Last week, I painted 6 days in a row. Seriously. Tuesday through Sunday, painting, painting, painting.

Half of this painting was the horrible kind. The kind where I was painting over colors that I liked and making them a boring, ugly white.

The other half? Was awesome.

We turned the living room at our new house from this…

To this:

(I promise that we actually painted the top of the walls – I just forgot to snap a photo!)

Thanks to the help of my amazing sister and brother-in-law, we actually managed to get the living room, dining room, hallway, and staircase walls all painted in this gorgeous gray.

We also got another room in the house painted, and it’s the part of all of my painting adventures last week that I’m the most excited about.

Want a peek?

That’s our master bedroom, and that’s an amazing gorgeous peacock blue color all over the walls. As a quick refresher, here’s what the room looked like before we got our hands on it.

And here’s the after.

Big change, huh? I’m so incredibly excited about this color, and I can’t wait to get in there and start decorating the rest of the room.

Of course, now that we have this color on the walls, Corey and I are going to have to do some planning as to what we’ll do with the rest of our room; particularly our bed, since it’s the biggest piece that will be in there. The ideal choice is a bright white bedspread, just like the one we have now, but Corey has declared that he wants to get rid of that one ASAP and get one a bit more dog-friendly, so that idea is out.

With such a bold color, we’re a bit limited in what we can do with our bedspread, but at the moment I’m heavily leaning towards this guy from West Elm:

I love that it’s a similar color to what’s on the walls, only much less saturated, which is a great way to get some color into our bedspread without having it compete with the wall color. I think this is our best option out of what we’ve seen so far, but I’m still on the lookout for something to jump out at me as the perfect choice.

Our room is going to be somewhat of a challenge to design without turning it into something that’s too colorful, but I’m so glad we chose this color and I can’t wait to see how it all comes together!

Did you make any bold choices for paint color in your house? Also, have any suggestions for me for a bedspread or duvet cover?

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You guys…

I don’t deal well with clutter. Or messes. Or disorder of any sort.

So, this whole moving thing is not agreeing with me at all. My house is a complete wreck and it’s starting to feel a little bit like a prison.

It all started when I had to re-paint our living room and bedroom last week. I spent well over 10 hours painting and because we had to move all of the furniture around to paint, it’s pretty much stayed there.

Our living room used to be nice and cozy and it looked something like this:

But now? It’s looking more like this:

And the rest of the house is just as bad. Let’s take a look, shall we?

Horrible! I’ve actually organized the living room a bit more since these photos were taken, but it’s still pretty terrible. Our bedroom is completely empty except for our mattress and a suitcase full of clothes for this next week.

I’m so glad we only have four more days here before we leave…I don’t know how much longer I can take it.

BUT, on the bright side, we spent the weekend at the new house and we’re going to have so much room once we move! I’ll be back later this week to share photos of the progress we made – and hopefully by then I’ll have my house in a little more order.

How do you handle the crazy messes that come along with moving?

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After two days of hellish anxiety, way too much driving, and more stress than I can even begin to describe, Corey and I are officially homeowners.

We dealt with a ridiculous amount of incompetency from our bank on Monday, and Corey had to make a second drive to Austin yesterday to fix some paperwork that apparently wasn’t signed correctly the first time (really?), but as of about 4:00 yesterday afternoon, we have the keys and the house is ours!

I may expand on all of the bank/closing drama later, but right now I’m still a bit too bitter to get into it. Just know that the bank we worked with was difficult to deal with every step of the way, and I am so glad we don’t have to deal with them anymore beyond sending in our monthly payment.

I’d love to write a longer post, but I’m incredibly busy painting, packing, and cleaning our little duplex so we can be ready to move in a week and a half!

If you’re a homeowner, did you have any trouble at closing on your house?

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A couple of days ago I decided that I could no longer take the thoughts of everything I needed to complete running through my head. I was getting overwhelmed with everything that has to be done before we can move out, so I did what I always do in these situations.

I made a list.

I plopped myself down at our kitchen table and jotted down every single thing I could think of that needed to be completed before we’re ready to move. Then, I organized the list into days, and stuck it to the fridge right next to our calendar.

Let’s zoom in on the calendar really fast and see if there’s anything important happening today…

What’s that say on July 18th? CLOSING! That’s right – today is the day that Corey and I will finally get the keys to our new house placed in our hot little hands, and we can’t wait!

But, back to the topic at hand. I’ll talk about closing in detail later this week!

As soon as I finished writing the list, I could feel the stress melting off of me. I was officially organized, and I would know what needed to be taken care of on any given day.

Here’s what this week’s to-do list looks like.

And here’s next week:

It is such an exhilarating feeling to look at a list of things I need to do next week and see the word “move” included. LOVE IT.

But, I have to admit, I felt like maybe I was being a bit neurotic by creating this list. I mean, in reality, these are all things I’m probably going to remember to do – I strongly doubt I’ll forget to pack our bedroom decorations or something. But to see it all laid out like this really made me feel like I could handle it and like I had a plan of attack to get everything accomplished.

Which brings me to the point of this post – am I crazy, or just organized? Are you a list-maker too, or do you prefer to just wing it?

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That’s right, the packing has officially begun to prepare for our big move! I was shocked when I went to check the countdown I have on my desktop today and I realized that we only have 25 days until we leave little old College Station for good!

I’m going to try to slowly get some packing done over the next couple of weeks, and I’m hoping that I can get everything done early so there isn’t a huge rush to get it all packed a couple of days before we leave.

I didn’t get much packing done today because I was glued to my television almost all day watching coverage of the Casey Anthony trial (opinions on it? I’d love to hear ‘em!), but come tomorrow I’m determined to start getting stuff done around the house. The paint should be delivered for us to return our house to white walls within the next few days, and I’m hoping to knock that out as soon as possible so I don’t have to deal with it later!

Any tips for me as I start packing up the house? Any tricks to making moving easier?

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