sister site The Knot when I was planning my wedding and loved all the helpful features there. The nest is fun because you can do anything from meal planning to decorating advice, to help with figuring out mortgages and health issues. I love the message boards. Seriously you can post almost any question you can think of and someone will usually know the answer. I was able to learn the best way to go about selling my old iPhone, where to find coupon codes for online stores, got a couple book recommendations and more. The Nest also has a fun blog and ideas for decorating and a huge recipe section. Another place I can kill time with no problem.

So those are a couple of my favorite places on the internet right now. Enjoy!