{House update} The first floor takes shape

Our visit to the site last weekend was by far the most exciting yet. With the exception of the back wall of the family room, the first floor had been all framed out. We could walk around the first floor and see how big each of the rooms are and start to imagine ourselves living there. We'll walk in through the garage, and throw our stuff in the laundry room. Here's the window above the sink that I'll be staring through when I wash dishes. Wow, this pantry is huge; will we ever have that much food in the house? And although the basement has been done for a little while now, this is the first chance we had to actually walk through it since the outside stairs had been added.

View from the sidewalk

Five Friday Favorites {Numero Uno}

Let's face it: I'm not exactly a model blogger. When am I going to post? What am I going to post? It's anyone's guess (and yours is as good as mine, honestly!). My content's all over the place, and while I do enjoy being a bit random, it would nice to at least occasionally post home-related stuff (which has been hard, since we're still impatiently waiting for that pesky house of ours to hurry up and get built already!).

To {slightly} help with those issues, I thought it would fun to start posting a series I decided to call Five Friday Favorites. For one thing, it gives me a regular post to stick to each week. Just one, and it's an easy one...I think I can handle that. For another, I can incorporate some home decor topics here. Not just home decor... that would be much too consistent for me... but definitely some favorite looks for around the house, and whatever else I might be fancying lately - DIY, food, fashion, travel, pet stuff, whatever. I had a lot of fun picking out my first set, and it was hard to limit it to just five things, so I'm definitely excited about continuing this in the future!

So here goes, five favorites for this fabulous Friday...

Favorite bold decor move: Black paint. I love the rich feel that black paint brings to a room. I don't know if I'd be brave enough to put it in a large living space, but I think I may go for it in our new powder room.

Source

FMS Photo-A-Day March Wrap-up

Three months down in the Fat Mum Slim photo a day challenge for 2013! March was a great month - our highlights included two little getaways (our WV ski trip and my girls weekend in Austin) and the foundation for our house being poured - yay! My favorite (only?) project of the month was our new return air grille - I'm still loving how it looks! Anyway, like the last couple of months (Jan and Feb), I wanted to do a quick wrap-up of my daily pics along with the list of prompts - here they are!

Girls Weekend in Austin

This past weekend, I had a pretty awesome girls weekend in Austin with two of my favorite ladies. We had very little planned ahead of time, but everything came together for the makings of a fantastic trip. Here's how our itinerary turned out for our weekend getaway in Austin...

DIY Return Air Grille {That's actually pretty!}

I've been pinning away on my home decor projects board. The problem is, for about 99% of them, I want to do the projects in our new house, so there's not a lot I can start on yet. But one pin I came across was perfect for our condo - this one. Our return air grille was all mangled, and most likely original to our mid-1980s building. It always looked ugly but I managed to ignore it... until we got our HVAC unit replaced. Now our air filters go directly behind the grille, so we have to unscrew the stupid/ugly/nasty thing every few months, then awkwardly try to replace it in the busted up drywall. Not fun. So, I decided to make a new one that would a) look a million times better, and b) be much more simple to remove and replace.

{House update} Visual Progress!

With all the delays we've been experiencing, I never would have guessed that our house would be moving faster than I'd post. I'm way overdue for this one! And not only have I not been keeping up, I've also been taking terrible phone pics of all the progress so far. Bad, bad blogger!

So the last news was that we got our building permit right around the beginning of February. Shortly afterward, we went over to the lot to check that the all the flagging around the trees marked for clearing was still up, and saw the first big sign of progress. Which was, literally, a sign.

First sign of progress - the builder's sign!

{Recipe} Healthy Crepes with Oats & Yogurt

I've always loved having special breakfasts on the weekend, ever since I was a kid. My mom and I would often make homemade waffles or pancakes or muffins. Now Bryan and I are generally most likely to go pick up bagels, but I've also been making crepes pretty often. I wasn't planning on having any crepes during my DietBet, but decided to experiment with a healthy version. These crepes are low cal, low fat, and high in protein.

Sorry for this sad excuse for food photography. I really just wanted to eat my breakfast.

{Mini-Getaway} West Virginia Ski Trip

Earlier in the winter I snatched up a Travelzoo deal for a night of lodging plus two lift tickets for $89 at Canaan Valley, West Virginia (yep, lodging and two lift tickets for $89 total - score!!), and we finally made use of it last weekend. It's definitely a small ski resort, but we had a great time checking out somewhere new to ski (for Bryan) and snowboard (for me). The snow conditions were amazing - so much fluffy powder to play in (something we're not used to on the east coast!), no crowds at all, and the lodge was pet friendly, so we got to bring Smokey along with us. Plus I was so excited to be on a snowboard again, since I hadn't been since we were in the Alps two years ago! Here are a few pics from the trip (please excuse the iPhone photo quality!).

{Recipe} Bread Love: The Naan Edition

Happy Saturday, all! I am oh-so-very excited for the weekend, and I hope you are too! If you have a little free time this weekend and are in the mood for some tasty bread, you might want to give making your own naan a try.

FMS Photo-A-Day February Wrap-up

Happy Friday & Happy March! I'm not exactly sure where February went. It was a pretty quiet month for us overall. Some of the highlights were watching the Ravens win the Super Bowl (hooray!!), learning how to make sushi at a friend's party (yum!), celebrating a simple Valentine's Day at home (so nice), and finally seeing some actual, visual progress on our home site (crazy exciting!! - more about that coming soon!).

I'm still enjoying keeping up with the #FMSphotoaday challenge by Fat Mum Slim (learn more about how to play here). Here's a collage of all my February pics, with the list of prompts below.

If you want to join in for March, you can grab the list here. And as always, I'd love for us to follow each other on Instagram - I'm @jdeares

Have a lovely weekend!