June | 2014 | Becky Jael

Things with the house are finally mostly finished, and it feels so good to just be at home. Both Vu and I often say how much we love living here. Our latest adventure with home ownership was one that really freaked me out. We had tent caterpillars. I get all creeped out and itchy just thinking about it. Disgusting!!! But it is worth it to be able to have a home we love so much. So finally here is the photo tour. Welcome to our home! 🙂

Warning, there are a lot of pictures. I hope you like it!

The entryway.

I love the video my church came out with around Easter, “Because of Him”, so I wrote down some of my favorite parts of the text and that is what I used in the quote boards. I cut 3/4″ plywood to 14×14″ and painted them white, then used a stencil to pencil in the letters until I got them where I wanted them to be and then painted it by hand. It would have been faster to use a stencil I could just paint through, but I couldn’t find one with simple letters and that would fit all the text I wanted to get on. It took me about a day to paint it. The “Because of Him” parts are a 1/4″ piece of board that I cut to 13 1/2″ long and glued on after I painted it. The nail board is of Angel Moroni, but I want to make the strings thicker, I just ran out of embroidery thread and haven’t gotten more yet. The bottom middle white piece is 1/4″ plywood that I glued large popsicle sticks to in a herringbone pattern and then painted white and attached a knob to hang something from. The canvas prints I had printed from Costco, their 14×14 gallery wrap.

The main living area’s are on the second floor, and all form one large room. We really like this layout (except that I have to always have the dishes done before people come over).

One of our favorite feature’s of the house is the wood floors. They are beautiful! Followed closely by the stone backsplash and the cabinet/counter area in the “dining room”. The builder called it a butler’s pantry, but I wouldn’t call it that. However I am not sure what to call it.

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Over Memorial Weekend I went camping to Olympic National Park with Rachel. Vu couldn’t come because he had class on Saturday and was going on his 6th week of being on call for work. We left in the afternoon on Friday and drove to the campground. We went to the coastal part of the park. This was our second time to this part of the park, the first time was 9 month’s after we moved to Washington, 7 years ago. We really love this park. We are both a huge fan of water: ocean’s, rivers, lakes, waterfalls, rain, etc… which was a big factor in our decision to move to Western Washington.

Even though Rachel and I always talk on the phone a least a couple of times a week, we still didn’t have enough time to catch up on everything we wanted to share with each other in the four hour drive to the campground. I love being a twin! We stayed at the Kalaloch campground which is in the most southern tip of the coastal part of the park. We love this campground because it is right in between all of the beaches, which is our favorite part. The whole drive, from Snoqualmie to Kalaloch, the roads were lined with tons of these yellow flowers that I love. They remind me of Wisteria, but yellow. We got to the campground at 7:30 and set up camp and then started a fire to make tin foil dinners and s’mores. We LOVE tin foil dinners. We aren’t the most experienced fire starters, so I was very happy that we were able to successfully cook the dinners.

I have seen a ton of different ideas for s’mores so we tired out some ones that were new to us. Our favorite was the Andes mints. But the Samoa’s were really good too!