Our Three Reasons - The adventures of Dan, Nicole, Otis & Penny

yup .. that's my husband 😜 http://t.co/YTjTKaeV twitter.com/nicolegreen 2012/05/18

August5th

3 comments

sod & wedding planning!

Posted in: just us, our wedding, the daily doormat

I’m the worst blogger in history! I cannot believe it’s been months since I last posted. I think the excitement of the warm weather and being incredibly busy with work left me zero time for blogging. I had to make sure I set aside time today to update the blog because there are a few exciting things going on that I wanted to share. :)

First of all, we finally have our sidewalks and our yard!! The months leading up to it felt like an eternity (I’ll spare everyone the details of our waiting game) but now that it’s finally here, we couldn’t be happier. It’s such a relief to be able to say our house is DONE!! :) We have a total of 10 lovely trees, (4 of them were a housewarming gift from our old landlords .. is that not the best housewarming gift or what!?) and handful of plants with plenty of room to add more next year! We’ve barely had any rain over the past two months so you can imagine how outrageous water bill has been having to water the sod, trees and plants every day. Unfortunately even with all of the watering, the intense heat has dried out the yard a bit and it just isn’t pretty at the moment. Here are a few photos from when the sidewalks and yard were going in to hold you over until we can get some good rain and I can get some current photos with a green yard. :)

(DNOP = Dan Nicole Otis & Penny) :)

As you can see in the photo above, Penny & Otis are loving life. :) They finally have their own yard after apartment living for years. A few weeks after the sod was rooted to the ground, we let them out in the backyard for the first time and it was like seeing two kids on Christmas. They were so happy! :) I’m pretty sure Penny would spend 90% of her life out there if we’d let her. :)

And now for our other big news .. Dan and I are officially starting our wedding planning!! We’ve been together for 6 years (engaged for 1 1/2 of those) .. so, it’s about damn time right?! :) Of course I’m planning on blogging all about it so I apologize in advance if you were hoping for lots of posts about our cute little house right away. :) There might be a few every now and then but our ‘decorating the house’ money is going straight to the wedding fund. :) We still have a TON to figure out but all of our fingers and toes are crossed that it will happen next September!! Stay tuned for all of the fun! :)
March4th

6 comments

happy anniversary to us!

Posted in: the daily doormat

I can’t believe we’ve lived here an entire month. It’s gone by so quickly! I’m so sorry for the lack of updating. In all honesty, I haven’t felt well enough to do much of anything. The toothache that I mentioned in my last post never went away, it just got worse! After a visit to my least favorite place on the planet, the dentist came to the conclusion that my tooth was abscessed and needed to be pulled. I’ve been a mess the past few weeks, drugged up and stuck on the couch. I also found myself becoming completely obsessed with Pinterest. Seriously, whoever started that site owes me hours of my life back! :) It’s so addicting!

Now that I’m finally feeling better, I’m trying to tackle unpacking all of these boxes. I’ve made some progress but it’s been so slow. I’m really focusing on my office (which will also double as my scrapbook room) since I spend about 90% of my day in there. I’ve come to realize it needs major work. As of right now, I have zero options for storage besides one two-drawer filing cabinet. The room size of my old office compared to my new office are like night and day. The “office” in our loft was a 6×6 alcove that barely fit my desk, computer chair, filing cabinet and a small side table for storing discs, photos and client folders. It wasn’t ideal but I had to make it work. We also luckily had extra built-in cabinets in the loft which I kept all of my shipping supplies, camera equipment and other paperwork. Here are a few pics of our old place. It was such a fun space to live in!

The pic above is where my teeny little office was. :) I now have a massive room and no clue where to go from here. I have a million ideas and a lot of room to work with so it’s become a little overwhelming. Luckily I have a friend/photography client who does interior design! We are most likely going to hire her to help us out to at least get me at a starting point for furniture ideas/layout and colors. It takes me way too long to commit to a paint color so maybe having someone push me along will help me out. :) I can’t wait to post before and after pictures one day. For now, here it is in all of it’s glory. It’s such a boring mess! Of cours Otis is in there stealing the show. He literally follows me around all day so getting pictures without him in them is almost impossible. :)
February11th

4 comments

moving day

Posted in: just us, the daily doormat

We are officially home owners!!! It’s pretty unreal to be saying that. :) Reality hit the day after we closed and the excitement of buying our first home was kind of put on hold. I had our entire week planned out .. what days we were going to finish up packing the apartment, when we’d paint, our appliance deliveries were already scheduled and Dan’s parents would be there Thursday & Friday to help us with some final details before we moved Saturday. I’ve come to realize I should really just stop planning things because it’s most likely always going to change! :)

We got hit with a major ice storm which caused us to be stuck in the new house with no appliances or furniture (besides an air mattress and one camping chair) for 2.5 days. We lived off of poptarts, cheetos, lunch meat & cheese (with no bread), and bottled water. It was a teeny bit miserable but at least it’s a fun story! ;) Luckily we got our kitchen, dining room and living room all painted (I finally committed to a shade of gray and I’m pretty happy with how it turned out! I’ll blog about that one of these days).

Finally the ice storm was over, moving day arrived and there was snow forecasted (of course!). We expected maybe an inch or so and ended up with 5-6! My incredibly wonderful friends and family still showed up and we got everything loaded and unloaded at the new place by 2pm. It was a super stressful and emotional day but Dan and I could not be more thankful that we are finally home. :) We cannot say thank you to everyone who helped us out that day. The roads were completely awful, it was freezing, 3 of our friends slipped and fell on the ice in our neighborhood and not one person complained. Everyone was just focused on getting the job done. We seriously have the best people in our lives!!

I’ll hopefully get back to blogging normally now that we are finally getting settled. It’s been such a busy week that I just haven’t had much time. I’ve also been dealing with a tooth ache since Sunday that’s pretty much put me out of commission for the past few days (it needs to go away ASAP!).

For now I’ll leave you with some photos of our moving adventure! :) Thank you once again to everyone that helped us!!!! You are incredible friends and there is no way we could have done it without any of you!!

Sure, it’s pretty but it’s a bitch to move in. :)

Fake smile alert!

Finally unloading the truck at the new house! :)

Carrying in the last of our crap! :) We were SO happy to be done!

My amazing friends and family who helped!!! My Aunt Pam from Florida is missing from the picture but I had to give a shout out to her! She flew all the way up to Indy to surprise us to help us move. It was so great having her there and she was a MAJOR help! I couldn’t believe she did that for us! :)
January31st

1 comment

big day!

Posted in: just us, the daily doormat

It’s officially our closing day (& Justin Timberlake’s birthday!!). :) It’s almost 1:30am and I should be in bed but I’m too excited and stressed to sleep. :) Of course we aren’t done packing (which is completely my fault) and just our luck, there’s a massive winter storm headed our way. Lovely right!? :)

How convenient that Indianapolis is located in the ‘Destructive Ice’ section. :) I’m just a little bummed because our plans throughout the week might have to change (appliances, painting, etc). Fortunately, we aren’t actually moving until Saturday so as long as the ice isn’t really destructive as my trusty weather.com is forecasting, we will be good to go besides some chilly temps!

I’m putting this crazy weather in the back of my mind so I can try and get some sleep before we purchase our lovely home! I cannot believe we are going to be home owners in just a few hours!! :)
January26th

8 comments

driveway

Posted in: the daily doormat

We finally have a driveway! :) It’s kind of been a mess getting to this point but Dan and I are just thankful the weather cooperated for a couple days so it could happen. Just a few weeks ago, we were told the ground was way too cold for them to pour it. Our construction supervisor said they would have to wait until Spring. Basically they would lay a few layers of gravel where our driveway would be so we’d be able to get in and out of our garage. Could you imagine what a muddy mess that would be?! Especially on moving day!? I won’t lie, we were pretty upset about it but things just happened to work out, yet again! The only issue is that we aren’t allowed to drive on it for a month since it’s so cold and the drying process takes longer. We are more than ok with that! :) We are so happy it’s done and the house finally looks complete (besides our incredibly muddy yard!). ;)