i love saving

You may remember that from 29 weeks on, I was put on modified bed rest when I was pregnant with Jude (a little firecracker even in the womb). After watching a ridiculous amount of Gilmore Girls and catching up on every email I'd ever been sent, I set to work putting our family on a strict budget. We had tried to budget before, but had never been able to really flesh it out and stick to it. Dave Ramsey says that most couples have a "nerd" who loves spreadsheets and numbers and a "free spirit" who hates being told what to do. You should see my Excel files for our personal home budget and for my Serwa Chic expenditures and profits. It's a thing of organized beauty. I won't go into the details of describing the piles of random receipts on Shawn's dresser (that I think makes sense to him), but suffice it to say that I am 100% the nerd, and Shawn definitely qualifies as the free spirit. The difference between this time we tried a budget and the last few times were many: 1)I did it all. We had always tried to do it together before, and we always put it off or did it halfway because we were avoiding the inevitable heated discussion. We were trying to do what every marriage counselor says to do and split the financial record keeping, but it turns out that just doesn't work for us. I keep up with the budget, and every couple of days or so when I'm entering in the numbers and seeing where we are with line items, I email or text Shawn to let him know how much money we have in each category 2)The fears of all of the forthcoming pre-term labor bills scared the pants off of both of us - so we had a very tangible reason to save our butts off 3)I suddenly had a ton of time to track every penny we spent, to put all of our bills on automatic withdrawal, to make a spreadsheet for every month of the next year and half, and to not only put us on a budget, but to look at our account every day, track our spending, and keep us on that budget. I obviously have much less time now, but I've found that I did all the hard work in the beginning - now it's just a matter of keeping us on track and running the numbers a couple of times a week.

Our goal since beginning this budget was to get ourselves so that we can live solely off of Shawn's income. This proved to be harder than we thought, so we're still working on that, but we're getting closer. In the meantime, we're using my income to pay down student loan debt, and save. One of our main goals for savings are our many home improvement projects. You see, we bought our house before the market really crashed when young naive couples everywhere were buying well above their actual price range. By the grace of God, we had the wherewithall to buy a house much below the loan amount for which we were approved, and much below what we could afford with our two incomes. We knew I'd eventually want to stay home with whatever kiddos we'd eventually have, and while we didn't know what exactly that would mean for us financially, we knew it would require a modest monthly mortgage payment and a small, fixer-upper home.

Why am I telling you all of this? Because I'm excited. After months of doing our best to stick to a budget, we were finally able to build our savings to a place to actually fix up our fixer upper. Don't get me wrong - there's still plenty of work to be done (the bathrooms and landscaping are the next step, I think), but it's been such a great feeling to see such improvement. Even better is knowing that we're able to pay cash for these improvement - knowing that we worked hard to be disciplined and are now able to see the dividends of that.

I'm not bragging - trust me, we have a loooong way to go before we're financially savvy AND before our home is anywhere near where we'd like it to be - I'm just really, genuinely excited and want to share.

I mentioned in a previous post that we were able to replace our old, very unsafe windows this spring, and our next project was to get a patio built off of the back of our home. Here is the only picture I could find of the back of our house pre-patio. Snow is a big deal in North Carolina, so yes - it warranted a photo:


And here's our new patio! This is the view of our backyard from the door (someday that corner in the top left will be a stellar vegetable garden):
Looking left from the back door:

Looking right from the back door:

And our brand new patio in all its glory (without landscaping - which is our goal for the late fall):

We were so excited, we grilled out the first night it was finished:

In case you're bored with this post (I wouldn't blame you), here's our sweet Judeabug at bath time. We use the nasal aspirator as a toy - it's perfect for shooting water under his neck crevices (which hides all manner of pea flavored spit up, lint, milk, and who knows what other grossness), and he loves holding it. It's a tough life having to choose between the ducky and the "squeezy ball" as we call it:

Daddy's getting ready to suction the nose!

Go ahead - try to resist the baby talk. I dare ya.

Okay, so after the patio was finished, we had a little left over in savings to get me this really cool thing from World Market (that was on sale AND for which we were able to use a 10% off coupon). I have to admit that I don't actually know what it's called. Shawn's called it a buffet, a console, and a few other terms that I don't remember. I just know that I do most of my sewing on our kitchen table. Whereas before I had to pile all my junk into the corner when I was finished, I now have the perfect sewing stuff holder that not only looks lovely, but organizes everything perfectly (nerd alert! nerd alert!).

Those baskets are actually from Matt and Patrice's yard sale and are the PERFECT length to hold the fabric that was randomly piled up in our guest bedroom before:

I'm working on a project right now, so the sewing machine is on the dining room table, but trust me - it fits perfectly right here. And it looks like if we ever wanted to use it as an entertainment stand, we could (that thing at the bottom will eventually be a shelf. The shelf pins were missing in the package, so we're calling to get those sent to us):

And there are three drawers. Perfectly sized to hold: 1)Elastic, Velcro, etc. 2)Microfiber and PUL fabric, and 3)Patterns and thread.

So while the discipline of saying "no" to things is not ever always fun, it's an awesome feeling to be able to finally do some of the bigger projects we've been wanting to do! So please excuse my long winded, picture laden post - I'm just really excited. :)