House Stuff and New Layouts

At the beginning of the summer my husband and I came across this 1.5 acre lot that was a "diamond in the rough". We decided to purchase it and build our dream home on it! Fun! This is a picture of the land before we bought it. Believe it or not, there is actually an old, neglected house behind the tall bushy trees in the middle of the photo.


As part of the purchase agreement the old existing home was to be knocked down. While tearing down a cinder-block wall, the driver found an 8' snake! Thankfully, he "disposed" of it for us and hauled it off with the rubble. Whew! I hope he doesn't have any more "friends".

Here's what it looks like today after the home being torn down and the land is now levelled. Hopefully, we'll begin retention work and foundation digging next week! Just gotta get the permits from the city and we're on our way!


This week is my husband's "Birthday Week". (We like to take advantage of our birthday privileges for as long as possible around here. LOL!) He drives we nuts sometimes because he hates it when we get him gifts. All he wanted to do was go and work on the lot without any distractions. He spent all morning working in the "forest" section of our lot next to the creek clearing out dead trees and cleaning things up. It's looking really good! I can't wait for the kids to have their adventures back in there!

Camryn was such a cutie while we were visiting dad. She's almost walking, and all she wanted to do was crawl around in the dirt. It was alright with me since I was able to get some cute shots of her including her trademark squishy-nose smile!

Last week I was thrilled to find out that I had won a $25 gift certificate from sugardumplin.com from entering a challenge. Awesome, eh?! I used my certificate to buy their darling September Seasonal kit featuring lots of fun Foof-a-la papers and school-themed embellies.

I decided to redo my previous layout using these pictures. Have you ever done that before? You look at a layout and decide you just don't like it as much as when you were creating it? You can see the previous layout in a previous post here on my blog. The colors I chose were too dark for these rainy-day shots of my daughter. I decided to brighten it up a with the red, yellow, and blue color combination in the paper. I like it much better now!

I wish I could take the design credit on this one-year layout of Camryn, but it's a total scraplift from my fellow Carolee's Creations DT friend, Danielle Calhoun. Check out her gallery on Two Peas. She does some amazing work!

http://twopeasinabucket.kaboose.com/userprofile.asp?user_id=242535

Here's one I was playing around with last night. I had fun combining some different colors on this one. Along with the primary colors I added some browns, teal and olive green stitching to tone it down a bit.