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    Home Tour: Austin

    Master bedroom
    Tate’s bedroom
    Henry’s bedroom
    Kitchen/Dining/Living
    Other direction
    Living room
    Entryway
    Boys’ bathroom
    Back of the house
    Backyard firepit
    Backyard

    I can’t believe we’ve lived here for more than a year and a half and I haven’t featured a home tour! Sorry about that. (Here’s the tour of our old house in Houston, if you’re interested). 
    As a recap of the process, Matt and I purchased architectural plans that were already in existence, which helped reduce the overall cost. This was the third time this particular house has been built in Austin. Because we were able to find an odd-shaped piece of empty land that was priced inexpensively,
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    Budget Update

    I wanted to check back in about how our new budget monitoring is going. Here’s the good, the bad, and the downright ugly.
    1. I am loving Mint.com. The app is particularly helpful because it is super easy to use on a daily basis to stay on top of our expenses. It doesn’t always categorize things the way we want to categorize them (for example, it says P.Terry’s is “fast food” and we just want to lump it under our general “Restaurant” expenses). Getting everything into the right category is integral to monitoring our budgets in the right way. 
    2. In addition to categorizing certain expenses, I like to look at the
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    February: Reflection & Rejuvenation

    February is here. So fast! We are already 1/12 of the way through the year with just a blink of an eye. How did that happen? 
    Here’s what I set out to do this month: 
    • Organize Henry’s closet: Yes! 
    • Organize junk drawer: Yes!
    • Get our wood siding refinished: Nope. We decided to use the money in our Home Improvement budget to buy this IKEA desk in white for Matt.
    • Paint our deck: No, see reason above.
    • Plan Reflection & Rejuvenation retreat (e-mail me for details!): Yes! It’s on the calendar for July in Austin! 
    • Get budget set: Yes! 
    • Work one hour a night and balance our chores: Um, I’ve
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