House Updates!

I just got the wedding pictures from the photographer last week, so I'll work on getting some of the official wedding photos posted sometime soon!  In the meantime, we've been busy, busy, busy writing thank you cards, getting all of the mess from the wedding timeframe organized and put away (still working on that...), and also doing prep work for my brother D and future sister-in-law B's upcoming wedding and associated events.  So I figured I'd post some of the pictures of our latest updates around the house to show all of our productiveness, starting with my first full-scale stained glass window!  The one of the right was purchased at a thrift shop a while ago, but I made the geometric, craftsman-style one on the left and I'm super proud of it!  Only took me slightly over 6 months....(blame the wedding)

I'd been wanting to replace the mismatched lamps that were taking up space on our bedside tables for ages, but never found a wall lamp I liked that was also affordable.  So many great ones that are over $150 apiece, but S can't quite stomach spending that much on bedside lighting.  A couple of weeks ago I was wandering around Target and found these that fit the bill and were only $30 a pop!  I just installed them last week and I'm loving the more direct lighting and all of the extra space we have now on our nightstands!

We have a few new additions to our bar area as well.  The lighted bar sign was a holiday gift from my brother-in-law and his wife and the Texas bottle top display was an awesome wedding gift from a friend.  Oddly, S has been buying more canned beer lately because it's more "summer-y" and then he complains that he has no more bottle tops to add...

These were additions we made just before the wedding when my parents were in town - they were SUCH a huge help!  The new ceiling fan was a wedding present from my parents and is by a company called Haiku - it's one that we can sync to our phones and to our thermostat for better temperature control in the house and S is still having fun toying around with his new house tech.  The new chandelier in the dining room was kind of a pain in the butt (this is the smaller version, the "grande" size is sold out).  The description online said it had a 12 ft cord, which we needed to accommodate our super high ceilings, but it only arrived with a 6 ft cord.  So my parents had to work with a local lighting repair company for us to get the cord lengthened, which was not easy at all.  Luckily we got it back just in time for the electrician to install it (with 20 ft ceilings, there was no way we weren't hiring a professional for this).  But despite the issues, I LOVE our new lighting situation in the front room!

And speaking of syncing our new ceiling fan with our thermostat - we can now actually do that because S upgraded us to a new Nest!!!  I've been wanting one of these for a while and so far I'm loving it!  Best part is lowering/raising the temperature from bed when I'm too lazy to get up at night!

And the rest of the new updates all revolved around artwork.  The two gorgeous pieces above were wedding gifts from my brothers and their significant others and I've hung them front and center in our entry way so people will see them when they come to visit!

The large center piece here in our hallway is also new.  We used some of our wedding money to buy this awesomely geeky art poster that details every space exploration mission that has ever launched from planet Earth!  We love it.

And finally, this is the first "real" artwork that S and I have purchased together!  We got these two photographs at an art gallery in Marfa during our post-wedding mini-moon.  S picked out the top one, a wide expanse of mountains and desert with a small structure in the center and I chose the bottom, a violent desert storm backlit by a sunset.  They're now gracing our hallway as well.

That's it on the house for now.  Wedding photos coming soon followed by a rundown of the mini-moon in West Texas!