Moving and Houses and Babies, Oh My!

It's been almost a year since I started this little blog of mine! Lots has happened in that short time. We settled into our cozy ranch house in Nashville, did lots of projects and updates, got pregnant, and then sold our house and moved into a new one. And as you may guess by this post, I am still pregnant! I've surpassed the point when Max was born (38 weeks), so now I'm just waiting to see when Baby Tornado will make his or her grand entrance.

Things have been wild and crazy between moving in, preparing for baby, being very pregnant and exhausted, and helping sweet Max, who is in full-blown two-year-old mode, through all of these changes. The blog has taken a backseat, but I haven't forgotten about it! Cookies & Beer is still a place where I love to share, write and keep my creative juices flowing throughout this whole crazy process of motherhood ... and life.

I've recently discovered Instagram (I know, I'm behind), and have had fun documenting all the little moments that make up our days. Here's a peek at what April looked like for us: 

(1) Move-in day at the new house! (2) The cozy courtyard area of our new backyard. We've already changed it up, but this is how it started! (3) Our new walk-in closet. Holy cow I am excited about this space. (4) Springtime at the amazing park we now live five minutes away from (5) Ben and I enjoying a lunch date (thanks to my fab in-laws!) at one of our favorite places, Margot Cafe, on a beautiful day in our old stomping grounds of East Nashville. (6) Curtain panels I sewed for Max's new room. Don't look to closely, the hemming is not entirely done. But I like the direction they're taking my guy's soon-to-be big-boy room!

We also managed to sneak in a super fun maternity photo shoot at our new home, with the talented and energetic Kalli over at Kalimana Photography. She'll also be documenting our birth and doing newborn sessions, and I'm so excited to be working with her! These are two of my favorites from the session (check out more on her blog):

I'll be keeping you posted on baby's progress. We can't wait to meet this little one. Baby Tornado rightfully earned the nickname - he or she is a flurry of activity in my belly, and is definitely keeping me on my toes! We're planning and hoping for a beautiful home birth with our midwife. It will be so special to bring baby into the world in the home he or she will (hopefully) grow up in.  I am doing my best to be patient and enjoy the last days of pregnancy and this beautiful spring weather. I know life will be an even wilder ride from here on out!

Surprise ... We Moved!

I told you in my last post that I had big news ... well this is it! After two years of sweat and hard work (and not just our own, but that of our amazing families, too!), we decided to move on to a new home base. There was a lot of debate, many pros and cons lists, and some serious soul searching over this decision. In the end though, as much as we truly did love our house and neighborhood, it just didn't feel like our "forever" spot. We tried hard to make it feel right, because god knows we did not want to uproot and move for the seventh time in as many years, but we couldn't stop our wandering eyes.

Right after Christmas, I dragged Ben to view a house I'd spotted online. It was a standard brick colonial; the online photos made it look fairly plain, and I wasn't expecting too much. But it was a good price point in one of our dream neighborhoods, so I figured ... why not take a peek? Well much to our chagrin, Ben and I both ended up really loving the house. Max was also a big fan, playing and running around the spacious rooms and the gloriously flat yard (one of our main troubles with the old house was that the entire yard was on such a steep slope). But we weren't ready for this. At all.

We went home and dragged our feet, and began the great debate of 2012, still discussing over New Year's whether we should jump on this house or not. When we followed up on the property, we learned that another offer had come in, and of course THAT was when we realized we really wanted the house. The next few days went by incredibly slowly as we waited to see if the house would be snatched away from us. As it turned out, the offer was rejected, and we had a real shot at this place! We scrambled to get our finances in order, analyzed our budget down to every last loaf of bread, and ran and re-ran the numbers about a gazillion times. This house would be a financial leap for us, but we felt we could pull it off as long as we were okay with living more frugally for a few years. No fancy vacations and less eating out - which we figured would happen naturally once we were balancing life with a 2-year-old and a newborn! So in went our offer, and then we waited.

Ben and I came up with a game plan to sell our house. Before making an offer, we'd already met with a realtor and contractor to get ideas on what updates would be needed, so we figured we would get started whether this deal panned out or not. Ben, Max and I had just walked into Home Depot for supplies when I got the call from our realtor. Our offer had been accepted! Just like that!

I thought Ben might start hyperventilating in the middle of the light bulb aisle. Not like, I'm so happy, yippee sort of hyperventilating (although he WAS happy, too), so much as an, oh my god, now we will have a bigger mortgage and we have to sell our house and move type of hyperventilating. We were thrilled and terrified all at the same time, especially since the whole deal hinged on us selling our own home within less than three months!

In a matter of weeks, we tore our house apart - upgraded kitchen counters and appliances, painted the exterior and interior, got a new roof put on. It was mayhem, I tell you! Our lives were turned upside down for a few weeks, and then finally our house hit the market. Keeping it clean for showings everyday (when living with a very hairy black dog and a 2-year-old) was intense. I spent at least an hour prepping everything each morning before Max and I left the house (and we HAD to leave the house in order to actually keep things clean). Thank goodness we only had to show our house for five days before an offer came in. All of our hard work wasn't for naught - we accepted the offer quickly, and so here we are now, totally moved into a new (to us) home ten minutes up the road! There was much nail-biting and suspense until the moment we signed our final signature on the closing of both homes. We are still amazed that everything worked out the way it did. There was a real possibility that we could be carrying two mortgages right now, or that we'd still be showing the house as I was going into labor, neither of which were enticing propositions!

I had grand plans of photographing our beautiful updated home for you, but every time it was cleaned up, it seemed we were running out the door to clear the way for a house showing, and I never managed to snap any photos. I finally got some shots of our (very empty) house as we were doing our final cleaning, so I will share those as soon as I can!

And of course there will be some photos of the new house to come - I have a whole new set of projects ahead, although nothing is quite as urgent in this home. There are no harvest gold appliances or mint green exterior paint, I am happy to report :) The things we'll be tackling first here are purely aesthetic, like lots of paint. But I will delve into those details another day.

Toning Down the Groove-Factor

You may remember this little teaser I posted a while back about one of our latest projects.

The mint green on the front of our house, mixed with our orange and maroon toned bricks, gave the house a really groovy 70s vibe. But not groovy in a cool, retro way. It was more of an outdated, musty sort of groove. But oh, the wonders of paint!! A little brown/gray combo and our house looks fresh and modern once more for the first time.

Oh, and a new roof didn't hurt either! After multiple hail storms over the past year, our roof was sufficiently damaged to warrant our insurance company replacing it. No more leaks, yippee! We also had the roofers pull off the collection of antennas and wires that had taken over the back of the house. Apparently the previous owners wanted to sample at least one of each type of antennae and satellite dish.

With me being pregnant and Ben working full-time, painting the exterior ourselves was unfortunately not an option. This is the kind of job that I highly recommend hiring pros for if you're able. It was major. This is the tedious kind of painting, that has to be done by hand with brushes, with lots of detail work around the shutters, trimming out the windows and doors, etc., and lots of climbing up on ladders and craning your neck to reach under the cornices and the top parts of the garage doors. It took the painters a good chunk of time to finish, but we couldn't be happier with the results! Here's another look at the before and after:

And the back of the house before and after:

We were amazed to discover that with a gray-toned trim color, we actually like the color of our brick! The gray does a nice job of toning down the orange and bringing out the more rusty browns. We hemmed and hawed about whether it would be worth spending money on the exterior of our house ... and answer is a resounding yes. What a difference!

Love Bites: (Belated) February Cookie of the Month!

Well hello! I am sooo failing at keeping up with the blog lately - but the reality is, life happens and that always comes first. And I have BIG news to share just as soon as I find the time to do it properly. I have "written" endless posts in my head that I'll hopefully empty into my keyboard for you one day soon!

In the meantime, I wanted to share this tasty recipe I tried out with Max for Valentine's Day. Ever since Christmas, I have been dying to make classic cookie cutter cookies with my little guy. By some miracle, I finally found the time in February. I couldn't shed my mom guilt about making cookies loaded with sugar and white flour (not to mention how bad sugar is for me during pregnancy), so I searched until I found a recipe that sounded close to the classic sugar cookie, but was a tad bit healthier. Enter the Snack Girl blog, with a perfectly adapted, healthful sugar cookie (that's an oxymoron if I ever heard one!). View the recipe here. Please pardon the wobbly camera phone photos!

Basically she gets away with less sugar by using spices (nutmeg and/or cinnamon) and brown sugar (which has a richer flavor than white sugar), and less butter by browning the butter first. Browning the butter is a pretty genius move. It only takes a minute or two, and really brings out that rich buttery flavor that makes sugar cookies so addictive.

I followed the recipe *almost* exactly; I didn't have white whole wheat flour, so I used half white and half whole wheat. And I opted for cinnamon instead of nutmeg, since I'm a cinnamon-aholic. My cookies had a light brown color due to the whole wheat flour, but that didn't bother anybody! Next time I'll add an extra tablespoon of butter, just to make the dough a bit softer and less crumbly to work with.

Now, you could follow the original recipe and just dust the cookies with powdered sugar before baking (obviously this is the healthier choice), but I wanted to let Max play with frosting. I found an awesomely simple recipe here, via allrecipes.com. I used Spectrum Organic All Vegetable Shortening (non-hydrogenated and trans-fat free, score!), and vanilla almond milk in place of the regular milk, and the results were sugary and divine. We tried to use it sparingly, so as not to undo all of my efforts at making a lower-sugar cookie! Max had a blast pouring food coloring into the icing and stirring it up.


My little helper assited with every step of the process, from mixing the dough, to rolling it (that part was a big hit!), to cutting shapes and then decorating them. I had sooo much fun, I can only hope he enjoyed it as much as I did! Ben even got in on the decorating action. These will not win any awards for prettiest cookies, but they are some of my favorites I've made in a while, because it was such a fun, hands-on project for my little man. Check out Snack Girl for the recipe!

Buh-Bye, Mint Green!

I'm all about mint ... mint chocolate chip ice cream, peppermint tea, mojitos wish muddled mint leaves, you name it :) But mint green as a trim color for our house? Not really doing it for me. We inherited this shade when we bought our home, and it was really the last thing on our to-do list for a while. I think we got so used to it, that we kind of forgot how funky it looked (on both the front AND back, ha!):

Well, surprise surprise, we've started painting out front. We also got a new roof (a hail storm caused damage, so our insurance company covered the replacement), so it was high time to update the rest of our outdoor look! We chose a nice pale tan to complement the bricks and the roof, and a deep, grayish brown for the shutters. I'm so thrilled with how it's looking so far. Ben and I stood in our driveway gawking for a good little while yesterday. We truly hadn't anticipated what a difference some fresh paint would make on the front of our house! Here's a teaser that I snapped using my brand-spanking new Instagram account. I'll have some more photos for you as soon as it's all done!