New House Construction

It all started at The Parade of Homes in 2008, when we saw a house that we fell in love with. Since then, we started working on plans and rearranging the layout to fit exactly what we wanted. Then last February, we purchased our lot, with the intention to build maybe in about 5 years. Then we saw interest rates fall so low, and decided it was time to pursue this dream that we've had for some time now. We shopped around for a builder. And the first week of January we broke ground on our dream house! Here's what it looks like currently:

The front of the house -

the garage on the left, the front door,

the window for the office, and the window for our master retreat

The back of the house -

our closet on the left (with a walkout to the hottub room), the Great Room windows, french doors and window for the dining area, and window for my craft room My craft room, we were able to squeeze out an 8 1/2 ft x 9 ft room for me when we found out our house could actually be 5 feet wider than we thought.

The view from inside looking out our back windows. The stairs to our basement - the basement will be unfinished, but most of it is framed already because the walls are supporting upstairs.

The third car garage, with a 12 ft garage door.

Grrr...

I've had the video done for a few weeks now, but for some reason I'm having a lot of problems uploading it to blogger. I'll keep trying, stay tuned. :)

Sneak Peak

Surprise! I'm back to the blogging world. I finally looked through all our pictures from the cruise. I'm working on putting together a video and hope to have it up within a week. But, here is my favorite picture of the whole trip.
Don't we look adventurous? This was during our zipline/repelling excursion. AWESOME!

Anniversary

Zariph and I celebrated our TENTH Anniversary last Thursday! I woke up early and made him french toast with strawberries for breakfast, while we watched this lovely video that I made which shows pictures from our ten years of married life.

I also bought him another wedding band, because he lost his other one in Las Vegas last August.

Zariph took me out to dinner that night. We went to The Roof at the Joseph Smith Memorial Building which overlooks the Salt Lake Temple (where we were married) and it is where Zariph proposed 10 1/2 years ago! There were ten red roses waiting on our table for me - how special.

Dinner was so good! The restaurant is a really nice buffet. Everything was delicious! I really overate, just check out my dessert plate. I couldn't decide, they all looked so good (and they were)!

The view from our table:

A Night of Michael Buble!

Wow, I've slacked off on the blog, I know... Anyway, I was lucky enough to attend the Michael Buble concert with my sisters and mom, when he came to SLC about two weeks ago. We met up after work and ate dinner at Wingers.

Then we drove down to the E Center in not much time at all. But the traffic getting off of the freeway was horrible! It took us about 45 minutes to get from the freeway exit to where we finally gave up and ended up parking in a little strip mall just down the street. It was pouring rain and we walked about a mile to the E Center. And I didn't know it, but apperently my shoe had a little hole in the bottom of the sole and was leaking water up into my sock everytime I stepped. It was so cold! So, I enjoyed the concert with one sock off and one sock on, lol. The man himself...It was a great concert!

A little excited...

Our matching shirts...

Here's a little sample from the night. It's amazing how his voice can always be perfect!

Lake Havasu and Las Vegas

We recently returned from our trip to Lake Havasu, Arizona, and Las Vegas. We had a nice time relaxing and spending time together just the three of us. We stayed in a condo on the beach of Lake Havasu for a week. We walked around by the London Bridge (yes, I know it's a little weird, but they bought the real London Bridge and reassembled it in Lake Havasu - we couldn't stop singing "London Bridge is Falling Down" everytime we drove over it). They have a few cute little shops around the London Bridge and it was nice weather to be outside and walk around. We went up to Laughlin to shop at some outlets - but soon discovered there weren't many people shopping there under 60 and all the stores were geared towards the "older" crowd. One day we drove down to Phoenix, it was Zariph and my first time going there. Once again we gravitated to the shopping. I love that Zariph likes to shop as much as I do. We also had a nice lunch at Rainforest Cafe. My 30th birthday was in the middle of the week. Zairph made me breakfast in bed and pampered me all day with letting me do whatever I wanted. We went on some walks and went on a boat tour of Lake Havasu. He also gave me a fun card with a print out that said I was signed up to skydive that weekend in Vegas! And we went to a nice dinner, too. Overall, the scenery was beautiful and it was a great relaxing week.
On the way home, we spent the weekend in Vegas. Saturday morning I went skydiving! It's something I've kind of always wanted to do, but didn't know if I really had the guts to do it. But I thought since I was turning 30, I just felt like I needed to do something crazy. So, I took the opportunity. When you jump out of an airplane that high in the air, you're not really worried about the ground, yet. It didn't even really feel like I was falling that fast, it's not really like a "falling" feeling at all. I just felt a lot of wind blowing in my face, I was most worried that I couldn't breath. Then finally after probably a whole 10 seconds the parachute was pulled and I felt like we were just stuck in mid air, I couldn't tell that we were getting any closer to the ground at all. Then my instructor taught me how to steer the parachute and coached me to spiral down in circles. It was fun. It is definitely something I'd do again.

My 30th Birthday Adventure