CJ and I celebrated our 6-month anniversary on Sunday! Unfortunately, CJ had to work the whole day but we were able to go to a nice dinner in Danville to celebrate. The restaurant was an adorable little place in downtown Danville called The Peasant and the Pear and they had amazing food! We highly recommend it.

It’s amazing how fast these past 6 months have flown by! We’ve renovated our kitchen, refinished our floors, moved into our adorable little home, started decorating, and so many more little things. Tomorrow marks exactly two months since we’ve officially moved into the house and four months since we officially became homeowners. Our contractor kept assuring us during the construction that we would forget all the hiccups once we moved into the house and that it would all be worth it. I definitely believe him now, it was all so worth it. For those wondering about a housewarming party, we still have a few more pieces of furniture to get before we start planning it but it will happen. 🙂

Tomorrow, we’re having a tree guy come over to tame the monster tree on our front yard. It is ridiculously large so we need to get it under control.

As promised, below is a picture of our new table lamp for our bedroom. I loooove the print on it and how it contrasts with the stripes on the duvet cover.

My beautiful bouquet

After our wedding, I did a bunch of research on what could be done to preserve my bridal bouquet. There are plenty of companies that do some sort of bouquet preservation technique to freeze dry it so it looks exactly the same as it did on the day of the wedding (for a shadow box or dome), or press the flowers and frame them. Unfortunately, I started doing this research a week or so after the wedding because it didn’t even occur to me before the wedding. If you want to do one of those preservation techniques, you need to ship off your bouquet within a day or two of the wedding to ensure that it can be properly preserved. So, you should contact the company way before the wedding to see what needs to be done. Some companies need to ship something to you before the wedding to put the bouquet in so it doesn’t get damaged in shipping.

I decided that I would just press all of the flowers and then try to do something with them when they were all flattened out. I pulled apart the bouquet flowers one by one and placed them in CJ’s college textbooks (glad we could make use of them one more time!). Once they were all put in the textbooks, I weighted them down with a ton more books to make sure they were as squished as possible. Then, I just left them there for several months.

Last weekend, CJ and I were running a bunch of errands and decided to venture into HomeGoods for the first time. As were were wandering down one of the aisles, we spotted the perfect shadow box for my flower project and it was only $12.99! I was sooo excited to bring it home and get started on my bouquet project.

When we got home, I took out all the flowers from the textbooks and started to place them in the shadow box to see how I wanted them to look.

I also rewrapped the fabric from the bottom of my bouquet so it was nice and neat.

Once I got the flowers where I wanted them in the shadow box, I laid the fabric base on top of the stems of the flowers and started pinning the base into the cushioned shadow box backing. Luckily, I had some extra pearl pins from my bouquet and the shadow box came with about a dozen of them. I kept pinning the fabric until the base was as flat as it could be and then lifted it up to make sure nothing moved. I closed the front of the shadow box and, VOILA! I was done.

Super easy project and it looks so professional. I’ve already had two people tell me that it looks like I bought it from a store. 🙂

Because the house is ready for us to move in, I’ve been loading up my car and dropping the items off each time I stop by the house. It’s so exciting to start bringing things in! I’m really starting to imagine everything in the kitchen and can’t wait to unpack all the wedding gifts and to FINALLY start using them.

I’m madly in love with all of our wedding gifts (particularly the KitchenAid mixer, thanks Mom! Such a dream come true) but there are a few items that are especially meaningful because they were made for us. Normally, I’m not a fan of receiving home decorations as gifts because, as most people who know me well would testify, I’m very picky about style and would rather pick things out for myself. But these items are the exception to the rule and I really can’t wait to find a place to put them on display in the house.

The first one is the most beautiful painting I have ever seen. Our family friend is an incredibly talented painter and painted this scene of CJ and I on our wedding day. It’s amazing how he was able to capture our feelings on our wedding day and make it look exactly like us (even down to the flower on my sash)! This was given to us at our reception so he painted this all even before seeing us. He had a little help from my mom so he knew what my dress was going to look like and I’m so glad my mom showed it to him. This is something that we will keep the rest of our lives and can’t wait to put it on display.

The second one is an adorable cross-stitch (I think that’s what it’s called) of a wedding dress, our names, and our wedding date made by my lovely mother-in-law. It’s SO cute and I love that she personalized it with our names and wedding color (purple, duh). I’m still brainstorming where to put it but I’m thinking that maybe we can do one of those picture collage walls (like this one on Young House Love) and include this in that medley of frames. It really depends on how everything looks when we move in but I think that would be a fun way to incorporate it into our decorations.