Maiden Voyage of the Miter Saw

Michael went camping with some boys from sunday school this weekend, so me and the pup decided we would go visit Emily, B, and Garrett! Russ was there too, and he's a pretty nice guy ;). We had lots of fun and I even accomplished a sewing project!

Emily is a pretty handy gal, and she has decided to dabble in some woodworking projects. She saved her first project for when we were there, and so I got to play with power tools :). She decided that little G needs some wood cubbies for his growing toy collection, so Friday night we went and bought a saw. We only ended up getting about halfway through the project due to buying the wrong drill bit and some important naps getting in the way of time, but here's what the final product will look like:

Pretty cool! We got all her wood pieces cut out, and here's a video of the first cut :)

Look out, that girl is a pro! Lots more wood-working projects coming soon to the Baur household!

Organizing My House: Kitchen Edition

Woohoo, the kitchen is organized!

I talked a couple of months ago about wanting to get my house organized, and focus numero uno was the kitchen. I obviously spend a lot of time there, and it was pretty bad. Here's a few pictures of the mess.

this pantry was probably the worst of all-yuck!

This has been a very slow project because I had this "organizational epiphany" right before the holiday season. I spent the month of December (in between christmas shopping and traveling) figuring out my game plan and gathering supplies. I probably spent waaay too much time on pinterest looking at an overwhelming amount of advice and ideas.
Last Saturday, I had absolutely nothing going on, and we were dog-sitting, so I spent the whole day going to town in that kitchen. I got everything in order and cleaned the entire thing. It looks great. Some of the cabinets didn't have huge changes, but overall it just feels so much better and things are easier to find. I even put labels on the bins in the pantry so Michael knows exactly where everything goes :).

I cleared off my counter-tops and put all my cookbooks up above the stove with the lighters and matches

 This cabinet mainly got cleared out and baskets were added to hold our dishtowels and vitamins

 Yay for an organized tupperware cabinet!

This used to house a lot of our small appliances and I could never find anything! It was one of those cabinets where everything fell out when you opened the doors.

 My spices were in rough shape and I had doubles of several things because I could never find what I needed. I found this idea from a blog and amazon prime sold them to me for pretty cheap. I think this cabinet door is my favorite area of the whole kitchen!

In the pantry, I added bins and grouped things together and labeled them. There was plenty of room, so I found a shelf at Lowe's that matched the others and we added it to the top for more storage space. I cleared all my small appliances out of a bottom cabinet and put them on the top 2 shelves of the pantry. The very top is for things we don't use very often, but still want to keep, and the shelf below that is for things we use fairly often, but don't want taking up space on the counter-top. 

I am so happy that I finally finished and how it all turned out! I won't bore you with pictures of all my other cabinets :), but here's a quick before and after of my laundry area that I cleaned up along with the kitchen since its in the same room as my pantry.

This is usually how it looked before (with dog towels up in that left corner when they were clean)

And now, its still a little crowded, but looks way better!

Alright, now on to the next project!

Christmas Crafts

I haven't shared the recent sewing/crafting projects that I have been working on lately, and I actually made a few Christmas presents this year. I forgot to get pictures of all of them (since a couple were pretty last minute), but here's a list of most of them!

I made my bro-in-laws each a case for their ipads using fabric representing their favorite teams. In case you were wondering, yes, the A&M fabric was very difficult to sew with; in fact, my hands are still a little rashy from the endeavor ;)

 For 2 of the little girls in my life (Lucy and Halle) I made Christmas tree shirts/onesies. I was actually going to make shirts for my nieces, but ran out of time :( maybe next year.

Garrett got the boy version of the Christmas tree onesie, and I'm so glad his mom was sweet enough to send me a picture of him wearing it! Ok, let's be serious, is he a heart-breaker or what??

 Thanks to pinterest, I found a really easy and cute tutorial for making holiday themed coasters. I was really happy with how they turned out, and still need to make myself a set!

One Friday afternoon before Christmas, my manager had a "team building" exercise upstairs in the ob/gyn office where we all made wreaths out of real christmas tree branches. I liked mine a lot, plus it smelled great, so I hung it in my kitchen and put some ornaments on it.

Man, looking at all this makes me sad that the season is over.  Hopefully my skills will improve over the next year, and I can make even more (and better) presents for next Christmas!

Griffin's Wedding

A few weeks ago, my cousin Griffin got married! She is from Temple, and decided to get married in the chapel that her parents were married in about 20 years ago in Salado. That worked great for us since its only an hour from Austin. Its always fun when all the Verheydens get together for a party :).  The wedding was small and really nice, and she was completely gorgeous. Her dress was amazing. I don't know her now-husband very well since she spent the last year-ish of college in Italy studying abroad and he is in the army. My Aunt and Uncle have told me lots of good things about him and I know he loves the Lord and loves Griffin, so it sounds like a good match!

Christmas!

Man I have some catching up to do! Since I last posted, I have done some fun crafting projects, spent a week in Dallas for the holidays, and a Verheyden cousin got married. So that stuff is coming later this week, for now, here's a run-down of the week we spent in Dallas.


I just love having a job with normal hours because that means its easy to take vacation at Christmas! We went to Dallas for a whole entire week and it was fabulous.
When we first got there, mom and dad had this set up for present wrapping :)

Later that day, my Grandma came to visit and we spent the day working a puzzle with my mom.
Sunday we went to church up north and spent the day with Michael's family. We met part of the family at a restaurant after church to watch the Texans game.

Unfortunately, they didn't win :(. Then we spent the rest of the day hanging out at his sister Lisa's house and cuddling with our precious new niece Elizabeth!

Ryan with his newly adopted dog Oreo!

We spent the night at Lisa's house so I could help with some middle of the night feedings for Elizabeth, then went back to my parents house for Christmas Eve. John brought Hannah and Jacob over and my brothers and sister were all in town at that point.

We went to the Christmas Eve service and I found Brooke!!

all the sibs :)

Christmas day I forgot to get pictures of present-opening, but we got all kinds of great stuff from both families. Lots of great games that we spent the rest of the week learning and playing! But, I did get pictures of the great surprise of snow on Christmas day!! So fun!

Christmas day evening, we braved the snow/sleet and had dinner and more presents with Michael's family.

Michael and Braeden trying out Braeden's new boxing gloves

The rest of the week was spent going back and forth between our 2 families and just enjoying being in Dallas! We did get to go to the Armed Forces Bowl on Saturday before we left thanks to Josh's hook-up in the air force. It was a cold day, but pretty fun to watch the game. 

What a great week! I'm so thankful that we had so much time to spend up there with family. I can't believe that it's already 2013, here's to another great year!