What better way to kick off the holiday season than with a fun holiday party? This weekend we opened our home to my amazing bride and grooms for our annual Audrey Rose Brides Holiday Party!! This is always one of my favorite days of the year! We had such a blast!

Ever since buying and moving into this house back in May, we really hit the ground running when it came to projects. I knew that there were certain things I wanted done ASAP when we were first getting settled in or else we would never do them. We started with painting the entire house (goodbye yellow and red walls!), then buying furniture and decorating, then making a dining room table, then redoing landscaping in the front and back yard and now finally redoing the back deck!

I’m so excited to finally announce that I am rebranding!! Ahh!! I have been working with the super talented Krista Jones over the last several weeks to come up with a fresh new brand for Audrey Rose Photography and it couldn’t have come out more perfect! Even better than I had imagined!

One of the things I hated about living in a tiny one bedroom apartment for 4 years was that we could never host many people, particularly for dinner. I’ve always dreamed of being able to have friends over for dinner and sit around a big dining room table together. So when we started looking for houses to buy, one of my top priorities was finding a house with a dining room that could accommodate a decent sized table. So once we found that, the next step was getting that table. I love the look of beautiful solid wood tables from Pottery Barn and Restoration Hardware, but I certainly wasn’t willing to spend thousands of dollars on a table. So we decided to build our own! Super simple, right? Wrong.

I keep telling myself that once the house, or even just one room, is ‘done’ then I would share it on the blog. But really, when are you ever done settling into a home? We moved into our first home together almost 4 months ago and I still hadn’t shared any of the house on the blog! So I am now finally sharing the one room in the house that is closest to done- the living room!

There’s nothing quite like a good family tradition. An event that your whole family looks forward to and brings everyone together. This past weekend we continued a tradition that my family started over a decade ago. The 11th Annual croquet tournament! Once a year, my mom’s side of the family comes together for a friendly, but quite competitive, croquet tournament!