What We've Been Up To...

As most of you know, my sister Amy left on her mission. She left at the beginning of December to serve in the Peru Arequipa Mission. She is in the MTC in Lima right now. It was hard to say goodbye, but we are so proud of her and know she will be a great missionary!

We had a wonderful Christmas! (Except for the part that I had to work on Christmas day.) Chris and I celebrated our Christmas on Christmas Eve. Santa surprised me with a foosball table and a new comfy office chair. Chris got an I-Home and I made him a cushion for the window seat in our bedroom. We had a lot of fun spending time with our family over the holidays.

We had a sleepover with our niece and nephews over the holidays. We had an ice cream party, let them get in the jacuzzi and watch a movie, drank hot cocoa, played games, read stories, stayed up late, and took them sledding the next day. We had a blast with them!

This is a picture of what the table looked like when I got home from work the other night. It had been an awful day and I didn't get home until after 8. When I got home the table was set and Chinese music was playing. I got a phone call from Chris saying that we would be having some special guests over and that I had time to shower and get ready and we'd be eating around 9. Chris showed up with food from our favorite Chinese take-out place in Sandy, the Asian Star. The special guests he invited over were my parents and my brother. It was really fun and a nice end to a hard day. I just love my husband!

Our New Home

We are finally in our new home! As you can see I haven't kept up with the blog for quite some time now. The main reason being that all of my spare time has been consumed with building our house. After a couple years of looking for homes and making several offers that fell through, we decided to build. It was very time consuming and a lot of hard work, but it was all worth it. Our parents were nice enough to let us live with them the past couple of years, which is what made this a possibility for us. We really enjoyed the time we got to spend with them, but we are very excited to have a place of our own now. We started building our home at the end of May and we moved in this October. We've spent the last few months getting unpacked, decorating, and enjoying the holidays in our home. So, here are the pictures of whole process:

We broke ground at the end of May. We met with an architect and were able to draw up our plans with him. It was so fun to see our house starting to go up.

Our Uncle Tom helped us with the electrical work. He taught us how to run the wire, so we were able to do a lot of it ourselves. I did sustain an injury to my head, but luckily no stitches were needed. Our family was great to come and help us out.

Once the drywall was up it starting feeling more like a house.

Chris was able to help our contractor, Paul, out with some of the finish carpentry. In one of the bedrooms we did something called "bat and board" that ended up looking really nice.

Chris and I spent several hours at the paint store debating on our colors. Then we would come back to the house with the small cans of paint and test them out on the walls. We made a few changes and are happy with how all of our paint colors turned out.

Our house was finished at the end of September and then we just had to pass inspection. We had three final inspections before we passed and we were able to move in the first weekend in October. We appreciated all the family and friends that helped us move in.

We are so happy to be in our new home. Hopefully I'll have a little more time now that we're settled to keep the blog updated. We love having visitors over, so if any of you ever want to stop by just give us a call.