what makes my house our home {{bookshelves}}

Awhile back when I was thinking about what I should blog on, I got the inspiration to start a little shall we say "series" on what makes my house a home.  I think you can have the most beautiful house, but its not a really a home until you add personal details to the things that fill your house.

One of the favorite spots in my house is the loft.  It's still not complete, but I truly love all the pieces that make up the space, but I especially love my bookshelves.  Currently we have two shelves, but they are getting so full that I want to add another one. I have always loved the look that bookshelves add to a space.  I would love to have a big library like office in our next house....ah, always dreaming.  My bookshelves are a gorgeous chocolate brown as is all the wood in my loft, and here are the beauties.

The shelves merge two very different people into one stylish collection.  If any space is a true combination of  Scott and I, it would definitely be these shelves.  I wanted to share with you the pieces that make up who I am on these shelves.

My bookshelves are a mix of some of my favorite reads, as well as coffee table books that I have added to my collection.  

I couldn't talk about my favorite reads, and not mention Tori Spelling.  Can I just say she is my FAVORITE writer? She's crazy entertaining and I loved all her books (as you can see).  Another favorite in my collection is this drool worthy book about Louis Vuitton.  Lastly, what makes up this shelf is the scripture that Scott and I build our lives upon.   If there is one thing that I strive to incorporate in our home, even in the decor, is that fact that we serve a wonderful God and live everyday to know Him more.

I only found it fitting that on a shelf featuring the book "Things A Woman Should Know About Style" that I include a picture of me on the most stylish day of my life.  My wedding day of course was the day that I felt most glamorous, and this photograph perfectly captured what a princess I felt like that day. I'm so grateful that we had an amazing wedding photographer!!!

And how can I not mention my honeymoon photobook?  Another "home-y touch" that incorporates "us" into this bookshelf.  I love flipping through the book and re-living those special moments.

Of course, Tom & Giselle are displayed on their OWN shelf as if they were part of the family.  I mean come on, they are only my most favorite couple of all time, and my love for Tom Brady needs a whole individual blog post to cover his hunkyness. :)  Anyways, moving on.....one of the "home-y touches" I like to add are pics of us from our high school days, I love being reminded our our young love days!!!

I thought that all the great love stories I read, deserved to be on the same shelf together.  Nicholas Sparks is one of my favorite authors, of course we all know how great his love stories are.  Again, I only found it fitting to add a picture of us on our wedding day because I feel that we truly have one of the BEST love stories of all time.  I might be bias though. :)

Another one of my favorite books has to be the Confessions of a Shopaholic series, its the BEST!  Of course, Chanel fits so perfectly with this I couldn't resist and just have to put them together.  Again my "home-y touch" is a picture of Scott and I in high school,  one of my favorite black of white pics of us, its just timeless.

As with everything in marriage, I share my life 50/50 with my husband, and this includes my bookshelves.  My husband big into graphic novels and comic books, and as much as I would love to box these up or store them in a closet, he displays them as proudly as I display Tom & Giselle.  Ahh, gotta love this OUR stuff!  As much as they may have not been my FIRST choice, I love that it truly reflects the mixture of us as a couple.

One thing he has let me do, is personalize his shelf space and this has to be my favorite "home-y touch" of all.  These are two pictures of us as babies.  My husband is of course dressed as Faithman :)  I love that it reflects where we came from and childhood.  I can't wait to explain to our little ones someday about these pictures!!  Its a very special touch that definitely adds that feel of HOME to our house.

So what makes YOUR house a home???

monogram love

Remember that corkboard revamp I blogged about here?  Well, I decided that it needed just a little something extra.   If you know me, you know that I LOVE me some monograms! I simply adore everything about them, and I decided that it would be the perfect touch to my corkboard.

I browsed Etsy in search of the perfect little monogram to add to my corkboard.  Everything I found was a large scale monogram, but I finally found the perfect little monogram here.  It was only $5 and you really can't beat that deal!  It finally arrived in the mail today, and I just couldn't wait to add it to my corkboard!!

Here's what it looks like now! :)

I picked the monogram in chocolate brown to match all the wood work and styling of my upstairs loft!! I just love it!! 

Here's a close up of the monogram.

Love.  Love. Love!!! 

I think it adds the perfect little touch to my board! I wanted something that would stand out, but not totally overpower the board and I think it looks awesome!!  

One last peek!!

So what do you think??? I hope you love it as much as I do! 

oh my stars (& stripes)!!!

Did you all have a great 4th of July? I sure did!!!!! It was so nice to get some time away from work and just relax and enjoy time with family!  I have been itching to do a project revamp shortly so hopefully I will have a fun blog post in the near future.

In the meantime, here's a cute little video of my fun 4th! My nieces and nephews are cuter than cute and I just love bragging on them :)

Have a great week ya'll!!

i've got the best

Happy Father's Day to my wonderful Daddy!! I truly have been blessed with the best Dad in the world! He has been the greatest example of God's unselfish, constant love my entire life and I couldn't express in words how much he truly means to me!

Happy Father's Day!!

you light up my life

So when we built our house, one of the things we didn't pay to upgrade was our light fixtures.  We decided to just stick with the ugly basic builder grade fixtures since we knew that we would just eventually replace them ourselves.  Now, whoever decides on the basic light fixtures for our builders must be blind, or seriously disturbed because they choose the most unappealing lights that I have ever seen and I am a bit ashamed that I lived with them for as long as I did.

When we first got married we had SO many expenses and basic needs to buy for the house that the light fixtures were doing the job we needed them to do and it wasn't in the budget to upgrade them.  As time went on and God has continued to bless & increase us, it wasn't so much about the money being the issue, it just kept getting put off and put off.  Finally, I couldn't handle it anymore and I told Scott that I was just going to order one because my eyes deserved to look at something prettier than we we had (at least in one room of the house).  After a horrible online experience of ordering from Lowe's....do yourself a favor and NEVER order anything online from them.  I waited THREE weeks to find out that the light fixture I ordered was out of stock until August, thanks Lowe's for telling me three weeks too late.  I am just really glad I was able to get my money back.  It ended up being a good thing, because I found this one from Overstock.com and I am disappointed in myself for not thinking of them in the FIRST place. They had so many choices and the price of my chandelier was like $60 cheaper than Lowe's.  Gotta loooooove that!!

Ok, so here's my light before.  I apologize for making you see this. :)

As if the gold brass isn't bad enough, the spider legs will get ya.  Bleh!!

& here's my little beauty now!! :)

Breathtaking isn't it?! I am so in love!! Now, I gotta say I am pretty proud of Scott & I for installing this.  Neither of us are well super handy, but we figured it out and it was a lot easier than we had anticipated.  The hardest part was the actual assembly of the chandelier.  The instructions that came with it were awful, it was a diagram of the finished product and no step by step instruction.  Scott couldn't figure it out and gave up, and lo and behold little ol' me assembled the whole thing with very little help from him.  Yah, I'm pretty proud of myself!! :)

Is it just me or when you get one new thing in your house, doesn't it make you want to keep going and going.  Now I want new curtains for the kitchen, and new lights in all the rest of my house that is still living in the 70's.  I guess for now this little beauty will do. 

Here she is with the lights on!!

Oh, I'm in love. :)

celebrating two years as mr & mrs

Tomorrow is my TWO year anniversary! Wow, time flies!! It feels like only yesterday was the big day that Scott & I were joined together as husband & wife, and now here we are two years later it just amazes! The past two years have been wonderful, challenging, beautiful, blessed, and so very much more.  I love being married to my BEST friend and sharing every day of my life together.  I could not have a better husband than Scott, he is my soul mate in every single way possible.  Thank you Lord for creating the most wonderful man to be by my side each day of my life.  I have loved being a wife, and learning and growing in that God given role more each day.

As amazing as the past two years have been, I cannot wait to see all the great things the future holds for us.  I know that this next year is going to be better than this year was, and each year will just keep getting better & better!! Honey, I love you SOOO much and I am so blessed you picked me to be your wife!

I put together this fun little video of our professional pictures from our wedding day as my little look back in honor of two years! I really hope you enjoy it! I absolutely LOVED my wedding photographer and I think they did an amazing job of capturing our special day.  I still can look through them for hours and they still take my breath away like the very first time that I saw them! Enjoy :)

gone too soon. i'll be missing you!

Well, this past week has definitely been a challenging one for me. This past Sunday, June 6th my beautiful Aunt Frances passed away and went home to be with the Lord. To say that this was a complete and utter shock would be an understatement. My Aunt was so young and still so full of life at the young age of 66 and to think that she is gone now heartbreaking. About two weeks ago, my cousin Lori had posted on Facebook that my Aunt was in the hospital and she was asking for prayers for her recovery. My Mom immediately made a call to my cousin to get the details of what was going on. My Aunt had been dealing with pneumonia since February and had been on medication to help but nothing seemed to make it better and she kept feeling worse and worse. When she finally did get to the hospital she was only breathing at 40% and from there things took a turn for the worse. She ended up in cardiac arrest which caused brain damage, and things continued to spiral downwards from there. After days of her struggling for life and finally becoming essentially brain dead my Uncle & cousins made the extremely difficult decision to take her off of life support.

I have dealt with death in my life before as two of my Grandparents have passed in the past 5 years, but for some reason this felt so different, so much harder. Not to say that I wasn’t heartbroken over losing my Grandparents, because I very much was, but they were getting up there in age where it cushions the blow a bit more, if that makes sense. I guess I felt that my Grandparents got to live a FULL life, but with this loss it really hit me that life is just so fragile. I feel like she still had so much life to live and that was just taken from her so suddenly. My parents are obviously in the same age range as my Aunt was, and to me that is still so young to lose someone. I could never imagine having to deal with the loss of my parents right now and it is breaking my heart thinking of how my cousins and Uncle feel right now. At first the whole shock of her passing didn’t hit me as I was so concerned about my Mom and her feelings on losing a sister. I was thinking and praying for my Mom that it really didn’t all hit me until an hour or so after I heard the news and then the tears finally came.

Unfortunately, I was not able to attend my Aunt’s funeral service, which is actually happening this afternoon. My Aunt & her family live in Southern California and as much as I would have loved to be there to honor her, my time with work, and money wouldn’t allow it. I figured this post would be a way to honor her life and memory today in my own special way. My Aunt was such a wonderful person and I will miss her greatly. I didn’t get to see her as much as I would have loved to, simply because of the distance and traveling that it takes to see each other. The last time that I actually saw her was at my Nana’s funeral about 5 years ago. It was always so funny to see her and my Mom together!! It was scary how much they were a like. Their mannerisms and verbage were so similar!! My siblings and I always found that hysterical as for most of their lives they have lived so far apart and did not spend a lot of time together face to face. Even their voice sounded similar, it was hard to determine if it was my Mom or Aunt talking at times. That’s genetics for you I guess! My Aunt was so loving and full of life, and just being around her made me feel so happy and loved. She was truly a beautiful person inside and out and I will miss her very very much. I can’t wait to see her again in Heaven, as well as all the other loved ones that have passed on of mine. It’s so wonderful to have the HOPE in Christ that I have. I know it’s not goodbye forever, it’s only a see you later. I know right now that she is rejoicing in the Heavenlies, in such awe of all the glory of God and I am so excited that she has met our wonderful maker.

Aunt Frances, I love you, I miss you, and I can’t wait to give you a big hug when we meet again.

If you could please pray for my Mom, my Uncle & cousins, and my family in general as they grieve this loss and deal with the days ahead I would really appreciate it! And don’t forget, make each day of life count. Hug tighter, give more kisses, & say I love you to the people you care for. Don’t ever take any moment of life for granted because you never know what tomorrow holds.