Ben's Castle & Wedding Updates

Ben's Castle (aka the shed) is coming along nicely. He has been slaving away on this during any free moment over the past month. Sadly, we've been fighting mother nature quite a bit, and so his prediction on how long it would take to complete has been tripled. I'm pretty sure that for 2 weeks straight, every day he had off from work and was available to work on the shed, it rained. A frustrating thing, as you can imagine. HOWEVER, it's almost done... we need to add the doors and paint it in order to cross it off our to-do list.

Check out the progress!

11/1/2012

The wedding is officially a week away! We are both excited about it and anxious to have it done. It has been a LOT of fun to plan, but also equally exhausting. Most of our to-do list is complete, with just a few things lingering over our heads, but even if those don't get accomplished it'll be okay. At the end of the day we'll still be married! WOOT! :)

Cupcake toppers

Ready for props to go with our photo booth!

The pumpkin place cards are finally done!

We'll be cutting off the stems and drilling in the center to add tea lights (part of the table decor)

It's hard to believe that it's November and very soon after the wedding we'll be in the full swing of the Holidays too. Ahhh! One step at a time. It's going to be fun to have added family this year to celebrate with and a HUSBAND to enjoy the season with! YAY! :)

Hope everyone is doing well! Say a prayer that Ben can have good weather to knock out his shed and not have to worry about it anymore.

Ben is Hard at Work

For those of you that know Ben, you know he loves to work with his hands. Ben's ability to visualize a project and bring it to "life" is not a skill that I possess... I can picture how a room will look if I paint it a certain color or decorate a particular way, but my brain doesn't put pieces together. I'm an "IKEA builder"; I enjoy the silly little cartoon people that hold fake hammer looking objects but are telling really telling the consumer to connect a few pegs in pre-drilled holes and then to smash pieces of wood together. That's my kind of building. My man on the other hand doesn't need little cartoon people or wooden pegs... he has real skill. Side note: maybe Ben and I should flip houses together... I'm good with real tools if I'm shown how to use them. ;) And I definitely know how to paint and decorate!

Ben has been hard at work on our house over the past couple of weeks while I've been focused on wedding details. I've lived in this house for three years, and have already made some fun improvements on the place, but there are still plenty of projects for Ben and I to work on together. The first order of business was attacking the master bedroom closet. We have standard, rectangular walk-in closets in each of our three bedrooms. Since I am a girl who enjoys a varied wardrobe, I already had the master bedroom closet full. Go me. Now it's time to change things up, so I donated a lot of clothes to Goodwill, and we bought more shelves.

Ben came up with a great plan for the closet, we bought the shelving to go in it, and then quickly realized that the closet isn't as big as we planned for. ;) SO Ben spent an entire evening sitting in the closet, sketching out ideas, measuring, and finally came up with a better solution. A couple nights later he tried the new set up and voila! Perfection. Well, kinda... (see picture below: the top left shelf- I'm going to move that basket too...) I'm guessing he's going to want more space than this in the closet when he moves in, so I need to figure out what else I can move out so he has more space. I've got a little time to figure this out. :)

For your reference- it used to be just one "L" shaped shelf across the whole length of the closet.

Shelves are new- we did a mock set-up of Ben's clothes on the left and mine on the right :)

The next project is the shed. As previously mentioned, my man works with his hands. Which means there should be no surprise that his current garage has a huge collection of tools. There should also be no surprise that I have one set of tools that came in a large plastic box my dad bought for me a few years ago (for him to use when he helps me with projects), along with a misc. collection of odds 'n ends that I've collected in a decopaged plastic box that I made in college, and that's the extent of my selection of tools. Thankfully, this house has a great two car garage that fits both of our cars nicely in it. The downfall is that there isn't room for Ben's tools AND our cars AND some storage. (My dad built an awesome shelf in it several years ago that allows me to store items in the garage without having to use the attack space.) So Ben's building a shed. I'm amazed he can do that. He found the building plans he liked, ordered the necessary materials at Menards, and he's cranking away in the back yard at this project this weekend.

We have supplies!

Starting on the foundation- Saturday morning

I'll post an update when it's done. My guess is that it'll take a couple of weekends to complete all of it, but I have no doubt it'll be a great space for B to keep all his tools in an orderly fashion. (Have I mentioned lately how thankful I am that I'm marrying a man who is as organized as I am?! LOVE that.)

News on the wedding front... I finished the favors last night. My best friend, Kelin (http://sahmchef.blogspot.com), made the apple butter for us and canned 72 4oz jars this week. She's amazing and so generous to do this for us! I have been looking at label templates online for a couple of weeks, but wasn't finding anything that stuck out, so I designed my own. I'm pretty pleased with how they turned out! I love that these little details that are coming together so perfectly. It makes me happy! There are a lot of other things we're working on for the big day, but I thought I'd share just a few of them for you to enjoy with us.

Our apple butter wedding favors

This is going to be a fun way to leave the reception!

Oh! We got our wedding license this week too! 41 days! :) Happy weekend!