We have a honeymoon!

Things are starting to really come together with the wedding this week. We finally asked Lucy (Ryan's cousin) to be our flower girl. Her and Ethan are going to be so cute together. We have an appt with Matty Cakes on Wednesday and hopefully we'll end up booking our cake with them. And last night, we finally booked our honeymoon. I can't quite remember how I originally stumbled upon Excellence Punta Cana, but as we've been looking at places, this is the one I have always come back to. Tripadvisor ranked it as a top honeymoon location and there are a bunch of good reviews. It was kinda scary typing in the credit card info last night (we've had a very expensive past few weeks), but Ryan pointed out all the vacations that we've gone on for free (Hawaii - twice, skiing - thanks to Ryan's wonderful parents, Chicago - most of which was paid for by Dell), so it made me feel a little bit better about spending a chunk out of our own pocket for our honeymoon. I'm excited!

Just about settled in

We've been really busy getting everything moved into our new place! It has been a lot of fun unpacking everything and finally being in a house. Apartment living had gotten old to both of us and we were really ready for this.

I took off the end of the week after closing and took about 5 van loads of stuff over, with Audrey's help in the evenings to start unpacking. Then Sunday we got the Riata moving truck to get the rest of the big furniture moved.

We've also had a few projects - we already repainted one whole room, chopped down an ugly cedar "tree" in the front yard, and did some yard work around the tree beds.

Here was our painting job, which we're pretty proud of, for a first attempt at home-improvement :-)

Before - their kid's room with neon green & bright blue alternating walls:



After - we're not quite sure how to describe the color. Kinda a blue-gray-green. Behr calls it "Pinedale Shores":





Also, yesterday, while outside, a bunch of the neighbors stopped by to say hi, and they seem like a fun crowd, so that was great. They all have kids, so every day there are hide and seek games and fun stuff like that happening in the cul-de-sac (today it looks like it's soccer).

Anyway, that's about it for now. We gotta figure out what to do for dinner. We're lost without our Riata grills.... we really need to find one since grilling is just about our only means of cooking for ourselves!

T-minus 5 days!

Wow, been a while since we posted....

We are in the home stretch - closing on the house in 5 days. I can't wait. I'm excited to start getting things moved over and start spending some time there. I'll be taking Wed-Fri off work to start moving and getting things ready

Audrey's just excited to have me start painting..... in my opinion, the neon green and blue room looks just fine as it is. :-)

We're a bit stressed though, because we still have a lot of packing to do to get everything ready, still need a fridge, and there's still the wedding planning we've been putting off (cake, honeymoon, tuxes, invitations). We're still keeping busy with other things though, going to Dallas tonight and staying the weekend for a friend's wedding.

We're officially under contract!!

We came to an agreement with the current homeowners for the house on Walnut! This week we have the inspection, which is always a nerve racking part of the home buying process for all first time home buyers.....according to HGTV :-)

So hopefully everything goes smoothly with that. We're really excited, and happy to finally have found a house that we're going to be happy in.

On the wedding front, we're trying to figure out our cake. We went and talked to one lady already, and we're thinking about checking out another one or two. The problem with the cake is that neither of us feel too strongly about anything we really want - it's not something that's too big of a deal for either of us, as long as it looks and tastes good.

We still need to figure out our honeymoon, though... feeling behind on that planning. Any suggestions on where to go? We're thinking Caribbean.

And now we wait

Ryan and I put in an offer on Walnut Cove! I have a feeling that they probably won't get back to us until Monday though, which is going to make for a really long weekend. At least we have some plans to help the time go by. We're going to the game on Saturday and I'm really excited to see the new stadium. Should be a good time.

Here is a link for better pics of the house:
http://www.floorplanhost.com/1304walnutcove/idx/

We'll update everyone once we hear back!

Maybe this could be our new digs?

Here's the house we're looking at now. Pics aren't great - Aud took them as we walked through, and the camera's battery was dying :-)
http://picasaweb.google.com/rdesjardins/WalnutCv

We'll see how this one turns out for us, it has just about everything we've been looking for. Audrey's going to take another look at it tomorrow after work and if everything goes well, we'll see.....!

Winery Tour

Last weekend Ry and I took a break from the house and wedding excitement and took a trip to Fredericksburg with Riata to visit some of the wineries. It was quite a long day, the bus left Riata at 9am and we didn't get home til 8:30pm. Visited four wineries: Texas Hills, Becker, Grape Creek, and Woodrose. I think Woodrose ended up being our favorite, not necessarily the wine, but just the atmosphere and everything.

Here are some more pics from the day: http://picasaweb.google.com/rdesjardins/WineryTour#

More engagement pics posted...

I posted a bunch of our official engagement pics which we just got back from Shannon:
http://picasaweb.google.com/rdesjardins/EngagementPics

More "Save the Date" Possibilities

We got the rest of our engagement pictures from Shannon this weekened. Surprisingly, there are quite a few good ones.

www.shannoncunninghamphoto.com
‘Clients’ tab
‘Audrey & Ryan’
Password is: 9585

You have to create a login to view them, but she said not to worry, you won't get spammed or anything, the info only goes to her.

I created a few more Save the Date options, let me know what you think. Shannon is mailing us a DVD with all the pics, but once we receive it, we want to be ready to submit our order. Let us know which is your fave!

Moving on......

So the first house isn't going to work out. The builder wasn't really willing to budge at all on the price so we had to give up on that one. We went out looking again with Josh today after work. There were a few possibilities, but I'm starting to feel like its more of a chore than a fun thing, looking at houses.

On a positive note, I think I found THE dress last night! I went shopping with Val, Mom, and Danielle at Belle Saison again. I'm really glad Danielle went since she didn't get to go last time and b/c she picked THE one! Can't really say much about it, but I will have to email everyone pics! Today at work, I pulled the camera out 3 different times to look at the dress again and was still excited about it every time, which I think confirms that this is the one.

Next few big things we need to do: honeymoon, cake, and ceremony music. We also are going to order the Save the Dates soon but I think we're going to wait until Shannon sends us the rest of the pics, so that we can ensure that we pick our most favorite. : )

Ok, past few posts have been boring and haven't had pics or anything, so I will include this funny clip!

Scary stuff....

So, we put down our first offer on a house tonight. We both LOVE the house (one in previous post), but are being very realistic in limiting ourselves to what we can really afford. While we would love for things to work out with this one, we have already accepted the fact that the builder is not going to budge much on the price. Josh, our realtor, will be calling us tomorrow with the builder's final offer. There is still a lot out there though, and I know that Ryan and I will find the perfect house that is everything we are looking for.

While the house stuff is very exciting and fun, I must remind myself that there is still more wedding planning to do. Most of the timelines are saying I need to have my dress ordered by the 6 month mark, which is about 3 weeks away. I think mom and Val are going to go shopping with me tomorrow and hopefully we make some progress!

Ok, that's all for now.

Possible Save the Date

I think we've decided on a pic, but now we have to find a template that it goes with. So far, I think this is our best option, what do you think? It also says "Save the Date" in white font at the bottom of the picture, but I covered that with our own pic. :)

Engagement pics

Shannon posted our engagement pics to her blog! I like the first one and the one with the yellow wall the best I think. The sun one is neat too:

You like?
We do.... still looking though

Weekend activities

We spent Saturday morning taking our engagement pictures with our photographer, Shannon. We'll probably get them back in a few weeks, but you can keep an eye on her blog in case she posts one or two sooner than that. We did some down by the Four Seasons, around a few DT streets, and some on campus as well.


After that, we had a marathon of looking at homes with our realtor. We looked at places for about 6.5 hours. Found a few possibilities, but nothing amazing. The next day, we hit a few builders and found one in the Buttercup Creek neighborhood that we really liked. It's not our perfect location, but not bad either.

We still have a good deal of looking around to do until we make any final decisions, but it's so exciting to be looking forward to moving into one of these places!


We still have a few big to do's for the wedding - this week we're looking to narrow down on hotels and rehearsal dinner locations.

Photographer

Ryan and I have been contemplating over a photographer choice for a few weeks now and I think we've finally made a decision. The first person we met with was Shannon Cunningham, who photographed my friend Ashley's wedding in May. Ashley and her husband were very happy with Shannon's photos and highly recommended her. We met with Shannon and really liked her work, but were hoping to get by a little cheaper. Last week we met with Eric Hegwer, who was recommended to us by Riverplace. His pics were very good as well, but we ended up going with Shannon because we're so impressed with her creativity. Let us know what you think!

(Pic is showing up a little blurry here, but looks much clearer on her blog)

Dress shopping!

Yay! My first post!

I'm trying to get the ladies together to start dress shopping. I want to check out Belle Saison. Getting all the girls in one place at one time is going to be tough. I'm trying to focus on bridesmaids dresses first.... but might get the itch once I get there.

Not positive what color I want for the dresses, but of course, I'm leaning towards my favorite teal! :) Here's one I like:

Save the date possibilities....

Aud's favorite:
Other possibilities:
Brown & Pink
Dots
Green

What do you think?

March 14, 2009

We're locked in for March 14!

Next up:
Finalizing our photographer, Florist, DJ, Hotel recommendations, and Save the Date's

We haven't started:
Dress/Tux, cake, invitations


Also, I got us a shorter Wedding page URL. We currently have:
http://www.theknot.com/ourwedding/AudreyWilmot&RyanDesjardins

....obviously, too long. You can now hit us on:
http://www.Ryan-and-Audrey.com

First post

Had an idea to use this to help keep track of our wedding planning process.

We've decided on River Bend Chapel for the ceremony.
River Place Country Club for the reception.
And March 14, 2009 for our date! 245 days to go...

Here is our Knot site.