This weekend I just wanted to be out of the house since the snow days had me stuck inside a majority of last week so we went to Ippolittos on friday night (a great italian restaurant). I had the Chicken French. It was so good and we stuffed ourselves on their amazingly huge rolls. Take a look at all the food we consumed.
We both started with salads (they come with the dinner meals)
I had chicken french and it has sun dried tomatoes (great extra touch).
David had the lasagna.
And we both ate like 3 rolls a piece. They are gigantic, but seriously the best food I've had in a while. Can you tell we don't get out much, but it really was that good. Btw, I stole these photos from their websites and a food critic review.
All this food talk had me wanting to plan all the yummy food I was going to make this week.
Friday- Homemade Raviolis. We were going to make these this weekend, but I just didn't feel like it so sorry David, I promise we'll make them this weekend.
Saturday-We're taking his nieces and nephews to Pizza as a delayed xmas gift.
We had 3 snowed in days here in Georgia and I have been cooking, cleaning, catching up on shows, laundry and working from home. I felt so accomplished today to make it into work and back even with all the ice still on the roads (I can't believe how bad it still is). I organized all the papers in our office and filed them away, we still need to go through the cabinets to sort things. I have realized that we really don't need all this "stuff" and other people might use it more than we do so we need to donate. Last night I tackled our upstairs linen closet. It was filled with towels, scrap towels, miscellaneous sheets, old duvet covers and things we really haven't used in years. I really only need 3 sheet sets for our king size bed (1 currently on bed, 1 spare to rotate and 1 flannel set for cold winter months).
I forgot to take a before picture, but this is what the hallway looked like as I was sorting everything. Molly is hiding in the workout room because I kept throwing things.
Here is the after shots! Starting at the bottom we have doggie towels, sheet and pillow cases, good towels and hair towels,
good towels, room for good towels in the laundry, small stock pile of bathroom essentials, and beach towels!
Here is my pile to donate. I was very pleased at how it all went.
I even found room downstairs in our pantry cupboard for kitchen towels. The pantry is next on the list to organize. I feel so much better after organizing so much this week, but realized I have a long way to go still. How do you stay organized? Am I that lazy?!
Now that we have paid off all of our debt, we are saving for our emergency fund and will then save up for some house renovations. We have been wanting to upgrade a few things since we moved in, but they aren't deal breakers so we waited until we had the money. We probably won't start until April, but its nice to get inspiration and figure out what we want to do.
We would like to re-carpet 3 of our rooms (the only rooms with carpet, the rest have wood floors). These rooms include both spare bedrooms and the office downstairs. I like the frieze style so above is some inspiration for that.
We want to put granite on the kitchen counter tops and a nice tile back splash. I am in love with the tiny glass tiles and picked out a few that I like. Of course they are $10 per square foot, but we don't have that much area to cover. Our kitchen is painted chocolate brown so I went with earthy tones for inspiration.
I'm not sure if they look too modern so we'll have to see. We will also be tiling the master bathroom floor, spare bathroom and laundry room as we have laminate in those areas. David will be doing most of the work himself, but the carpet installation and granite installation are virtually free with promotions they usually have going so we will see about that.
One of the bigger renovations is going to be our master bathroom. We currently have a stand up shower and a tub in the bathroom, but the shower is very, very small. I am short so by the time I am standing where the water hits, I hit my elbows on the walls. So we are going to cut into our closet to make our shower bigger and more functional, I use our spare bathroom now. Our master closet is gigantic, I'm talking like 12 feet long x 5 feet wide so I won't miss the space if we take a couple feet out. The above picture is exactly what we want to do. We currently have a wall between the tub and the shower so we will take that down and have glass installed, which is not cheap by the way. I will show pictures a little later so you can see the before, but we have a little while before we start so its just fun to talk about now. Our total cost we hope to spend for all the above mentioned is $8-9,000 since labor is usually the most expensive and David is cheap!
I know that New Years Eve seems like it was so long ago, but I wanted to post about our fun night over at Darrin (David's Brother) and Stacey's house.
We toasted with Mimosas since champagne wasn't everyone's favorite especially because we all got the cheap brands.
We had fun eating delicious steaks and appetizers and we went next door to their neighbor Courtney and Davids house to visit their get together. Sorry, no pics of them though. You can tell how much my David loves pictures.
Much better.
Darrin and Stacey. I think its impossible for the guys in this family to pose like normal people.
Ashley (Their daughter) hung out with us for a little while until her bf Daniel got off of work, but she ended up staying till midnight. She kept trying to get us to go to 37 main (a rock band club type of place in our local downtown area), but we were all content just hanging together. I feel so old, but its true, we'd rather just hang out with good people instead of going some place loud where you have to pay to get in and can't hear each other.
Annslee and their dog Pippit.
Ashley got bored with us and was trying to demonstrate how to dance at the clubs or something. We also played wii dance and everyone was so good at it, I think they must play non-stop because I sucked.
We had fun watching the ball drop,
Watching the boys do fireworks,
And toasting the new year!
Happy New Year! Austin celebrating with Pippit.
Hope everyone's new years is off to a great start!
David and I are proud to announce that WE'RE DEBT FREEEEEEEEEEEEEEE (if you listen to the Dave Ramsey show, then I'm sure you are saying it in your head... freedom). Our journey to living debt free started 14 months ago when I found Dave Ramsey on an AM radio station on the way home one day. I like people talking to me on the radio and I was looking for anything that wasn't political or sports related and found Dave talking about money. I have been addicted ever since. I was sick and tired of being sick and tired. David and I were both working and could make all our monthly payments, but we had nothing to show at the end of the month. We'd maybe have $200 extra to put into savings. We did what most everyone our age was doing, we both got car loans after school and we deserved all this new stuff we put on credit (or so we thought). I purchased Dave Ramsey's Total Money Makeover book and the rest was history. I was gazelle intense and ready to get started. David was hesitant at first and just went along with it. He calls me Accounts Payable and Accounts Receivable because I tell our money where to go before the month has even started thanks to our written budget. I also passed the book on to my sister and word spread and we got my brother on board as well. I am the final member to join our sibling pact to being debt free! Congrats to everyone!
After we went to the Total Money Live event in Atlanta back in October, it finally clicked with David. He was on board before, but he was fully on board and telling all his friends and family after we got back. I couldn't have asked for a better reaction. I decided to tell all the details in hopes to inspire some of you out there.
What was our debt? We had a few credit cards, 2 car loans, and both our student loans. Yes, we consider student loans debt. Although we wouldn't be here today at our current jobs without them and I'm glad for that, they still are debt and we wanted to get rid of them. The only thing debt doesn't include is the mortgage.
How much did we pay off? Hold on to your pants, we have paid off approximately $45,000 in just 14 months! I know to some that seems impossible, and I would have never thought it was possible for us. It was obviously our income that helped that, but we also sold everything and anything we could find that we didn't need. David even sold his scuba diving gear to help towards our goal.
What was the last thing we paid off? My student loan! Payment came out yesterday. I have never saved up that much money at one time. Crazy to see it in the account for that brief moment before it was taken out.
What was the hardest part? 14 months is a long time to stay focused and keep motivated about seeing the big picture. We had some set backs during the year. Molly needed surgery and diminished our baby emergency fund so we spent time building that up. We also had car troubles where we both needed work done so we had to put things on hold a few times. Life happens and we were just so glad we didn't have to put anything back on a credit card to pay for any of that. We also did not take a big vacation this past year. We visited family in NY, FL and TX to save money, but sometimes it takes sacrifice and we really didn't miss it.
What was the easiest part? I loved the budget part. You start out with your income, then your expenses and make your ending number 0 at the end of the month. You tell your budget to spend X on groceries, X on clothes for the month and X on entertainment. I knew that I had $50 a month to buy clothes so I didn't' feel guilty about going out and buying a few things. David usually let me spend his too, what a good husband.
What's next? We will keep following the baby steps and build up our 3-6 month emergency fund, step up our retirement savings, start buying things with cash and start working towards paying off our house in full. We will also start saving for future cars so we can pay cash and never take out a loan again! We put buying really anything on hold so we have a small list of things that we need to upgrade/replace but just lived with it during this whole process. A few things on the list are a new computer for me, I've had mine for over 7 years now and its seen its better days, and we are going to be remodeling a few rooms in our house. More on that later!
As most of you know, I'm from NY so I have seen my share of snow. It is still exciting when it comes to us here in Georgia, because its not every day that you see it. The anticipation is just like when we were kids, because I am not venturing out in it if the schools are closed. I decided to go to the grocery store saturday because I thought it would be really crowded yesterday. I was wrong, everyone had the same idea that I did. I'm glad I didn't wait till later to go. It was absolutely crazy in there, I couldn't stop laughing at everyone freaking out, but then I did say quick david to the meat and milk aisle because I wanted some food to eat!
There was serioulsy no fresh vegetables. The lettuce that was left was brown everywhere. I managed to get 1 bag of pre-cut lettuce and green onions as my only fresh ingredients.
I then headed to the meat department and there was absolutely no ground beef (I wasn't going to get that anyway, but was shocked at what I saw or didn't see). There were a few packs of chicken that I bought but everything else was scarce.
When I went outside this morning, we officially had 5 inches of thick, heavy snow. Shortly after the freezing rain/sleet started and they are thinking this is going to coat the snow and freeze on the top making driving dangerous through tomorrow.
It's a good thing molly is a bigger dog, because my sister's dog would have had a hard time. Molly just frolicked around. She doesn't mind the colder weather.
Then Molly decided she was freezing and took off for the back door. My iphone caught her in 2 diff. running positions. It looks like she is coming out of her body! Here is a video of Molly playing in the snow.
So today I will take advantage of 1 more day at home by doing laundry, cleaning, cooking, organizing the office and working on our neighborhood newsletter. Here is a recipe for you that I got to make since it is mostly canned items for the soup. It was really easy and tasted great. I'd double the recipe since we really only got 3 servings out of it.
2 Tablespoons extra virgin olive oil
1 medium onion, finely chopped
2 Tablespoons fresh minced garlic
11 oz can corn with peppers, drained
1 12 oz cans Swanson’s Chicken, drained
1 1/2 Cups Chicken Broth
1/2 Cup BBQ Sauce
1/2 teaspoon kosher salt
1/4 teaspoon fresh cracked black pepper
1/4 teaspoon Lawry’s Garlic Salt
1/2 Cup fresh cilantro leaves, chopped (had to leave that out since there was none at the store)
1. Heat oil into a medium pot over medium heat. When hot, saute onions for 5 minutes or until softened. Stir in garlic, corn and chicken breast; mix to combine. Pour in chicken broth, BBQ sauce, salt, pepper, garlic salt and cilantro leaves. Reduce heat to low and simmer for 5 minutes or until ready to serve. Garnish each bowl with a fresh sprig of cilantro.
Happy Friday! Today we are wrapping up our San Antonio Trip photos. We went to tour the Alamo and back down to the River Walk.
This is a free exhibit so it was pretty crowded. It was cool to read and see all about what went on back in history at the Alamo.
I am not a huge history buff so I know the boys enjoyed it more than the girls, but it was still interesting for a little while.
Everything was really pretty and I loved the trees. I didn't understand why everyone kept saying for David and I to switch spots, now I get it.
I was really excited to take a boat tour through the river to see all the buildings and learn what everything was.
Our tour guide was great and told us history of the area and showed us what everything was. He also told us what the best restaurants were in his opinion.
We didn't lose the car this time, we made James go get it and pick us up at the restaurant. Shout out to my brother since we passed my brothers bar, but we couldn't get a good picture because James was driving so this is what we ended up with. Nice boys.
We had fun eating, having drinks and hanging out together.
It was so pretty at night with all the lights all around the river walk. I would recommend a visit for everyone! Have a great weekend.
