One Year

 I cannot believe it's been a year since this wonderful day. God continues to bless me through Michael every single day. We have so much fun and are always laughing. It's such a special relationship. I am forever grateful that God brought us together. Here are some highlights from our first year of marriage!

September 28th-October 4th: Of course our honeymoon was so fun! From lunch with the Disney princesses to me saving his life while he almost got stung by a huge jellyfish in Sanibel. It was a lovely trip!

 October 17th--Watching him do his exercises and walk the hallway after his knee surgery. I couldn't believe how strong and determined he was.

November 3rd--Omgsh. I will never forget the JOY I felt this day to bring Mike home from the hospital. I would go home to our apartment every evening before I went to the hospital to be with him and our apartment was always so eerie without him. It was so nice to have him home.

November 29th--Yes, the DAY after Thanksgiving we got our FIRST CHRISTMAS TREE. Such an exciting moment! Especially since Mike lovessssss Christmas so much.

December 24th-- I'll never forget us laying on the floor next to our crispy, dried up tree (because we got it in November...) talking about our Christmas wishes and dreams for the future. What a special night.

December 31st-- We rang in the New Year with Mandy and Jared. We had such a fun night with them. We came back to our apartment the next day to find it was below 50 degrees in our apartment because our heat was broken...

2015

February 14th-- First married Valentine's Day. Good thing we didn't make any fancy dinner plans since it snowed like crazy. We watched people getting stuck on the road outside our apartment and ordered pizza for dinner.

April 27th-- We got to relive our honeymoon when I made orange crunch cake from The Bubble Room for Mike's birthday! Yum.

May 15th--We settled on our condo!

May 27th--After MONTHS of torture, drills, weights,  and running, Tim kicked Mike out of PT. We both left a little dumb-founded, like did that really just happen? Big moment for Mike in his ACL rehab.

June 19th--Mike's first time hitting at the batting cages! I think I was more excited than he was--I even shed a few tears of joy watching him. :)

June 24th--Mike's first softball game since his ACL surgery. Wow, what an exciting and special night to see all his hard work pay off!

Summer 2015--It was full of NATS games and trips to the country while we slowly pieced our condo together. I loved every minute spent working beside my husband. He worked so hard on our condo but we still took time to relax and have fun.

September 5th--My first time on the Williford Family Vacation to Salvo, Hatteras, NC. I definitely fell in love with Hatteras and cannot wait to go back. We spent every day with Kristen on the beach. We did lots of shopping, seafood-eating and swimming. We even got to see baby sea turtles!

It's been a wild year, but I've loved every minute of it. I love you Michael!

Condo Before-After Reveal

OKAY. The pictures are finally here! Things are not fully done yet, but I felt bad not sharing any after pictures. There is still much decorating and organizing to be done, but here's what we've got so far.

Dining room view when you walk in.  

Dining room view when you walk out of the kitchen. 

Living area.

Note the pink table on the left of this image. I really wanted to paint the powder room that color, but felt it was too pink. So we decided to do a little side table with it instead. And we both love it (I was definitely surprised Mike was on board with a pink table). :) 

When we first saw the condo, I felt like the kitchen was livable. But as our renovation plans continued to develop we decided to just do the kitchen. So we painted the cabinets, laid new flooring, painted the walls and ordered new countertops. Eventually we plan to replace the appliances with stainless steel.

So with the help of my father, I built that large pantry closet to the left of center. With the laundry unit in the kitchen closet, that left literally no space for food. So I got that huge pantry closet for maybe $160. It's quite nice and wasn't too difficult to build...except for the fact that it's taller than me...

We really like our fancy faucet. Check it out here.

And YAY, here's my pretty coral bathroom! Coral Reef by HGTV Home-Sherwin Williams. Love love love it. 

So that was a TON of work and we're not done. It's been so much fun. And we could NOT have done all this work without help from my mom and stepdad, Dave, and Mike's grandad. My mom and I painted and cleaned the appliances while Dave, Grandad and Mike did the floors, replaced the toilet in the powder room and all kinds of other projects. 

(Almost) Homeowners!

OMGsh OMGsh OMGsh! We are almost homeowners! So exciting and so scary all at the same time. Here's a little bit about how we came across this condo.

So our real estate agent, Susan Souder, is my aunt. She's been a realtor in Howard County for over 30 years. What a huge blessing and advantage it was to have her as our agent! So knowledgeable and so amazing at what she does! So we met with her maybe end of December or early January to get the whole process going. She got us on her email list so we could start getting a feel for what was out there. We would casually look, knowing we didn't need to get serious until around March-April.

Some properties stayed on our list, some went, and after a few months of starting at the list, we finally decided to go see a few. What a fun experience! Some places we'd seen in pictures and liked, we hated in person. And places we'd been indifferent to in pictures, we fell in love with in person. We started to fall in love with a neat condo and decided to put an offer on it. We met with Aunt Susan the next day and went over all the paperwork...boy was that insane. Come to find out that condo had already been sold and apparently the selling agent was still living in the stone ages. Haha. 
We were a little discouraged, and decided to give it a break. Of course the morning after we decided to give it a break, a small townhouse popped up on our automatic listing that was literally across the street from our apartment complex. We love this area, so then we had to go see it! We went and it was adorable and we loved it. So we decided to put an offer on it. While waiting to hear back, Aunt Susan got wind there was a second offer, so then Mike and I panicked. We spent a few hours trying to decide whether or not to change ours and we decided to leave it. Well...they took the other offer. Grr. We were so annoyed. 
Back to square one... Later that week, one afternoon, I was finishing up at work and Aunt Susan emailed me a listing and asked if we wanted to go see it that evening. I took a quick peek and saw it was cute and told her yes! Mike was annoyed and didn't want to go. We got there and it was older and weird shaped. For some reason, though, I kept picturing us there and trying to convince Mike. He was having nothing of it. So we left, discouraged again. 
A few days later, nothing new had really popped up and Mike emails me while at work saying..."I am kind of thinking I liked that last place we saw..." Shocking, he liked it, but didn't want to admit it! So we went to see it again that night. And we thought we could make it work so we decided to put an offer on it! And they accepted! We couldn't believe it! So we really have Aunt Susan to thank for the find and for begging the seller's to allow us to see it on a night they weren't planning to show it. :) 
We are already planning our DIY projects and yep, you guessed it...I'll be blogging about them! I am going to try to be good about it, haha! So we'll see how that goes. 

Here are a few fun pictures from our search: 

This is the first condo we really liked & tried to put an offer on. It had some neat aspects and a loft. 

This was the townhouse we loved loved loved but that went for way above asking price. 

Here is the place we chose! Mike was obviously over looking at it. Haha. 

Our future kitchen! :) 

So settlement is set for May 15th! We are counting the days--we can't wait!