Oh What Fun

Our new home! As of this post the house is FINALLY almost done...we are hoping to close on Tuesday next week! Hopefully this is the last major stress for a while...this year has been a little busy. The house was supposed to have been done before Thanksgiving so that Nate and I could move the week of Thanksgiving...that didn't happen, so we have been living at Nate's parents' house for the last week and a half because our apartment lease was up on the 30th of November. Kind of a pain in the butt...we had to move all of our stuff into one of those PODS storage things and then basically live out of a suitcase at his parents' house until the house is finished. Anyways, here's few pictures showing the progress :)

I think I already talked about Nate and I deciding to tile the whole main floor and the upstairs bathrooms and laundry room...the next few pictures are of Nate laying all the tile. He's basically amazing!

Apparently this next picture didn't flip like it was supposed to...oops!

Yay for grass! It looks much more like a home with the sod in.

This picture shows the comparison to our neighbors exterior colors...the right side is obviously much better looking ;)

Master bath...with Nate in the closet

Master shower

Master tub

Jack and Jill bathroom between the two guest bedrooms (Mel and Mar's bedrooms)

Mel and Mar....how do you like the double sinks and gigantic mirror???

Laundry room

Shelves above washer/dryer

Now...welcome to our blue polka-dot house :) The builder wanted us to walk through the house and mark areas that needed to be fixed/touched up. You'll notice (by all the pretty blue pieces of tape) that we have some fabulous painters who were responsible for our house ;) Basically, I've decided their philosophy was...if you can't really see it...it doesn't need to be painted very well. Nice huh?!

That's all for now...hopefully next week we'll be able to move in and the next pictures on the blog will be of the house with our stuff in it :)

Dominican Republic

I'm finally getting the pictures from our honeymoon on the blog! Here's us sitting on our first flight (in first class!).

Nate killing time at the airport in Miami...he had no idea I was taking this picture :)


Even though electronics were supposed to be turned off I kept the camera on for a minute. I wanted to get some neat pictures from above the island during our descent.

Welcome to Punta Cana!

The airport in Punta Cana was quite different than any we've ever seen.

For some reason we never got any pictures of the front of the hotel...so we'll jump right into what our room looked like. This first shot I was standing in the doorway.

That would be Nate calling his dad to let him know we made it.

Our bathroom

Huge shower!

Jacuzzi tub in the room

This was our view from the little porch outside our room.

Me after a little nap :)

This was the TINY lizard we found on our way back from dinner that night. I had to put our hotel key next to it to emphasize how tiny the thing was.

This is just part of the hotel...this hotel was gigantic! It had just under 2000 rooms...we didn't even see half of the hotel.

Some pictures taken inside the main hotel building (there were several buildings that made up the whole hotel)

This was looking into the Mexican restaurant they had there. The hotel probably had about 8 different restaurants to choose from...with all sorts of different foods.

Me eating some really good chips and guacamole :)

This was what the roof looked like in the main reception area where you checked in...pretty interesting!

These next few pictures are from our excursion off of the resort. The resort itself didn't have a ton to do right there so we decided to head off the resort and go on this snorkeling trip. A bus picked us up at our resort and took us to where the boat was. The boat then took us out to a "floating island" kind of thing (that's what they called it anyway). There were lots of chairs to lay out on, a place you could get drinks and several activities to do.

These roped off areas were where we could swim with sting rays and nurse sharks. They told us the kind of sharks we would be swimming with didn't bite and that the sting rays had their barbs removed so they couldn't sting...so Nate and I decided to take a swim with them :)

They actually let you hold a sting ray and took a picture of you...I'll have to upload that one later.

Another activity was snorkeling with the fish and coral. That was pretty neat...but snorkeling gave me a little anxiety trying to breathe through that tube, especially when a wave came rolling over the top of it ;)

This one was taken back at the resort before dinner one night. I think we were headed to the steak house that night.

The resort had 9 different pools! We only went swimming in 2 of them. The all had lounge chairs sitting in a shallow portion of the pool, and most had swim-up bars as well.

Pictures of the beach :)

That little dark spec is Nate on a boogie board...kinda got lost in the wave

He had some pretty good waves to play in (he's standing up in this picture)

I did go in the water a little bit, but this is mostly what I did on the beach :)

There was a river that crossed through the resort....there are buildings on both sides of the river

Us waiting in the Punta Cana airport for our flight home. They had a Wendy's in the airport where we decided to grab some lunch from...$20 for 2 cheeseburgers, 1 french fry and 1 frosty! Apparenty the Dominican Republic doesn't have the dollar menu ;)