White Water

My sister and I grew up going to White Water in the summers. It was so fun to go back with the boys and see them enjoy it the way we used to! 

Blog Feature and Classroom Makeover

Thanks to Melissa, from the Cup of Joe Blog Hop, for spotlighting our blog this week! Melissa's blog offers coupons and giveaways, and every Thursday, she hosts something called a blog hop that allows you to check out other blogs and make some new friends as you visit. :) This week, she is featuring our blog at the top of her hop! Thanks, Melissa! If you want to check out the hop, click on the link above or the picture below.

If you are visiting for the first time from the hop, thanks for stopping by! I'm Heather, and my husband Matt and I are first-time homeowners enjoying the joys and occasional trials of owning our first home. We closed on our house back in September of 2010, and did about five months worth of renovations before moving in in February of 2011. Since then, we've been working on making it our home and have since started tackling the yard in stages. If you'd like to check out the transformation, click on the "Our Home" tab at the top of the page. Thanks for visiting! 

Classroom Makeover

This will be my fifth year teaching at my school- so hard to believe! Time flies. Amazingly enough, I have spent the last four years in the same classroom, which is pretty rare at my school. This year, I had to move rooms for the first time. I'll still be teaching third grade, just from a different classroom. Here's what the room looked like when I first arrived about a month ago:

That's my mom getting right to work on the paint!

My mom helped me a TON! I'm a little (understatement) particular about everything having a place- it's own place that is, not just a place. So moving classrooms meant that I had to find new places for lots of things. I probably should have taken a picture of the inside of my desk and all of the cabinets for you to fully understand what I mean.  But it's probably better that you think I am slightly sane. :) 

. . .We spent two long days working away, and then I made a few other visits on my own. I'm am thrilled to say it is DONE! Take a look:

Yay! Setting up a classroom is a lot like setting up your house for the first time- I'm so glad it's finished! We're at t-minus six days until we go back for pre-planning and then the kids come the following Monday. I am excited about meeting my new kiddos, but summer, how are you almost gone?! I know I'll feel good once I'm back in the swing of things- that end of summer transition is always hard! Thank goodness we have one last little getaway this weekend. . . pictures to come!

A Few New Gifts and Finds

I found these three glass pillars recently at Bed, Bath, and Beyond for only $19.99. Which means, with the 20% coupon, they were only $16! 

Since then, I've been trying to find monogrammed candles with black letters to put inside. All I could find were these on Amazon for $28.00 each, and these for $14.99 each. Very cute, but kind of defeats the purpose of getting the pillars for so cheap. SO, I started thinking that maybe I could MAKE the monogrammed part on regular cream-colored candles! These "crafty" ideas come few and far between my regular thoughts, so I immediately felt quite impressed with myself. I actually had a vision for a crafty decoration in our house. And on top of that, I even planned to make them myself. :)

Thanks to my sweet mom who came to stay with us last Thursday, my craft project got a kick-start when she brought me three candles to use.

While we were out shopping for some things for my classroom, we found these monogrammed stickers at Michael's for $2.99. Perfection!

It's definitely worth mentioning that while we were there, we each bought 4 tiki torches for $2.50 a piece! Those will be going up around our patio at some point- once we muster up the energy to hack away at all of the monkey grass laying in the spot where they should go. 

Back to the craft project. . .

Step One: Peel

Step Two: Stick

Step Three: Place candles back in opening

The craft project is now complete.

 

 Yay!

The second surprise she brought was an outside thermometer for our garage! I was super excited to put it up so we didn't waste any time.

 My cute mama :)

Please look at how quickly the temperature rose. . . last time I checked, we lived in Georgia. GoodNESS!

The third gift she brought was a really pretty vase. Which happens to be on a very cute new table that Matt's mom gave us last week! We are seriously lucking out with sweet gifts from our parents!

This naturally prompted a trip to T.J. Maxx (see favorite finds page :) ) to outfit the top of the table. Here's what I came up with:

So thank you to both of our moms for surprising us with new goodies for the house. We definitely appreciate it!!