FRIDAY NO.3

IT'S FRIDAY!!!! And it's moving weekend! The movers will be at our apartment tomorrow morning to start loading all of our furniture up and taking it over to OUR HOUSE!! We are so excited and so ready to be in our home.

Matthew got home yesterday afternoon from being in Knoxville the past two weeks and he doesn't have to go back- anytime soon! Woo hoo! We celebrated him being home last night with Cheddar's...and because we don't want to buy a lot of groceries since we're moving lol.

I didn't get a chance it share my chicken taco's recipe this week, but will try to next week. I also have a delicious crockpot potato soup to share!

One of my Christmas presents from Matthew was this Rifle Paper Co. recipe box. I've been waiting to put this baby in it's forever home...our new kitchen. I KNEW it would look so good with the white back splash. I took it over the other night and just stood there and admired it for a few minutes. Seriously, I love it and all Rifle Paper Co. products.

Since Matthew has been out of town my best friend and sister came and stayed a couple of nights with me and helped me pack and move a few things over!
After moving some storage totes over we decided it was only right to treat ourselves to a small blizzard from Dairy Queen. ;) Awful quality but here's a picture of us waiting in line of our blizzards lol.

My sister came down a few times and helped me so much! We made three trips in one night with both cars completely loaded down. I could not have done it without her. The older I get the more I realize my sister is one of my best friends, and I'm so thankful!


Have y'all watched How To Get Away With Murder?!?! My sister wanted to watch an episode one night after we got back from moving a lot of stuff and I agreed to watch one episode to see what it was all about and before I knew it, it was almost 1 in the morning and we had watched THREE episodes! It was so good, and I can't wait to watch more.

The past few weeks at work have been crazy busy, and I don't think it will be slowing down anytime soon, but I like the work and enjoy staying busy- makes the day go by quicker!

Blog Posts from this week:

- Weekend Recap: Snow Edition

- Crockpot Sausage Tortelloni

 - Coffee Bar

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FRIDAY NO.3

WEEKEND RECAP: SNOW EDITION

Hope y'all aren't tired of all the snow posts, if you are, well then just skip right over this post ;)

Let's back up to last Monday...about 6:30 a.m. I dropped Matthew off with one of his coworkers and they headed up to Knoxville for the week. One of their big clients is up there and they had to spend the week up there working on them. I spent the week packing up our apartment and watching One Tree Hill. Fast forward to Thursday... all day Thursday there was talk of a "big snow storm" heading our way. I watched the weather all day and I'm positive it changed back and forth at least 3 times. At first they were forecasting the snow storm to hit early Friday morning, then they changed it hitting late Friday afternoon, and then changed it back to the morning. I talked to my boss and she told me that if it's going to do what they say it's going to do then they will close the office. I got off of work and did what any other sane person would do...I went to the grocery store....along with half of Nashville. I didn't get milk and bread though...just milk and other stuff for crockpot recipes. ;)

Thursday night I decided to take a night off from packing and spent it parked on the couch. I talked to Matthew for a little bit before he said he was going to bed, and then decided I was going to watch another episode of OTH before calling it a night. I got a call from Matthew five minutes later saying they were leaving in ten minutes and coming home. They were going to come home Friday mid day but decided it would probably be best to come home that night. So I cleaned up and then ran back to the grocery store to get breakfast sausage (the store I went to earlier was sold out- told you half of Nashville was there too) for breakfast in the morning and then headed to pick Matthew up. It may have been midnight but I was THRILLED!!!!!! We got back in a little after 1 that morning and went to bed.

We woke up Friday morning a little before 6 and this is what I saw outside our apartment! We are SO thankful they decided to come back Thursday night instead of Friday mid day! 

And that was the start to our snowy weekend! It snowed, and snowed, and snowed, and snowed, AND SNOWED all day Friday. Seriously, I don't remember it ever snowing that much and for that long. We watched it all day Friday and couldn't stop talking about how pretty it was. We decided (I talked Matthew into it) to go outside and walk around in it so I could get some pictures of it and a couple of us! Had to document our first married snow day, duh ;) And I am so glad we did! Everything was absolutely beautiful. I doubt he would admit it but I think Matthew enjoyed seeing it all, too!

The walking trail at our apartment

 So much snow on our roof!

We were sad the pond didn't completely freeze over lol oh well, still pretty!

We got 8 INCHES OF SNOW!

Our apartment did a great job of scraping/salting our parking lot. (This was the before picture lol)

We spent the whole day watching How I Met Your Mother and lounging around. It was perfect!

Saturday the snow was still around most of the day. We lounged around most of the day and then decided to try and drive over to our house. The roads were still somewhat messy but not terrible. Our neighborhood on the other hand was still really bad. We are SO thankful our moving day wasn't this past weekend and is this upcoming weekend! 

OUR HOUSE IN THE SNOW!!

And our backyard! I can already tell we are going to love having a backyard! And yes, that's a trampoline in our backyard lol the sellers left it.

Friday morning I made our favorite sausage roll ups for breakfast and I made crockpot sausage tortelloni for a late lunch/early dinner, along with cheesy-garlic pull apart rolls. 

 Saturday we had cheese biscuits for breakfast and a stuffed crust DiGiorno pizza for lunch...we love them but try to eat them only every now and then so I figured a snow day was the perfect time for one! For dinner I made crockpot chicken tacos (one of Matthew's favorites) and Mexican rice.

I put our crockpot to good use this weekend! I'll be sharing both of those crockpot recipes this week.

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WEEKEND RECAP: SNOW EDITION

CROCKPOT BEEF ROAST - DINNER

Today I am going to share with y'all one of Matthew's favorite meals, crockpot roast beef!

It is probably one of the easiest meals I can make and my crockpot does all of it. I just fix a few sides to go with it and then it's time to eat! I also use crockpot bags so cleanup is REALLY easy. If you haven't discovered crockpot bags yet then get some the next time you go to the store and you can thank me later! 

Ingredients:

- 2-2.5lb beef roast

- 1 package of brown gravy mix, dry

- 1 package of ranch dressing mix, dry

- 1 package of dried Italian salad dressing mix

- 1/2 cup water

Directions:

- Place roast in crockpot

- Pour each package over roast

- Pour water around roast

- Cook on low 8-9 hours

I made this soon after we got married and Matthew has requested it multiple times, so I always make sure to keep those three dry mixes in our pantry. The ranch and Italian dressing mix both come in boxes of 4, and the brown gravy comes in single packs at .50 each. Can't beat that!

I usually fix mashed potatoes, mac & cheese and green beans with this roast, and we always have leftovers for a couple of days- which makes for perfect lunches! Follow along on Snapchat (shelbycoats), I'm usually snapping away while I make dinner, and I love following other bloggers to get dinner ideas.

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CROCKPOT BEEF ROAST - DINNER

TOUR OF OUR NEW HOME

I'm so excited to share this post with y'all today! We knew the house was a little outdated in some some rooms and that if we bought this house we would have some work to do, but honestly that's exactly what we wanted. We wanted something that we could do some work on but not something that was going to make us the next Chip and Joanna Gaines. So with that being said, here is our house! We are so excited to begin working on our house and take it room by room.

The entryway

It's a two story entryway and Matthew's first words when he saw the entryway was "this is the perfect place for a 12ft tall Christmas tree." I was one proud wife! ;)

 Study and dining room

Around the stairs is the study. Some people use it as a formal living room, but we don't want to have a formal living room. So we decided to make it Matthew's office. 

Dining Room

Connected to the dining room and kitchen is the dining room. That wallpaper will be coming down within the next two weeks ;) I am in love with the wainscoting. So pretty!

Up next is the kitchen!

Again, this wall paper is coming down very soon! The kitchen and dining room are where we are going to do quite a bit of work. We are so excited to redo the kitchen!

Living Room

We plan on taking that half wall down so the entrance into the living room isn't so small.

So excited we have a fireplace, and I am loving those 3 big windows!! So much natural light pouring in.

Not pictured downstairs:
Around the corner from the kitchen is a small storage closet, half bath and a entrance to the garage.


Upstairs:

There are 3 guest bedrooms that all look just like this. We are so excited to have family and friends be able to stay with us now!! One guest bedroom will be my office and I will finally be able to put my new desk somewhere!!

Guest bathroom

Master bedroom

Master Bathroom
Double vanity, actual vanity, and water closet...I was SOLD.

Through the door on the left is our walk in closet! Woo hoo for having a bigger closet!













Not picture upstairs:
Linen closet and laundry room

Our backyard

It's a decent size yard and it's fenced in! The sellers left their trampoline lol.

And that's our house! We are so excited and so grateful for the opportunity to have a home of our own! We keep telling each other we can't believe we have a house, but we do! We feel like it was just yesterday he was picking me up for our first date and here we are almost 6 years later, married and just bought our first house! So incredibly blessed to be doing life with Matthew.

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TOUR OF OUR NEW HOME

WE BOUGHT A HOUSE!

Surprise! If you are following me on any social media account then I'm sure you saw my post on Friday afternoon if not, then we bought a house! YAAAYYY! I'm so excited that I can finally talk about what has been happening for the past month or so. 

Let me start from the beginning. Around October we started thinking about what we wanted to do once our lease was up (it's not up until the beginning of February, we were just really planning ahead lol.) We threw around the idea of buying land somewhere and building. My uncle is a contractor and has always said he would build us a house one day. We looked at different plots of land and different options, but it isn't the time for us to build right now. We want to live somewhere for awhile to make sure that's where we want to build. So once that was out we started looking online at houses. Nothing serious, just browsing. Occasionally we would drive around and look at some of the ones we found online. We knew we couldn't really do anything because of our lease at our apartment, but still just liked looking. We found this one house on Zillow early November and just fell in love with it. We drove by it many times, but we weren't serious about buying a house at the time and KNEW it wouldn't still be on the market when we were ready. I checked Zillow every single day to see if it was still on there. I called it "our house" and told Matthew it would still be for sale when we were serious about buying a house, I just knew it.

Fast forward to the Monday after Thanksgiving and we came home to a note taped to our door from our apartment letting us know that our lease was up in 6 months (as if we didn't know lol.) They listed the month to month leasing prices and we were FLOORED. If we chose to stay in our apartment and lease on a month to month bases until we found something then our rent would have almost doubled. Matthew and I both agreed that we would live in a cardboard box before we paid that for a 1 bedroom apartment. That same night we started looking on Zillow and other websites for houses. We had originally planned on using a realtor from church, but things happened so quickly. Tuesday morning Matthew called about the house we both LOVED (the one I kept calling "our house")since it was still showing up as for sale on Zillow. The realtor listing it told us it was under contract but if anything changed she would let us know. I'll be honest and say that I was completely bummed. I told Matthew I hope the contract comes off of it and it becomes available again to which he replied "Shel that hardly ever happens". So back to searching we went. We met with a realtor Tuesday night and he showed us a house. It was nice, but it just wasn't for us. That realtor became our realtor and we are so thankful for him! He lined up 2 more houses to show us the next day (Wednesday afternoon.) Well Wednesday afternoon right before we got off the listing agent on "our house" called and said the contract fell through and it was back on the market. Matthew asked our realtor if we could look at that one after the other two and he got it all worked out. So we looked at the first one and it was really small and didn't have much of a yard. The second one was REALLY nice and had been completely updated. It was a lot smaller than what we were wanting but it was just gorgeous on the inside. Our realtor told us there were multiple bids on it and if we put an offer in then we would be entering a bidding war and that the prices on those always shoot up quickly. So we went and looked at the last house ("our house"), as soon as we walked through the front door I knew we would be making an offer soon. Both of our reactions were the same and we kept giving each other the look. We drove out of the neighborhood and Matthew said "Well I think we just found our first house" and I cried. We went home and talked it over and prayed about it for a few hours and just felt like we really needed to put an offer in asap. So Matthew called our realtor and told him we wanted to make an offer. The sellers had until Thursday night to accept and they did. I'm pretty sure neither of us slept that Wednesday night, and we hardly ate anything all day Thursday waiting on them to accept or not. They accepted and we celebrated with ice cream from Dairy Queen.

So "our house" actually became OUR HOUSE! It all happened SO fast...like in four days fast but looking back now and we can see so clearly how it was all apart of God's plan for us. This house was on the market for 70 DAYS (only because it had a contract on it previously for a few weeks and then it was dropped) and right now that is unheard of. Especially in the area we bought it in. It is definitely a sellers market right now and houses are going so quickly after being listed. We still can't believe it, and we are so incredibly grateful!

2016 is starting out pretty great. We have a lot of work to do, but we are so thankful for the opportunity to make this house our home!

Here are a few more pictures from the past few months that I haven't been able to share until now :)

Celebrating that they accepted our offer at Dairy Queen!

First picture in OUR house. This was the night we had our home inspection.

Our realtor and home inspector checking out our fireplace.

And here is our closing gift from our realtor! The cutest basket and picture of our home. Love it all!

Come back tomorrow for pictures of the inside! 

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WE BOUGHT A HOUSE!

FRIDAY NO.2

It's Friday! I feel like this has been one of the longest weeks of my life lol but it's finally Friday! In hopes of keeping this whole "Friday No." going today is No.2!

Have y'all seen this napping office chair?? This hilarious and genius all at the same time lol. The price tag, however, is not! It's probably a good thing my office doesn't have these, because I would be out.

I love reading these kind of posts! Most of them have some good tips and are really always get me pretty pumped about being more productive. Do y'all like reading these? There are a ton on Pinterest!

Last night was a little scary. I had just pulled out of a neighborhood and was going down the road when someone pulled out in front of me. There wasn't anything I could do but slam on my brakes and unfortunately I was just too close and I hit the other car. It was a pretty hard hit, hard enough that my airbag deployed- thankfully I sit really far back, literally for that exact reason, and it barely popped my nose. I got a burn on my stomach from either my seat belt or the airbag and it's bruised a little. The girl that pulled out in front of me was really young and said she just didn't see me coming. Thankfully, she was fine too. Matthew wasn't far down the road so he was there in about 5 minutes, such a blessing! As soon as I saw it was a young girl, I went into what I like to call "mom mode" lol. I guess I'm so used to being protective of my younger sisters and knowing how to take care of them so I helped her out of her car. Her driver door wouldn't open so she had to climb over to the passenger seat. She was pretty scared and shaken up so I helped call her mom after I called the police.  We were in the middle of an intersection so we got over to the side of the road far enough from the road. We had traffic backed up for a good bit until the police arrived, and when they arrived I mean they all arrived lol. There were about 5 of them. I have always heard really good things about Mount Juliet's police department and from last night I definitely believe they are all true. They were all so nice, patient and really helpful. They had a few directing traffic and a couple of them helping the both of us so it helped get everything that needed to be done, done and in a timely manner. The young girl's parents were there pretty quickly after it happened as well, and were really nice, too. Overall it was scary, but it definitely could have been worse. We were both really lucky! I am going today to pick up a rental car.

I blogged twice yesterday! My second post was a fun linkup and I loved finding new books to read from other bloggers who linked up.

Happy Weekend, friends!!

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FRIDAY NO.2

THOUGHTS OF THURSDAY

This week has done me in! By Tuesday night I told Matthew I was already over adulting and the week wasn't even half way over lol. Between trying not to drown at work, training for work, working on things at our apartment, and life in general. I let stress get the best of me this week, and our apartment is reaping the consequences. Laundry is piling up, dishes need to be unloaded from the dishwasher, and just a good cleaning needs to happen!

I took a deep breath this morning and told myself that it was time to get everything done. I'm thankful for the additional responsibilities I have been given at work. It lets me know that my boss and co-workers trust me enough and I'm excited. I'm thankful for everything that is going on right now in our lives, we are so blessed and I sometimes forget that.

So even if we haven't grocery shopped all week, laundry is piling up, and our apartment is a mess- I am thankful for where we are in life! I'm also really thankful for having this guy by my side through it all.

Also, if don't have a robe then you need this one. I usually only wear shorts and a t-shirt to bed and I hate getting out of the bed/shower cold. I've been on the lookout for a good robe, but one that didn't cost and arm and a leg. I came across this one at Target the other day. So far I am loving it. It's not too think or too short and that's what I love about it. There are a few different color options, but I chose white. I love the clean and crisp look to it. Perfect to wear over my pj's or to wear while I am getting ready for the day!

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THOUGHTS OF THURSDAY

JOHNSON CITY

This past weekend we made a trip to Johnson City to visit my BIL and SIL. They start PT school and clinicals this week so we knew this past weekend was the best weekend to go before they get busy with studying! It's about a 4 hour drive, so we headed out as quick as we could Friday afternoon.

We got there pretty late Friday night so we talked for a little bit and then crashed for the night. Matthew's parents got there Friday afternoon and stayed in a nearby hotel, we decided to crash at their apartment for the weekend.

We made a stop at Chick-fil-A for breakfast Saturday morning and then got a tour of their campus. They both go to East Tennessee State University (ETSU) and goodness, what  beautiful campus it is, surrounded by mountains. SO pretty! Here are some pictures from our tour. It's still Christmas break so there weren't many people on campus.

Saturday night we went to a cute restaurant called The Firehouse Restaurant. It was so good and the cutest little place, with great service.

After we went to dinner we went to the movies. They have this awesome $3 theater, and we saw Spectre, the new James Bond movie. It was pretty good, definitely a lot of fighting scenes lol.

Sunday we went to church with them and had lunch at one of our favorites, Cookout. We always enjoy seeing where our family and friends worship at, and enjoyed meeting new people. 

After lunch we packed up and got ready for the trip back. Before we could leave though the boys had to play a game of hockey...

boys will be boys ;) 

On the way home we made a stop at Puppy Zone in Knoxville and a big furniture warehouse before heading on home. There weren't many puppies this time and the ones they did have were all asleep lol.

Most of the drive home it was raining or spitting snow flurries and when we were about an hour from home the sun finally decided to come out. Giving us a beautiful winter sunset!

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JOHNSON CITY