Way back in December of 2009 I posted a photo tour of our first married apartment (reading through the comments I was amazed to see how many of you have been reading regularly since that time!), and I’ve been wanting to do another tour since we moved, but I only wanted to do it on a day when I could clean the house first. Though both TH and I are relatively neat and clean, sometimes the clutter and dust builds up and we don’t make the time to get rid of it right away. What you’ll see below isn’t anything close to magazine worthy, but it’s wonderful to walk around the apartment on freshly vacuumed carpet and not see any clutter built up in random piles around the rooms. I learned a good lesson after cleaning this weekend though, pregnant women should not be cleaning the bathroom. The cleaners I used to make that room sparkle have left me feeling rather sick, and so bathroom duty is officially up to That Husband for a few weeks!

On to the tour of our second apartment!

The Living Room

I think we’re going to sell the bookcase/entertainment center when we (possibly) move this fall. I love it, but it’s not something I want to have with a toddler around.

Our couch recently broke, rendering the middle cushion unusable. TH and I don’t have a lot of time to just sit together and watch TV, but when we do I always feel a bit sad that we have to sit on opposite ends.

This is my favorite part of the room. The assortment of frames along the fireplace are from Goodwill, as well as the silhouette diamonds in the center.

The kitchen/dining room.

We don’t have a lot of storage in this kitchen, but I love how open the space is.

Baby and I made an appearance in this shot!

The bare bones little office.

I see pictures of the office spaces some women have created but I’m just not sure where you keep all the cords and other necessities to make it look that way! I’ve always wanted to decorate it a bit more but the “household” portion of our budget never built up to the point where that was possible. By the time we move we’ll likely be done co-sleeping and we’ll have to give the second room up to baby.

See how bare it is? Blah!

The bathroom.

My favorite room, the bedroom.

As you can see this room has the most color, and the most decor. I’m going to work to always try to make our bedroom my favorite room in the house, as it helps me sleep better knowing I love the space I’m in.

The closet is so huge that we can’t even fill up the clothing racks with our wardrobes combined.

Someday I will get some yellow embellished froufy pillows for our bed. Someday.

My favorite decor int he whole house. A horseshoe from my grandma, my favorite childhood photo of TH, our wedding invite, a purse knit by my grandma, the flower I wore in my hair for our wedding, a family heirloom, and a painting of my wedding dress. I painted the trio of frames below the shelf myself and they are much too bright, but I can’t really see myself fixing that until we move into our next apartment. I don’t embark on craft projects very often.

As you can see, what little baby stuff we do have is still put away, and so I’m preparing myself for things to become nice and cluttered with the joys of parenthood very soon.  We should find out within the next few weeks (months?) if we are moving away from Dallas or staying put for another year.

I made it home! Wait, is this still my home? Do I have two homes now, one in Washington and one in Texas?

I guess the best way to say it is that I made it to my childhood home. I don’t know about you, but I always find the experience to be a bit magical. My parents have lived in the same place for over 15 years now (pictures of the quadruple-wide they live in are coming I promise, it’s pretty amazing what my mom has done with two trailers stuck together!), and I love wandering excitedly through the house to see the changes they’ve made since I was last here.

Via Annpar on Flickr

This time I found a Christmas tree (waiting expectantly for ornaments to be hung as mom agreed to wait for me to get home to do it), my childhood bedroom filled with photos and trinkets I love to revisit, my wedding dress (still needs to be sent off to be cleaned), homemade apple cider from our neighbors, a cupboard filled with Trader Joes chocolate, a new car for my mom (I love pressing all the different buttons to see what they do), and

PUPPIES!

I’m not really a dog person, but I do love baby animals of every kind. In the country dogs are allowed to roam pretty free and so when our female German Sheperd goes in heat mutt puppies are usually the result. My mom doesn’t welcome the responsibility of caring for them, but my sister and I get excited about little wriggly bodies to play with whenever they are born. We’ll give them all away (or they will get stolen like last time) and the cycle will repeat itself in a year or two. Tomorrow I’m going to head out into the snow with my camera to give you a little peek at their cuteness.

I’m sure there are many other things waiting around here for me to discover, not including the Christmas presents my mom is so excited about giving to TH and I. I always love to come home and explore the small changes, but Christmas has made the experience twice as bewitching. It’s my first official Christmas spent in my childhood home as a married woman, and the only one I’ll spend without kids in tow. I hope baby feels lucky to be a part of this family, I know I most certainly am.

What’s your favorite part of visiting your childhood home?

1. Throw away your crap before you move, not after.

2. Don’t come down with CMS* right before you move.

3. Humble thyself and call friends/fellow church members/family and ask for their help in the move and the cleaning. They will in turn, one day, ask the same thing of you, but multiple group moves are much better than a move attempted alone.

4. When you are touring new apartments, take a glance at your cell phone signal when you move from room to room. No matter how much you love the layout, it might not be worth it if you can’t stretch out on your bed or do the dishes while you talk to your mom.

5. Arrange to have the internet guy show up to do the installation the day of the move, not almost a week after.

6. Make friends with people who have a pickup truck.  (Of course we aren’t your friends just for your truck M&Y!)

7. Stop buying everything except meat, dairy, fruit&veggies several months before you go in an attempt to lighten your food stores.

8. Hire movers. They are so worth the money.

I know a few of you have moved lately. What am I missing from this list?

*Convenient Moving Sickness

Want to see our new apartment? AKA the thing in my life wearing out my husband and causing me to ignore my inbox like never before (if you have emailed me lately about something pertaining to Jenna Cole I promise I will get to you as soon as I possibly can, husband has been wonderful about taking most of this move on by himself but I do need to help him as much as I can).

We decided to move because we found a place with more light (light is very important to me), more storage, a bit more square feet, and an attached garage all for about the same price we are paying right now. Also moving helps purge all of the built up crap we have been hanging on to unnecessarily for the past 11 months.

Let’s start the home tour in the kitchen, my favorite room in the place. I fell in love with the open space (light, so much light!) and even though we don’t actually host any parties I like to pretend this would now be a good place to do so because of the way it would foster movement between rooms. I hope that hanging the pots from the ceiling looks elegant, not cluttered…

The dining room. We haven’t decided yet if we think the mirrors are cool or strange. Any suggestions on how we can spruce them up a little bit?

The living room that I love so much. I’m going to use up some wedding gift cards and go to Lowe’s or Home Depot and get some porch furniture so we can eat out on the deck at night, and I’m going to go yard sale/thrift hunting for funny trinkets to line the top of the fireplace with.

The front door has a coat closet, which means no more keeping the coats in the office. Hooray! And board games can be stored away in there as well.

Why did I take a picture of this particular closet? Because I’ve claimed it as my photography closet and I’m thrilled to be getting all of my very expensive equipment off the ground.

We can’t agree what this room is. I call is the baby’s room. He calls it the office. TH can have his way… for now.

The bathroom, with a big huge tub and two sinks! TH is awful at sharing the sink when we get ready at the same time (didn’t spend hours in the bathroom with a sister like I did I guess) so Sundays will go much easier from now on I think.


The master bedroom. Not really much to talk about until we get our stuff inside.

Yay for enormous closets! Of course we will stuff it to the brim very easily.

I’ll give you another tour once everything is put away, put up, and organized (right now it doesn’t really seem like that could ever happen!). A big thank you to TH for doing most of the work during this move. I really picked a good one when I snatched him up.

P.S.-He recently found out about a promotion at work, meaning we are officially staying on in Dallas for another year and that he kills it at his job, something I already knew from all of his late nights. I love him dearly for the sacrifices for our family.

Have you seen this article? It made me so happy when I saw it on my friend Andrea’s blog.

“Pre-rinsing dishes is a big mistake,” said John Dries, a mechanical engineer and the owner of Dries Engineering, an appliance design consulting company in Louisville, Ky. “People assume that the dishwasher will perform better if you put in cleaner dishes, and that’s not true. Just scrape. Pre-rinsing with hot water is double bad, because you’re pumping water and electricity down the drain.”

It’s actually triple bad, according to Mike Edwards, a senior dishwasher design engineer at BSH Home Appliances in New Bern, N.C. “Dishwasher detergent aggressively goes after food,” Mr. Edwards said, “and if you don’t have food soil in the unit, it attacks the glasses, and they get cloudy,” a process known as etching that can cause permanent damage.

So college roomies… I was on to something when you thought I was just being lazy.