Wedding present finished!

Brian and I received many many many wonderful wedding presents. We are very grateful to everyone who gave us them. Some of those gifts were in the form of cash. With that cash we paid off a student loan which is a huge weight off our shoulders....one less bill to pay, way less interest over time...always a good thing to pay something off.

With the rest of the money (yes, we had money left over....people were VERY generous) we decided to do a house project. We wanted that project to be something that we needed to get done rather then just wanting to get done. We wanted to put the money to the best use possible. If we were going to "waste" money it should be our own not other peoples. My mom also gave me a wonderful idea that I would send a picture of the finished product to those wonderful, overly generous people that gave us the money. So I kept a list of all who gave us money to send a picture of the finished product to. And I put it in a safe place. So safe, I cannot find it at the moment. Could have thrown it out but I have not given up looking for it yet. I may look like a feminine (I hope!) version of my dad but I am definitely my mom's daughter. So hopefully I will be able sending out old fashioned photo's soon but for now this will have to do.

So what project did we chose to do with the wedding money?

Putting blinds up with trim. We have 15 windows of various sizes and I think every house needs some kind of window treatment but you definitely do with a house in the south. We knew what we wanted but we could not afford that and frankly, I am not sure the house would be worth the investment. It took us a while to figure out what we could do. We ended up getting basic white blinds from Home Depot, had them cut to size and used trim to hide the top portion of the blinds.

I did not take very good before, during, and after but you will get the idea I am sure.

Before we had either nothing up on the walls or curtains on tension rods:

Before

There are no during pictures. We spent a LONG time waiting for the trim to be put up. We wanted our bookcases done before we added more work to our friends "To Do" list.

And so we skip right to the end:

That is what it looks like with the blinds closed which they always are. With them open....

These are the windows in the breakfast nook you are seeing but all of our windows are like this.

The process took a LOT longer then we thought....not counting the time we were waiting for the bookcases to be done to even start the trim portion. We also started the spice rack process this weekend. The made to order doors had come in so we were going to have them painted and put on this weekend but we are still waiting on the doors. A project we thought was going to take 1 day has taken 3 but so far we are loving the results. What do you think?

Next project? Back splash in the kitchen and finishing the spice rack so stay tuned.....