What We've Been Up To Lately

Wow! Brent & I have been so busy lately!  I have completely finished up my classes that I needed to become an official CPA!!!  Now I'm just waiting on the grades to be official so I can send the state my transcript.  We also finally had our first big grill out/get together with our friends at our new house.  It was a lot of fun, and our house is perfect for entertaining!


We are also really trying to work away at our "To Do Before Baby Carter" list.  And we are really making progress!  Brent got our deck stained last week and I finally got around to finishing up the painting that needed to be done and got stuff hung in our master bed/bath.  We also finally found some curtains for the living room, which was about to stress me out!  It is so hard to find curtains that tie black & brown together.  I had previously attempted the Pinterest paint-striped black/white curtains, but Brent told me they looked like jailhouse uniforms so I decided not to go with those! 


Now we are beginning a kitchen remodel as my reward for becoming a CPA.  We will be replacing the flooring, backsplash, countertops, and appliances...so basically everything besides the cabinets...over the next month.  I am also having one new cabinet put in to match the others in a spot where I think it needs one and a new door made for another.  All the decisions are about to kill me!  We are trying to get something nice, but also something that will last for a long time and hopefully not go out of style too quickly.

So many choices!!

We have picked out granite countertops.  I was happy with Formica, but Brent said we might as well get something that will last, and granite is definitely made for that!  Brent asked the man selling it how long it should last, and he said "well, it is already a million years old, so I would say another million or so!"  We tried to pick a pattern that is very versatile and not too patterned or trendy.  We ended up with Tropic Brown as shown below.

Then we had to decide on flooring.  There is currently tile down, but it is all cracked and broken up, so that made me lean towards something besides tile.  Brent wanted to continue the hardwood throughout the kitchen, but I wasn't crazy about that idea.  So we decided on Permastone tile, which looks like tile, but is more of a laminate type flooring (but much stronger and pretty than most laminate).  We couldn't decide between two colors, so we took them home and decided to go with the darker since our cabinets are light colored.

We found a tile backsplash at Home Depot after shopping around for awhile.  We ended up buying a square of each type we liked so we could bring them home and see them next to our cabinets and granite & flooring samples.  I couldn't find the tile online, but the one we chose is the one at the bottom left of the picture above.


And we are still trying to decide on appliances.  We knew we wanted black, but the fridge has been the hardest thing to decide on.  I picked out a dishwasher pretty quickly because I knew I wanted one with the buttons that don't show from the front and with an adjustable top rack.  And the ovens are pretty much the same (as long as it was a flat top).  But the fridge has been difficult.  There are so many options and sizes!  I thought I wanted just a normal fridge in the old crinkle style because I had a side-by-side at our old house and hated it!  It felt like there was no room inside, but the thing took up a ton of space, which is limited in the space we have for it.  And it had the flat finish on the front, but that drove me nuts because it was constantly covered in fingerprints!  So now I am considering the french door refrigerators, but they don't come in the crinkle finish, so I am just about to pull my hair out!  We have to make a decision soon though, because the countertop guys want the appliances in so they can fit to them perfectly!