Dia de Gracias

So thankful for:

Salvation in Christ. An amazing hubby whose love for Jesus guides his love for me and his attitude towards marriage. A sweet pup. Family that lives close enough to see on a weekly basis. Family that we can travel easily to see. A house we can call our own. A best friend I can now call my sister. A body of believers we can worship with and live life with. Employment.

I am richly blessed, even though I don't deserve it.

Amen.

Oh wait, where do you go to school?

That stinks, I WENT to Clemson :(

freshman year...our first photo together and first unofficial date

First snow at Clemson freshman year!

Freshman year...both of us very excited about Clemson!

Sophomore year- making the best of the upper deck with the future bro-and-sis-in-law

Junior year- representing Clemson at Big Ben in London!

Senior year- making the best of several rainy games

Senior year- one of the few times I actually sat on the hill and stormed the field..with friends that I used to see everyday..whaaaaa

Graduation for three of us ;)

Clemson friends at our wedding

 First game as alumni! Scored free tickets...in the last row of the upperdeck!

*click the link at the top to see some of Clemson's most awesome traditions
**thanks to Maria for sharing this link and making me miss my Clemson days...ya jerk

The smartest pup in the world!

If we are this proud of our pup I'm scared to see how into our kids we'll be ;)

Grady can officially sit:

Lay Down:

and shake:

 

We're also working on rolling over but he hasn't quite caught on to that yet :)

And by the way, has anyone noticed the patchwork blanket that's in just about every pic I've taken around the house? Nick's grandma made him that blanket and it's pretty much been attached to his side since birth. He slept with it all four years of college, cuddles with it on the couch, and even sleeps under it in the summer. It was months into our marriage before I got to actually use that blanket, especially if it meant him using another. He will deny it, but I have some pretty concrete photo evidence ;) I love that the blanket was handmade just for him and that even as an adult he still loves it! Keep your eyes peeled for more photo evidence of Nick and his Blanket!

What are some other fun tricks we can teach our pup?

So fresh and so clean

The first thing we tackled on the house was the struggling laundry room area. The laundry area is located in the garage, and was separated from the storage/car parking area of the garage by a thin divider wall that fell about a foot short from the ceiling. Here it is as we saw it when we first walked through the house:

Take a look at the struggling ceiling tiles and the popcorn ceiling under that.

 The paneling on the wall both in the laundry room and on the divider wall was rotted at the bottom and curling away from the wall, the pipes to connect to the washer/dryer were rusted, busted and leaking, and there was dryer lint, dirt and cobwebs EVERYWHERE.

This is after using a commercial vac to get up most of the dryer lint...

 Moving further into the laundry "room", there was a grimy outdoor sink and a wooden cabinet full of cobwebs and an old birds nest. The naked dirty hot water heater pipe and unfinished window completed the look:

 

The first thing we did (after my dad fixing all the pipes) was tear down all the ceiling tiles and scrape off the popcorn ceiling throughout the whole garage to get down to the raw plywood underneath. The ceiling tiles didn't take long but scraping the popcorn took hours. We also scraped up the patchy linoleum tile. Then we tore down the wimpy divider wall and all the paneling and used a commercial vac to vacuum up all the dirt, lint, and nastiness that had accumulated (including tons of acorns in the wall...some squirrel family might return this winter to find their whole life savings gone).

Then my dad and Nick got to work on rebuilding the wall:

Nick's first experience drilling

This has been the dirtiest work so far

After we got the bones of the wall up we put in beadboard in the laundry room and faux-wood paneling on the garage-side of our new wall. We did the faux-wood for two reasons: 1) it's a lot cheaper and easier than putting up a drywall wall, and 2) the rest of the garage is already paneled with faux-wood paneling and it's in good enough shape to not have to replace.

We'll paint this and the rest of the garage so the walls will match

We put in a light and painted the plywood ceiling (4 coats!):

My dad had to update the plug for the washer and install a vent for the dryer. He also added a heating/AC vent to make it more room-like. Then we added molding and baseboards, added molding around the window, painted the floor with an epoxy-coated floorpaint, painted the walls, and added a door:

I wanted to have a purple room somewhere in the house :)

Finally, we added the whole reason for the room: our washer and dryer (a Craigslist find!). We also added a few stand-alone cabinets we found on clearance at Home Depot for storage. Oh, and we cleaned up the grimy sink and put that back in, which is super useful for cleaning out paint brushes, etc.

So there you have it! Our first house transformation. We took a disgusting 'nook' and turned it into a super useful laundry room. We still need to add some hooks for hanging clothes but we're incredibly pleased with how it turned out and are so thankful to my dad for providing expertise and helping us make it happen!

Grady

Nick and I had been experiencing bouts of puppy fever the entire time we've been married but due to our last apartment not allowing dogs (a big wommmp-wommmp-wommmp) the fever was subsided over the last year. Well fast-forward to this past Friday night. Nick and I were eating tapas at The Kazbah and our conversation inevitably moved to the P word...when would we get a puppy? Nick agreed that we didn't necessarily have to wait until November when he started working to get one, and I agreed that we didn't necessarily just have to run out and get one tomorrow. We did decide it'd be fun to go check out the Humane Society the next day just to check it out, since we agreed that it'd be best to adopt a puppy.

So the next morning I decide to check out the puppies at the Humane Society on their website and see that an australian shepherd mixed litter had just come in a couple days before. They are ADORABLE, so I start freaking out and running around to get ready, convinced we are going to get a puppy that day. My reasonable hubby sees my eyes glaze over with excitement, and decides that it would still be a good idea to go to the Humane Society and 'look'. We both agree that I won't go expecting to get a puppy, while Nick won't go expecting to NOT get a puppy.

We walk in, see the litter I'd seen online, and I immediately pick up the black and white spotted puppy with an all black head. He cuddles right into my arms and lays down (where he pretty much stayed until we took him home). At one point Nick held out his arms and told the puppy to "come to daddy". I knew my reasonable hubby was completely smitten and that we weren't leaving without that puppy.

So we'd like you to meet our Little Man, Grady:

 

 

He is currently recovering from a stomach bug that he acquired from the shelter, and after spending the night at the vet last night he is like a new puppy. And my hubby is still pretty smitten...

watch out world..

The Crandalls are homeowners!! 

Stay tuned for more photos, details, and hopefully lots of fantastic before-and-afters! :)

Front-Row-Center Vanilla Mousse Cheesecake

Cheesecake is one of the hubby's favorite desserts. Over the course of our one-year-and-counting marriage I've tried to attempt his very favorite foods and so far I've tackled chicken alfredo, chicken fried rice, and ribs (in order of easiest to most difficult). Until recently I hadn't been brave enough to tackle his favorite dessert: cheesecake.

Why?

Well, funny you should ask. Way back in December 2006, when our relationship was in its tender first-month-getting-to-know-each-other-while-feeling-a-little-awkward-to-be-newly-dating-stage, my now sister-in-law and I decided to take a trip to visit Nick and Sean and their family in Bluffton for a weekend over Christmas break. Maria and I'd both only met Nick's family once or twice before that at a tailgate, so we were a little nervous about spending the whole weekend with them. Would they like us? Would they approve of us dating their sons? I decided that to show our appreciation of them letting us crash their house for a weekend and to prove that I'd be a valuable asset to Nick and the Crandalls as his girlfriend, I'd bake something for everyone to enjoy during our time there. So Maria and I headed to the store and settled on Nestle Tollhouse refrigerated fudge pull-apart-brownie dough with Christmas sprinkles. We even got a Christmas tin to put them in as a nice touch.

We baked those babies to perfection and headed down to Bluffton with our Christmas tin of brownies, looking forward to how impressed Nick's mom would be at our thoughtfulness and excited to see everyone enjoying our brownies all weekend. We got there and our brownies were received with a "thanks girls...yall are so sweet" and were promptly placed on the top of the fridge...where they stayed the entire rest of the weekend. The air was completely let out of our balloons. As it turns out, my mom-in-law Marcy is absolutely famous for her homemade brownies, so for the rest of the weekend I'd hear from Nick, "hey Lyndsey, I'm going to get a brownie...my mom's brownies are so good!!" which would be followed by Nick skipping in to the kitchen, pushing our brownies aside to reach Marcy's, and scarfing one down with a smile (at least that's how it seemed).

We still joke about it with them and the family, and Nick and Sean have come to find out that it's polite to compliment your significant other's attempts in the kitchen, no matter how good or bad...or how much worse than your mom's ;).

Ever since then, I've been a little weary about making anything that falls under the "my mom makes it best" umbrella...until recently! Nick's mom makes amazing cheesecake. Seriously. Nick's fave is her caramel praline cheesecake, and he requests that she make it for every major holiday or event celebrating him (including our rehearsal dinner). So when I saw a recipe for vanilla mousse cheesecake in a magazine, I knew it'd be the perfect dessert to try for the one-year-anniversary dinner I was going to make for him, but I was a little concerned it would turn out just like the Brownie Debacle of 2006. I made it and nervously cut Nick a piece for him to try, terrified I'd hear a phrase like "not quite...." or "you'll learn....", but to my surprise, Nick loved the cheesecake. While Marcy's recipes will always be well-received by the hubs' (and my) appetites, I'm glad to know mine have a place in his heart too :)

I'm happy to report that my cheesecake did not get banished to the back of the refrigerator! And really, I should get no credit for the deliciousness of this cheesecake. It's so easy to make, there's almost no way it could come out badly...

So here's the recipe for my Front-Row-Center Vanilla Mousse Cheesecake:

Ingredients:

For the cheesecake:
40 vanilla wafers, crushed (about 1.5 cups)
3 tbsp. butter, melted
3 pkg cream cheese, softened (8 oz. each)
3/4 cup sugar
1 tbsp. vanilla
3 eggs

For the mousse:
1 pkg cream cheese (8 oz.)
1/4 cup sugar
1 tsp. vanilla
8 oz. whipped topping, thawed

Heat oven to 325. Mix wafer crumbs and butter; press onto bottom of 9-in springform pan.
Beat 3 pkg. cream cheese, 3/4 cup sugar and 1 tbsp vanilla with mixer until well blended.
Add eggs, one at a time, mixing on low speed after each until just blended.
Pour over crust.
Bake 50 to 55 min. or until center is almost set. Run knife around rim of pan to loosen cake; cool completely in pan.
Beat 1 pkg. cream cheese, 1/4 cup sugar, and 1 tsp. vanilla in large bowl until well blended.
Whisk in whipped topping; spread over cheesecake.
Refrigerate 4 hours. Remove rim of pan before serving cheesecake.
Garnish with fresh berries if your heart so desires.

Enjoy!