titus2keeperathome is back.....

hello everyone out in blog land! i know its been years since  i have posted here. im kind of hoping some one out there missed me !!

well tomorrow  is january 24th 2022  and my plan is to post daily or at least weekly. my husband and I are building  a new home in a town about 15 miles away from where we live now. they are supposed to be starting it in February and we are both excited about it. i plan on posting all the info on my blog from february till October the mentioned finish date.

I have been visiting my favorite blogs in the recent months and have been trying to keep up with every bodies goings on. I look forward to reading and commenting as time goes on.  

 i have a lot of funny stories  to share with you and some not so funny!

Have a blesssed week  ahead of you and come back to  visit whenever you like!

 

 

 

 

"To be self controlled, and pure, to be busy at home, to be kind and to be subject to their husbands , so that no one will malign the word of God." Titus 2:5

My little boy turns the big 30 today!!

I have redone some of the numbers on this post because I just havent had the time to sit down and write a new post for my blog.  Our youngest child turns 30 today. Matthew Thomas William Bates was born way back in 1990 on April 24th at 8:02 PM.

Mattie you are our most favorite son we could ever have!! We love you very much and I found a few pictures of your years growing up, very nice memories.....

Happy Birthday Mattie,
We love you very much and pray that the Lord Blesses you immensley on your birthday and all the days of your life.




Mattie one month old, May 1990~





Mattie and Jennifer May 1990~



Your 4th birthday part with the family at the park in Escalon, April 1994~



Your first day of school, August 1995, Kindergarten, Mrs. La Rossa, room A-1 Dent elementary Escalon




Giving Mom a great big smile while playing around on your bunk beds with your new comforter, January 1996~

Look at what a cutie you were, and still are :) January 1993~

You always loved to play in cabinets in the kitchen~

You and Mom at the In and Out burger in Bakersfield on our way to Disneyland,July 31, 2000~

You and Roger in our Motel room across the street from Disneyland , looks like you are both worn out from all the fun!!!, July 31, 2000~

Your 16th birthday party, the pirate party!! April 2006~

Sadly this year you are many, many miles from home in California and I am here in Idahobut I still know it is your birthday and you are in my thoughts as you always are every day of my life.

Lots of Love, we miss you bunches and bunches. Remember you will always be my little SB :)

Update on moving to Idaho :)

 Above picture is of the choices we made this trip to Idaho. We picked out the granite for the counters and the rest we had already picked out on our last trip. I think it all looks very good together but it was very hard to choose colors because it was such a sunny day so this was my second or third choice as the first choice I had my sunglasses on and boy did it make the colors look so different. We are both happy with our choices and with the progress on our new home. I was so excited when we first got to Idaho Falls that I really wanted to go right out and see the home but it was night time and it was snowing so we had to wait till morning.....oh what a long night that was for me :)

 tile and cabinet color inside the business that is making the cabinets, that floor tile sure looks different when there isn't any sun shining on it.

 This is the color for the laundry room counter, I love the way it looks!

This picture was taken from in front of our new home looking east, you can't really tell from these cell phone pictures but there are some beautiful mountains right behind the homes.

 This picture is taken looking south from our new driveway, after the snowplow had gone through. When we firs went out there it hadn't been plowed yet but our new truck made it through very nicely, I felt very safe.

We are still on track for our May 22 move date and every day it gets one day closer and I get more excited. We both loved the snow and I especially liked the quietness . You would think you would only have quiet out in Rigby because it is so much smaller than Idaho Falls but it was just as quiet standing outside our motel room. I was just amazed. The doggies alsoo seemed to like the snow also, Molly  for sure, Mandy not so much she enjoyed being in the nice warm truck. The first day we were there I wasn't doing very well but after buying some nice warm boots I was feeling much better.

We also got to meet up with Miranda our interior design person and I so enjoyed seeing her again. I can't wait to meet her husband and children when we move up there and have more time. I have not actually packed anything yet it seems to early but I have boxes and I have been going through everything I come across.

This last picture is of the sold sign in front of our new home, my favorite picture!!




 So this last visit we met up with the builder, the cabinet maker, tile person, fence person, landscape person and still had time to just enjoy ourselves. We were busy and didn't get to do everything we had planned but we got a lot of things done and questions answered. We feel so  much more comfortable with our new home and its progress. It is very hard to have a home built in another state but we are getting through the process one day at a time.



"To be self controlled, and pure, to be busy at home, to be kind and to be subject to their husbands , so that no one will malign the word of God." Titus 2:5

Happy New Year!

     Happy New Year to one and all. I have been horrible at keeping up posting to my blog and I am so sorry about that. With us building our new home pretty much every waking and sleeping moment has been consumed with it. I didn't realize when we made the decision to build a new home so many decisions would have to be made. We are currently in the phase known as framing and our builder has sent us pictures weekly of the progress, but as anyone who reads my blog knows I am not very good with my computer and pictures so I will see what I can do, I may post a picture and then again I may not. Its kind of nice that he takes a picture in the same spot so you can see what has been done. It doesn't look like much in the first picture, but then when you see the latest one you notice a diference. They have framed the basement and hopefully they will start on the main floor soon. Then we will be going up for a visit to make sure the framing was done correctly. If we didn't go up and then noticed something later it would be far harder to correct. I can't wait to go up there. They have snow right now, isnt' that exciting? I have always lived in California in the valley so snow always excites me. I know people who live in snow probably don't like it that much but I really hate the hot weather here so I will be giving up the much disliked hot weather for cold weather. Like I tell Roger, at lease with cold you can always put a coat on or a blanket but in hot weather when you get down to skin there isn't much you can do about it.
     I have once again deactivated my Facebook account, figured there wasn't any better time than the first day of the year. I have done this many times before and I always go back and reactivate it but I am really praying this time I can just leave it behind me. I did like keeping track of my kids and grand kids but there have been less pictures of the grand kids as time goes on. They are getting older so there aren't as many cute little things to post about . Jennifer and Chris have busy lives, Kaitlyn turned 10 last October and Dylan will be 13 this coming March. Our little babies (our doggies) are getting all grown up too. Molly turned 13 this past September and Mandy turned 7 in November. I am really wanting to get another puppy but with the house stuff going on I think it's best to wait until
after we move.
 Okay so I put the pictures up but they are kind of out of order.

 this picture above is the third picture our builder sent us.

 The picture above is the second picture our builder sent us.

 This picutre above is the first picture our builder sent us.

 The picture above is the most current picture with the framing in the basement. I will try and keep more current with what is going on.

     I pray everyone has a very blessed year ahead of them, I am choosing to find Joy in the journey we are currently on. I pray daily that everything goes smoothly. I have started the countdown and we have started going through lots of things here and there.  We have less than 5 months but we are praying it goes pretty quickly, though I am sure  we will wonder where the time has gone When moving day comes.



"To be self controlled, and pure, to be busy at home, to be kind and to be subject to their husbands , so that no one will malign the word of God." Titus 2:5

Finally got the picture thing figure out...........

My wonderful husband fixed my picture problem so I am now able to show you the pictures I've been wanting to. The first picture is of a home just right inside of the subdivision. This is not our new home just one of the many homes I thought were pretty and don't ya just love the pretty blue sky with the white clouds, I just love them.

 One of the homes when you first enter the subivision, not our new home just one of many beautiful homes that have already been built there.

 The entrance to our new subdivision, it has this on both sides of the entrance. I thought it was so pretty and yes it has the pretty clouds too.

This is a picture of a home that our builder built in Idaho Falls, Idaho and the owners were gracious enought to let us take a look at the inside. We both loved it, pretty much everything about it. We loved the floor plan and most of the colors. Our new home will look very similar to this but different colors on the outside. I really love the big giant front porch and they had it decorated so pretty. Can't wait to have my own front porch to decorate each holiday season.

So there you have it, not many pictures but it kind of gives you and idea of what our new home will look like. The main floor is 1782 square feet and the basement is 1600 square feet. The basement will have 2 bedrooms 1 full bathroom,family room, a storage room, mechanical room and a cold storage room. The main level will have the master bedroom, master bathroom, living room, kitchen, dining room, walk in pantry, laundry room, mud room, full bathroom, office and second bedroom. We are having tile in the entry way that looks like wood flooring and then carpet in the living room area.

I am so excited to be moving to this new home, it is a home that both Roger and I picked out together and that makes it very special to me. I have lived the past 17 years in a house that  Roger and a former girlfriend of his picked out and that has always bothered me. Roger has tried to re do anything I wanted but we are both happy with the new home that we are having built. Neither of us has every owned a new home where everything is what we picked out together and new.  When we met with the builder Jake and his draftperson Robyn she made a great suggestion about doing the walk in pantry a little different and it almost doubled the size of it, she has a good eye for things like that.
I also have to tell you about the design lady that Jake introduced us to  who took us around to all of the places to pick things out. She was just wonderful. She was so cute and bubbly, she is our daughter Jennifer's age and she was so patient and nice it was almost unbelievable. The first day we left our motel room around 8:30am and didn't get back till almost 5pm. We first met with our realtor Jed in Rigby to go look at lots, we picked out a lot after a lot of going back and forth from Idaho Falls, back to Rigby but we are happy with our choice of Rigby for our new home. The subdivision is about 45 new homes, all will have 3 car garages and  be at least 1600 square feet on the main floor. We originally wanted an acre of land but it is so expensive to fence that much land so the lot we ended up with is a little over half an acre.Since we have the doggies we wanted to make sure nothing could come on our land and hurt them. The doggies  did very good on the trip even mandy she didn't get car sick once!! We will need to go back up to Idaho at least one or two more times while they are building and then the last time for good to move there. We are hiring a moving company to  move our stuff, but we will do the boxing up of everything. We are hoping for a move in date of early to mid May of 2017, but you never know. Seems like something always comes up to derail our plans.

Praying everyone has a wonderful weekend.

Blessings, Joann


"To be self controlled, and pure, to be busy at home, to be kind and to be subject to their husbands , so that no one will malign the word of God." Titus 2:5

A Picture, yes just one!!

 So here I am at 11pm still trying to get my pictures from my phone to my computer. I can see the pictures on my computer but when I go to add an image to a post they don't come up. I did get this one picture, which is of the rock that will go on the front of our new home and I have no idea how I got it on here. I will still try and get some more pictures on here if I can. I have been up since 5 this morning so I am headed to bed with a great big old headache from all of this picture drama. Blessings,Joann

"To be self controlled, and pure, to be busy at home, to be kind and to be subject to their husbands , so that no one will malign the word of God." Titus 2:5

This post has no pictures, not because I Don't have any but they are in my phone and me being the non computer friendly person , I have no idea how to get them out and put them on my computer.
Update on moving to Idaho. We went up to Idaho this past month, we bought a lot for our new home and met with our builder Jake!  We picked out the floor plan and his draftperson Robyn helped with making a few changes here and there and both Roger and I are happy with what we chose. We ended up with a lot that is a little over half and acre and are we glad we did I couldn't even imagine the cost of putting a fence around an acre of land. The 6tenths we ended up with is costly enough. I do have pictures of the land and a house we looked at that is very similar to the one we are having built. They are hoping to break ground the first week of November with and estimated finish time of May 2017.  I am real excited and I of course think of nothing other than our new home , I think of it daily. It will be so nice when it is finished and I can't wait until we can move in. The part I am dreading is the actual move, the packing and all that entails. I am going to start some serious packing and going through every single item in this house and rate it's priority to us. We are packing everything but are having an actual moving companyto move everything. We are planning on putting our current home on the market this coming springtime. If I can figure out this picture thing I will post again in the next few days. Our new subdivision is called Auburn Hills in Rigby Idaho. We don't have an actual address yet but should have one as soon as we get the building permit. Praying everyone is having a blessed day and week.
Blessing,Joann


"To be self controlled, and pure, to be busy at home, to be kind and to be subject to their husbands , so that no one will malign the word of God." Titus 2:5